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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWho Goes To Jail? Matt Taibbi on American Injustice Gap From Wall Street to Main Street
pt. I
pt. II
Award-winning journalist Matt Taibbi is out with an explosive new book that asks why the vast majority of white-collar criminals have avoided prison since the financial crisis began, while an unequal justice system imprisons the poor and people of color on a mass scale. In The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, Taibbi explores how the Depression-level income gap between the wealthy and the poor is mirrored by a "justice" gap in who is targeted for prosecution and imprisonment. "It is much more grotesque to consider the non-enforcement of white-collar criminals when you do consider how incredibly aggressive law enforcement is with regard to everybody else," Taibbi says.
.........(snip).........
AMY GOODMAN: in this day and age. Talk about the thesis. What is the divide?
MATT TAIBBI: Well, this book grew out of my experience covering Wall Street. Ive obviously been doing it since the crash in 2008. And over and over again, I would cover these very complex and often very socially destructive capers committed by white-collar criminals. And the punchline to all of the stories were basically the same: Nobody would get indicted; nobody went to jail. And after a while, I started to become interested specifically in that phenomenon. Why was there no enforcement of any of this? And around the time of the Occupy protest, I decided to write this book, and then I shifted my focus to try to learn a lot more for myself about who does go to jail in this country, because I thought you really cant make this comparison accurately until you learn about both sides of the equation, because its actually much more grotesque to consider the non-enforcement of white-collar criminals when you do consider how incredibly aggressive law enforcement is with regard to everybody else.
.........(snip).........
AARON MATÉ: But back to this doctrine that you cant punish an entire company for the misdeeds of a few because you might hurt the economy, you might hurt shareholders, you know, some of which are pension holders andpension funds and so forth, how do you get from hurting ahow do you equate hurting an entire company to just not jailing a couple of executives?
MATT TAIBBI: Well, thats the whole point. Theyve conflated the two things. Originallyso, thisto answer the second part of your original question, "Where does this come from? Where does this doctrine come from?" way back in 1999, when Eric Holder was a deputy attorney general in thein Clintons administration, he wrote a memo that has now come to be known as "the Holder Memo." And in it, he outlined a number of things. Actually, it was originally considered a get-tough-on-corporate-crime memo, because it gave prosecutors a number of new tools with which they could go after corporate criminals. But at the bottom of it, there was this thing that he laid out called the "collateral consequences doctrine." And what "collateral consequences" meant was that if youre a prosecutor and youre targeting one of these big corporate offenders and youre worried that you may affect innocent victims, that shareholders or innocent executives may lose their jobs, you may consider other alternatives, other remedies besides criminal prosecutionsin other words, fines, nonprosecution agreements, deferred prosecution agreements. And again, at the time, it was a completely sensible thing to lay out. Of course it makes sense to not always destroy a company if you can avoid it. But what theyve done is theyve conflated that sometimes-sensible policy with a policy of not going after any individuals for any crimes. And thats just totally unacceptable. .......................(more)
The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/news/item/23115-who-goes-to-jail-matt-taibbi-on-american-injustice-gap-from-wall-street-to-main-street
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Who Goes To Jail? Matt Taibbi on American Injustice Gap From Wall Street to Main Street (Original Post)
marmar
Apr 2014
OP
marions ghost
(19,841 posts)1. We prosecute street crime
--not suite crime.
Fraud and corruption is not considered criminal, even though it destroys lives right and left. Every once in awhile they sacrifice an extreme offender like Bernie Madoff. But mostly these people get off. Happens at every level.
Matt Taibbi
joelz
(185 posts)2. The idea that Holder is
still working as the Attorney General of the United States is beyond disgusting.