On the opening day of Trump Plaza in Atlantic City in 1984, Donald Trump stood in a dark topcoat on the casino floor celebrating his new investment as the “finest building in the city and possibly the nation.” 

Thirty years later, the Trump Plaza folded, leaving some 1,000 employees without jobs. Trump, meanwhile, was on Twitter claiming he had “nothing to do with Atlantic City,” and praising himself for his “great timing” in getting out of the investment.

As I show in my new book, “Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few,” people with lots of money can easily avoid the consequences of bad bets and big losses by cashing out at the first sign of trouble. Bankruptcy laws protect them. But workers who move to a place like Atlantic City for a job, invest in a home there, and build their skills have no such protection. Jobs vanish, skills are suddenly irrelevant and home values plummet. They’re stuck with the mess.

Bankruptcy was designed so people could start over. But these days, the only ones starting over are big corporations, wealthy moguls and Wall Street bankers, who have had enough political clout to shape bankruptcy laws (like many other laws) to their needs.

One of the most basic of all economic issues is what to do when someone can’t pay what they owe. The U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 4) authorizes Congress to enact “uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States,” and Congress has done so repeatedly.

In the last few decades, these changes have reflected the demands of giant corporations, Wall Street banks, big developers and major credit card companies who wanted to make it harder for average people to declare bankruptcy but easier for themselves to do the same.

The granddaddy of all failures to repay what was owed occurred in September 2008 when Lehman Brothers went into the largest bankruptcy in history, with more than $691 billion of assets and far more in liabilities. 

Some commentators (including yours truly) urged then that the rest of Wall Street be forced to grapple with their problems in bankruptcy as well. But Lehman’s bankruptcy so shook the Street that Henry Paulson, Jr., George W. Bush’s outgoing secretary of the treasury, and, before that, head of Goldman Sachs, persuaded Congress to authorize several hundred billion dollars of funding to protect the other big banks from going bankrupt.