Author Archives: William Black

The CEO’s Great Advice About Whistleblowers Never Mentions Them

Posted on August 21, 2016 | 3 comments

By William K. Black
August 22, 2016     Kansas City, MO

The New York Times has a columnist who interviews business leaders.  He interviewed, Bracken Darrell, Logitech’s CEO in a column entitled “Be Sure to Tell the Boss What’s Wrong.”  When we, the co-founders of Bank Whistleblowers United, here a phrase like that our ears perk up.  It is exactly the right message the CEO should send.  The people who most obviously take that message to heart, in the most difficult circumstances for the employee and where following the CEO’s advice is most vital to the firm, are whistleblowers.  Despite the title of the article, and the famous role that whistleblowers played in disclosing the frauds that drove the most recent financial crisis, however, the CEO never mentioned whistleblowers.  The entirety of the discussion of basis for the title of the article is shown below.

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WSJ’s Top Reason to Defeat Hillary: She’s Against Rape

Posted on August 15, 2016 | 7 comments

By William K. Black
August 15, 2016     Bloomington, MN

The Wall Street Journal’s Deputy Editor, Daniel Henninger, wrote an op ed dated August 10, 2016 designed to convince Republicans to hold their noses and vote for Donald Trump.  His means of attempting to convince them was conventional – play on their hate of Hillary Clinton.  Op eds need to be brief, so Henninger picked as his argument the single policy he felt would be most compelling to the paper’s readers.

It is a testament to how bizarre the WSJ editorial writers are and how bizarre they believe their readers are that Henninger chose as his most dreadful policy supported by Hillary that should enrage the paper’s readership – her opposition to rape.  The specific context was that she opposes the rape of coeds.

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Thomas Friedman Worships Lifetime Learning but Refuses to Learn

Posted on August 11, 2016 | 5 comments

(4th column in my series on Friedman advising Hillary to Move Hard Right)
William K. Black
August 10, 2016     Bloomington, MN

Thomas Friedman has written two columns advising Hillary Clinton to win the election by adopting traditional Republican economic dogmas.  Friedman despairs that Hillary Clinton refrains from:

[T]elling people the hardest truth: that to be in the middle class, just working hard and playing by the rules doesn’t cut it anymore. To have a lifelong job, you need to be a lifelong learner, constantly raising your game.

Friedman has two big pieces of economic advice for Hillary – financial deregulation and ratifying the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).  Friedman treats TPP as if the issue were “trade,” but as I explained earlier in this series, TPP is actually crafted by corporate elites to eviscerate effective financial, health, and safety regulation.  Trade is simply the pretext for TPP’s passage.

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Thomas Friedman: This Time is Different: Deregulation Makes Banking Safe

Posted on August 10, 2016 | 4 comments

(3d column in my series on Friedman advising Hillary to Move Hard Right)

William K. Black
August 8, 2016     Bloomington, MN

In this column I focus on Thomas Friedman’s plea that Hillary Clinton embrace deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization (the three “de’s”) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as a “knock-out” political strategy against Donald Trump and as a means to produce dramatic economic growth and financial stability.  He claims that embracing the three “de’s” and the TPP creates an “open system.”

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Thomas Friedman Wants A “Center-Left” Democratic Party Based on Austrian Economic Myths

Posted on August 9, 2016 | 5 comments

(2d column in my series on Friedman advising Hillary to Move Hard Right)

William K. Black
August 7, 2016     Bloomington, MN

Thomas Friedman has written two columns advising Hillary Clinton to renounce her campaign promises and the Democratic Party’s platform and move to the right of the Republican Party on economic issues.  My first column in this series critiqued the centerpiece of his plea to her – deregulate banking.

This column discusses Friedman’s economic assumption, which he probably does not understand he was making, that is (a) false and (b) dangerous.  Friedman doesn’t cite it as an economic assumption.  Instead, he makes a systems theory assertion without even trying to explain why it would be applicable to his proposed sharp move to the right on economic policies.

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Why Don’t Giuliani’s Critics Attack Him For What He Actually Said?

