With Liberty and Justice for few, a very few- A book review

" Soylent Green - here today"

This is a "grabber" title for a review of Matt Taibbi's book, "Divide-American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap."   For those who want more traditional reviews of this book, that I consider one of the most incisive, erudite, readable and yes, even in a dark way- entertaining books of our day, we have them in abundance: Some are listed here from right to left:  The Wall Street Journal, N.Y. Times and then even an early one here in the Democratic party website  Dailykos.

I was struck with the similarity between the Soylent Green fiction and Taibbi's depiction of today's America. That distopian future 2022 society's useless takers were "only" slaughtered and used as protein for food while for the  unfortunate vulnerable group in today's America, their fate could be worse.  They feed the wealthy in a different way, by spending most of their lives in jails and prisons with intolerable (but not publicized) conditions, their numbers doubled over the last few decades even as crime rates have been halved.  These now often privatized prisons become the source of steady jobs for their towns, and vast profits for investors.  Unionized prison guards can do pretty well in some states also, so have no interest in decreasing the numbers of those incarcerated.  Soylent Green was food for survival, the Prison Industrial Complex, fuel for prosperity.  

That science fiction book year of 2022, like our country today was divided between the ultra-rich and the useless, the old, the poor.  This includes those whose lives began at the very bottom, usually Black children born into families with no father, no network of those with secure livable incomes, and immersed into a culture of violence, at home as well on the streets.  Taibbi has a knack for just the right personal illustrations of a larger process.  Describing a ten year old kid who was snatched up by a police officer in East New York for stoning a abandoned car window, an older observer mentioned how, "when I was a kid they would have taken him home to his mother, now they are written up and they have a record."  Thus a criminal identity is formed, which is seen by a harried court system as a presumption that the apprehended is guilty of whatever described by the arresting officer.  No time for overstressed judges to listen to an explanation, but push that guilty plea for time served (no explanation of future consequences) and move right along.

This is a video Taibbi's  interview with Jon Stewart where he shares his own journey of learning how bad things really are. Here's the second part.   While his 400 page book is additive with multiple vivid examples of the rich being immune while the poor don't have a chance -- in spite of his detailed explication, his very writing of this meaningful book (a very civil act) rather than chaining himself to a federal courthouse has the inevitable subtle byproduct of  acknowledging that this is the unchangeable structure of American society in this first part of the 21st century. 

Inherently, for those who watch his interview with Stewart, Tiabbi has to pull his punches.  He has to share ironic amusement at his observations and not come off as an angry incensed man, and always wear a bemused smile. One comment he made to Stewart in part 2 that "I see you are already asleep"  illustrates the problem, that sustaining anger at something so pervasive as what he describes is not  only difficult but highly stressful.  The conversation has an effect of explaining away of his accusations under Stewart's friendly questions.   Thus, the revolutionary becomes the sociologist.   

Stewart brings up the irony of  "Moral Hazard" being given for government not making home owners whole after the sub-prime collapse,  yet this hazard disintegrates when bailing out the prime perpetrators who fomented this.  (after all these years the Feds are just allowing those underwater to get new lower rate mortgages)  Jon finished by saying "I can't wait to see all the terrible things "they" will say about you, because they will."  Actually, after searching for such criticism of his book, including National Review (with no review at all) I did find this one from the ultra right wing "Weekly Standard," where the reviewer shows no evidence of having read the book and just castigates him for earlier work.  I have found no serious substantive refutation of any facts or conclusions of this book in any review.

If the Weekly Standard, had reviewed the book, it could have advanced their anti-Democratic party agenda, since the primary individual that Taibbi attributes responsibility for most of the travesties he describes is none other than William Jefferson Clinton.  Clinton unleashed both pincers of this gross attack on justice in our society, damning the most destitute matched by immunity for the other extreme.  Most tragic, as Clinton did this to gain votes from Republican strongholds,  Wall Street and anti-black bigots, he won election but deprived this country of a populist party. 

Taibbi only briefly touches on the power and culpability of the Federal Reserve system, as unlike every other defect that could potentially be reversed by legislation or executive implementation, the Federal Reserve has absolute independence.  This institution, a fourth branch of government, could be seen as basic cause of the mentality toward the financial elite he decries. since it defines the structure of our economic system.  It is based on unlimited created fiat money, the Keynesian consensus, but funnelled through avaricious powerful and often sociopathic financial elites -- who often are members of the Board of Directors of the Federal Reserve.

He provides a specific example of self dealing by the Fed, where a sweetheart deal was made between this institution and a bank led by a sitting member of its board.  It was unreported at the time, as the Fed operates in secrecy- only with required disclosures months after action is taken.  While President Obama could not get even a fraction of  the extra trillion for economic stimulus through Congress, the Fed, without any approval of any elected body, created the funds to allow banks to get no-interest money for a rare kind of stimulus.  It gave banks the ability to float relatively cheap mortgages to pump up the real estate -- banking industry - with the profit distributed to mainly top executives and then shareholders.  This impoverished retirees living on the income from low risk revenue sources that now were undercut by free loans to banks by the Fed.  This created a new definition of the ultra rich, now measured by wealth in the billions,  who, unlike Tiabbi and his readers, like things exactly the way they are.  


The root cause of degradation of life for impoverished African Americans of this book, for me often worse than death itself,  is the law the Clinton ran on and signed, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA). That law precipitated an unanticipated change that turned out to be profound.  Over the last couple of decades, while crime has halved, it fostered treatment of those in dire need to not only less support, but makes what is provided a landmine for criminalized "error" -- contributing to the doubling of our prison population.   Caseworkers who used to attempt to help those in dire need have largely been replaced by "fraud investigators" where any mistake, even by the government agency's overpayment, could lead to jail time and a destroyed life.

