Political Voices // William K. Black

 

William Black has been very good at explaining the fact that the foxes have been in charge of our hen house and they have been robbing it mercilessly. Our problem seems to be that many believe we can keep on going making our profits without ever paying attention to these facts. It’s like, yes, Al Capone is in charge of Chicago, but  why be worried because we can still make our current profits…

I wrote the following in response,

The TV show "COPS" is about police tracking down and arresting, on camera, various petty criminals like drug pushers, thieves, and scam artists. It's not a TV show about the administration of justice. What we know from William Black, and others, is that the people at the top of the political system, the ones who control it, get away with white collar crime. The power boys are not similarly beaten up by the police. This makes the police "thugs in blue." They are just the hired thugs told to keep the less fortunate in line. It's like how Capone kept the peace in his neighborhoods so that he could better get away with the crimes he was carrying out hidden away.

The problem isn't just that letting white collar criminals get away gives the poor ideas that they too can get away with crime. The system is told to step on those people. This is why the real cops are not discouraged from beating the shit out of people in those examples filmed by bystanders. The leadership wants the little people to know that the criminal behavior of the rich should not be a license for them to "have at it."

The corruption involving letting white collar criminals off to steal again causes the corruption of the system of criminal justice. Letting some people be above the law destroys the rule of law.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/08/real-reason-sec-has-been-shredding.html

 

Here’s more of Black doing his explaining…

And here, from Washington’s Blog, about Black…

Saturday, April 4, 2009

Senior S&L Regulator Says Government Engaging in Massive Cover-Up of Economic Crisis: “The Entire Strategy Is to Keep People from Getting the Facts”

William K. Black was the senior regulator during the S&L crisis, and an Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri (bio).

Black says that massive fraud is what caused the economic crisis. As one example, he explains that everyone involved knew that the CDOs which packaged subprime loans were not AAA credit-worthy (which means that they are completely risk-free). He also said that the exotic instruments (CDOs, CDS, etc.) which spun the mortgages into more and more abstract investments were intentionally created to defraud investors.

Moreover, Black says that the government's entire strategy in dealing with the economic crisis is a massive cover-up:

[They] don't want to change the bankers, because if we do, if we put honest people in, who didn't cause the problem, their first job would be to find the scope of the problem. And that would destroy the cover up....

Geithner is ... covering up. Just like Paulson did before him....

These are all people who have failed. Paulson failed, Geithner failed. They were all promoted because they failed....

Until you get the facts, it's harder to blow all this up. And, of course, the entire strategy is to keep people from getting the facts....

[Question] Are you saying that Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, and others in the administration, with the banks, are engaged in a cover up to keep us from knowing what went wrong?

[Black] Absolutely....

They're deliberately leaving in place the people that caused the problem, because they don't want the facts. And this is not new. The Reagan Administration's central priority, at all times, during the Savings and Loan crisis, was covering up the losses.

[Question] So, you're saying that people in power, political power, and financial power, act in concert when their own behinds are in the ringer, right?

That's right. And it's particularly a crisis that brings this out, because then the class of the banker says, "You've got to keep the information away from the public or everything will collapse."

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/watch.html

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/04/senior-s-regulator-says-government.html

 

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