Posted on August 9, 2016 | 1 comment

Part 6 of my series on Race, Crime, and Policing

William K. Black
August 7, 2016     Bloomington, MN

Former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani made a series of comments on race, crime, and policing on when he was interviewed recently on “Face the Nation.”  I am a strong critic of Giuliani’s approach to the intersection of race, crime, and policing.  Giuliani said several objectionable things in his interview that he could not defend.  The mystery is why his critics keep ignoring those comments and attacking other comments me made in that interview that are essentially correct.  In the course of their efforts to bash Giuliani his critics are repeatedly misstating what he said in the passages they seek to ridicule and demonstrating such fundamental analytical errors that they must be allowing their eagerness to hurt Giuliani shut down their critical faculties.

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Thomas Friedman’s Big Idea for Hillary: Embrace Wall Street and Deregulation

Posted on August 8, 2016 | 8 comments

William K. Black
August 7, 2016     Bloomington, MN

Thomas Friedman’s economic illiteracy and sycophancy for Wall Street “elites” have never been in doubt, but he has (unknowingly) plumbed new depths in his columns advising Hillary Clinton to remake the Democratic Party in Bill’s image – by embracing Wall Street’s dream of deregulation.  Friedman has literally learned nothing from the three great epidemics of accounting control fraud (“liar’s” loans, inflated appraisals, and fraudulent resale of these fraudulently originated mortgages) that drove the financial crisis and the Great Recession.

In other columns in this series on Friedman’s columns advising Hillary on moving the Democratic Party well to the right of the Republican Party on economic issues, I show that Friedman has literally learned nothing from the successes of stimulus, education, and infrastructure, the horrific failures of austerity and deregulation, or his repeated distortion of “capitalism” and “socialism.”.  Friedman gives no indication that he realizes that (1) his economic dogmas were all falsified by our recurrent financial crises and (2) the policies implemented on the basis of those dogmas proved disastrous.

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Michael Eric Dyson’s Blood Libels and History

Posted on August 6, 2016 | 6 comments

Part 5 of my series on Race, Crime, and Policing

William K. Black
August 5, 2016     Bloomington, MN

I explained in my two prior columns the blood libels against “whites” as a race and law enforcement officers (LEOs) made by the sociologist Michael Eric Dyson.  Dyson was particularly vitriolic in complaining that whites refused to “condemn” LEOs who shot blacks until they knew whether the LEOs had acted criminally or even improperly.  Dyson portrays this adherence to due process and the rule of law by whites as an outrageous moral failure.  This column explains two famous incidents that played critical roles in shaping our society’s view that we should celebrate the moral courage required to maintain respect for due process in circumstances where much of the public is baying for its destruction.

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Michael Eric Dyson’s Blood Libels and the NYT’s Hypocrisy

Posted on August 5, 2016 | 3 comments

Part 4 of my series on Race, Crime, and Policing

William K. Black
August 2, 2016     Bloomington, MN

Part 3 of this series began the explanation of the hypocrisy of the New York Times in its treatment of the sociologist Michael Eric Dyson’s blood libels against police and whites as a race.  Part 3 focused on the terrible timing of Dyson’s op ed in the NYT.  The ambush murders of Dallas law enforcement officers (LEOs) falsified Dyson’s blood libels while the ink was still figuratively wet on his op ed.

I first need to reprise for the reader the NYT’s hypocritical attack on former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani while ignoring Dyson’s blood libels.

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Policing as a Tool of Systemic Racism

Posted on July 31, 2016 | 3 comments

Part 2 of my series on Race, Crime, and Policing

By William K. Black
July 31, 2016     Bloomington, MN

My introductory column in this series laid out the blood libels against police, policing, blacks, and whites that are doing so much harm to America.  This second installment provides a brief historical overview necessary to begin the discussion about the blood libels against Black Lives Matter, law enforcement officers (LEOs) and whites as a racial group.  I repeat my warning from my introductory installment that criminology produces hard truths and nuanced explanations that upset almost everyone.

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