A big story hit the news this week after a joint investigation by ProPublica, WNYC and The New Yorker. Reporters Andrea Bernstein, Jesse Eisenger, Justin Elliott and Ilya Marritz discovered that Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance dropped a potential felony fraud case against Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr., before a campaign contribution made to Vance.

It was a real estate fraud case involving Trump SoHo, a hotel and condo project. Investigators believed the Trumps had made falsely reassuring statements to prospective buyers of units in the complex, where sales had been tepid.

The reporters learned that the evidence included email chains in which the Trumps "discussed how to coordinate false information." In another set of communications, they apparently reassured a broker who was concerned about the deception.

When the investigation got hot in May of 2012, Trump personal lawyer Marc Kasowitz went to meet with Vance. Three months later, the case went away. Kasowitz reportedly later bragged about his work, saying it was "amazing I got them off."(The lawyer now denies making that statement). Subsequently, Kasowitz made an additional contribution to Vance of $32,000, and reportedly helped route additional contributions to the DA.

At almost exactly the same time he was meeting with Trump's lawyer, Cy Vance was pushing another case through the Manhattan courts. On May 31st, 2012, just two weeks after his meeting with Kasowitz, Vance's office moved to indict for mortgage fraud a tiny Chinese immigrant bank called Abacus Federal Savings, along with 19 of its employees.

For the arraignment in the case, the 19 individual defendants were frog-marched into court in a literal chain gang - you can see the now infamous photo in a contemporary New York Times piece - in a scene that was clearly designed to show Vance's office was throwing the book at white-collar offenders. Some of the people in the chain gang made as little as $35,000 a year.

Though the case had absolutely nothing to do with the 2008 financial crisis - more on that in a moment - Vance shamelessly pitched Abacus as a prosecution directed at the causes of the crash.

"If we've learned anything from the recent mortgage crisis," he said, "it's that at some point, these schemes will unravel and taxpayers could be left holding the bag."

Abacus was a small family-owned bank, a mainstay of the Chinatown neighborhood, that had self-reported the discrepancy that led to the prosecution. In exact contrast to the broader financial crisis dynamic, it made home loans to people who made their payments. The alleged victim, Fannie Mae, did not experience a penny of loss. Abacus was ultimately found not guilty, in a major embarrassment to Vance's office.

The absurdity of the Abacus case was that Vance could have walked in just about any direction in lower Manhattan and run into a viable mortgage fraud prosecution involving a much bigger actor. Virtually all of the country's biggest banks have since settled, in many cases for billions, for behavior far worse than anything Abacus was even alleged to have done.

But Vance picked Abacus for prosecution, seemingly because it was small and easily pushed around, rather than take on the behemoths in lower Manhattan.

The case was a metaphor for the criminal justice system as a whole, which consistently avoided treating fraudsters at big banks as criminals. The more typical resolution involved back-room settlements in which money changed hands but no executives did time or got a record.

The news about the Trumps highlights this dynamic. Underscoring that I don't know how solid the prosecution's case was against Don Jr. and Ivanka, this new story fits the pattern: The rich and connected get off, while those outside the tent are prosecutable. We've effectively divided the country into two classes, Too Big to Fail and Small Enough to Jail.

I ended up writing about the Abacus case in my book, The Divide. Hoop Dreams director Steve James and producer Mark Mitten ultimately also made a movie about the case. The film, Abacus: Small Enough To Jail, has achieved critical acclaim this year and apparently is an Oscar contender.

There is an irony in the side-by-side cases of Abacus and the Trumps. Abacus, founded by Thomas Sung and run by daughters Vera and Jill Sung, was also a New York family business with strong real estate interests. The Sungs were not politically connected in the same way the Trumps were.

This was simply a case of one successful New York family being inside the tent, and the other family being outside looking in.

When I first heard Vance had kicked the Trump case while he was targeting the Sungs, I had mixed feelings.

On the one hand, the Trump SoHo case sounds like exactly the sort of fraud prosecution that at some point long before last year's presidential run should have taken place in the orbit of Donald Trump, a man who has demonstrated over and over that he has no compunction about lying in the most high-leverage situations.

