Robert Scheer on the Great American Stickup

Robert Scheer

In our second hour we take up the issue of the 2088 economic crisis with veteran journalist and author, Robert Scheer in a discussion of his recent book: The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street.

In "The Great American Stickup," Scheer begins with Ronald Reagan' s obsession with the radical deregulation of financial markets and it glorification under the Clinton administration to Obama' s reform efforts that oddly enough, rely on Clinton cronies to clean up and profit from the mess they made. Scheer proves that, when it comes to the ruling sway of money power, Democrats and Republicans are no different. He provides readers with the characters who set up the American economy for its own demise - Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Alan Greenspan, while at the same time telling us about those who sounded the alarm and underscoring the foreseeable results of putting Wall Street in the driver' s seat. Scheer demonstrates how a economy once designed to help Americans become members of the middle class was turned into a global casino - a confoundingly enormous and esoteric system of gambling on new financial products worth hundreds of trillions of dollars. By the time the house of cards began collapsing in 2007, only Wall Street understood what it had created while its government partners remained clueless and the American people were taken to the cleaners.

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