CRIME AND NO PUNISHMENT
Wealth, Power, and Violence in America
by Marie Gottschalk
A distinguished political scientist condemns the “social murder” of America’s working people committed by corporations, the wealthy, and the state.
Murder is a very real thing, writes Gottschalk: “Tens of millions of US gun owners are locked and loaded, ready to take the law into their own hands or to turn their guns on themselves.” Death by despair, as it has been dubbed, is also rampant, with high rates of drug addiction and alcohol abuse. Police officers increasingly visit violence on people, particularly people of color, and go unpunished; meanwhile, people of color find themselves incarcerated at rates far higher than the white population, penal policy having “become the policy of first resort to address the massive economic and social dislocations of the last half century in the United States.” Against this backdrop, Gottschalk’s central thesis is that many societal strands, from militarized police to a pattern of “forever wars” and the increasing financialization of the economy all combine into state-sponsored, class-based violence against ordinary Americans, who live, it seems, in a different country from the wealthy, who commit all sorts of economic crimes—fraud, wage theft, and the like. Writes Gottschalk, “Crime in the suites victimizes more people and causes more harm than crime in the streets.” For all that, a battery of laws constitutes a kind of “corporate shield” that protects wrongdoers from prosecution, apart from the occasional sacrificial lamb: The regulatory agencies, for instance, “made a spectacle of sentencing Bernie Madoff to essentially die in prison while ignoring the willful blindness of regulators and leading bankers that allowed his multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme to flourish for decades.” There are remedies, Gottschalk notes, that may never be applied, from taxing the ultrawealthy to reforming tort law to remove barriers to suing corporations and government agencies.
A clearsighted analysis of the systemic class war that the 1 percent is waging on the rest—and without penalty.