By MATT BROWN, Multimedia Director.
On Tuesday, March 24, Matt Taibbi, the National Magazine award winner and longtime editor to “Rolling Stone” magazine will speak at Delta College.
The speech will be held in the Delta College Lecture Theater, G-160 at 9:30 a.m.
Taibbi is a New York Times bestselling author, writing books such as “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap,” and “Griftopia” on the 2008 financial crisis.
“The Divide,” Taibbi’s newest novel, explores the growing income inequality and its impact on the American criminal justice system.
“There wasn’t this whole concept of a few people have billions and everybody else is struggling to have benefits… that just didn’t exist 30 to 40 years ago,” said Taibbi, via phone interview. “The idea that you’re going to get out of college and become even comfortable is now even a distant reality for a lot of college graduates.”
It is no secret that the wealth of the few have a greater impact than the many in terms of political influence. The Princeton study, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” found the influence of ordinary Americans registers at a “non-significant, near-zero level.” The analysts further discovered that rich individuals and business-dominated interest groups dominate the policymaking process.
“If there was one thing that you could do that could actually have a chance at moving the needle in American politics it would be somehow fixing the money is politics issue,” said Taibbi. “The problem is that they made it so easy now that the situation will become more exacerbated, not less, in the near future…The deck is kind of stacked against things happening these days.”
Taibbi noticed a trend while researching for the novel, that, “The people who know a lot about how brutal the criminal justice system is for poor people, most of those people don’t know a lot about white-collar enforcement and vice-versa.
Then the Politicians who are very tough on crime, or as Taibbi says, “who want to put a lot of people in jail, who want push zero tolerance policies,” are very popular with the “former-middle class, frustrated voter.”
The following brutality in the police departments, “is a reflection of political reality more than anything else,” says Taibbi. “You don’t see the same kind of zero tolerance advocated with white-collar crime mainly because nobody knows anything about it.”
Taibbi felt that he just needed to “show these two things side-by-side,” to tell a series of stories and allow people to draw their own conclusions. In his experience seeing these stories and digesting them, “made me angry and made me want to do something to fix the problem.
“We are not going to see anything but the status quo until something terrible happens,” Taibbi said. Though, “If they blow up the economy again, there probably will be a cleaning house kind of a sweep.
The presentation is free and open to the community. No tickets are required. The lecture will be followed by a question and answer dialogue with the audience. The author will sign book, which will be available to purchase, after the presentation.
