The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap Highlight

And in all but a very few of these cases, the narrative is exactly the same. There is somehow just enough evidence to extract hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in penalties, but somehow not quite enough evidence to force any individual to do so much as a day in jail. Every single time, the state lands itself right in that oddly enormous sweet spot between spectacular leverage (to extract fines) and no leverage at all (to hand down criminal penalties). This makes the “not enough evidence” defense either a total lie or the most unbelievable coincidence in history. In one case, maybe. But across all these diverse settlements, in so many different types of cases, there’s not one case against an individual?