Show 472 Book- Architects of Ruin. Medved talks to author. Audio MP3

laying waste to the economy

Architects of Ruin by Peter Schweizer

It happened so quickly: in 2008, the housing market went bust, leading to a global economic collapse. But in reality, this debacle had been a long time coming: Leftist activists, businessmen and politicians (including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) had been laying the groundwork for the destruction of the housing market and the devastation of the American economy for decades. In Architects of Ruin, bestselling author Peter Schweizer explains how it happened -- and shows how today, the very same people who planted the seeds of the collapse are back in Washington, determined to use the crisis they caused as cover for a massive overhaul of the American economic system.

 Schweizer, the New York Times bestselling author of Do As I Say (Not As I Do), lays out the whole sorry story of how an unsavory coalition of Far Left policymakers and power brokers set out on what they regarded as a noble long-term effort to broaden homeownership among minorities and the poor. All they accomplished, of course, was to hurt the very people they were supposedly trying to help and damage the economy in ways that will take decades to reverse. Schweizer reveals that the seeds of the 2008 housing collapse were sown in the 1960s, when followers of Saul Alinsky, the legendary Chicago radical Leftist rabble- rouser, joined up with race-baiting activists like Jesse Jackson to argue that banks were guilty of racial discrimination. He details how in the 1970s, with the help of liberal senators like Ted Kennedy and William Proxmire, this initiative gathered steam with legislation that put bankers under the thumb of local activists.

But Schweizer shows that Leftists laid the groundwork for the housing disaster most energetically during the Clinton years, when a new generation of liberal technocrats came to power in Washington and on Wall Street. He 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 -- which only led them to take ever larger and more dangerous risks. The inevitable result? The bursting of twin bubbles in mortgages and mortgage-backed derivatives, leading in turn to a global economic collapse.

 We're not out of the woods yet -- not by a long shot: Schweizer shows that liberal activists are working with the Obama administration today to lay the groundwork for future bubbles in not only in real estate, but also in health care, the auto industry, and "green" technologies. Architects of Ruin is thus much more than just a story about the past -- it is also an urgent warning about the future. The Leftists responsible for the housing crisis have learned nothing from their past mistakes. Architects of Ruin proves that ordinary Americans who had to foot the bill for the last state-capitalist bubble have reason to be afraid -- very afraid -- of what is to come during the remaining years of the Obama Administration.

 Why the housing bubble burst, staggering the global economy:

 The housing crisis: a failure of capitalism -- or liberal social engineering?

 The chorus of liberal triumphalism that blamed the Right and the free market for the housing collapse, and sought to usher in a "new" New Deal -- all the while ignoring some inconvenient facts

 How the fair housing movement would probably have remained a fringe phenomenon had it not been for strong support from liberal politicians in Washington

 How the

Clinton administration aggressively pushed billions of dollars in home mortgages to minorities, knowing they would never be repaid

 The Left's activist jihad against American banks: how a gang of liberal activists, labor unions, and politicians in

Washington set the stage for the biggest bank heist in history, forcing banks to make more than $4 trillion in bad loans to people with poor credit

Bill Clinton's seduction of Wall Street and the birth of the bailout culture

 How liberal Senators Ted Kennedy and William Proxmire put the power of the federal government behind the "affordable housing" scam

 Playing the race card: how Democrats made credit a civil right

 How the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus turned Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into nothing less than a private piggy bank

 How subprime mortgages were used to fund radical activist groups, including the apple of Barack Obama's eye, ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) -- to the tune of $9.5 billion

 How Barack Obama was personally involved in the affordable-housing racket as a young Chicago lawyer

 How Obama's top aide Rahm Emanuel made more than $46,000 an hour as a board member for Freddie Mac

 How prominent Democrats parlayed their "fair housing" activism into lucrative appointments to the boards of subprime lenders

 How liberal Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd profited from their alliance with subprime lenders -- and squelched investigations of the looming mortgage fiasco

 Brazen hypocrisy: how the very activist groups that once sued banks for failing to make enough loans in poor and minority neighborhoods are now suing those same banks because they loaned too much!

How the leading role of Democrats and their allies in the fair housing movement in the housing crisis has gone strangely unremarked by the liberal media elites

 How experts foresee another wave of mortgage defaults and predict that unemployment will continue to rise

 How Barack Obama plans to use liberal state capitalism to create the next big economic meltdown

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