Matt Taibbi.

• Author: Rampell, Ed
• Position: THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW - Interview

Author and journalist Matt Taibbi has emerged as one of the most profound critics and chroniclers of what he calls "the age of oligarchical capitalism."

In his new book, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, the former Rolling Stone reporter synthesizes two significant strands of social analysis: One concerns the increasing income disparity attacked by Robert Reich and Joseph Stiglitz; the other addresses the racism of our criminal justice system so aptly described in Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. In stitching together these two threads of thought, Taibbi demonstrates that the United States now has two separate--and unequal-judicial and economic systems.

"Some people have simply more rights than others," Taibbi argues in The Divide. "Some people go to jail, and others just don't." People of color and the poor are in the former category; Wall Street CEOs are in the latter.

"No high-ranking executive from any financial institution has gone to jail, not one, for any of the systemic crimes that wiped out 40 percent of the world's wealth," he writes. These white-collar crimes took place downtown, on Wall Street, not uptown, in Harlem. As he puts it in his book: "Too-big-to-fail, meet-small-enough-to-jail."

Taibbi blames some of these disparities on Attorney General Eric Holder, who, when he was deputy attorney general in the Clinton Administration, formulated the theory of "collateral consequences" for charging corporations in 1999. In essence, this notion holds that when considering corporate wrongdoing, prosecutors "may take into account" how a trial and conviction might affect a firm's employees and the possible impact upon the overall economy. According to Taibbi, this has resulted in fewer and fewer prosecutions, and some fines for corporations but no jail time for CEOs.

Taibbi presents contrasting court cases to make his point. For instance, a small-time drug offender gets imprisoned at Rikers Island for possessing half a joint, while HSBC laundered "up to $7 billion for Central American drug cartels" but is merely fined "$1.9 billion"--about "five weeks of revenue" for the bank, he writes. He also notes that mothers who are trying to feed their kids get the book thrown at them for welfare fraud, but when Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Countrywide, and other banks commit massive mortgage fraud, no one goes to jail and no CEO pays a fine out of his own pocket.

Taibbi was born in 1970 and raised in the Boston area. He graduated from Bard College in 1992 and studied abroad at Saint Petersburg Polytechnical University. He has developed a punchy, witty style, making very complex, serious subject matter accessible, even fun, as when he dubbed Goldman Sachs "a great vampire squid, wrapped around the face of humanity."

Indeed, Taibbi has a...