Cannibal Capitalism

Most of us have lived our lives by the rules-going to school, investing in real estate, and building careers-but the so-called Great Recession has changed everything. Cannibal Capitalism: How Big Business and the Feds Are Ruining America answers the questions on everyone's lips: what happened and where do we go from here? Taking a thoughtful look at how income and wealth disparity, industry consolidation, anticompetitive business practices, political ideological extremism, and the hoarding of existing wealth are destroying the wealth-building capacity of the nation and the promise of ideal capitalism, the book examines the financial crisis and its fallout in a clear, no-nonsense way. Unlike in most other recent instances of financial turbulence, when this crisis hit, the country turned on itself economically, with the powerhouses-corporations, business leaders, and government-throwing the everyman under the bus, spurring the frustrated clamor of the Tea Party on the right and the Occupy Wall Street movement on the left. Small businesses that produce tangible goods and services and employ regular people were sacrificed, while paper traders who amass vast wealth through the exchange of abstractions derived from the real economy were propped up for being too big to fail. In an effort to avoid becoming slightly less rich, the super-rich effectively cannibalized the true engines of growth in the economy, in the process putting the bottom 99 percent of the population at serious risk of losing everything. Cannibal Capitalism fights back, arguing that to really recover, we need to educate our children, invest in our small businesses, use our inflated money to develop real things that build real wealth, and get back to exporting in a big way.