Matt writes about the crazy divergences not just in wealth, but in treatment by the State too. ~ Ilene
Stories like this "Clean Halls" program are beginning to make me see that journalists like myself have undersold the white-collar corruption story in recent years by ignoring its flip side. We have two definitely connected phenomena, often treated as separate and unconnected: a growing lawlessness in the financial sector, and an expanding, repressive, increasingly lunatic police apparatus trained at the poor, and especially the nonwhite poor.
In recent years, as Wall Street firms turned into veritable felony factories, we had pundits and politicians who cranked out reams of excuses for one white-collar criminal after another and argued, in complete seriousness, that sending a rich banker to jail "wouldn’t solve anything" and in fact we should "tolerate the excesses" of the productive rich, who "channel opportunity" to the rest of us.
On the other hand, we’ve had politicians and pundits in budget fights and other controversies railing against the parasitic poor, who are not only not "productive" enough to warrant a break, but assumed to be actively unproductive (they consume our tax money and public services) and therefore sort of guilty in advance.
Full article: Mike Bloomberg's New York: Cops in Your Hallways | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone.
