Its documentation is powerful and shocking.” -The Washington Post He takes readers inside not only investment banks, hedge funds and the blood sport of short-sellers, but into the lives of the needy, minorities, street drifters and illegal immigrants. “Taibbi is a relentless investigative reporter. The Divide is not just a report from the new America it is advocacy journalism at its finest.” -Los Angeles Times “These are the stories that will keep you up at night. impossible to put down.” -The New York Times Book Review Through astonishing-and enraging-accounts of the high-stakes capers of the wealthy and nightmare stories of regular people caught in the Divide’s punishing logic, Taibbi lays bare one of the greatest challenges we face in contemporary American life: surviving a system that devours the lives of the poor, turns a blind eye to the destructive crimes of the wealthy, and implicates us all. As he narrates these incredible stories, he draws out and analyzes their common source: a perverse new standard of justice, based on a radical, disturbing new vision of civil rights. On the other side of the Divide, Taibbi takes us to the front lines of the immigrant dragnet into the newly punitive welfare system which treats its beneficiaries as thieves and deep inside the stop-and-frisk world, where standing in front of your own home has become an arrestable offense. He uncovers the startling looting that preceded the financial collapse a wild conspiracy of billionaire hedge fund managers to destroy a company through dirty tricks and the story of a whistleblower who gets in the way of the largest banks in America, only to find herself in the crosshairs.

In The Divide, Matt Taibbi takes readers on a galvanizing journey through both sides of our new system of justice-the fun-house-mirror worlds of the untouchably wealthy and the criminalized poor. The Divide is what allows massively destructive fraud by the hyperwealthy to go unpunished, while turning poverty itself into a crime-but it’s impossible to see until you look at these two alarming trends side by side. In search of a solution, journalist Matt Taibbi discovered the Divide, the seam in American life where our two most troubling trends-growing wealth inequality and mass incarceration-come together, driven by a dramatic shift in American citizenship: Our basic rights are now determined by our wealth or poverty. The prison population doubles.įraud by the rich wipes out 40 percent of the world’s wealth. Over the last two decades, America has been falling deeper and deeper into a statistical mystery: NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST, NPR, AND KIRKUS REVIEWSĪ scathing portrait of an urgent new American crisis.

The divide by matt taibbi