Download or read book The Divide by Matt Taibbi Key Takeaways Analysis Review written by Instaread and published by Instaread Summaries. This book was released on 2015-08-27 with total page 37 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Divide: by Matt Taibbi | Key Takeaways, Analysis & Review Preview: 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. 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. Instead, either the very smallest actors in those activities were prosecuted, or the companies negotiated fines and settlements outside of court. 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. Policing in major US cities generates a high volume of arrests, criminal charges for trivial offenses, and economic incentives not to fight allegations in court… PLEASE NOTE: This is Key Takeaways, Analysis & Review of the book and NOT the original book. Inside this Instaread Key Takeaways, Analysis & Review of The DivideOverview of the bookImportant PeopleKey TakeawaysAnalysis of Key Takeaways

Download or read book The Divide written by Instaread and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2015-08-26 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PLEASE NOTE: This is Key Takeaways, Analysis & Review of the book and NOT the original book. The Divide: by Matt Taibbi | Key Takeaways, Analysis & Review Preview: 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. 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. Instead, either the very smallest actors in those activities were prosecuted, or the companies negotiated fines and settlements outside of court. 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. Policing in major US cities generates a high volume of arrests, criminal charges for trivial offenses, and economic incentives not to fight allegations in court... Inside this Instaread Key Takeaways, Analysis & Review of The Divide Overview of the book Important People Key Takeaways Analysis of Key Takeaways

Download or read book Summary of The Divide written by Instaread Summaries and published by Idreambooks. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inside this Instaread Key Takeaways, Analysis & Review of The Divide* Overview of the book* Important People* Key Takeaways* Analysis of Key Takeaways

Download or read book The Divide written by Matt Taibbi and published by Random House. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. Praise for The Divide “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 “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. . . . The Divide is an important book. Its documentation is powerful and shocking.”—The Washington Post “Captivating . . . The Divide enshrines its author’s position as one of the most important voices in contemporary American journalism.”—The Independent (UK) “Taibbi [is] perhaps the greatest reporter on Wall Street’s crimes in the modern era.”—Salon

Download or read book Hate Inc written by Matt Taibbi and published by . This book was released on 2021-03 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Spanking the Donkey written by Matt Taibbi and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An up-close look at the democratic race for the White House—it isn't pretty Spanking the Donkey is a campaign diary like no other. Celebrated reporter Matt Taibbi turns a withering eye on the kissing contest of puffed-up martinets and egomaniacal fantasists more generally known as the 2004 Democratic primaries. Taibbi's contempt for the whole charade, and for most of those involved (including a generous helping of his fellow journalists), makes for a searing and highly entertaining account. His refusal to take the proceedings seriously leads him to volunteer for Wesley Clark's New Hampshire campaign in the guise of an adult-film director, while his take on a John Edwards press conference in New York City is filtered through the haze of hallucinogenic drugs. Taking up residence in slums and halfway houses as he follows the circus around the country, Taibbi juxtaposes an idiotic dog-and-pony show in which clashes of plainly identical candidates are presented as real controversies, with the quite separate concerns of the ordinary Americans whose lodgings he shares. The gap between the antiseptic exercise in faint patriotic optimism that is mainstream politics and the harsh realities of life for the millions of Americans that the electoral parade simply passes by has never been more sharply, or hilariously, sketched.

