Tag Archives: nyt

The CEO’s Great Advice About Whistleblowers Never Mentions Them

Posted on August 21, 2016 by | 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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The New York Times Urges the Troika to “Make an Example of Greece”

Posted on July 7, 2015 by | 16 comments

By William K. Black
Quito: July 7, 2015

It is often the moral and economic blindness of New York Times articles about the EU crisis that is most striking. The newest entry in this field is entitled “Now Europe Must Decide Whether to Make an Example of Greece.” That is a chilling phrase most associated in our popular culture with a Consigliere and his Don deciding whether to order a mob “hit.” It is, therefore, fitting (albeit over the top) as a criticism of the troika’s economic, political, and propaganda war against the Greek people. Except that the article is actually another salvo in that war.

Let’s start with the obvious – except to the NYT. “Europe” isn’t “decid[ing]” anything. The troika is making the decisions. More precisely, it is the CEOs of the elite German corporations and banks that direct the troika’s policies that are making the decisions. The troika simply implements those decisions. The troika consists of the ECB, the IMF, and the European Commission. None of these three entities represents “Europe.” None of them will hold a democratic referendum of the peoples of “Europe” to determine policies. Indeed, they are apoplectic that the Greek government dared to ask the people of Greece through a democratic process whether to give in to the troika’s latest efforts to extort the Greek government to inflict ever more destructive and economically illiterate malpractice on the Greek people.

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A Harvard Don is Enraged that Pope Francis is “Opposed to the World Economic Order”

Posted on June 22, 2015 by | 13 comments

By William K. Black
Quito: June 21, 2015

A New York Times article entitled “Championing Environment, Francis Takes Aim at Global Capitalism” quotes a conventional Harvard economist, Robert N. Stavins. Stavins is enraged by Pope Francis’ position on the environment because the Pope is “opposed to the world economic order.” The rage, unintentionally, reveals why conventional economics is the most dangerous ideology pretending to be a “science.”

Stavins’ attacks on the Pope quickly became personal and dismissive. This is odd, for Pope Francis’ positions on the environment are the same as Stavins’ most important positions. Stavins’ natural response to the Pope’s views on the environment – had Stavin not been an economist – would have been along the lines of “Pope Francis is right, and we urgently need to make his vision a reality.”

Stavins’ fundamental position is that there is an urgent need for a “radical restructuring” of the markets to prevent them from causing a global catastrophe. That is Pope Francis’ fundamental position. But Stavins ends up mocking and trying to discredit the Pope.

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RIP TPP?

Posted on June 13, 2015 by | 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 by | 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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The New York Times’ Secret Rule Forbidding Its EU Writers from Reading Krugman

Posted on May 11, 2015 by | 2 comments

By William K. Black
Quito: May 10, 2015

I don’t know when the New York Times adopted the (obviously secret) rule that forbids its news staff that writes about the EU from reading Paul Krugman’s columns in that obscure newspaper named the New York Times. I can say that compliance with the rule appears to be nearly 100 percent. It is, of course, a mystery why the NYT would give Krugman, a Nobel Laureate in Economics; the most prominent position in the world to explain economics and then require its news staff covering Europe to ignore virtually everything he explains.

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Prime Minister Cameron’s “Southern Strategy” Wins (and Loses)

Posted on May 8, 2015 by | 4 comments

By William K. Black
Quito: May 8, 2015

Paul Krugman has a good column today entitled “Triumph of the Unthinking” about the Tory electoral triumph in the UK. Krugman makes three central points. First, the Tories and the UK media have created a myth about austerity that is utterly false – and poison to Labour while falsely flattering to the Conservatives. Second, rather than fight the myth by explaining why austerity in response to the Great Recession was an insane policy that gratuitously forced the UK back into a severe recession, Labour has embraced austerity. Krugman opines that Labour felt that public support for austerity was so strong that the party’s leadership felt it was impossible to do the right thing.

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HSBC Violates its Sweetheart Deal and Lynch Praises It

Posted on April 2, 2015 by | Comments Off on HSBC Violates its Sweetheart Deal and Lynch Praises It

By William K. Black
Quito: April Fools’ Day 2015

HSBC got a sweetheart deal from the Obama administration.  It laundered vast amounts of money for Mexico’s murderous Sinaloa cartel, helped bust sanctions for terrorists and mass murderers, and did not cooperate with the investigation.  The U.S. Attorney in charge of the case, Loretta Lynch, refused to prosecute any of the HSBC bankers or even sue them individually.  Instead, there was a pathetic non-prosecution agreement limited to HSBC.  Lynch is accused of not contacting either of the primary whistleblowers in the case.  The failure to contact one of the whistleblowers has already blown up in Lynch’s face as it became public a few months ago that the governments of the U.S. and Europe were provided many years ago with data on HSBC’s Swiss affiliate that show it was helping terrorists, genocidal leaders, the most violent drug gangs, and tens of thousands of wealthy people evade taxes.  Lynch failed to bring that case or use any of the invaluable data provided by the whistleblower who copied the files from the Swiss bank.

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DealBook’s Willful Blindness Exemplified in the Whistleblowing Article’s First Sentence

Posted on April 1, 2015 by | 1 comment

By William K. Black
Quito: April Fools’ Day 2015

The odious New York Times “brand” (DealBook) managed in its lead sentence to show that how complete its pro-CEO banker bias is and how that bias prevents it from getting even the most basic aspects of our recurrent crises correct.  The April Fools’ Day article is entitled “S.E.C. Fires Warning Shot About Confidentiality Agreements.”

“A sound that delights regulators and strikes fear in corporations — employees’ blowing the whistle on wrongdoing — is poised to become louder.”

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What’s Wrong with David Leonhardt’s NYT Piece on Inequality?

Posted on February 19, 2015 by | 5 comments

By Pavlina Tcherneva

The New York Times made waves this week with another piece on inequality, saying that it has not risen since 2007. The article was based on this paper by GWU’s Stephen Rose.

The article also suggests that expansions are not a good way of looking at trends in inequality (as I have done in the past, also covered by the NYT). Instead, one needs to look at the business cycle. It also concludes that, thankfully, because of government tax and transfer policies, inequality has not been “that bad” over the last few years and governments can clearly do something about it.

So what’s wrong with this picture?

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