Title: The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street Source:
amazon.com URL Source:http://www.amazon.com/Great-America ... s/dp/1568584342/ref=pd_sim_b_4 Published:Jan 29, 2011 Author:Robert Scheer Post Date:2011-01-29 15:55:05 by Godwinson Keywords:None Views:2018 Comments:1
The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street [Paperback]
*Starred Review* Coziness between Wall Street and Washington, D.C., from as far back as the Reagan administration, set up the nation for a deliberate swindle that nearly brought down the U.S. economy, argues Scheer, a veteran journalist and editor of TruthDig.com. Drawing from investigative reporting, memoirs, and news accounts, Scheer traces the building crisis through the Reagan, Clinton, Bush, and even Obama administrations, taking aim at three myths: that the financial markets are logical and self-correcting, that excesses only hurt speculators and not the general public, and that government regulation stands in the way of effective free enterprise. Instead, he presents a portrait of financial and political skulduggery by several influential players, notably Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and Phil Gramm, and heroic efforts by a few regulators to stop it. Scheer explains in accessible detail the expanding derivatives markets, loosening of regulations on financial activities, and the subprime mortgage market, with much of the abuse aided and abetted by a handful of influential men. He highlights Rubin’s machinations within government to grant expanded powers to Enron and Citigroup, then later joining Citigroup to benefit from the changes that he helped to engineer. Scheer is also critical of the business press that championed deregulation and asked few questions as iconic figures sat atop failure after failure, many of them now engaged in “reforming” the system. A scathing, penetrating look at the unsavory links between American finance and politics. --Vanessa Bush
Robert Scheer on The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street
Robert Scheer, longtime journalist based in California. He is the editor of Truthdig and author of many books. His latest is The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street.
The Clinton Administration in the '90s basically fulfilled the promise of the Reagan Revolution. Reagan was not able to reverse the sensible regulations of the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt designed to prevent us from getting into another depression. And those regulations of Glass-Steagall, which Feingold was against—was for keeping and against reversing, said that investment banks playing with supposedly rich people's money should not be allowed to merge with commercial banks that were using the deposits of people that were insured by the taxpayers and that these were different activities. And Reagan could never pull off that kind of deregulation. In fact, because of the savings and loan scandal at the end of his term, he actually had to sign off on increased financial regulation. But when Clinton came in, he brought in one of the big players on Wall Street, Robert Rubin, who has been head of Goldman Sachs, and basically turned to him and said, "You know, what do I need to do to get Wall Street on my side?" And they said, reverse what they considered to be onerous financial regulation. And Clinton delivered on that. He brought in Rubin then to be his Treasury secretary, who was followed by Lawrence Summers, who's now the top economics adviser in the Obama White House.
And in addition to the Gramm bill that reversed Glass-Steagall, he did something even more significant for our current crisis. He—after Summers had pushed it through, Congress signed off on the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. He was already a lame duck president. It was in the closing weeks of his administration. And this is the source of our whole problem, really, in terms of the housing meltdown, because we had these suspect derivatives that sensible people in the administration, like Brooksley Born, had warned against. No one knew what these toxic investments all about, the bundling of mortgages, which is what encouraged all of the wild subprime and Alt-A financing, because they were then going to be packaged together, made into securities, and then backed by credit default swaps, and all of this stuff that really didn't exist. It certainly didn't exist in Adam Smith's capitalism, but it didn't really exist even in Ronald Reagan's capitalism.
How the 1% rich stole the wealth of the 99% of the people.
"Keep Your Goddamn Government Hands Off My Medicare!" - Various Tea Party signs.