Matt Taibbi's new book is I Can’t Breathe.From the transcript of his Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross:
GROSS: So you've just written this new book about Eric Garner's life and how he died at the hands of police. You've also covered white-collar crime that has happened on Wall Street, financial crimes. Are you struck by the differences in how the white-collar financial crimes and selling smuggled cigarettes on the street are dealt with?--Marshal Zeringue
TAIBBI: Absolutely. Yeah, no, I think that's a preoccupation of mine. That's how I came to the story in the first place is because years and years ago - I think it was 2010, 2011 - the few of us who in the media who were covering the fallout of the financial crisis from a criminal perspective who were waiting for indictments to be handed down for things like subprime mortgage fraud or money laundering or bribery or any of the many things that went on before 2008 that led to the crash, when we started to notice that nobody was getting indicted, there became a preoccupation - at least on my behalf - of trying to understand why that was. Why weren't we bringing cases against these rich and powerful people?
And the flip side of that question is, well, if we're not - if we're not bringing cases against these people, who are we sending to jail? You know, why - if we have two and a half million people in the prison system in America and none of them are the people who are responsible for this mess, who are these people? And why - and how easy is it for somebody to get to jail? So that led me to write a book called "The Divide." And that's how I learned a lot about community policing, and that's how I got interested in the Garner case I think to begin with. So yes, absolutely.
I mean, that's one of the ironies of the Garner case is that you would never see a law enforcement officer actually put his hands on an offender in the white-collar crime arena, even someone who was guilty of the worst kinds of offenses. But in Garner's case, where he hadn't actually even done anything that day, they had no compunction about jumping on top of him, putting him in a chokehold. So the dichotomy is really stark. And it's much more important - it makes it much worse than it would be in a vacuum, you know? If you compare it to how people are treated...[read on]