A Head Full of Ideas that were Driving Me Insane....

Subtitle: Who Rigged It, How We Fix it

Robert Reich (pronounced with a "sh" ending, not a "k" - so it rhymes with "fleisch," not with "hike") has served in education (he recently retired as the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy, at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley) and in government (he served in the administrations of both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, was Secretary of Labor during Bill Clinton's first term, and was a member of Barack Obama's economic transition advisory board. In 2008, Time named him one of the ten most effective Cabiniet members of the century; in the same year, the Wall Street Journal listed him sixth on its list of most influential business thinkers ... and, yes, some of that was cribbed from Wikipedia, thank you ... the point is, this is a guy who knows what he's talking about.

And what he's talking about is how the "free market" is rigged so that those with large amounts of money get to keep it and gather more, while those with very little have very little hope of keeping even what they have.

This isn't just a whining about how the rich have all the advantages. It's a careful description of how, beginning in the 1980s, what you might call "moneyed interests" began pressuring, persuading, and outright bribing, government officials to dismantle the protections against monopoly power put in place beginning with the Sherman Anti-Trust Act(1890) and culminating in the reforms that were put in place to ease the Great Depression that began in 1929, and to prevent another one. (Sherman is still nominally in place, but the Depression-era laws, like the Glass-Steagall provisions of 1933, are mostly gone. Poof.)

Much of this has come from belief in something called the "free market." What this belief fails to note is that no market is truly "free;" every market runs by a set of rules.

What has happened in the past four and a half decades has been a gradual and subtle, and occasionally rapid and blatant, reform of those rules so that they ensure that the "moneyed interests" can take outrageous chances -- for example, the famous "junk bonds" and "derivatives" that played such a large part in the 2008 financial crisis. When those risks pay off, the gamblers keep their winnings, and pay little or no taxes on them; when they crash and burn, things are set up so that the government -- meaning taxes paid mostly by the middle and working classes -- bail them out.

Reich goes into this in much more detail, with better explanation than I have any hope of giving in the space of a review. He supplies lots of historical background, comparing the current situation to the "first Gilded Age" (that of the "robber barons" of the late 19th and early 20th centuries).

And, most important of all, he ends with reason to hope and an actionable program by which that hope can more speedily be brought to fruition.

9 out of 10 junk bonds.