The infamous Trump University mess, which then candidate Donald "I don't settle lawsuits" Trump settled for $25 million, is an example of something that feels like it should have stuck to the Trump empire long before we got to this place.

In that highly similar situation, incidentally, Trump reportedly made an illegal campaign contribution to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, after Bondi had begun investigating Trump University.

My other reaction, though - and I know how this is going to sound - was that even the Trumps were relatively small-time compared to the targets Vance could have chosen.

The financial crisis of 2008 was caused by fraud on a massive, industrial scale, far beyond anything Don Jr. and Ivanka could have pulled off. The misrepresentations made by megabanks were systematic and involved hundreds of billions of dollars worth of financial instruments. When the toxic deals went south, they nearly sank the world economy.

Even if Vance had gone forward with a prosecution of the famous Trumps, in other words, it would have been a paltry effort compared to what he could have done, in terms of targeting the systemic problem. But he lacked the backbone even to take on connected individuals.

Still, the aborted prosecution(s) involving the Trumps should help Americans understand the high stakes of the Too Big to Fail era. Donald Trump has successfully danced around the law his whole life, and the consequence we share for indulging that system of kid-glove treatment for the rich and connected is that a sociopathic truthophobe and his goofball family now occupy the White House.

We don't yet know what the consequences will be for the bigger miss: letting Wall Street skate with a back-room payoff after causing the 2008 crash. Unfortunately, we'll likely find out sooner or later.
(c) 2017 Matt Taibbi is Rolling Stone's chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the likes of journalistic giants Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi's 2004 campaign journal Spanking the Donkey cemented his status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. His books include Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire.

JUST IMAGINE: A new movement among the Mizrahim is born in Israel.

It declares that all the existing organizations of Mizrahim (Oriental Jews) are phony. That they are all instruments of the Ashkenazi (European Jewish) elite to keep the Mizrahim in subjugation. That the Oriental Shas party is a joke, especially since the death of Rabbi Ovadia Josef, who was an authentic Mizrahi leader.

It says the Likud is the most cunning instrument for keeping the Mizrahim down. That the endless rule of Binyamin Netanyahu, the very personification of the Ashkenazi elite, symbolizes the powerlessness of the ignorant Mizrahi masses, who keep him and his entire Ashkenazi gang in power.

SO a new Mizrahi party is set up, led by energetic young people who put forward a shocking revolutionary idea: separation.

Their plan is to partition the State of Israel along the Jaffa - Jerusalem road, dividing the country into two halves. Everything north of the dividing line will remain the property of the Ashkenazis, everything south of it will become the new sovereign Mizrahi state, to be called Medinat Mizrah.

From there, your imagination can lead you anywhere you want.

WHERE WOULD I stand in such a situation? Asking myself seriously, I find myself in a very ambiguous situation.

I am an Ashkenazi. As Ashkenazi as you get. I was born in Germany. My family had been there for ages. But I never defined myself as such. The very idea of being "Ashkenazi" is completely alien to me.

More so, I have a very deep attachment to the Mizrahi society. I had it even before four young recruits from Morocco risked their young lives to save my life in the 1948 war. I was attached to Oriental culture from early childhood.

So, confronted with a vigorous Oriental separation movement, where would I stand? Frankly, I do not know. I certainly would not send the Israeli army and police to put it down. That would be impossible anyhow, considering that most soldiers and police are themselves Mizrahim.

Fortunately, the whole idea is preposterous. Can't happen. Even less than Kurdish or Catalonian separation.

CURIOUSLY ENOUGH, the Kurds and the Catalans are two peoples I have always liked.

I don't know when I started to like the Kurds or why. In my youth, Kurds were considered nice but primitive. The saying "Ana Kurdi" (Arabic for "I am a Kurd") meant that I am a simple person who fulfills his task without asking questions.

Jewish immigrants from Iraqi Kurdistan spoke of their former hosts with affection - unlike most Jewish immigrants from other countries.

