Author Archives: William Black

By William K. Black
November 2, 2016     Kansas City, MO

The uber-right wing economist Tyler Cowen, has written a column entitled “TPP Is Exciting. Let’s Make the Case for It.”  Cowen’s column is remarkable for his inability to even get himself excited about TPP, much less his readers.  He begins with what should be an important warning – there will be a major effort by President Obama and the largest corporations to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) during the lame duck session after the election.

Cowen’s effort to excite his readers to support TPP is so weak that I will comment on only a few points.  First, he says that Americans should be overjoyed that TPP would produce 18,000 tax cuts – for corporations!

Continue reading →

By William K. Black
October 30, 2016      Bloomington, MN

When last I wrote of Roger Lowenstein he was complaining that the Wall Street felons were being criticized – not jailed – criticized.  Lowenstein is Wall Street’s self-appointed apologist-in-chief.  Naturally, he despises Senator Warren, the most effective elected official in exposing Wall Street’s elite frauds.  The New York Times granted him an op ed in which he sought to mansplain financial regulation to Senator Warren.

Lowenstein does not like women that he considers too loud, gratuitously complaining that Senator Warren is “high-decibel” supporter of regulation.  Coming from someone who has spent his journalistic career shilling for Wall Street, this sexist trope is painfully embarrassing.  Wall Street is infamous for raging males who believe that screaming at subordinates who can’t fight back proves their virility.

Continue reading →

By William K. Black
October 24, 2016     Quito, Ecuador

Pete Peterson is back, and his message and rhetoric are always the same.  The federal budget deficit is a disaster and – any day now – will produce massive inflation.  Peterson has written his 20,000^th version of this fantasy in the NYT with Paul Volcker.  The first rhetorical game that Peterson plays is to assert that it is bad for a sovereign nation to run budgetary deficits because they are not “sound and sustainable.”  Except that the U.S. has run deficits for most of its existence without ever suffering hyper-inflation.  For a nation like the U.S. with a sovereign currency, a federal budgetary deficit is not unsound and it is not unsustainable.  Federal budget deficits can, depending on the circumstances, be the very definition of “sound” fiscal policy – a policy that is often essential for “sustainable” recovery and growth of the economy.

Continue reading →

By William K. Black
October 18, 2016     Kansas City, MO

What happens in the petrocracy formerly known as the State of North Dakota to the tiny minority of reporters who actually expose the misconduct of the petrocrats?  Fracking has perverted many organs of the government in North Dakota into petro-cronies.  They act to protect their petrocrat patrons from criticism from this minority of reporters.  A county North Dakota prosecutor decided to use what is becoming the petrocrats’ favorite strategy to censor Amy Goodman by imprisoning her.

In North Dakota, the petrocrats hired a force of goons with attack dogs to intimidate and attack Native American protesters against the Dakota Access Pipeline.  Amy Goodman, an award-winning journalist most famous for Democracy Now, was the only journalist to cover the attack on the protesters.  The petrocrats were enraged when her video of the private goons and their dogs’ attacks on the protesters attained wide publicity.

Continue reading →

NEP’s Bill Black appears on The Real News Network and explains why criminal prosecutions of executives time after time are not happening. The video is below and if you would like to view with a transcript, click here.