The Divide

American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap

By: Matt Taibbi

Narrated by: Ray Porter

Length: 14 hrs and 1 min

Publisher's summary

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • 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 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.

©2014 Matt Taibbi (P)2014 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Ambitious . . . deeply reported, highly compelling . . . impossible to put down.”—The New York Times Book Review

“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.”—Los Angeles Times

“[Matt] 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, to juxtapose justice for the poor and the powerful. . . . The Divide is an important book. Its documentation is powerful and shocking.”—The Washington Post

Sad

Sad, it makes you want to cry. I don't think it will until the next big crisis.

Should be required reading for everyone in the US.

Another amazing book by Taibbi. It's interesting, illuminating, & terrifying to listen to this in March 2021 and see that nothing has fundamentally changed in the intervening years. Its just as significant a piece of writing now as it was when it was first published.

The Broken System

An excellent book with great information not pursued by either side of the media. Only wish author would allow for the fact that there are a lot more white people who are ridiculously poor and victimized by the system. His assertion that the wealthy are loved by most regardless of how that wealth was accumulated is spot on.

Matt Taibbi speaks for the underclass of man.

when I started reading Griftopia and forgot my book in Colorado. soon after returning I ran to the divide.

stress inducer

listen someplace relaxing, because the juxtaposition of the two worlds Tiabbi shows can be infuriating.

Excellent

“What destroyed the nations preceding you, was that if a noble amongst them stole, they would forgive him, and if a poor person amongst them stole, they would inflict God’s Legal punishment on him.

By God, if Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad stole, I would cut off her hand.”

-Prophet Muhammad

It may sound extreme, But I do not believe if the hedge fund manager knew they would lose their hands they would be so bold or arrogant about the commiting massive fraud and theft. Deterrence as a punishment can be argued but then so can excessive permissibility, which leads to the rampant complacency, and corruption. I would much rather see forgiveness for the poor and the unfortunate. It's hard to get the evidence to convict the rich while there is no evidence to sweep up the innocent and charge them falsley. It would be poetic Justice and of course humorous, to simply throw a big net over the executive suites in America and see what kind of crimes we can find, if we get some Innocent people oh well they make nice salaries and will be fine. On a serious note, There is always a reaction to injustice. We have prolonged its impact. In time we will undo our nation.

Mega Matt Fan

This was my third book by Mr Taibbi, and I am solidly in his fan base now. He's extremely good at presenting the divide in a succinct manner. A lot of the material presented in this book I was already aware of, which made his presentation of the unfamiliar believable. This is not just an opinion piece; the author gives dates, names, etc. which can be verified. Ray Porter did a fabulous job with the narration as well.

Sickening. Amazing.

Matt Taibbi does an amazing job telling a horrifying truth about American. This book envoked anger enough in me as a former JP Morgan employee to lessen my already negative opinion of the company and of our system which has become a corporate kleptocracy.

Well-written & enlightening juxtaposition of class

Taibbi's in your face and conversational style is a perfect fit for the audio form. The book works extremely well as a transition from the pages of Rolling Stone to an extensive and in - depth investigation of how Americans treat crime differently on the basis of race, class, and financial holding. By comparing issues like the aggressive accusations of small scale fraud of desperate Americans to the encouraged economic gutting of global financial markets, The Divide is able to illustrate the horribly misguided justice system that now exists.

Though some may find lengthy parts of the book devoted to breaking down how wealthy financiers orchestrated lawyerly banking heists to be drab, it is balanced superbly by what appears to be the unrelated troubles of out of luck everyday people. Artfully Taibbi shows you how they connect and sparked the realization of the importance and sheer hypocrisy of these scenarios in relation to civil rights and legal protections. Many of the chapters are worth revisiting and some left me uncharacteristically emotional.

Interesting insight but at times over the top.

What did you love best about The Divide?

I enjoyed the scope as well as the nuance of the writing.