He is by far my favorite narrator - his reading of 'Ghost in the Wires' was also excellent. 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.įirst off, if I could give 6 stars for Ray Porter's performance I would. 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.

Fraud 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: A scathing portrait of an urgent new American crisis.

The divide matt taibbi sparknotes