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Business. Politics. Sociology. Nonfiction. HTML:NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER â?˘ NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST, NPR, AND KIRKUS REVIEWS 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 worldâ??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 trendsâ??growing wealth inequality and mass incarcerationâ??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 crimeâ??but itâ??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 justiceâ??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 astonishingâ??and enragingâ??accounts of the high-stakes capers of the wealthy and nightmare stories of regular people caught in the Divideâ??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. Praise for The Divide â??Ambitious . . . deeply reported, highly compelling . . . impossible to put down.â?ťâ??The New York Times Book Review â??These are the stories that will keep you up at night. . . . The Divide is not just a report from the new America; it is advocacy journalism at its finest.â?ťâ??Los Angeles Times â??Taibbi is a relentless investigative reporter. 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. . . . The Divide is an important book. Its documentation is powerful and shocking.â?ťâ??The Washington Post â??Captivating . . . The Divide enshrines its authorâ??s position as one of the most important voices in contemporary American journalism.â?ťâ??The Independent (UK) â??Taibbi [is] perhaps the greatest reporte… (more)
User reviews
That said, I liked The Divide rather than loving it. I think there's a ton of great information in it, and I agree with Taibbi's thesis: that there's something broken about a society that fails to pursue any of the Wall Street criminals who egregiously broke laws and ruined lives in search of bigger year-end bonuses, especially when that society is simultaneously cracking down on -- and cracking heads of -- poor folks in "bad neighborhoods." My only objection to the book was that I thought the anecdotes went on a bit too long, and I thought they were too exclusively focused on the problems of the urban poor, especially in greater New York City.
The book begins well, with a stark comparison. "At its peak in 1991," Taibbi says, "according to FBI data, there were 758 violent crimes per 100,000 people. By 2010 that number had plunged to 425 crimes per 100,000, a drop of more than 44 percent" (p. 1). The contrast: "In 1991 there were about one million Americans behind bars. By 2012 the number was over 2.2 million, a more than 100 percent increase." Taibbi believes "We’re creating a dystopia, where the mania of the state isn’t secrecy or censorship but unfairness" (p. 12). The process begins, in Taibbi's story, with a 1999 memo written by an obscure Clinton staffer named Eric Holder. "Bringing Criminal Charges Against Corporations" is an interesting memo, and it had an interesting role in the reinterpretation of the Justice Department's role. For me, it was a little too much of an insider story, though. I was more interested in the connections between Holder (and his associate Lanny Breuer) and the law firm of Covington and Burling (one of whose founders wrote extensively in opposition of the New Deal back in the 1930s). When Holder and Breuer were running Justice, twenty-two other lawyers from that single firm held key positions in the Department. I'd like to hear more about that.
Taibbi has collected a lot of these bizarre, unjust contrasts. "For instance , in 2011, the state of Ohio —the same state that lost tens of millions in the early 2000s when its pension fund bought severely overpriced mortgage-backed securities from a Lehman Brothers banker named John Kasich, who would later become governor —tried to recoup some of its losses by sending out 22,000 notices to Ohioans seeking “overpayments” in either welfare or food stamps"(p. 341). In a passage that reminds me of Chrystia Freeland's discussion of cognitive capture, Taibbi describes President Obama's remarks on 60 Minutes in December, 2011, suggesting that a lot of the "least ethical behavior" on Wall street wasn't strictly illegal. "The thing that’s interesting about this claim," Taibbi says, "isn’t that it’s factually wrong, which incidentally it almost always is, often to a humorously enormous degree. What’s interesting is that the people who make this claim usually believe it to be true. Even Barack Obama , despite the fact that he’s almost universally understood to be an outstanding lawyer and should know better, probably believes it to be true. This weird psychological kink is where the Divide lives. Increasingly, the people who make decisions about justice and punishment in this country see a meaningful difference between crime and merely breaking the law" (pp. 397-398). Crime, it turns out, is what poor people are increasingly assumed to be doing, even when they're just standing outside their apartment building having a smoke at 1 AM. Breaking the law is just being "aggressive" with the rules of the game, and it's perceived as victimless -- even when taxpayers have to ante up billions of dollars in bailouts.
And let's not forget to follow the money. While the Financial Crisis Inquiry Committee got $10 million in funding, "the federal drug enforcement budget leaped from $ 13.275 billion to $ 15.278 billion. That meant that just the increase in the national drug enforcement budget for the year of the biggest financial crisis since the Depression was roughly two hundred times the size of the budget for the sole executive branch effort at formally investigating the causes of financial corruption" (p. 407). Policing and incarceration are big business in America. It's the one thing, after all, we can't outsource overseas.
He gives vivid examples: Andrew Brown of Bed-Stuy, a working man who is continually harassed, stopped and frisked by NYC police for blocking the sidewalk at 1:30 AM and made to pay fines and waste time in court for not committing a crime other than being part of an evil quota system. Then there's "The Greatest Bank Robbery You Never Heard Of", where the Lehman collapse nets Barclays 5 billion dollars, all stolen from pensions funds, with no penalty.
Re: Lehman and Dick Fuld, its CEO: "Fuld wanted complete control over the company (Lehman) for a simple reason. They wanted to transform the bank's entire financial strategy into a vehicle for maximizing their personal compensation."
Taibbi skillfully rips your guts out with stories of immigrants deported by Georgia cops who stop anyone non-white and force them to pay thousands to retrieve their vehicles. In contrast is the hedge funders' mission to destroy an insurance company because they had bet against its success. They pay large fines, avoid any admission of guilt, and go on their merry way.
In none of these instances does the government protect anyone but the 1%. Bill Clinton started it, with "welfare reform" and the removal of Glass-Steagall. Eric Holder, Lanny Breuer, Cyrus Vance Jr, Tim Geithner, and Barack Obama let the disgraceful crimes of HBSC, UBS, Chase, etc occur on their watch and did nothing.
"If you choose to take the money over and over again from the Wall Street crowd while the welfare moms keep getting jail and community service, now suddenly you've institutionalized the imbalance."
A most heartbreaking book. Taibbi explains complicated issues in beautiful prose and lets fly sentences like this: "If the law is applied unequally enough over a long enough period of time, law enforcement becomes politically illegitimate."
READ THIS CRITICALLY IMPORTANT BOOK. I wish it was fiction but it's not.
The sale of Lehman Brothers to Barclays Bank was advertised as a last-minute, desperation fire sale. How did
On the other side of the divide, how can America's prison population be going way up while the rate of violent crime is way down? The answer is: Stop and Frisk. Did you know that standing on the sidewalk in front of your house in New York City can get you arrested and thrown in a police van that just happens to be nearby? After going through the court system, charged with Blocking Pedestrian Traffic (even if there was no one else on the sidewalk at the time), you could be back in front of your house. This time, you are standing at the edge of the sidewalk, almost on the street. Prepare to get arrested again, charged with Blocking Vehicular Traffic (even if you weren't actually in the street).
The new criminal class in America seems to be welfare applicants and recipients. The author does not mean to suggest that accusations of welfare fraud should not be investigated, and, if necessary, prosecuted. What is the sense in assuming that Everyone is trying to defraud the system? This is not a case of "guilty until proven innocent" but "we know you are guilty, and eventually, we'll prove it."
This book easily reaches the level of Wow. It is a very eye-opening, and rather disheartening, look at life in present-day America. It is extremely highly recommended for all Americans.