Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans - Book Review

 

Book Review: 5 Stars

Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans (Forbidden Bookshelf Book) by Stephen Pizzo.

It has been said that you can sell the American public anything, even a war. Glib tongued and charismatic Ronald Reagan pulled it off, and he even became a two term president. Only in America!

I found this well-written and remarkable book informative and educational in the extreme. The numerous examples of shyster financial skullduggery are overwhelming.

Excerpts:

Those pushing for deregulation are promising that, if Congress relaxes its hold over them, they’ve learned their lessons from past mistakes and will act only in the best interests of the industry and nation. Congress is, again, in a listening mood. And there’s more lobbyists and more money flowing in their direction than ever before. And once again, those of us with long memories worry.

Of the missing money as much as half had been stolen outright. Yet few of the hit-and-run artists who infiltrated the thrift industry went to jail and little of the money was recovered. In short, these inside jobs not only paid but paid very well

Just when the country needed the best regulators money could buy, those regulators were stopped cold in their tracks by some of the best politicians money had bought. indeed. The savings and loan industry as Americans had known it for 50 years teetered on the edge of collapse.

Not until meaningful campaign finance reform was enacted meaning, public financing and limits on spending would this change. It was simply cheaper to pay for politicians’ campaigns than it was to pay later for their corruption.

The Hoover years from the roaring twenties to the early 1930s left the lasting impression of the great depression and Ronald Reagan would do him one even better. The period that came to be known as “the Reagan years” spawned a wave of graft and corruption along with the Iran-Contra scandal unlike any period in history.

Between 1981 and 1989 the net worth of the 400 richest Americans listed by Forbes magazine rose 300 percent.

At the same time, the federal government debt grew by trillions.

After 50 years of trying to entice the communists into the capitalist camp, the United States was too broke to help them when they finally did capitulate.

Review by John Grimsrud

The Hidden History of the Korean War, 1950-1951 by I. F. Stone

 

The Hidden History of the Korean War, 1950-1951 (Forbidden Bookshelf Book 10)

by I. F. Stone

Right wing radical Republicans had been searching since the Hoover days in the early 1930’s for a war to propel their man Eisenhower along with his like minded cronies Nixon, the Dulles brothers, Earl Butts and their rabble rousing Joe McCarthy spewing anti-communistic hate mongering rhetoric. If you don’t vote Republican you are a commie!

Ironically the Korean War would begin a long string of military defeats making World War Two the last war the Americans would win.

I truly found this fascinating factual historical book an intriguing and enlightening look inside the political forces that moved America with poisonous personalities. NATO and the United Nations locked horns with Soviet Russia and Red China leading the Americans to discover they no longer had military supremacy.

Excerpts:

The major conflicts that the United States has fought since 1945, the Korean War is the least understood, the most likely to be “forgotten,” and the most important one of all. It was the occasion for Pentagon spending to reach its highest point during the Cold War, and for establishing hundreds of American military bases on a world scale; it was the crisis that created the national security state at home and at large, including a permanent standing army for the first time in American history; and the prosecution of the war stabilized a containment doctrine that had been under attack, if only because China intervened and demolished the American attempt to overthrow the North Korean regime. The Korean War is also the longest-lasting of American conflicts. Some twenty-five thousand US combat troops arrived in Korea in September 1945 to set up a three-year military government, and today, nearly seventy years later, twenty-eight thousand American soldiers remain in the South.

The British were curious to know how the Russians got so much more power out of this engine than the British did. “How have the Russians,” the question was put, “obtained such high performance from a centrifugal flow engine?” The Manchester Guardian’s aviation correspondent was quoted as asking how the Russians had managed to “fly at the speed of sound” with such an engine. Aviation Age had warned, in its special Russian survey number, that “the industrial-technical gap between the U.S.A. and the USSR is not as great as some Americans think.”

The subsonic bombers on which the American military had depended for delivery of the atom bomb in a future war against Russia were indefensible against jet interceptors flying at or above the speed of sound.

I. F. Stone (1907-1989) was an American journalist and publisher. After working at the New York Post, the Nation (as editor from 1940-1946), and PM, he started his own journal, I. F. Stone’s Weekly, in 1953. This publication notably covered the New Deal, McCarthyism, the birth of Israel, and the Vietnam War. In 1999, I. F. Stone’s Weekly was voted the second-best print-journalism product of the entire twentieth century in a poll of fellow reporters. Stone also published more than a dozen books and was considered one of the most influential journalists of the post-war period.