Divide

Bernie Sanders has said the business model of Wall Street is fraud but Matt Taibbi provides the details. We think we live in a world of laws but culture trumps (pun intended) law in that enforcement is controlled by cultural narratives. We've been told many stories about how US government works. And other stories about classless society and democracy but in the end, it's all just nice stories protecting us from an ugly reality. We don't want to know that reality--it's too scary and horrible so we listen to the nice fictions about the land of opportunity and how criminals get punished.

We may have learned from Mr. Taibbi's previous books that how laws get made isn't what we've learned in school. Now we see that how they're enforced is just as far from what we've been taught. The poor and darker skinned are set up to become convicts while the respected captains of industry are given free reign to commit, not crimes, but "short cuts" to keep the economy running smoothly.

And no one wants to pay attention to the details because they're either too boring, too confusing, or too unbelievable.

What keeps this book from getting a fifth star is that it isn't written in a way that a conservative can read and understand. And that's too bad because the stories conservatives believe need to be debunked in a form they can digest. The data is all there but it's packaged in a way that those who most need to hear it will never stay with it long enough to realize their values are being betrayed by their heroes.