Download or read book Smells Like Dead Elephants written by Matt Taibbi and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2014-07-08 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From “the only political writer in America that matters” comes a collection of his best reportage about the worst of times (Harford Advocate). Matt Taibbi is notorious as a journalistic agitator, a stone thrower, a “natural provocateur” (Salon.com). Now, bringing together his most incisive, intense, and hilarious pieces from his “Road Work” column in Rolling Stone, the “political reporter with the gonzo spirit that made Hunter S. Thompson and P. J. O’Rourke so much fun” shines a scathing spotlight on the corruption, dishonesty, and sheer laziness of our leaders (The Washington Post). With no shortage of outrages to compel Taibbi’s pen, these pieces paint a shocking portrait of our government at work—or, as Taibbi points out in “The Worst Congress Ever,” rarely working. Taibbi has plenty to say about George W. Bush, Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, and all the rest, but he doesn’t just hit inside the Beltway. Taibbi gets involved in the action. He infiltrates Senator Conrad Burns’s birthday party under disguise as a lobbyist for a fictional oil firm that wants to drill in the Grand Canyon. He floats into apocalyptic post-Katrina New Orleans in a dinghy with Sean Penn. He goes to Iraq as an embedded reporter, where he witnesses the mind-boggling dysfunction of our occupation and spends three nights in Abu Ghraib prison. And he reports from two of the most bizarre and telling trials in recent memory: California v. Michael Jackson and the evolution-vs.-intelligent-design trial in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A brilliant collection from one of the most entertaining political writers of today, Smells Like Dead Elephants is “the funniest angry book and the angriest funny book since Hunter S. Thompson roared into town” (James Wolcott).

Download or read book Divided written by David Cay Johnston and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The issue of inequality has irrefutably returned to the fore, riding on the anger against Wall Street following the 2008 financial crisis and the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of the super–rich. The Occupy movement made the plight of the 99 percent an indelible part of the public consciousness, and concerns about inequality were a decisive factor in the 2012 presidential elections. How bad is it? According to Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist David Cay Johnston, most Americans, in inflation–adjusted terms, are now back to the average income of 1966. Shockingly, from 2009 to 2011, the top 1 percent got 121 percent of the income gains while the bottom 99 percent saw their income fall. Yet in this most unequal of developed nations, every aspect of inequality remains hotly contested and poorly understood. Divided collects the writings of leading scholars, activists, and journalists to provide an illuminating, multifaceted look at inequality in America, exploring its devastating implications in areas as diverse as education, justice, health care, social mobility, and political representation. Provocative and eminently readable, here is an essential resource for anyone who cares about the future of America—and compelling evidence that inequality can be ignored only at the nation’s peril.

Download or read book The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing written by Matt Taibbi and published by OR Books. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing tells the story of a hyper-observant, politically-minded, but humorously pragmatic weed dealer who has spent a working life compiling rules for how to a) make money and b) avoid prison. Each rule shapes a chapter of this fast-paced outlaw tale, all delivered in Huey Carmichael's deliciously trenchant argot. Here are a few of them: No guns but keep shooters. Stay behind the white guy. Don't snitch. Always have a job. Be multi-sourced. Get your money and get out. Part edge-of-the-seat suspense story, part how-to manual in the tradition of The Anarchist Cookbook, The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing is as scintillating as it is subversive. Just reading it feels illegal.

Download or read book Griftopia written by Matt Taibbi and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-09-06 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliantly illuminating and darkly comic tale of the ongoing financial and political crisis in America. The financial crisis that exploded in 2008 isn’t past but prologue. The grifter class—made up of the largest players in the financial industry and the politicians who do their bidding—has been growing in power, and the crisis was only one terrifying manifestation of how they’ve hijacked America’s political and economic life. Matt Taibbi has combined deep sources, trailblazing reportage, and provocative analysis to create the most lucid, emotionally galvanizing account yet written of this ongoing American crisis. He offers fresh reporting on the backroom deals of the bailout; tells the story of Goldman Sachs, the “vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity”; and uncovers the hidden commodities bubble that transferred billions of dollars to Wall Street while creating food shortages around the world. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the labyrinthine inner workings of this country, and the profound consequences for us all.

