The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap by Matt Taibbi

Author:Matt Taibbi [Taibbi, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Published: 2014-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

Meanwhile, not one single employee of any foreign bank—not one banker from Barclays, Deutsche Bank, RBS, Dexia, Société Générale, or any of the other numerous foreign banks that have been caught up in the many serious fraud and manipulation scandals in recent years—has yet been deported or jailed for any crime connected to the 2008 financial crisis.

So we’ve built a massive and ruthless police apparatus for the ordinary immigrant population, complete with a sprawling, essentially extralegal detention complex, to catch and detain people who have not committed any actual crimes.

This gigantic, menacing complex of bars, chains, buses, and airplanes built to deal with the immigrant poor stands in stark contrast to the tiny, disorganized confederation of perhaps a few hundred lawyers policing transnational financial companies. We don’t have special jails for foreigners or executives from foreign firms who steal by the million or billion.

So hundreds of thousands of people go to jail without committing crimes. Thousands or tens of thousands more commit extremely serious crimes, and no jail even exists to detain them.

There’s a profound story here about what’s happening to the very idea of citizenship, be it individual or corporate, in the new global economy. It used to be that citizenship in a strong and healthy state was universally prized, because citizenship confers rights. But with citizenship also comes responsibilities, and it turns out that not everybody wants those. In the minds of some, if you can get the rights without the responsibilities, you’re really onto something.

In other words, there’s a new class of people whose goal is to become above citizenship. Live in America, conduct your trades in the weaker regulatory arena in London, pay your taxes in Antigua or the Isle of Man. Keep the rights but offshore the responsibilities.

The flip side is that there is a growing subset of people, like undocumented immigrants, who live below the level of full citizenship. If the first group is stateless by choice, these people are involuntarily stateless and have virtually no rights at all.

For a country founded on the idea that rights are inalienable and inherent from birth, we’ve developed a high tolerance for conditional rights and conditional citizenship. And the one condition, it turns out, is money. If you have a lot of it, the legal road you get to travel is well lit and beautifully maintained. If you don’t, it’s a dark alley and most Americans would be shocked to find out what’s at the end of it.

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