The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap -- Matt Taibbi

<b><i>NEW YORK TIMES </i>BESTSELLER - NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY <i>THE WASHINGTON POST, </i> NPR, AND <i>KIRKUS REVIEWS</i> <p/>A scathing portrait of an urgent new American crisis</b><br> <b> </b><br> Over the last two decades, America has been falling deeper and deeper into a statistical mystery: <p/> <i>Poverty goes up. Crime goes down. The prison population doubles.</i><br> <i>Fraud by the rich wipes out 40 percent of the world's wealth. The rich get massively richer. No one goes to jail.</i> <p/> 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. <p/> In <i>The Divide, </i>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 large