Mother Jones reporter Clara Jeffrey’s interview with Matt Taibbi was my one Must Read from last week. The whole thing is worth your time but a couple takeaways:
1. On his transition from political humorist to investigative reporter:
… here I should make a confession: when I decided to write [The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap], this was right around the time of the Occupy protests, and ironically the financial crisis had sort of been a boon to my career. Before 2008, I was sort of a typical political humorist. I sort of made fun of politicians for a living. That was really all I did, and I had this existential crisis about whether or not that work was valuable at all, and then I got assigned to cover the financial crisis and the causes of it, and I started doing these stories, and I discovered this whole, complicated world of things I never knew about and I had to study. I was doing these pieces basically translating these very complicated and elaborate scams and trying to help broad audiences understand what had happened in 2008, and I thought this was a really worthwhile endeavor, but it was really just an intellectual exercise. I got a charge out of the challenge of deciphering these things and translating it for audiences.
When I’d finished this book, Griftopia, which had done fairly well, so I was getting offers to write another book. And I was trying to think of what I would write about next, and it occurred to me that I should write about the fact that nobody really was going to jail, and somewhat cynically I thought, “This is going to be easy. Morally, this is totally indefensible and all I have to do is tell a few stories about people who had done terrible things and gotten away with it, and boy, will that make people angry, and it’ll sell a lot of books, and that’ll be easy.” And then I started to do my due diligence, I decided to look into who does go to jail in America and why, and I started to become overwhelmed by all these horrible, horrible stories about injustices that were being done to ordinary people who didn’t have money. One of the first days I went out, I heard about a thirteen-year-old, mentally disabled, African American boy in Brooklyn who’d been picked up by a couple of cops, and they’d thrown him in the back of a squad car and told him that he couldn’t go home that day ’til he helped them find an illegal gun. And so he ended up telling them there was a gun at his grandmother’s house, and they descended upon that kid’s grandmother’s house, they hauled in the grandmother, they hauled in the kid, the hauled in the kid’s brother—it’s terrible.
I heard story after story. A woman gets arrested, an undocumented immigrant in Los Angeles who gets arrested for driving without a license, and she’s sentenced to 170 hours of community service and a $1,700 fine, and she has to take her kids to the community service every night. She’s crying herself to sleep every night.
I was overwhelmed, emotionally overwhelmed by all these stories of people who were doing time, who were thrown in jail for varying degrees of absurdity, and it struck me that there was no way to talk about whether or not this Collateral Consequences policy [link added] is justified until you actually look in the mirror and ask yourself: Do you really know who’s going to jail in this country, and why people going to jail in this country? I was living my life happily not knowing that all these people were being arrested, but it’s morally indefensible when somebody can pay a fine and get out of a billion-dollar theft while other people are doing two or three years in jail for reaching into a cash register in a liquor store. That’s a very long-winded answer, but the whole point is, you have to look at the two things side-by-side in order to evaluate the policy, and that’s what they don’t do. When officials defend these policies, they deny the connection that there’s any connection between the two problems.
2. On how Occupy Wall Street came up short:
… I think Occupy was great. It was unexpected, it was organic, it developed out of thin air. It wasn’t the creation of some foundation that decided it was going to force an issue somewhere. People just came out to the streets and they gathered. Originally I was disillusioned that there wasn’t a single coherent goal of Occupy, but over time, I thought that became a strength of the movement because people just sort of came out and they were expressing their general dissatisfaction with something. It was important that we all recognized there was something wrong with our society, and I think that was cool.
To me, the failure of Occupy had a lot to do with who was coming out to protest. I remember going to a foreclosure court in Jacksonville, Florida. There was this little room where a judge sat and this attorney who had been hired by the banks to throw people out of their homes would come in first thing in the morning with a gigantic stack of folders. He was like Dagwood with a sandwich, he was just carrying this gigantic stack of folders. And each one of those represented a family who was going to be thrown out of their house that day, and there was such pure rage in that room of people who were losing their houses, and those people weren’t the people protesting at Occupy. And I think if you could combine the people who were the real victims of the financial crisis and of the crime and of the misdeeds and the people who came out at Occupy, then I think you’d have something really dangerous. But they never managed, I thought, to reach all those people.
To me, that last paragraph captures a critical failure of contemporary liberalism. The people getting shafted aren’t connecting with the people taking to the streets. (Can you blame them? Who’s got time to protest when you’re trying to keep the bank from illegally taking your house?) Support for neoliberalism isn’t the solution either. We’ve got about twenty years of data at this point. Bill Clinton and his crew laid the groundwork for the financial crisis and Pres. Obama hasn’t done a damn thing to remedy the underlying problem – or even tried to – during his time in office. Taibbi, I think, points to the need for a “Third Way” which gets us past thinking that our choice is between OWS (or the like) and kinder gentler Republicanism neoliberalism.