It was Clinton, as most of know who ended the Glass Stieagall Act and eliminated or cut funds for monitoring Wall Street companies.  His most clear payback was that Goldman Sachs became his largest contributor in 1996.  Taibbi is no kinder to our current President and his attorney General.  His critique of Holder is interesting, as it points to his long stint as a corporate lawyer, as others in his position have been.  He sees that as supporting a common cultural identity to those at the very top of financial firms, so that the very idea of threatening them with real punishment, the sound of gates closing to their life of enjoyment of wealth and family shall never happen.  So they manage to insulate these "masters of the universe" from clear responsibility of crimes such as money laundering of sex traffickers and Drug Cartels, and destroying lives of those who thought they were home owners.

And that leads to the ultimate meaning of this book for me, that it shows how the root problem is not who happens to be the President or Attorney General, since the attitude that the financial elite are only committing "white collar crimes" has been internalized in our society.  Even if some future idealized administration of a Bernie Sander or Elizabeth Warren would criminally prosecute these "banksters" an individual juror, or appeals court majority could find a loophole to save these solid citizens from the kind of pain that only those who receive a few thousand dollars in food stamps deserve. 

This is the tragic message of this brilliant book, that brings to mind the sign over Dante's Inferno, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." Yet, I can't really do that myself.  So I  write this article that will probably hardly be read.  And, I have to continue my local political quests in some form, even though the chances of having any effect are nil.  What I have learned is why so few choose to stand up in public to voice objection to what is described here.  That which is doable  behind a keyboard in the privacy of one's own home takes on a different quality as a sole voice in an official public setting.  This explains why anger simmers for years, decades even, until there is that spark, and then the unleashed anger is unfocused, leading to a reaction that only reinforces the original cause of outrage.   But I guess this is another story for another time. 

 I'll end with the hypothetical future of that young man described in this book that I mentioned earlier, who years later after a sole uncorroborated "eye witness" in a short trial was convicted, only aided by a harried public defender who just didn't  have the resources to mount a meaningful defense.  He could do no more than that first lawyer who convinced him as a kid to cop a guilty plea after the two months of "time served" because he couldn't raise the thousand dollars bail.  It could be that he is really guilty this time of this third offense he is now serving life for, but the chain of events, the unwritten laws that made avoiding this existence all but impossible were not of his making.  He was born onto a conveyor belt, that we have created and perpetuated; its nature made evident for this man when the uniformed officer dragged him away in cuffs for throwing stones at a wrecked car in a junk yard.
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Addendum:

A problem of this important non-fiction book is a lack of an index, or even a detailed description of each chapter.   I have this rough effort below, but the comprehensive index along with annotations should be provided by the publisher on line which I have recommended to them.

Brief chapter descriptions:

Introduction

1- Unintended Consequences
Describes a deputy AG, Eric Holders memo under Clinton to consider the ancillary damages to employees and stockholders when prosecuting major corporations.  How this ballooned to provide legitimization for the gross criminality of Wall Street preceding the 2008 meltdown.

2- Frisk and Stop
  First pass at showing the excesses of police action against N.Y.C. black youth

3- The Man who couldn't stand up
  More on the excesses of cops, the assembly line imitation of justice for petty crimes, and how a minimum penalty of community service can destroy the life of an overstressed mother with several jobs.  This compared to the ability of the wealthy elite to summons masses of upright citizens to get off with no personal punishment -  no matter the harm of his actions.

4-The Greatest Bank Robbery You Never Heard Of
   Detailed and personalized story of how Lehman Brothers didn't go bankrupt, as widely reported.  The executives joined the purchaser Barclays and negotiated millions in salaries, while the shareholders and purchasers of bogus instruments were the ones to get not even the proverbial pennies on the dollar.

5-  Border Trouble Part 1
    This is a different theme, as it describes the misery of those who come across the border of Mexico without documentation.  It goes into details including the exact laws and ICE regulations.  How police wait at streets where these people must drive their cars to their jobs, and a missing light (real or claimed) leads to arrest and the end of a mother ever seeing her citizen children. 

6- Border Trouble Part 2
   A self contained story of the open flagrant inside information that can be manufactured for "short raids"  Describing the special crudeness of those out to destroy companies that must be smashed by any means.  (This is the only part of the book, where some of the details of this ugliness could have been cut short)   Taibi gives a nod to his one hero in this book, the N.Y. then AG, Eliot Spitzer who had the guts to go after these guys with the contempt they deserved.  I guess it was just an accident that someone happen to notice his tryst in that D.C hotel that ended his career!

7- Little Frauds
   Describes the effect of Clinton's "Welfare Reform"  All it took was a mistake by the welfare department to send a few hundred dollars extra, to be a crime that caused a woman the loss of her children and personal collapse.

8-Big Frauds
   Uses the example of one woman, Linda Almonte, who reported the fraud of Robo Signing first discovered in the sub-prime context.  It is also prevalent in collection of debts by major banks, in her case Chase, of unconscionable, sometimes non existing, credit card debt.   Clear, lucid, and tragic.

9- Collateral Consequences
    Starts with a real life story of a young  man who is mugged then arrested by plain clothed police,  He is let off,  but it caused PTSD, the real thing.  I know how fragile we are, as over fifty years ago something like that happened to me, and for weeks I spun around in defense at the sound of  footsteps behind me.  The summary of the book is completed with Taibbi expressing clearly the rationale for special protection of the Wall Street elite,  and then demolishing it.