There are many ways to divide people; race, religion, location, gender, age, level of education, and more. What Matt Taibbi explores in his research is the divide in America between our wealthiest and our poorest, because, as he was shocked and saddened to discover, while the original sin of the Orwellian dystopia was thoughtcrime, “in our new corporate dystopia the secret inner crime is need, particularly financial need.” The more you need and the less you have, the fewer rights you also have. And, conversely, the more you have and the less you need, the more rights you are granted, even beyond what is actually written into the laws. “On the extreme ends of this spectrum it is literally a crime to be poor, while a person with enough money literally cannot be prosecuted for certain kinds of crimes.” This is epitomized by the poor black man from the projects who can get picked up and prosecuted for riding his bike on the sidewalk while the CEO’s on Wall Street violate insider trading laws ten times a day and are celebrated for savvy financial strategy.To most of us average citizens, this reality is very hard to understand, let alone even believe in. But let me ask you this: Have you ever been arrested by the police for standing on the sidewalk out front of your house? Andrew Brown of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn has. Another victim of New York City’s notoriously terrible and racist Stop and Frisk policing policy, where the cops arrested first and asked questions later, Brown was standing on the sidewalk in front of his apartment building talking to a friend at one in the morning on a quiet night in November of 2012. The police approached, questioned them, and tossed the men in the back of separate vans to be brought to the station for the standard questioning, strip search, and court summons. His offense? Blocking pedestrian traffic. Blocking whom exactly is the million dollar question, one that cannot be answered, because it was one in the morning and there were no other people present. Brown was simply caught in the massive drag net the NYPD throws over the poor neighborhoods of the city. Thats the strategy anyways: catch all the fish, see who has guns or drugs, and throw the rest back, Amendment rights be damned.While the lower classes of Americans like Andrew Brown are penalized for ‘committing’ these types of petty crimes, there is an entire upper class of citizen that is above the law. This flip side is embodied by hedge funds and too-big-to-fail Wall Street banks who borrow money from the Federal Reserve at far below market interest rates, through the Fed’s emergency lending program, and turn around and make a profit off loaning it to people for mortgages, businesses, and credit cards. While they have been profiting off of insider trading for decades (revealed in recent Senate testimony), their most egregious behavior exploded in grand fashion in 2008, when the American housing market collapsed and the financial repercussions reverberated around the entire globe. In his book, Taibbi walks us through the backroom deals made at the time, when Lehman Brothers were staring down the barrel of bankruptcy, in addition to Washington Mutual, and others. The British banking behemoth Barclays acquired Lehman Brothers (and all of their assets) for a fraction of their worth. Likewise, Washington Mutual was bought out by Bank of America in a similar shotgun-style wedding.Why were these banks facing bankruptcy in the first place and forced to sell? Because they were knowingly accepting fraudulent loans for years. Loaning someone money to buy a house when they have no recognized source of income and have put zero money down on the initial purchase is incredibly irresponsible lending, but that is exactly what they all did, because they knew the Federal Reserve would bail them out with taxpayer money if anything went south. This is exactly what happened when the housing market blew up in 2008 and the Fed was forced to ‘rescue’ the banks for fear of what letting them fail might cost. What was the result of all of this? Not a single member of any hedge fund or Wall Street institution was indicted or seriously investigated. Nobody has seen a day in jail, and they won’t, because the crimes they committed were the ‘right’ kind.In the intro to his book, Taibbi asks his readers a very important question: “What deserves a bigger punishment—someone with a college education who knowingly helps a gangster or a terrorist open a bank account? Or a high school dropout who falls asleep on the F train?” In America, we believe it’s the latter, despite the fact that senior members of several of the largest banks in the world have been caught doing the former. (HSBC was found to have knowingly laundered money from the Sinaloa Drug Cartel, and while their executives got off scot-free, the people who bought the dime bags that HSBC so thoughtfully enabled the cartel to sell can spend years in prison.) In America, we punish those who are easily punishable, and let the big fish swim away. It has become baked into our cultural ethos.When people on welfare fill our their application wrong and ‘commit fraud’ by accepting $50 more in food stamp money than they should be allotted, the system penalizes them in the form of fines, community service, numerous court dates, and jail (as if being poor isn’t already bad enough). When the bankers and hedge fund managers commit fraud on a mass scale, forging signatures on court documents or accepting fraudulent loans because they know the Fed has their back, their members are never personally culpable and never have to admit fault. The details of these ‘white collar crimes’ are often much too arcane and the government is unable or unwilling to effectively investigate or prosecute. If anyone is prosecuted, they simply dance through a few legal loopholes, pay a laughably minimal fine, and continue on their merry way. It’s the regular people who suffer, as the city of Long Beach can attest too.A few weeks before Lehman Brothers collapsed, the Long Beach city council voted to invest $20 million with the bank in the hopes of growing the fund. Even now, years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Long Beach has been enacting sweeping budget cuts. “In the first year after Lehman’s collapse, the Long Beach school system cut summer school classes and bus routes for one thousand students. The city announced plans to lay off thirty-four policemen and close at least one fire station. The mayor asked the city council to cut all funding for the Long Beach Museum of Art. And the city continues to be way behind the financial eight ball. In fact, its projected deficit for 2013 almost exactly matches the Lehman shortfall—$20.3 million.” Almost ubiquitously, the higher ups on Wall Street walk away richer, often on the taxpayers dime. Similarly, it is always the regular people who suffer the consequences. Not just the Andrew Brown’s of the country, but also the Latin immigrants who get picked up by ICE on a daily basis and shipped off to rural Mexico, or the welfare mothers who ‘commit fraud’ by claiming money from the state just to feed their starving children. All while Wall Street continues to enrich itself by playing a rigged game.The scariest part about all of this is that the divide is growing and becoming more severe. It is no secret that the wealth in this country has been exponentially going to the top richest few, but the body of poor, lower-class citizens has also been exponentially increasing. As more and more people fall into poverty, the drag net for losers also increases in size and scope. “It all adds up to a system that has many of the features of a police state, right down to the nagging omnipresence of the police in the daily lives of the target community.” This is the real divide in America: that between those who are financially above the law and those who are beneath it. They are mostly out of sight of the general public, and entirely out of sight from one another, but they are both growing, and eventually one side will tip the scale.