Download or read book The Chickenshit Club written by Jesse Eisinger and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2018 Excellence in Financial Journalism Award From Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jesse Eisinger, “a fast moving, fly-on-the-wall, disheartening look at the deterioration of the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission…It is a book of superheroes” (San Francisco Review of Books). Why were no bankers put in prison after the financial crisis of 2008? Why do CEOs seem to commit wrongdoing with impunity? The problem goes beyond banks deemed “Too Big to Fail” to almost every large corporation in America—to pharmaceutical companies and auto manufacturers and beyond. The Chickenshit Club—an inside reference to prosecutors too scared of failure and too daunted by legal impediments to do their jobs—explains why in “an absorbing financial history, a monumental work of journalism…a first-rate study of the federal bureaucracy” (Bloomberg Businessweek). Jesse Eisinger begins the story in the 1970s, when the government pioneered the notion that top corporate executives, not just seedy crooks, could commit heinous crimes and go to prison. He brings us to trading desks on Wall Street, to corporate boardrooms and the offices of prosecutors and FBI agents. These revealing looks provide context for the evolution of the Justice Department’s approach to pursuing corporate criminals through the early 2000s and into the Justice Department of today, including the prosecutorial fiascos, corporate lobbying, trial losses, and culture shifts that have stripped the government of the will and ability to prosecute top corporate executives. “Brave and elegant…a fearless reporter…Eisinger’s important and profound book takes no prisoners” (The Washington Post). Exposing one of the most important scandals of our time, The Chickenshit Club provides a clear, detailed explanation as to how our Justice Department has come to avoid, bungle, and mismanage the fight to bring these alleged criminals to justice. “This book is a wakeup call…a chilling read, and a needed one” (NPR.org).

Download or read book Insane Clown President written by Matt Taibbi and published by Random House. This book was released on 2017-01-17 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Dispatches from the 2016 election that provide an eerily prescient take on our democracy’s uncertain future, by the country’s most perceptive and fearless political journalist. In twenty-five pieces from Rolling Stone—plus two original essays—Matt Taibbi tells the story of Western civilization’s very own train wreck, from its tragicomic beginnings to its apocalyptic conclusion. Years before the clown car of candidates was fully loaded, Taibbi grasped the essential themes of the story: the power of spectacle over substance, or even truth; the absence of a shared reality; the nihilistic rebellion of the white working class; the death of the political establishment; and the emergence of a new, explicit form of white nationalism that would destroy what was left of the Kingian dream of a successful pluralistic society. Taibbi captures, with dead-on, real-time analysis, the failures of the right and the left, from the thwarted Bernie Sanders insurgency to the flawed and aimless Hillary Clinton campaign; the rise of the “dangerously bright” alt-right with its wall-loving identity politics and its rapturous view of the “Racial Holy War” to come; and the giant fail of a flailing, reactive political media that fed a ravenous news cycle not with reporting on political ideology, but with undigested propaganda served straight from the campaign bubble. At the center of it all stands Donald J. Trump, leading a historic revolt against his own party, “bloviating and farting his way” through the campaign, “saying outrageous things, acting like Hitler one minute and Andrew Dice Clay the next.” For Taibbi, the stunning rise of Trump marks the apotheosis of the new postfactual movement. Taibbi frames the reporting with original essays that explore the seismic shift in how we perceive our national institutions, the democratic process, and the future of the country. Insane Clown President is not just a postmortem on the collapse and failure of American democracy. It offers the riveting, surreal, unique, and essential experience of seeing the future in hindsight. “Scathing . . . What keeps the pages turning in this so freshly familiar story line is the vivid observation and original turns of phrase.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Download or read book Plutocrats written by Chrystia Freeland and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-10-11 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Financial Times Best Book of the Year Shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize There has always been some gap between rich and poor in this country, but recently what it means to be rich has changed dramatically. Forget the 1 percent—Plutocrats proves that it is the wealthiest 0.1 percent who are outpacing the rest of us at breakneck speed. Most of these new fortunes are not inherited, amassed instead by perceptive businesspeople who see themselves as deserving victors in a cutthroat international competition. With empathy and intelligence, Plutocrats reveals the consequences of concentrating the world’s wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Propelled by fascinating original interviews with the plutocrats themselves, Plutocrats is a tour de force of social and economic history, the definitive examination of inequality in our time.

