richer at Enron, Sunbeam, WorldCom and Qwest, workers and investors lost their jobs and their savings. During the late ’90s, over 700 U.S. corporations were found to have defrauded the public.

The year 2000 was the apogee of soft money, and its principal recipient, George W. Bush, with the cooperation of those corporate favorites, the Blue Dog Democrats in Congress, returned the favor. In short order, the federal government gave away wheelbarrows full of taxpayer dollars to big oil, big banks, big agriculture, big insurance and big military contractors. Bush & Co. were no less charitable to rich taxpayers, who got 73 percent of the massive tax cuts dished out in the early ’00s. Together, this charity for the rich ballooned the deficit by hundreds of billions and constitutedone of the largest transfers of wealth from have nots to haves in American history.

Beginning in the ’90s, Wall Street began delivering $5 billion worth of lobbying and campaign contributions to Congresses, Presidents and bank regulators. In turn, the feds gave Wall Street carte blanche to make a killing, and kill they did, with a housing scam that was a license to print money. When the scam’s bubble finally burst, it became The Great Recession. Its cost included a doubling, within one year, of the unemployment rate, to double digits. Six years later, unemployment still plagues 5 million more Americansthan it did before the recession.

Other costs of the campaign money-induced recession include:

A crashed GDP that even by 2013 was still $850 billion below normal, and is not expected