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American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap
Spiegel & Grau
April 2014
On Sale: April 8, 2014
448 pages ISBN: 081299342X EAN: 9780812993424 Kindle: B00EBRUB02 Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
A scathing portrait of an urgent new American crisis Over the last two decades, America has been falling deeper
and deeper into a statistical mystery: Poverty goes up. Crime goes down. The prison population
doubles.
Fraud by the rich wipes out 40 percent of the world’s
wealth. The rich get massively 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.
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