The Vast Divide Between Too-Big-to-Jail and Too-Poor-to-Fight-Back

I had a review out in this
weekend’s
Wall Street Journal about the new book from Matt Taibbi,

The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth
Gap. Here’s how the review begins:

When the polemicist who made Goldman Sachs synonymous with
a “vampire squid” writes a book called “The Divide,” with a
subtitle that references “the wealth gap,” one may reasonably
anticipate some undergraduate-style fist-shaking about income
quintiles and the predatory rich. But one would be wrong. Matt
Taibbi’s “The Divide” is primarily concerned with the grotesquely
unequal application of American justice, between the
too-big-to-jail Wall Street elite and the too-poor-to-fight
minority underclass. “The cleaving of the country into two
completely different states—one a small archipelago of
hyperacquisitive untouchables, the other a vast ghetto of
expendables with only theoretical rights,” Mr. Taibbi maintains,
“is a terrible story, and a crazy one.” The characterization is
typically overwrought, but the general indictment is broadly
correct.

And here is how it ends:

But at heart “The Divide” is a face-slap, not a legal brief.
Though Mr. Taibbi doesn’t couch it in these terms, his warning is
all about moral hazard, in two senses of the phrase. When swindlers
know that their risks will be subsidized, and their potential
crimes will be punishable only through negotiated corporate
settlements, they will surely commit more crimes. And when most of
the population either does not know or does not care that the
lowest socioeconomic classes live in something akin to a police
state, we should be greatly concerned for the moral health of our
society.

Reason on Taibbi
here, including this
2007 interview.