Author Archives: William Black

RIP TPP?

Posted on June 13, 2015 | 7 comments

By William K. Black
Quito: June 13, 2015

My answer to the question I pose in my title is “no.” The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is far from dead and can only be defeated by heroic efforts by a broad coalition of Americans dedicated to the interests of our Nation and its people and willing to pay the price to oppose the triumph of corporate interests. The focus of this column, however, is on the New York Times’ coverage of Friday’s vote on a key component of President Obama and the Republican leadership’s efforts to make the TPP law. That focus requires some tangential discussion of the substantive arguments for and against TPP but I will minimize that discussion because I have explained previously in greater detail why I oppose the TPP and urge Americans to make our efforts to defeat it one of our highest priorities.

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Roger Cohen Laments his Inadequate Schadenfreude because the Greeks Don’t Suffer Enough

Posted on June 11, 2015 | 3 comments

By William K. Black
Quito: June 11, 2015

“Schadenfreude” is a German word that describes taking a “malicious, gloating pleasure in the suffering of other people.” It is a form of sadism. Roger Cohen has written an extraordinary column describing how much he hates the Greek people. Change the name “Greek” to almost any other group and it is certain that the New York Times would refuse to print such a mass of ethnic slurs. The Greeks are fair game, however, for even the crudest slurs in the NYT.

But what causes Cohen’s June 8, 2015 column attacking the Greek people to reach a new level in hate speech is this paragraph.

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Geithner’s Ghost Writer and the Parable of the River of Risk

Posted on June 10, 2015 | Comments Off on Geithner’s Ghost Writer and the Parable of the River of Risk

By William K. Black
Quito: June 9, 2015

Michael Grunwald has written a column attacking Senator Bernie Sanders. It is entitled “Don’t break up the megabanks.” As Grunwald appropriately discloses, he is Timothy Geithner’s ghost writer and a fervent co-religionist of Geithner’s gospel of adoration of and devoted service to the world’s most fraudulent bankers.

Grunwald gives the reader fair warning that he has no financial expertise and is prepared to say anything to try to defend the banksters and Geithner when he makes his first argument the claim that it is “un-American” to break up banks that pose a global systemic risk. To the contrary, few things could be more American if you are even remotely familiar with American views of megabanks from the founding of our Republic.

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President Obama Fateful Error in Making Bush’s Goldman Sachs/AIG Scandal His Scandal

Posted on June 4, 2015 | 4 comments

By William K. Black
Quito: June 3, 2015

We have known from the beginning that Lanny Breuer, who the Obama administration chose as its head of the Criminal Division in order to ensure that there would be no prosecutions of the banksters that led, and were enriched by the fraud epidemics that drove the crisis, would be a national embarrassment. Readers may recall that Breuer publicly admitted that what caused him to lose sleep was not the world’s most destructive fraud epidemics that ruined our economy or his grant of effective immunity to the banksters who led and became wealthy through those frauds. He lost sleep solely over his fear that if he held them accountable for the frauds that had bankrupted their corrupt banks those banks might be placed in receivership and honest managers appointed. (Of course, that isn’t how he phrased it, but that is what he was actually saying.)

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The Murdoch Effect and the Continuing Bankster Crime Wave

Posted on June 3, 2015 | 1 comment

By William K. Black
Quito: May 30, 2015

One of common characteristics of the two epicenters of the elite banking fraud epidemics – the City of London and Wall Street – is Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers’ repeated efforts to create a criminogenic environment in both financial centers by cheerleading the regulatory race to the bottom. Murdoch’s papers also act as apologists for the resultant epidemic of elite banksters’ crimes.

One of the bit players that the Wall Street Journal has deployed as part of this apologia is particularly interesting for white-collar criminologists. The setting, as always on the WSJ’s editorial pages, is that the writers are overwhelmingly the most extreme right wing ideologues. The only criminological theory that the right wing loves is “broken windows.” The WSJ presented an op ed by Heather Mac Donald of the hard-right Manhattan Institute. The title gives a good feel of the extreme claim she is making: “The New Nationwide Crime Wave: The consequences of the ‘Ferguson effect’ are already appearing.”

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Sorkin on the Street’s Surge of Suicides: Ignoring the Obvious

Posted on June 3, 2015 | 2 comments

By William K. Black
Quito: June 2, 2015

Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote two related columns only two weeks apart, but ignored his first column in writing his second. The May 15, 2015 report by the University of Notre Dame on the results of its survey of financial sector participants in the U.S. and the UK was the subject of Sorkin’s May 18, 2015 column entitled “Many on Wall Street Say It Remains Untamed.” “Untamed” is a word with a positive connotation that Sorkin chose as his euphemism in his self-appointed role as apologist-in-chief for the banksters. Here is the report’s summary.

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SEALs, CEOs, Milton Friedman, and Fraudulent Incentives

Posted on June 1, 2015 | 5 comments

By William K. Black
Quito: May 31, 2015

I saw an intriguing squib in the Wall Street Journal about an article in the Harvard Business Review entitled “How the Navy SEALS Train for Leadership Excellence.”  The article offers an, unintentionally, useful insight into the pathologies of elite business schools, their “leadership” faculty, and our elite C-suites.

The most interesting comment in the article is by Brandon Webb, a former senior SEAL sniper trainer.

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Peggy Noonan Joins George Will in Being Enraged at Rape – Victims

Posted on May 27, 2015 | 6 comments

By William K. Black
Quito: May 26, 2015

Peggy Noonan’s column in the Wall Street Journal attacks and mocks a victim of a sexual assault and four of her classmates at Columbia University who supported her in an op ed in the school paper. Here are the facts as Noonan presents them.

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The WSJ and Barron’s Apologists for the Banksters Peddle Wallison’s Fables

Posted on May 25, 2015 | 3 comments

By William K. Black
Quito: May 23, 2015

Few people’s efforts at myth-making have been as devastatingly refuted as Peter Wallison. But fables that are designed to make the banksters look less criminal are always welcome by the banksters. Any honest discussion of Wallison’s claims would begin with three points. First, Wallison’s adult life has been devoted, on behalf of the banksters, to pushing the three “de’s” – deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization. He is therefore as culpable as anyone in the world for the epidemics of accounting control fraud that drove the financial crisis and the Great Recession.

Second, he was appointed by the Republican leadership to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) to assure that the banksters would have the benefit of their leading apologist. The chances that he would ascribe any problems to the three “de’s” was always non-existent because he does not have a scholarly instinct in his body. He is rabidly ideological and a willing tool of the banksters.

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Krugman Is Half Right

Posted on May 18, 2015 | 1 comment

By William K. Black
Quito: May 16, 2015

Paul Krugman has a nice column entitled “Fraternity of Failure” dated May 15, 2015.

In Bushworld, in other words, playing a central role in catastrophic policy failure doesn’t disqualify you from future influence. If anything, a record of being disastrously wrong on national security issues seems to be a required credential.

But refusal to learn from experience, combined with a version of political correctness in which you’re only acceptable if you have been wrong about crucial issues, is pervasive in the modern Republican Party.

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