The Great American Stick-up

From a journalist legend, this is a muckraking expose of the bipartisan origins of the greatest financial scandal. The great banking meltdown of 2008 has largely been described by bankers, politicians and the mass media as unexpected in its severity and the result of complex investment instruments t [...]
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From a journalist legend, this is a muckraking expose of the bipartisan origins of the greatest financial scandal. The great banking meltdown of 2008 has largely been described by bankers, politicians and the mass media as unexpected in its severity and the result of complex investment instruments that are exceedingly difficult if not impossible to penetrate. Robert Scheer, who has been covering power and corruption for two decades as a reporter and columnist for the "Los Angeles Times" and as a founder of "Truthdig", argues that there is nothing murky or even surprising about the meltdown. In "The Great American Stick-Up", Bob Scheer revisits those years of business lobbying when the politicians of both parties rolled over for the banks, in order to show that this fiasco could have been anticipated and that there are culprits responsible that should be named and who continue to wield enormous power over our lives.Scheer particularly angles in on a bipartisan grouping who have played a formative role in shaping this disaster: the ultra power couple of Phil and Wendy Gramm, whose roles in the private sector and government have pushed for the wholesale deregulation of the banking sector for two decades, two former leaders of Goldman Sachs, Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson, and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers. This group provides a framework to understand the web of moneyed influence that threatens our future. It is not a tale about the exceptional misuse of power but rather a sobering revelation of business as usual.