“The Divide” by Matt Taibbi is a book that explores the growing income inequality in America and its devastating effects on society. Taibbi argues that there are two different justice systems in America, one for the wealthy, and one for everyone else. He explores how this divide has been created and perpetuated, looking at factors such as the financial crisis of 2008, the criminal justice system, and the role of politicians and corporations. Through interviews with those impacted by the divide, including both low-income individuals and wealthy bankers, Taibbi provides a compelling argument for why this growing inequality is a threat to American democracy and offers suggestions for how to address this issue. Ultimately, “The Divide” is a powerful critique of the current state of American society and a call to action for readers to demand change.

• The Divide

• American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap
• By: Matt Taibbi
• Narrated by: Ray Porter

A scathing portrait of a pressing new American crisis

Over the past two decades, America has become more and more entangled in a statistical mystery:

Poverty increased. Crime decreased. The prison population doubled. Fraud by the rich takes 40 percent of the world’s wealth. The rich are getting richer. No one goes to jail.

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 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 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. 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. 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. 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.

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.

An in depth easy to understand book on the mess this country is in. It should be required reading. Giving it to my kids. We need a change.

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