Product Description

Was the financial collapse caused by free-market capitalism and deregulation run amok, as liberals claim?

Not on your life, says Peter Schweizer. What we are really witnessing is a massive failure of social engineering by liberals.

Architects of Ruin, bestselling author Peter Schweizer describes in riveting detail how a coalition of left-wing activists, liberal politicians, and "do-good capitalists" on Wall Street leveraged government power to achieve their goal of broadening homeownership among minorities and the poor. The results were not only devastating to the economy, but hurt the very people they were supposedly trying to help.

The story begins in the 1960s with Saul Alinsky, the legendary Chicago rabble-rouser who trained his acolytes in highly aggressive techniques of community activism. Alinsky's disciples—along with race-baiting activists like Jesse Jackson—seized on the "redlining" controversy of those years to argue that banks were guilty of racial discrimination. In the 1970s, with the help of liberal senators like Ted Kennedy and William Proxmire, legislation was passed that put bankers under the thumb of local activists.

In the Clinton years, a new generation of liberal technocrats came to power in Washington and on Wall Street. Schweizer describes how a powerful phalanx of elite liberals, including Bill Clinton, Robert Rubin, Andrew Cuomo, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Janet Reno, Deval Patrick, Henry Cisneros, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, Charles Schumer, and many others, aggressively pushed banks to make trillions of dollars in loans to individuals who should never have received them.

Meanwhile, Clinton forged a new form of state capitalism in which the big Wall Street financial companies were repeatedly bailed out—with their profits intact—from a series of costly errors, leading them to take ever larger risks. Both financial policies had profoundly distorting effects. The result was the bursting of twin bubbles in mortgages and mortgage-backed derivatives, in turn leading to a global economic collapse.

This tale of liberal "Robin Hood capitalism run wild" has never been told. But more than just a story about the past, it is also an urgent warning about the future. For today, the very same people who planted the seeds of the collapse are back in Washington, tasked with cleaning up the mess and determined to use the crisis they caused as cover for a massive overhaul of the American economic system.

These people have learned nothing from their past mistakes and are busy applying the same methods to other sectors of the economy—health care, the auto industry, real estate (again!), and above all the promotion of "green" technologies—inflating bubbles that are sure to bring about another crisis. Ordinary Americans who foot the bill for the last state-capitalist bubble have reason to be afraid—very afraid—of the inevitable result.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5018 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-01
• Released on: 2009-10-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780061953347
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"An entertaining exposure . . . In a series of 11 profiles on leftist icons from Noam Chomsky and Al Franken to Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy, Schweizer reveals that the most vocal liberals do not practice what they preach." (Weekly Standard )

Praise for DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO:"A spirited attack on lefty icons." (New York Times )

About the Author

Peter Schweizer is the author of numerous books, including Reagan's War, The Bushes, Makers and Takers, and Do as I Say (Not as I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy. He is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and lives in Florida with his wife and children.

Customer Reviews

How to use racism to extort and destroy
At the time of the collapse of Freddie and Fannie, I had imagined that there was a big secret gala attended by a good many of our congressmen. This book identifies who might have attended that party and why they were celebrating the start of the global financial disaster. Worst thing? The book explains that they are not done. Definitely not reading material for anyone who thinks businesses are innately bigoted or that Progressives actually help poor people.

An important book
This book will be a revelation to those who have let history be warped by political expediance.

Extremely Well-Constructed Narrative
Schweizer has done what few other analysts of the late 2008 financial meltdown have been able, or even willing to do, and that's write a comprehensive and comprehensible narrative of the origins of the crisis. Many analysts of a free market bent will throw off broadsides at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Community Reinvestment Act and leave it at that, assuming that, having taken shots at these obvious governmental meddlers, the total picture simply paints itself. Well, it doesn't, and that's where Schweizer excels. Schweizer starts at the beginning and, chapter by chapter, walks you forward into the teeth of the meltdown. A true tour de force.

Three points of interest:

1) Schweizer opened my eyes to the neat trick pulled by President Clinton - while declaring the Era of Big Government to be Over, he was concurrently manipulating financial institutions to pick up the wealth redistribution slack, almost wholly under the public radar. Brilliant. Devious. Destructive.

2) I believe Schweizer goes too easy on the Bush administration. While they did make efforts to address the worst of the Clinton abuses, they did encourage the same sort of "universal home ownership" mentality as the Clinton cabal. Chalk up their efforts to promote ownership as misguided and their efforts to reign in the worst of the abuses as lacking in sufficient urgency (rather than neglect) - they still failed to head off the financial collapse.

3) Schweizer altered my perspective on the wage controls that were imposed on the executives of the financial institutions that received bailouts. Those wailing about the assault on the free market are, for the time being, off-base. Free market my rear end - a firm like Goldman Sachs has been gambling for decades with the implicit backing of the Treasury; much of their past compensation has derived from that government backstop. Remove the backstop, and I don't care how much they make. Otherwise, as long as they're playing with the House's money, I don't see why they shouldn't be paid government scale wages. (Heh - a monkey could do what the execs of GS are doing now, borrowing at 0% and lending it back to the Fed at 3%. Hardly work worthy of millions in bonuses.)