In the 1950s I came to know a semi-clandestine cell of Egyptian Jewish emigres in Paris. They assisted the Algerian struggle for independence - a cause which I fervently supported myself. Its leader was Henri Curiel, and one of its members was a young Egyptian Jewish woman, Joyce Blau, who was also an ardent supporter of the Kurdish cause. This was also the field of her academic studies.

Through her, I learned more about the Kurdish story, or tragedy. Though Kurdistan is a compact territory, it is divided into pieces that belong to different states - Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, with more communities dispersed in other countries.

At the end of World War I, there was an effort to set up a Kurdish state, but the rapaciousness of the victors and the re-emergence of a strong Turkey made this impossible. The Kurds themselves were not completely blameless: they were and are consistently unable to unite. Their leading families act against each other.

After having set up the "Israeli Council for Algerian Independence", I found an Israeli group of immigrants from Iraqi Kurdistan and together we founded the "Israeli Council for an Independent Kurdistan".

As a member, I had some unforgettable experiences. Twice I was invited to address mass meetings of Kurds in Germany. Mass meetings in the literal sense: huge numbers of Kurds from all over Europe cheered my speech, quite a boost for my ego.

My efforts petered out when I discovered that high-level Israeli army officers were already in Iraqi Kurdistan, helping to train the Peshmerga ("Before Death") guerrillas. The motive of the Israeli government in sending them there was quite cynical: to undermine the Iraqi state, according to the eternal Roman maxim "Divide et Impera", divide and rule.

How did they get there? Easy, they were under the benevolent protection of the Shah of Iran. But one day the Shah made peace with Saddam Hussein, and that was the end of this particular Israeli project. When the Shah was toppled and Iran became Israel's deadly enemy, Israeli military intervention in Kurdistan became impossible.

But the sentiment remains. I believe that the Kurds deserve independence, especially if they are able to unite. Since they are blessed - or cursed - with oil riches, foreign interests are deeply involved.

THERE IS no similarity whatsoever between the Kurds and the Catalans, except that I like them both.

Catalonia is a highly developed country, and during my several short visits there I felt quite at home. Like all tourists, I strolled in the Rambla of Barcelona - both Hebrew names, so it seems. They are remnants from the times when Spain was a colony of Carthago, a city founded by Semitic people from Phoenicia, who spoke a kind of Hebrew. Barcelona is probably derived from Barak (lightning in Hebrew), and Rambla from the Arabic Ramle (sandy.)

Trouble is, I also love other parts of Spain, especially places like Cordoba and Sevilla. Would be a pity to break it up. On the other hand, one cannot really prevent a people from achieving its independence, if it wants to.

Fortunately, nobody asks me.

THE LARGER question is why smaller and smaller peoples want independence, when the world is creating larger and larger political units?

It looks like a paradox, but really isn't.

We in this generation are witnessing the end of the nation state, which has dominated world history for the last few hundred years. It was born out of necessity. Small countries were unable to build modern mass industries which depended on a large domestic market. They could not defend themselves, when modern armies required more and more sophisticated weapons. Even cultural development depended on larger language-areas.

So Wales and Scotland joined England, Savoy and Sicily created Italy, Corsica and the Provence joined France. Small nationalities joined larger ones. It was necessary for survival.

History is moving on, and now even the nation-State is not large enough to compete. States unite in ever-larger units, such as the European Union. I have no doubt that by the end of this century, there will be in place an effective world government, turning the entire world effectively into one state. (If some extra-terrestrials threaten this world, it will help.)

So how does the separation into smaller and smaller states fit this trend? Simply, if the state of Spain is not necessary anymore for economic and military purposes and its central functions are moving from Madrid to Brussels, why shouldn't the Catalans and the Basques secede and join the Union under their own flags? Look at Yugoslavia, look even at the Soviet Union. Germany is the great exception but it is quite large by itself.

The two processes are not contradictory, they complement each other.

The idiotic Brexit is ahistorical. But if the Scots and the Welsh want to separate from England, they will succeed.

