By Matt Taibbi, Molly Crabapple
A scathing portrait of an pressing new American crisis
Over the final twenty years, the US has been falling deeper and deeper right into a statistical mystery:
Poverty is going up. Crime is going down. The criminal inhabitants doubles.
Fraud by way of the wealthy wipes out forty percentage of the world's wealth. the wealthy get hugely richer. nobody is going to jail.
In seek of an answer, journalist Matt Taibbi chanced on the Divide, the seam in American lifestyles the place our such a lot troubling trends—growing wealth inequality and mass incarceration—come jointly, pushed by means of a dramatic shift in American citizenship: Our uncomplicated rights are actually made up our minds by way of our wealth or poverty. The Divide is what permits vastly harmful fraud through the hyperwealthy to move unpunished, whereas turning poverty itself right into a crime—but it's very unlikely to work out till you examine those alarming tendencies aspect by way of side.
In The Divide, Matt Taibbi takes readers on a galvanizing trip via each side of our new process of justice—the fun-house-mirror worlds of the untouchably prosperous and the criminalized terrible. He uncovers the startling looting that preceded the monetary cave in; a wild conspiracy of billionaire hedge fund managers to break a firm via soiled tips; and the tale of a whistleblower who will get within the means of the biggest banks in the US, simply to discover herself within the crosshairs. at the different part of the Divide, Taibbi takes us to front strains of the immigrant dragnet; into the newly punitive welfare process which treats its beneficiaries as thieves; and deep contained in the stop-and-frisk global, the place status in entrance of your house has develop into an arrestable offense. As he narrates those tremendous tales, he attracts out and analyzes their universal resource: a perverse new general of justice, in keeping with a thorough, demanding new imaginative and prescient of civil rights.
Through astonishing—and enraging—accounts of the high-stakes capers of the rich and nightmare tales of standard humans stuck within the Divide's punishing common sense, Taibbi lays naked one of many maximum demanding situations we are facing in modern American existence: surviving a procedure that devours the lives of the terrible, turns a blind eye to the harmful crimes of the rich, and implicates us all.
“These are the tales that might continue you up at evening. . . . The Divide is not only a file from the hot the USA; it truly is advocacy journalism at its finest.” —Los Angeles Times
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Extra info for The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap
Example text
We see the centrality of the cultural work that can be done in ideas about poor white people operating in experimental research on race, poverty, and gender in the United States. In Gilliam’s research, interviewees hearing and viewing the same script performed by black and white impoverished women had more extreme antiblack attitudes when they viewed poor white women. Respondents were being cued to comment on their views about the mythological “welfare queen” caricature of antipoverty policy and those deemed the undeserving poor.
Many low-wage jobs were available for young white women who were also breadwinners for both themselves and their families in the rural areas. Civilized labor also led to the deskilling of white craftsmen as they were more rapidly compelled to join the urban proletariat. There was a high cost of living for small professionals in new cities like Johannesburg and increasing rates of unemployment for older and unskilled white men. The latter could often get jobs on the railways as blacksmiths, carpenters, plumbers, checkers, painters, dumpsmen, watchmen, and other government public relief jobs.
C]ompletion of the transcontinental railroad [would] bring about the Plains Indian Wars of the 1870s and 1880s. Nativist vigilantism against the influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe in the Northeast and entry of the Chinese into the West created a lethal synergy with anti-black mob violence. 98 The federal government, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and arms manufacturers used the new technology of the machine gun to murder entire peoples and to consolidate American Empire. 101 These technologies moderated antagonistic social forces and more profoundly entrenched freedmen and freedwomen in the perpetual position of being seen as property of white society: “workers” whose labor was not seen as labor but tribute due to their collective racial superiors.
