Many of these cases made use of the collateral consequences, a principle based on a memorandum written by Attorney General Eric Handler that states prosecutors should consider whether prosecution would cause too many lost jobs or too much financial harm to the company. Instead, either the very smallest actors in those activities were prosecuted, or the companies negotiated fines and settlements outside of court. In the US, bankers and financial officials whose unethical and illegal behavior contributed to the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent economic scandals rarely faced prosecution for their activities. Taibbi will discuss the punishing logic of these trends and what he argues is 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.The Divide by Matt Taibbi approaches the complicated topic of the unequal treatment of defendants in the United States criminal justice system based on wealth, through individual stories and rarely heard cases revealed in court proceedings.

His book is the first examination of these two alarming trends side-by-side and an exploration of what Taibbi reveals is a dramatic shift in the nature of American citizenship: our basic rights as citizens are now determined by our wealth or poverty focuses on the lives of real people. “The Divide” is Taibbi’s term for the seam in American life where two troubling trends - growing wealth inequality and mass incarceration - come together.

Yet the rich have become massively richer. And on the other end of the spectrum, financial fraud by the rich has wiped out 40 percent of the world’s wealth. A special evening with one of America’s premiere journalists as ProPublica President and Founding General Manager Richard Tofel interviews bestselling author Matt Taibbi on his groundbreaking new book, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap.ĭuring tonight’s talk, Matt Taibbi will discuss the inequity of American crime and punishment, exploring the reasons why, as he shows in The Divide, America has, over the last two decades, been falling deeper and deeper into a statistical mystery: Poverty has gone up crime has gone down and yet the prison population has doubled.

The divide matt taibbi sparknotes