Review by Buzz Flash

The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity—and What We Can Do About It (Paperback). Autographed by the Author for BuzzFlash Readers.
By Les Leopold

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From the Introduction:

"And then there's the subprime-mortgage puzzle. The financial media has all but concluded the crash was caused by risky mortgages taken out by poor people and deadbeats who couldn't afford them, and issued by reckless lenders who should have known better. About $1.3 trillion worth of such mortgages are out there. Of that, about $300 billion are in default or nearly so…. Please, can someone explain how that amount (about 2 percent of household net worth, could devastate the world's financial system? To date, the taxpayer has put up about $2 trillion in bank bailouts and loan guarantees. Why didn't that take care of the problem long ago? Like some perverse modern-day miracle of fishes and loaves, how did $300 billion of bad debt multiply into trillions of dollars in financial toxic waste? Poor people did all that? In this book I go after these questions -- and I hope the answers will tell us a good deal about our economic woes and what to do about them. At the very least, I hope to contribute modestly to our collective financial literacy. In short, if I can understand this crap, so can you."

*****

"I loved this book. A worms'-eye dissection of the Wall Street crisis from a very sharp and very knowledgeable labor economist. Here's hoping that before the Washington consensus gets set in stone, policymakers will read it and reflect on the havoc the masters of the universe have wreaked on ordinary people."

--Charles Morris, author of The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash and Money, Greed, and Risk: Why Financial Crises and Crashes Happen

“Les Leopold has given an entertaining account of the growth of the derivative market that supported the housing bubble during the last decade, and offers useful recommendations for avoiding the next bubble-and-bust. He is one of the few observers to have understood how today’s crisis has roots going back three decades, and to have seen how it connects to the upward redistribution of income over this period.”

--Dean Baker, Co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy

"Les Leopold's book is a cogent, clear, and compelling explanation of how Wall Street's Big Casino wrecked the economy. I might not agree with all of his provocative proposals, but so what? This book is a fun read, despite the sickening scenario it describes."

--Jonathan Alter, Senior Editor and Columnist at Newsweek and author of the bestselling book The Defining Moment: FDR's 100 Days and the Triumph of Hope

"The Looting of America" is a must-read story of how we were all taken to the cleaners by Wall Street. But it also represents how BuzzFlash promotes progressive books and small publishers, like the incomparable Chelsea Green Publishing house in Vermont. Like BuzzFlash, Chelsea Green started with a vision -- in their case sustainable living along with some progressive politics -- and against all odds established a viable, growing independent press. We've come to know them and offer many of their books, promoting progressive life styles, politics and commerce all at the same time.

That is what BuzzFlash is about and makes it -- along with partners in creating a progressive, sustainable future -- a model for online liberal publications and change agents. Or as Cheslea Green phrases it: "The politics & practice of sustainable living."

With that in mind, "The Looting of America" is quickly attracting a lot of attention as it rolls off the Chelsea Green presses. As America was mugged politically in 2000 with the theft of the election, we have been being pickpocketed by Wall Street and corporate America -- through the Republicrats via K Street lobbyist campaign contributions -- for three decades. The Reagan revolution basically began a license to loot hard working Americans and make them like it.

"The Looting of America" reveals the deatails and offers a return to an economic system based on producing products, paying people livable wages, and ending our Wall Street addiction to gambling America's economy away on a financial system that has little basis to real value.

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