14-04-07 US: Tabibi finally zooms on corruption of the justice system as the primary cause of current conditions in the US

In Book's Trial Of U.S. Justice System, Wealth Gap Is Exhibit A

Investigative journalist and author Matt Taibbi has long reported on American politics and business. With an old-school muckraker's nose for corruption, he examined the events leading up to the 2008 financial crisis in Griftopia. With Gonzo zeal, he described a two-party political system splintered into extreme factions in The Great Derangement.

And in his newest book, Taibbi sets out to explain what he thinks is a strange state of affairs:

"Poverty goes up. Crime goes down. The prison population doubles.
Fraud by the rich wipes out 40 percent of the world's wealth. The rich get massively richer. No one goes to jail."

The result of his investigation is The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap. The book explores the connections between growing income inequality and a justice system that Taibbi says disproportionately punishes the poor.

Although he found the subject matter disturbing, Taibbi tells NPR's Kelly McEvers that he took an odd sort of pleasure in writing the book.

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Matt Taibbi is also the author of Griftopia, The Great Derangement, Smells Like Dead Elephants andSpanking the Donkey.

Courtesy of Random House

"I thoroughly enjoy this topic in kind of a dark way," he says. "There's a kind of deviousness and brilliance that is on display in a lot of these things that is really fascinating to me."

http://www.npr.org/2014/04/06/297857886/in-books-trial-of-u-s-justice-system-wealth-gap-is-exhibit-a