The Divide
About This Book
Over the past twenty years, American statistics have pointed in directions that seem impossible to square. Poverty has climbed while crime has fallen, and yet the prison population has doubled. Financial fraud among the wealthy has wiped out roughly 40 percent of the world's wealth, the rich have grown far richer, and almost no one has been jailed for it. Matt Taibbi set out to explain these contradictions and concluded that they are two halves of one story. He calls the point where they meet the Divide: the seam in American life where widening wealth inequality and mass incarceration join. His argument is that a person's basic rights now depend on whether that person is rich or poor. The same logic that lets enormous fraud by the hyperwealthy pass without punishment also treats poverty itself as something close to a crime. The pattern is hard to notice until the two trends are laid next to each other. Taibbi works through reported stories on both sides. On the privileged side, he looks at the looting that came before the financial collapse, a scheme by billionaire hedge fund managers to bring down a company through dirty tricks, and a whistleblower who got in the way of some of the largest banks in the country and found herself targeted for it. On the other side, he follows the immigrant dragnet, a welfare system that treats recipients as suspected thieves, and the world of stop-and-frisk policing, where standing in front of your own home can get you arrested. The result is an angry, closely reported look at a justice system built on a troubling idea of civil rights, one that crushes the lives of the poor, overlooks the destructive crimes of the rich, and draws the rest of us in as participants.
ISBN: 9780812983630
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