The news this week got worse by the day… by the hour, even. First broker Lehman Brothers failed and Merrill Lynch sold itself to Bank of America:

Then the Fed essentially nationalized megainsurer AIG to the tune of $85 billion in taxpayer dough, in exchange for a nearly 80-percent share of the company.

And then the U.S. government decided it needed to step into the subprime crisis and assume $700 billion in bad mortgage debt, nationalizing the loss on the risk that private investors had taken:

The final details of that plan has yet to be worked out, but one thing is clear: We are living in a Plundered America.

In Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal, the followup to his 2007 documentary In Debt We Trust — which was the first to expose Wall Street’s connection to subprime loans and predicted the economic crisis that is upon us — investigative reporter Danny Schechter explains how investment bankers turned mortgages, many given to the poorest Americans, into securities that were sold worldwide. Billions were made by blue chip firms, real estate brokers, and middlemen before more than three million families faced foreclosure, banks failed and a round of bailouts began. This scandal has rippled around the world putting the global economy at risk and leading some experts to predict a possible depression.

Plunder is a must read for anyone who wants to understand how this crisis could happen. This book:

● shows how debt has restructured our economy and put Americans under a burden that many will never crawl out of.

● identifies some of the profiteers and calls for an investigation of those behind this shrewdly engineered subprime scheme.

● indicts the regulators who enabled the crisis and the media that missed it.

Read the book’s introduction here. (Alert: PDF.)

Plunder is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.