I have great respect for the power of nationalism. In our era, it has prove, to be stronger than religion, communism or any other creed. It is strongest when it combines with religion, as in the Arab world. So the nationalism of small peoples will gain satisfaction in football games, while the real business will be conducted elsewhere.

AT THIS very moment, the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, is busy with enacting a new law, called the Nation Law, which is intended to make clear that the Jewishness of the Jewish State takes precedence over democracy and human rights.

Israel has no constitution, but until now it was assumed that Israel was equally "Jewish" and "democratic". The new law is about to abolish that notion.

The FBI has apparently chosen a new heading under which to lump Black Americans targeted for political persecution: "Black Identity Extremists." There's a simple explanation for the new categorization. The FBI is a bureaucracy whose day-to-day work involves drawing up lists of people and organizations to be surveilled, disrupted and prosecuted. The dramatic increase in Black "movement" activity since the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, has presented the FBI with a much larger field of targets, including youthful elements loosely grouped under the Black Lives Matter banner. When bureaucracies compile new lists, they typically file them under new names.

In a sense, the change in nomenclature is an acknowledgement by the FBI that, after nearly two generations of Black political stagnation and capitulation, there is finally a Black "movement" with the potential to upset the status quo. The leaked FBI counterterrorism division report, scooped by Foreign Policy magazine, also signifies that Black grassroots political activity is under the purview of the national security state's War on Terror and, therefore, subject to the awesome array of repressive measures authorized to law enforcement and intelligence agencies since 9/11.

COINTELPRO - the FBI's program to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" those designated as enemies of the state - was itself exposed as an illegal police state mechanism in the mid-1970s. Since 2001, the government's COINTELPRO-like programs have been superseded by a far more repressive regime, inaugurated by President George W. Bush and strengthened under Barack Obama. The post-9/ll national security state has legalized the world's most intrusive surveillance apparatus and detention without trial or charge, a system designed specifically to crush targeted ideologies - meaning, modes of thought and political identification.

It is in this context that the FBI's umbrella designation "Black Identity Extremists" is so insidious and dangerous, in that it targets people based on their (stated, imagined or inferred) beliefs and ethnic loyalties, rather than specific criminal acts or even organizational affiliation. It is a catch-all for blanket repression of Black activism of any kind.

The FBI mindset has clearly been shaped by its frustration with so-called "lone wolf" Islamic jihadists -- individual actors not directly affiliated with al Qaida or its offshoots. U.S. police and intelligence operatives speak constantly of the need to identify and neutralize Muslims in our midst that have been "radicalized" or "self-radicalized" and thus are fair game to be subjected to every tactic of entrapment and dirty tricks. The FBI views Black activists in the same light -- as potentially dangerous, "self-radicalized" threats. The counterterrorism division report cites six armed attacks on U.S. cops in the post-Ferguson period, including Dallas, Baton Rouge and New York City, as justification for its ideology-based categorization of the Black menace. Micah Johnson, who shot 11 cops in Dallas, "appeared to have been influenced by BIE ideology" based on his "journal writings and statements to police," said the Bureau.

"BIE ideology" is whatever the FBI thinks it is. In the tortured logic of white supremacist law and order, Black identification with other Blacks is inherently subversive and a prima facie justification for surveillance. The Bureau's BIE list could eventually accommodate every conceivable political tendency of Black thought -- including the "ideologies" resident in the venerable old NAACP, which issued a statement on the leaked FBI document.

"In a time when white supremacists are marching down city streets with loaded weapons and tiki torches - organizing rallies of terror around the country - it comes as a great shock that the FBI would decide to target black identity groups protesting police brutality and their right to exist free of harm, as a threat," said NAACP president and CEO Derrick Johnson.

