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

Robert Scheer is a journalist in the gadfly tradition of Lincoln Steffens, I. F. Stone and Seymour Hersh. His latest book, "The Great American Stickup," blames the "captains of finance" for causing the 2008 "meltdown" of the global economy in the first place and then profiting from the tax dollars that were thrown at the problem--"a giant hustle that served the richest of the rich," as he puts it, "and left the rest of us holding the bag." We've been reading Scheer's informed, edgy prose since his days at Ramparts magazine, and his career has included a long stint as a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and, more recently, the founding of the website Truthdig. By now, he is so practiced at investigative journalism and advocacy journalism that his book is like a strong dose of black coffee--bracing and eye-opening. Remarkably, Scheer is capable of making sense of...the workings of the economy. And he is not only willing but downright eager to name names, including such now-dubious gurus as Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers and Alan Greenspan,among others...and argues that Democrats and Republicans share the blame...Indeed, Scheer always allows himself the luxury--and gives his readers the pleasure--of verbal pyrotechnics that would be out of bounds in a newspaper...[He] is plainly a progressive but also, and above all,a populist." If we as a people learn anything from this crash, it should be that there are no adults watching the store, only a tiny elite of self-interested multimillionaires and billionaires making decisions for the rest of us," he concludes. "As long as we cede that power to them, we can expect to continue getting bilked." On that point, I suspect, a great many of his readers, Democrats and Republicans alike, will agree.--Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times

REPRESENTATIVE HENRY WAXMAN, Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee
“Robert Scheer has used his skills as one of the best investigative reporters to show that the deregulation philosophy from Reagan to Clinton and both Bushes led to the near collapse of our financial institutions and the Great Recession from which we are still suffering.”

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post
“The Great American Stickup exposes the ugly truth behind the economic meltdown: the fix is in. Seduced by campaign cash and hordes of lobbyists, political leaders of both parties regularly do Wall Street's bidding--leaving Main Street to fend for itself. Even worse, Scheer shows that the people that nearly drove our economy over the cliff still have their hands on the wheel.”

MATT WELCH, editor-in-chief of Reason magazine
“Robert Scheer is among the vanishing breed of journalists who take it as a patriotic duty to criticize power no matter who wields it. Whatever your views on financial regulation, The Great American Stickup makes nauseatingly clear that both major parties—including the current and former president—colluded with banks ‘and left the rest of us holding the bag”

CHRIS HEDGES, Senior fellow of The Nation Institute and author of Empire of Illusion 
“Robert Scheer, one of our most brilliant journalists, shows how we have been fleeced by Wall Street and our bankrupt political class. Those in the halls of Congress, the White House, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department and the corporate offices of high finance have ignored the common good, trashed the economy, set us on a course for another economic shipwreck and looted the U.S. Treasury of trillions of taxpayer dollars to sustain a system of casino capitalism.”

Publishers Weekly, 8/30/10
Following Ronald Reagan’s obsession with the “radical deregulation” of financial markets through its apotheosis under the Clinton administration to Obama’s reform efforts--which rely, oddly enough, on Clinton cronies to clean up (and profit from) the mess they made--Scheer (The Pornography of Power) proves that, when it comes to the ruling sway of money power, Democrats and Republicans, Wall Street and Washington make very agreeable bedfellows. Scheer names names (Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Alan Greenspan), while praising those who sounded the alarm and underscoring the foreseeable results of putting Wall Street in the driver’s seat. What grew in this regulatory vacuum, Scheer shows, was a global “casino,” a mind-bendingly enormous and arcane system of gambling on new financial products worth hundreds of trillions of dollars. By 2007, when the house of cards collapsed, Wall Street alone understood what it had wrought while its government partners remained clueless.

Vanessa Bush, Booklist, 9/15/10
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.

San Francisco Chronicle
“Scheer, a veteran journalist with a large following among conventional left-wingers, refreshingly admits that the "greedy bankers and the politicians who love them" are both Democrats and Republicans. . . . By blaming and shaming, Scheer reminds us that, because no one associated with the fraudulent practices in banking has gone to jail, and many remain in their high-paying jobs, at the very least, the reputations of these people should be destroyed.”

USA TODAY
“As promised, muckraking liberal journalist Robert Scheer delivers an opinionated screed on what (and mostly who) he thinks caused the financial calamity of 2008-09. . . . To politicians and bankers who say there was no way they could have foreseen the financial meltdown, Scheer says: Baloney. . . . The renowned journalist makes some convincing arguments. . . . if you're looking to throw stones, Scheer offers plenty of houses, including a white one.”

Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times
Remarkably, Scheer is capable of making sense of the workings of the economy...he is not only willing but downright eager to name names...and argues that Democrats and Republicans share the blame.