Books
Seattle Poetry Slam Local poets share their verse and spoken word compositions. 21 and over. Rebar, 1114 Howell StreetSeattle, WA $5 Tuesday, December 30, 2014, 8 – 11:30pm
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Matt Taibbi His famous vampire squid quote about Goldman Sachs-this in 2009, with the subprime mortgage crisis upon us and anti-Wall Street sentiment at peak rage-will one day be carved on Taibbi’s headstone. Until then, thankfully, the muckracking political journalist will find plenty more targets in Washington, D.C. Dissecting the causes of the Great Recession, when not a single banker went to jail, was one thing, but that outrage is now three congressional election cycles past. Republicans have swept the table, and the reasons are more complicated than partisan redistricting, red-state anger over Obamacare, or low turnout among young urban Democrats. What’s really going on, as Taibbi explores in The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap (Penguin, $17, new in paperback), is structural. A pinched middle class, many of whose white members already had health insurance and didn’t need a new government benefit, is stuck in place, angry, and bewildered. Real wages, adjusted for inflation, are lower than they were in the ‘70s. And the economy’s post-recession rebound has disproportionately benefited the vampire squids of our very unequal society. Part of The Divide concerns Wall Street impunity: those who get away with everything. The other part of the book concerns the poor: those who get away with nothing, who are essentially criminalized for being destitute or black or in the wrong place at the wrong time when a cop decides to write a summons (see: Ferguson, Staten Island, etc.). Street crime, of course, is today at record low levels, while the Dow Jones index heads in the opposite direction. With two years to go before the next election, The Divide-which belongs on the bookshelf alongside George Packer’s The Unwinding-vividly describes forces that will drive voters on both the right and left. (Whether the latter are enraged enough to vote is a different matter.) BRIAN MILLER Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave., Seattle, WA 98101 $5 Tuesday, January 6, 2015, 7:30 – 8:30pm
Seattle Poetry Slam Local poets share their verse and spoken word compositions. 21 and over. Rebar, 1114 Howell StreetSeattle, WA $5 Tuesday, January 6, 2015, 8 – 11:30pm
Seattle Poetry Slam Local poets share their verse and spoken word compositions. 21 and over. Rebar, 1114 Howell StreetSeattle, WA $5 Tuesday, January 13, 2015, 8 – 11:30pm
Seattle Poetry Slam Local poets share their verse and spoken word compositions. 21 and over. Rebar, 1114 Howell StreetSeattle, WA $5 Tuesday, January 20, 2015, 8 – 11:30pm
Seattle Poetry Slam Local poets share their verse and spoken word compositions. 21 and over. Rebar, 1114 Howell StreetSeattle, WA $5 Tuesday, January 27, 2015, 8 – 11:30pm
