The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street

Robert Scheer – 2010

The 2008 global financial crisis was the worst of its kind since the Great Depression.  It wiped out about 40% of the world’s wealth overnight and resulted in the biggest nationalization of private companies in human history.  That didn’t happen in a third-world country just taken over by a communist regime; it happened in the United States, the home of free market capitalism, engineered by the captains of finance on Wall Street in cooperation with the powers-that-be in Washington D.C.  The officials charged with protecting us from just as a crisis found themselves scrambling for answers as President Bush and the rest of America wanted to know how this could have happened.  In The Great American Stickup, former Los Angeles Times journalist Robert Scheer outlines the causes of the meltdown and how the primary culprits behind it used the crisis as an opportunity to profit while skirting any responsibility or penalties.  The villains are well-known; longtime FED chairman Alan Greenspan, Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and power-couple Senator Phil Gramm and Reagan-era economic guru Wendy Lee Gramm, among others.  Over a roughly 15-year period, through Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses, they pushed for the removal of any and all regulations that were deemed even remotely inconvenient to the financial services industry, including lending banks like Countrywide, insurance giants like AIG, and mega investment banks like Goldman Sachs.  The repeal of laws in place for 60 years since the Depression led not to a foretold golden age of unprecedented wealth trickling down to every level of society, but to a feeding frenzy among sharks so crazed with the taste of blood that they couldn’t stop themselves from eating even though they were also being eaten alive.  Believe it or not, there were a couple of heroes in this story too.  Brooksley Born was the chair of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in the Clinton administration.  In what Scheer describes as a “valiant stand,” Born warned vociferously of the coming disaster, and was in turn ignored and discredited by Rubin, Greenspan and others.  Scheer reserves special contempt for banks, lawmakers and pundits who tried to shift blame for the crisis to the lay investors and mortgage holders who ended up losing everything.  He is adamant that the banks knew what they were doing, and were not just giving the people what they wanted but were actively pursuing and misleading them into bad investments.  Like Matt Taibbi’s book on the same subject, Griftopia (2009), The Great American Stickup is solid, impassioned journalism that finds jaw-dropping arrogance and wrongdoing not only on both sides of the aisle but among the “too big to fail” banks that emerged unscathed and richer after a crash they helped cause and which decimated the savings and livelihoods of millions of Americans.