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

Why go after intangible rewards like political optics when you can have, bird-in-hand-style, $2 billion right now, without even risking the possibility of losing? That’s an argument one can have. It might even have, who knows, some merit. But to even have that argument, one has to admit what it concedes. And what it concedes is that there’s a concrete difference between how we treat an individual who commits fraud within the structure of a giant multinational company with a lot of settlement money lying around, and how we treat, say, an ordinary broke person who commits welfare or unemployment fraud. If you choose to take the money over and over again from the Wall Street crowd while the welfare moms keep getting jail and community service, now suddenly you’ve institutionalized the imbalance. From there, it’s not long before the tail starts wagging the dog. A massive, unconscious tendency toward reverse profiling occurs. Because, thanks to all these various factors, executives from giant multinationals simply don’t end up in the prison population, law enforcement soon starts to operate on the reverse principle, that those huge companies are not the places where jailable crimes take place. So even white-collar investigators start to look for targets elsewhere, like at smaller businesses.