Justice for All, Except Those Too Big to Jail
by Leonard Pitts Jr.
Fair warning: this book will make you angry.
"The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap," by
Like the Vietnamese refugee and rape victim in
Then there's
But it is not simply these stories that will make you angry. No, what will really spike your blood pressure is when Taibbi juxtaposes them with other stories: tales of the bankers, money men -- and occasional women -- who committed billions of dollars in fraud, laundered money for terrorist organizations and drug cartels, precipitated the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression, yet never spent a night in jail.
The author's thesis: this country has evolved a two-tier justice system under which some of us are considered fair game for policing tactics so aggressive as to be downright fascistic, while others are regarded as "too big to jail" because of the supposed economic repercussions if they were held to answer for their crimes. Indeed, in an interview on "The Daily Show with
"Appropriate." You might want to let that one stew for a moment.
Taibbi argues that this represents a relatively new perversion of justice.
After all,
The only thing it is a victory for is the idea that some of us are more equal than others.
Yet, there is no uproar. A nation that proclaims "liberty and justice for all," and "all men are created equal," somehow manages to sleep through the betrayal of those supposedly cherished ideals. We are, writes Taibbi, "numb to the idea that rights aren't absolute but are enjoyed on a kind of sliding scale." So big money criminals live to scam another day, but the government slams like a truck into the rest of us, those on the bottom end of the wealth gap who are deemed "appropriate" for being thrown to the ground, or having their panties held up on a pencil eraser or otherwise treated with contempt by a system that judges them guilty on sight.
Like ," Taibbi doesn't so much tell us something we didn't already know as assemble it in such a way as to let us see what was right in front of us all the time: a system of justice that is separate and unequal and thus, broken. And if, indeed, that realization does make you angry?
Good.
Available at Amazon.com:
The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap
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"Justice for All, Except Those Too Big to Jail "
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