Robert Scheer, as the blurb by Joan Didion on the book's cover says, is one of the best reporters of our time. I concur. He was once one of the very few reasons I read the LA Times. He was a mainstay for a couple decades, got turfed out in one of the corporate takeovers, when his frank and incisive reporting was deemed expendable, if not flat-out undesirable. LAT is much the poorer for it, but thanks to the Internet, we can still obtain his wisdom and insights at Truthdig. Scheer has written a seminal work on one of the most consequential events of our time. The event's antecedents extended back almost three decades, to the beginning of the "Reagan Revolution." When they culminated in 2008, it was far worse than a "stickup"; I would propose a better title. It was far worse than "highway robbery." Virtually all Americans lost a significant portion of their patrimony, a word of French origins, which is often used to connote national heritage. Not only were trillions of dollars of "wealth" vaporized, but many core values, considered to be part of the "American character" were rendered "inoperative": government of the people; the concept of justice that those who committed the crime must pay; education and hard work will pay off...etc. The criminals not only walked away with their booty, but continue to profit from the massive economic disaster they caused, and no doubt will cause again, since they were neither punished, nor constrained, as at least in the latter case, they were in the economic collapse of 1929.
Fortunately Sheer was paying attention, and has provided an excellent account of how it all occurred. One of the essential premises of Sheer's book is to avoid the sterile argument that it was the Republicans,... no, no, the Democrats fault. It was absolutely bipartisan, starting with Reagan, on to Bush I, and then the poor boy from Arkansas, Clinton, with Bush II, and eventually Obama facing the wreckage of a "free-market" fundamentalist ideology truly run amok. No rules, no supervision, and the market would regulate itself, was the mantra. And the careful framework of controls that were erected after the 1929 disaster was dismantled; things would be so much more efficient if we "got government off our backs." Scheer chronicles how it was the Gramm's, Wendy, and her Senator husband, who would be so instrumental in having Clinton throw the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated the staid saving accounts of your grandmother (and maybe yours), insured by the FDIC, from the gamblers on Wall Street, into the dustbin of history. And there went the lessons learned from the Great Depression, because we were "modernizing."
Some of this story I knew, portions I did not. One of the persons regrettably I had never heard of was Brooksley Born, who Scheer bills as an upscale DC version of Julia Robert's "Erin Brockovich." She was head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, and actually had the temerity to think that the "fun house" of the alphabetic soup of sub-prime "tranches" should be regulated as they were being traded, just like pork bellies. Lawdy, did the "Big Boys" gang up on her, and stop her. The question that our grandchildren, who will still be working as servers in restaurants after college graduation will be asking: why didn't Obama chose her (and Paul Krugman) to plot the course out of the mess, instead of two key players who caused it: Geithner and Summers? Scheer devotes chapters to the Enron debacle, Robert Rubin and the millions he made playing the revolving (plantinum) door game between governmental posts and Citigroup, which required a government bailout, the folks, like Franklin Deloro Raines who 90 million in five years, running the Fannies into the ground, purportedly with the cover of "trying to help the poor," and how Goldman Sachs got bailed out, via AIG, and in reality, the taxpayer, at 100 cents on the dollar, for their criminal incompetence.
Scheer's writing style is lively and pithy. Nice analogies, like the familiar one about not wanting to know how sausage (or bank policies) are really made. Typical of his "bi-partisanship," he says: "Under Obama as with Bush and Clinton before him, there was to be tough love for welfare mothers but never for bankers." As for Brooksley Born: "She also is a woman of annoyingly strong convictions who was known to possess a flaw fatal for the budding careerist: a moral center." Scheer also highlights Alan Greenspan's Ayn Rand fetish. In all, the entire book, as Scheer hints, would make an excellent high school civic lesson as to how laws are made, and government really works. Think sausage.
I did find the book marred, as many are by reporters, by some redundancies, such as on Rubin's role in the fiasco as well as how Johnson got his start at Fannie Mae. Guess it could be forgiven, `cause it is a tale that needs to be told twice. Play it again, Robert. The main stream media never attempts to place a dollar figure on this disaster, even to the nearest trillion. Sometimes there will be a "blip," like "the Fed expanded its balance sheet by buying up $600 billion in sub-primes acronyms..." and then it just disappears. Wish Scheer had tried to "ballpark" a comprehensive figure, you know, plus or minus a trillion.
Overall, a great, solid read, for civics class, as well as every adult. I'm still glad Scheer remains, "fighting the good fight." 5-stars.
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- Amazon CustomerReviewed in the United Kingdom on February 19, 2013
the politics of rip-off banking