Johnson then attempts to lay the blame for this state of affairs on President Trump, who has "emboldened... right-wing extremists, white nationalists and white supremacists." But, the FBI has been surveilling Black Lives Matter activists ever since the explosion of resistance in Ferguson. As early as December, 2014, the FBI was discovered to have tracked Black Lives Matter activists at the huge Mall of the Americas in Bloomington, Minnesota, in conjunction with state and local officers of the Joint Terrorism Task Force. In July of 2015 The Intercept reported that "Feds Regularly Monitored Black Lives Matter Since Ferguson," exposing extensive surveillance of the rejuvenated Black movement by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Back in the nineteen seventies, there was a best-seller, widely read in the business community, called Winning through Intimidation. Barack Obama should pick up a copy, because that is what Donald Trump may be doing to him. Obama stays mostly silent as the belligerent Trump rolls back or destroys the legacies of Obama's eight years in office. The mere thought of tangling with the Trumpster's foul, prevaricatory, sneering tweets offends Obama's own sense of civil discourse between politicians.

Given the present crises, this revulsion is just another form of self-indulgence by the former, self-described community organizer, Senator and President. There is no other political leader, in our celebrity culture, as well known or so high in the polls. Consequently Obama owes a different attitude and level of engagement to the American people.

In a previous column, I described some of these engagements, none of which involve a twitter fight with Trump. They provide focal points for Americans to rally around agendas and opposition to the politics of anxiety, dread and fear generated by the unstable occupant of the White House. That is, a way to respond to Trump's raging tantrums, fact-impairment, loss of self-control and ego-centric vanities.

Mr. Obama could, for example, work to strengthen civic groups and help substantially to create new organizations to address urgent needs (such as averting wars); he could back opposition to Trump's destructive policies that are running America into the ground while shielding Wall Street and the dictatorial corporate supremacists whose toadies Trump has put into high government positions.

Obama is a big draw and can raise hundreds of millions of dollars faster than most. Furthermore, he has the unique ability to fill the void the mass media is desperately looking to fill by serving as a counterweight to Trump. Hillary, hawking her latest book, doesn't fit the bill here.

Instead, Obama, besides raising funds for his presidential library (about $1 billion), is getting press primarily for being paid $400,000 or more per speech before Wall Street and other big business audiences. Most recently, the New York Times located him in Sao Paulo, Brazil, speaking generalities to businesspeople who were charged from $1,500 to $2,400 to hear him say essentially nothing of note. The speech title was grandly cheerleading: "Change the World? Yes, You Can"-a nod to his unofficial 2008 campaign slogan, "Yes We Can."

Obama's spokesman would not say how much Obama gets to keep of the approximate $2 million generated by this event, which was sponsored by the Spanish bank Santander and Brazilian media conglomerates. The paying attendees were attracted to his celebrity status and didn't care about the sizable tab probably picked up by their companies. One attendee was quoted by the Times as saying, "It was a bit disappointing. I don't feel like he said anything new."

There is plenty to be said in the U.S. that is both new and significant by Obama. However, apart from a few words here and there on bigotry and immigration, Obama has preferred to bounce between high-priced lecture gigs and wealthy watering holes where he is a guest of the super-rich, and to work on his book, for which he is receiving over $30 million. Michelle Obama is receiving many millions of dollars for her book and has also been attending celebrity-filled gatherings. When asked at one such event, whom she would most like to be if she had another career, she answered, Beyonce.

Meanwhile, down at the grassroots level, where people live, work and raise their families, tens of millions are without living wages or health insurance. Underemployment and people dropping out of the labor market in frustration over their rejected skills, mask what is in reality a deceptively low unemployment rate, and yet poverty indicators are everywhere. Under Trump, families will be exposed to more hazards in the workplace, the environment and the marketplace, and they will face rip-offs by companies that have been liberated from regulatory law and order.

The list of protective programs and responsible business laws destroyed by Trump's wrecking crew of a cabinet grows longer every week.

It isn't as if Barack Obama doesn't realize what he is doing and what is happening to him in this self-enriching bubble he has shaped, post Presidency. He can't seem to help himself, and going to nearly 500 fat-cat political fund-raisers outside Washington, D.C. as President didn't help to change or expand his chosen circle.

In his best-selling 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, then Senator Obama admitted: "I found myself spending time with people of means-law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists. As a rule, they were smart, interesting people. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class: the top 1 percent of the income scale."

Classic Obama: Say the right thing and the people won't mind so much when your words don't match your deeds.