The Divide
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY "THE WASHINGTON POST "AND NPR 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.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
4mentions
4people
2014–2017years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I don't understand how this myth persists. Of course they broke laws. Do you think Goldman Sachs would have paid out a 5 billion dollar settlement if they thought they could win in a courtroom?.. of course not.
The problem isn't that they didn't break laws.. it's the justice department's fault for accepting cash settlements instead of actually taking people to trial and holding them accountable. The criminals always win in this scenario because nobody goes to jail, the fines are less than the profit, and there are no lessons to be learned other than to not get caught.
Matt Taibbi does a really good job of examining this shift in the Justice Department's strategy in his book The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, which I recommend if this is a subject you are interested in.
- Matt Taibbi has an interesting book out "The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap."
There are issues in the US beyond just the seizing of assets, the question is how do we fix it so that everyone can prosper? The idea of the United States is still awesome, but have we as a country ever come close to the ideal? Is it possible to reach the ideal?
- You should read Matt Taibbi's new book " The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap". It explains how this system of "well, if it's a company doing it then I guess we can't press charges" came to be.
- Matt Taibbi wrote about this in his book The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap [1].
Enron was probably the last big corporate take-down by the government.
From an interview http://www.democracynow.org/2014/4/15/who_goes_to_jail_matt_...
1. http://smile.amazon.com/Divide-American-Injustice-Age-Wealth...But at the bottom of it, there was this thing that he [Eric Holder] laid out called the "collateral consequences doctrine." And what "collateral consequences" meant was that if you’re a prosecutor and you’re targeting one of these big corporate offenders and you’re worried that you may affect innocent victims, that shareholders or innocent executives may lose their jobs, you may consider other alternatives, other remedies besides criminal prosecutions—in other words, fines, nonprosecution agreements, deferred prosecution agreements. And again, at the time, it was a completely sensible thing to lay out. Of course it makes sense to not always destroy a company if you can avoid it. But what they’ve done is they’ve conflated that sometimes-sensible policy with a policy of not going after any individuals for any crimes. And that’s just totally unacceptable.
