Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream Review

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Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream ReviewArianna Huffington paints a grim picture of the State of the Union: "Every day, Americans, faced with layoffs and tough economic times, are forced to use their credit cards to pay for essentials such as food, housing, and medical care--the costs of which continue to escalate." P. 77.
Our mediocre grammar school and high school educational system continues its downward slide. The Great Recession is squeezing school budgets.
Meanwhile, multi-national corporations avoid taxes, while enjoying bailout loans and fat government contracts.
The over-hyped American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 earmarked only $72 billion of the $787 billion appropriation of taxpayer dollars to projects to improve the country's infrastructure.
Top subprime lenders included Wells Fargo; Countrywide, purchased by Bank of America, Washington Mutual, now part of JPMorgan Chase; CitiMortgage, part of Citigroup; First Franklin (now closed), purchased by Merrill Lynch, which was purchased by Bank of America; ChaseHome Finance, part of JPMorgan Chase; Ownit, partly owned by Merrill Lynch, which was later purchased by Bank of America; and EMC, part of Bear Stearns, which was purchased by JPMorgan Chase. Most of the rest depended on massive loans from Wall Street. Many of these lenders were sued by states for fraud and paid billions in settlements.
According to trade publication "Inside Mortgage Finance," top mortgage backed securities underwriters included now defunct Lehman Brothers, Bank of America's Countrywide Securities, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America's Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan's Bear Stearns, and Goldman Sachs.
This doesn't even include collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), and structured investment vehicles (SIVs) and credit derivatives, all of which amplified losses.
Fannie and Freddie do not make loans. They purchase mortgage loans and earn fees for guaranteeing payments on the loans. In 2006, Fannie and Freddie accounted for 33% of total mortgage backed securities issuance. In the first half of 2010, they accounted for around 64% of new issuance. They were forced to pick up the slack and buy more when Wall Street's private label securitization Ponzi scheme blew up. Fannie and Freddie did not create the housing bubble, and they are now Wall Street's dumping ground.
At the start of the meltdown, the IMF and the U.S. administration estimated losses of $2 to $2.5 trillion. Unemployment and the losses are now shockingly worse. What was merely a recession escalated into the Great Recession.
According to William K Black, after the much tinier S&L crisis, there were over 1,000 successful felony prosecutions, several thousand successful enforcement actions, and roughly 1,000 successful civil actions. This time Congress gave us the Great Cover-up. Bank officers dodged jail time and collected billions in bonuses.
Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream names the culprits and gives a roadmap for solutions. Congress must start over on financial reform, regulate derivatives, commodities trading, break-up the Too Big to Fail financial institutions (update Glass-Steagall), and more. We deserve better than a third world economy divided by ultra-rich on one side and debt-ridden middle class and dirt poor citizens on the other.
We'll need a Constitutional amendment requiring full public financing for political campaigns (for starters). Our politicians have shown us how willing they are to be owned by special interest groups that will buy votes, buy a campaign, or just buy them off. As Arianna Huffington explains: "If someone's going to own the politicians, it might as well be the American people." (P. 172)
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