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It has become the fashion in book publishing to have a short title of hot words and then a very long subtitle describing what the book is really all about. The subtitle of Architects of Ruin is How Big Government Liberals Wrecked the Global Economy -- and How They Will Do It Again If No One Stops Them. The attack on our economy in 2008 appeared to happen so quickly. Schweizer explains that the seeds of the 2008 housing collapse were sown years earlier in the political effort to broaden homeownership among minorities and the poor. This campaign ended up hurting the very people the politicians were pretending to help, and damaged the economy in ways that will take decades to reverse. Schweizer tells how the followers of Chicago radical Saul Alinsky joined with race-baiting activists to harangue and intimidate the banks, claim they were guilty of racial discrimination, and use demonstrations to force them to sell houses to people who could not afford them. He tells how professional shakedown organizations like ACORN and Operation PUSH cowed lenders into making irresponsible loans, all the while lining their own pockets to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Schweizer names the politicians who promoted this racket: Bill Clinton, Robert Rubin, Andrew Cuomo, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Janet Reno, Deval Patrick, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy and many others who aggressively pushed banks to make trillions of dollars in loans to people who could never pay back the loans. Schweizer tells how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were hijacked by liberal politicians and helped send the economy into a downward spiral. Architects of Ruin is much more than a story about the past. It is also an urgent warning about the future. We must learn the lesson that the housing crisis was not a failure of capitalism, but of leftwing social engineering. The real culprit is not the economy; it is the government. (Regnery Publishing Co., 209, 247 pages, $25) |
The housing market went bust, leading to a global economic collapse. But leftwing activists and politicians had been laying the groundwork for the destruction of the housing market for many years. Bestselling author and Hoover Institution scholar Peter Schweizer explains how it happened, and how the same people responsible for the collapse are using the crisis they caused to bring about a massive overhaul of the American economic system. This is hardly the "change" the country voted for in 2008.
