or Reagan-era zealotry for sweeping deregulation and for a supine Congress in hock to the lobbyists and political action committees (PACs) . . . The corruption at work is epic. A program designed to safeguard the savings of the middle class and poor was used to subsidize an unprecedented frenzy of speculation and business criminality. And the bottom line is this: those we selected to lead our democracy let it happen, turned their back on us, made us pay for it, and, astonishingly, were reelected (p. xiii-xiv).
The argument of the book is that at every turn of the crisis and the scandal, the American citizen and taxpayer was thoroughly victimized. In the first place, the system, which was set up to protect the average citizen seeking to securely save money in the nation's savings institutions, was corrupted so that the average citizen was left unprotected and so that the rich in
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