"The Divide: American Injustice in the
Age of the Wealth Gap" 

A Book Discussion with Matt Taibbi

Join us for a special evening with one of America's premier journalists, Matt Taibbi, who will discuss his groundbreaking new book, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap. 

Mr. Taibbi's book examines what he calls the great inequity of American crime and punishment, exploring the reasons why 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. On the other end of the spectrum, financial fraud has wiped out 40 percent of the world's wealth -- though for these crimes, The Divide shows, virtually no one has gone to jail.

"The Divide" is Taibbi's term for the seam in American life where two troubling trends -- growing wealth inequality and mass incarceration -- come together. His book is the first examination of these two alarming trends side-by-side, and in The Divide Mr. Taibbi describes the punishing logic of these trends and what he argues is one of the greatest challenges we face in contemporary American life -- a dramatic shift in the nature of American citizenship today. Mr. Taibbi argues in The Divide that the basic rights of Americans are now largely determined by our wealth or poverty.

Rita Hauser, President of the Hauser Foundation and member of the Roosevelt House Advisory Board, will introduce the program.