Robbing Us Blind: The Return of the Bush Gang and the Mugging of America

<div>A century ago, Kansas farmers called them "The Robber Barons" and Teddy Roosevelt singled them out as "malefactors of great wealth." Steve Brouwer rigorously marshals the devastating evidence and indicts the Bush Gang for encouraging a corporate crime wave (Savings and Loan scandals of the 1980s; Harkin and Halliburton; Enron, WorldCom and Arthur Anderson) and promoting the greatest economic inequality since the 1920s. While Brouwer teases the Bushes for following the "Skull and Bones" flag of their elite Yale club, he also -levels the serious charge that they are "pirates." The richest 1% of Americans grabs 20.3% of our national income. They have overwhelmed democracy with campaign bribery. Brouwer&#8217;s book is indispensable to ousting the buccaneers. Steve Brouwer has been writing for two decades.</div>

Brouwer (Sharing the Pie) calls George W. and Jeb Bush "the great-grandchildren of the Robber Barons," and not just for the family's purported personal forays into ethically ambiguous finance. Brouwer carefully documents the Bush administration's support for capital investment at the expense of labor, while observing that the blame can't be narrowly placed. Corporations' lobbyists have set up the terms of the debate and taken advantage of it, Brouer says, and the Democrats have taken their fill from the trough as well. Brouwer traces the effects of Bush's tax cuts and "labor discipline" on the American working class and warns that the administration's eyes have already turned to the rest of the world's riches.
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