Fraud as our culture

  • Greater losses than all other forms of property crime combined… [link]
  • The exact kind of behavior that has been destroying America… [link]
  • Calculated dishonesty by people in charge at the heart of corporate scandal… [link]
  • Corporations optimized as a weapon to loot creditors and shareholders… [link]

William K. Black interviewed at Bill Moyers Journal:

MOYERS: I was taken with your candor at the conference here in New York to hear you say that this crisis we’re going through, this economic and financial meltdown is driven by fraud.

BLACK: There’s no more effective acid against trust than fraud, especially fraud by top elites, and that’s what we have.

The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own OneEconomic theory about fraud is underdeveloped…

Economists are not taught about fraud and fraud mechanisms…

Economists minimize the incidence of fraud… and the importance of fraud… for reasons of self-interest, class and ideology…

Ponzi investments, drug money laundering, the CIA, suppressed SEC investigations, and political financing… self-interest, class and ideology.

Now Black is focused on an even greater scandal, and he spares no one — not even the President he worked hard to elect, Barack Obama.

But his main targets are the Wall Street barons, heirs of an earlier generation whose scandalous rip-offs of wealth back in the 1930s earned them comparison to Al Capone and the mob, and the nickname “banksters.”

What happens after a plane crashes?