Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America

by Charles Ferguson Narrated by Rob Shapiro

Overview

Charles H. Ferguson, who electrified the world with his Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job, now explains how a predator elite took over the country, step by step, and he exposes the networks of academic, financial, and political influence, in all recent administrations, that prepared the predators' path to conquest.*
* * *Over the last several decades, the United States has undergone one of the most radical social and economic transformations in its history.*

·******** Finance has become America's dominant industry, while manufacturing, even for high technology industries, has nearly disappeared.

·******** The financial sector has become increasingly criminalized, with the widespread fraud that caused the housing bubble going completely unpunished.

·******** Federal tax collections as a share of GDP are at their lowest level in sixty years, with the wealthy and highly profitable corporations enjoying the greatest tax reductions.

·******** Most shockingly, the United States, so long the beacon of opportunity for the ambitious poor, has become one of the world's most unequal and unfair societies.*

If you're smart and a hard worker, but your parents aren't rich, you're now better off being born in Munich, Germany or in Singapore than in Cleveland, Ohio or New York.
This radical shift did not happen by accident.*

* * *Ferguson shows how, since the Reagan administration in the 1980s, both major political parties have become captives of the moneyed elite.* It was the Clinton administration that dismantled the regulatory controls that protected the average citizen from avaricious financiers.* It was the Bush team that destroyed the federal revenue base with its grotesquely skewed tax cuts for the rich. And it is the Obama White House that has allowed financial criminals to continue to operate unchecked, even after supposed “reforms” installed after the collapse of 2008.

* * *Predator Nation reveals how once-revered figures like Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers became mere courtiers to the elite.* Based on many newly released court filings, it details the extent of the crimes-there is no other word-committed in the frenzied chase for wealth that caused the financial crisis.* And, finally, it lays out a plan of action for how we might take back our country and the American dream.

Editorial Reviews

Kirkus Reviews

A concise, cogent assessment of the 2008 banking disaster and how the fallout has affected the country. In his Oscar-winning 2010 documentary, Inside Job, Ferguson did a first-class job of explaining the mess on Wall Street. This book is a longer, more detailed version that underscores the film's points, offering a broader picture of how Wall Street has poisoned the country. The author returns to the scene of the crime, where the slow rise of deregulation under President Reagan had turned into a lawless frontier by the time Clinton left office. Scrapping the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act--which kept investment and commercial banks separate--allowed investment firms to indulge their greediest desires, such as credit default swaps. Their partners in crime were Ivy League economists, who were paid handsomely for either testifying before Congress or writing papers that told banks what they wanted to hear, and ratings agencies like Moody's and Standard & Poor's, who recklessly doled out AAA ratings to the well-heeled major firms. So why didn't anyone go to jail? Well, you can't break laws that don't exist. Still, Ferguson argues that real crimes were committed, from lying to federal authorities to filing fictitious financial statements. The author makes sure we get the big picture, too: that the money-driven Wall Street culture of corruption doesn't advance American progress; it weakens it. Ferguson points to key areas--broadband technology, innovation and education--where greed has kept America lagging behind the rest of the civilized world. A deeply argued call to action from a lucid, impassioned polemicist.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172164965
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	05/22/2012
Edition description:	Unabridged

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