197
" Twenty-six billion dollars of fraud: no felony cases. But when the stakes are in the hundreds of dollars, we kick in 26,000 doors a year, in just one county. You can drive yourself crazy trying to figure out how this makes sense, financial or otherwise. But it does make sense. It’s just not about money. It’s about fucking with people. It’s the logic of our new shadow government. It turns out that we’re too lazy to govern ourselves, so we’ve put society on bureaucratic autopilot—and autopilot turns out to be a steel trap for losers and a greased pipeline to money, power, and impunity for winners. This goes far beyond the oft-quoted liberal cliché about how we now have “two Americas,” one for the rich and one for the poor, with different sets of laws and "
― Matt Taibbi , The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap
198
" different levels of punishment (or more to the point, nonpunishment) for each. The rich have always gotten breaks and the poor have always had to swim upstream. The new truth is infinitely darker and more twisted. The new truth is a sci-fi movie, a dystopia. And in this sci-fi world the issues aren’t justice and injustice, but biology and mortality. We have a giant, meat-grinding bureaucracy that literally alters the physical makeup of its citizens, systematically grinding down the losers into a smaller, meeker, lower race of animal while aggrandizing the winners, making them bigger than life, impervious, super-people. Again, the poor have always faced the sharp end of the stick. And the rich have always fought ferociously to protect their privilege, not just in America but everywhere. "
― Matt Taibbi , The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap