Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism links to a great smack-down of the Wall Street Journal's lapdog corporatist reporting on behalf of the big banks and multinational corporations. It's William Black, Why aren't the honest bankers demanding prosecutions of their dishonest rivals? Apr. 12, 2011. (I've linked to the Naked Capitalism coverage, since that is where I first spotted it. )
Stephen Moore, calls government employees and regulatory agents "takers" that are destroying America. Earlier, he had written about Sarbanes-Oxley as a "white collar witch hunt" with an article that labeled regulatory action "Neobolshevism". Here's just a taste of Black's response:
Moore, for example, is the Wall Street Journal’s senior economics writer. Somehow, prominent conservatives have become “bleeding hearts” for the most wealthy, powerful, arrogant, and destructive white-collar criminals in the world. ... People like Moore not only spur neutralization, they actively campaign to minimize the destructiveness of elite white-collar crime and to deny the regulators and the prosecutors the resources to prosecute the criminals.
....
The anti-regulators got their wish – they took the regulatory cops off the beat. The banking regulatory agencies ceased making criminal referrals, the SEC ceased bringing even their wimpy consent actions against the massive accounting control frauds, and the Justice Department ceased prosecuting the accounting control frauds during the run up to the crisis. The results were multiple echo epidemics of fraud, a hyper-inflated bubble, and the Great Recession. If Baker and Moore think these fraudulent CEOs constitute the “productive class” – then capitalism was killed by the producers. The financial frauds, however, were not productive. They were weapons of mass financial destruction. Their fraudulent CEOs were motivated by the most banal of motivations that every major religion warns against – unlimited greed, ego, and a radical lack of empathy for their victims. The most pathetic figures in the crisis, however, are not the CEOs but their shills.
A commenter (Eric) noted that he was "still puzzled to see how strongly small-business people support the criminality of the big business oligopolists who make things so difficult for them." I suspect it is in part because of the incessant shilling of media like the Wall Street Journal on behalf of the big buys.
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