Download or read book In Defense of Looting written by Vicky Osterweil and published by Bold Type Books. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh argument for rioting and looting as our most powerful tools for dismantling white supremacy. Looting -- a crowd of people publicly, openly, and directly seizing goods -- is one of the more extreme actions that can take place in the midst of social unrest. Even self-identified radicals distance themselves from looters, fearing that violent tactics reflect badly on the broader movement. But Vicky Osterweil argues that stealing goods and destroying property are direct, pragmatic strategies of wealth redistribution and improving life for the working class -- not to mention the brazen messages these methods send to the police and the state. All our beliefs about the innate righteousness of property and ownership, Osterweil explains, are built on the history of anti-Black, anti-Indigenous oppression. From slave revolts to labor strikes to the modern-day movements for climate change, Black lives, and police abolition, Osterweil makes a convincing case for rioting and looting as weapons that bludgeon the status quo while uplifting the poor and marginalized. In Defense of Looting is a history of violent protest sparking social change, a compelling reframing of revolutionary activism, and a practical vision for a dramatically restructured society.

Download or read book The Velvet Rope Economy written by Nelson D. Schwartz and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From New York Times business reporter Nelson D. Schwartz comes a gripping investigation of how a virtual velvet rope divides Americans in every arena of life, creating a friction-free existence for those with money on one side and a Darwinian struggle for the middle class on the other side. In nearly every realm of daily life--from health care to education, highways to home security--there is an invisible velvet rope that divides how Americans live. On one side of the rope, for a price, red tape is cut, lines are jumped, appointments are secured, and doors are opened. On the other side, middle- and working-class Americans fight to find an empty seat on the plane, a place in line with their kids at the amusement park, a college acceptance, or a hospital bed. We are all aware of the gap between the rich and everyone else, but when we weren't looking, business innovators stepped in to exploit it, shifting services away from the masses and finding new ways to profit by serving the privileged. And as decision-makers and corporate leaders increasingly live on the friction-free side of the velvet rope, they are less inclined to change--or even notice--the obstacles everyone else must contend with. Schwartz's "must read" book takes us on a behind-the-scenes tour of this new reality and shows the toll the velvet rope divide takes on society.

Download or read book Fox Populism written by Reece Peck and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-03 with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fox Populism offers fresh insights into why the Fox News Channel has been both commercially successful and politically effective. Where existing explanations of Fox's appeal have stressed the network's conservative editorial slant, Reece Peck sheds light on the importance of style as a generative mode of ideology. The book traces the historical development of Fox's counter-elite news brand and reveals how its iconoclastic news style was crafted by fusing two class-based traditions of American public culture: one native to the politics in populism and one native to the news field in tabloid journalism. Using the network's coverage of the late-2000s economic crisis as the book's principal case study, Peck then shows how style is deployed as a political tool to frame news events. A close analysis of top-rated programs reveals how Fox hails its audience as 'the real Americans' and successfully represents narrow, conservative political demands as popular and universal.

Download or read book Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison The Subscription written by Jeffrey Reiman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-14 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illustrates the issue of economic inequality within the American justice system. The best-selling text, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison contends that the criminal justice system is biased against the poor from start to finish. The authors argue that even before the process of arrest, trial, and sentencing, the system is biased against the poor in what it chooses to treat as crime. The authors show that numerous acts of the well-off--such as their refusal to make workplaces safe, refusal to curtail deadly pollution, promotion of unnecessary surgery, and prescriptions for unnecessary drugs--cause as much harm as the acts of the poor that are treated as crimes. However, the dangerous acts of the well-off are almost never treated as crimes, and when they are, they are almost never treated as severely as the crimes of the poor. Not only does the criminal justice system fail to protect against the harmful acts of well-off people, it also fails to remedy the causes of crime, such as poverty. This results in a large population of poor criminals in our prisons and in our media. The authors contend that the idea of crime as a work of the poor serves the interests of the rich and powerful while conveying a misleading notion that the real threat to Americans comes from the bottom of society rather than the top. Learning Goals Upon completing this book, readers will be able to: Examine the criminal justice system through the lens of the poor. Understand that much of what goes on in the criminal justice system violates one’s own sense of fairness. Morally evaluate the criminal justice system’s failures. Identify the type of legislature that is biased against the poor.