The Divine Right of Bankers: Sorkin Proves Baroness Orczy Correct

By William K. Black

In yesterday’s column I discussed the fact that Andrew Ross Sorkin (ARS) of the New York Times and CNBC has unmasked himself in a video entitled “Two Myths and One Reality” as the scourge of Wall Street who had worked tirelessly for five years to find the “criminal element” that caused the financial crisis.

“If there’s one question that I get just about more than any other, ‘So why didn’t anybody go to jail, and did nobody try?’ And there’s an answer to that too.

A lot of people had an incentive to try to find a way to bring not justice, but to put people away.  Prosecutors, law enforcement, journalists; it would have been a better story.  But for the last five years we’ve tried, all of us have tried, to find that criminal element.”

I explained that ARS pretended to function like a modern-day Scarlet Pimpernel dedicated to freeing the French aristocrats (elite U.S. bank CEOs) from the Great Terror (the threat of prosecution by the Department of Justice) in order to gain access to the CEOs.  ARS revealed in his video that he did this in order to aid his exhaustive five-year search for “the criminal element.”

What I deliberately left out of my last column was the sting in the tail of ARS’ tale.  The last line of ARS’ discussion of his quest to root out the criminal element was:

“And while things happened that were upsetting and frustrating and unethical and immoral sadly, it may not have been criminal.”

ARS has proven that the gods are prone to whimsy.  The irony is that ARS concludes by telling us that his quest to find the “criminal element” of elite bankers failed.  This is the first Virgin Crisis: conceived without sin by any senior officer of any large bank.  He and his League of inveterate journalists devoted to exposing the crimes of the bank aristocrats instead proved that the aristocratic bankers represent the only sector of America that is so pure that it has no criminal element.

ARS’ modern journalistic League of the Scarlet Pimpernel has proven the central premise of the creator of The Scarlet Pimpernel, Baroness Emma Magdolna Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála “Emmuska” Orczy de Orczi.  Her works made clear that the aristocrats rule because they are superior morally and intellectually.

The twin outrages are that the inferiors of the elites banks’ CEOs have dared to impugn the aristocrats’ enlightened rule and that the CEOs’ critics have sought to recreate the Reign of Terror.  The CEOs’ critics seek to pervert the criminal justice system into an instrument of terror designed to usurp the legitimate power, steal the wealth, and deprive the liberty of our Nation’s best and brightest – the CEOs of our elite financial institutions.  As in France during the Reign of Terror, the U.S. mob is baying for the blood of the financial aristocrats.  The Baroness would not be surprised that ARS and his modern-day League have proven that the cream of society still rises and forms a natural aristocracy of talent, integrity, honor, and duty.  The true crime is committed by people like me who call for prosecutions of our modern nobility – our aristocratic bankers.  Our call for the punishment of the innocent, elite bank CEOs constitutes treason against our rightful Wall Street rulers.  We have committed repeated acts of lèse-majesté.  We are not worthy!