Daily Archives: May 28, 2013

If you want to Revel in Blind Hypocrisy Read the Comments to an Attack on the Left

By William K. Black

We all know that the folks who comment on web sites are not a random selection of humanity.  They tend to have stronger views than the general public and on sites that have intense political views they are commonly nasty towards their political opponents.  An anonymous conservative author who writes under the pseudonym Leften Wright about being oppressed by liberals has just authored an article pitching his book.  The article claims that liberals are (uniquely) rude to conservatives.  Conservatives and liberals periodically write this article demonizing their opponents for the alleged crime of demonizing their opponents.  As befits the genre, the anonymous author relies on innuendo and ad hominem attacks that generalize to his/her political opponents based on slights to the author.  None of these personal slights can be tested given the author’s anonymity.

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Why Do the Folks Who Make Booze Care More about their Reputations than the Bankers?

By William K. Black
(Cross posted at Benzinga.com)

There are many forms of control fraud.  I have written primarily about accounting control frauds because they drive our recurrent, intensifying financial crises and we are in the midst of the worst such crisis in modern history.  I wrote recently about the intersection of anti-purchaser and anti-employee control fraud in Bangladesh that killed 1,127 employees (and injured roughly twice that number) and made the point that control frauds kill and maim more people than traditional blue collar crimes and cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined.  Control frauds also cause a greater number of crimes than do traditional blue collar crimes.  Think for example of the number of victims of the Libor scams, measuring in the hundreds of thousands and the foreclosure frauds.

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