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Hugh commented on the blog post Live Chat – William K. Black: The Foreclosure Settlement
I am so sorry to hear about Mary. She was one of the most committed people I knew to Constitutional rights and personal freedoms. I will miss her.
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Hugh commented on the blog post Live Chat – William K. Black: The Foreclosure Settlement
No you haven’t. Re-read my comment at 84. You continually say that politicians must be pressured or voted out of office, but you fail to recognize, despite masses of evidence, that politicians aren’t pressured. Threaten them with loss of office and they will go into the private corporate welfare system of lobbying and think tanks where they will make multiples of their current salaries with far less aggravation. And those who replace them will come from the perennial choice between the corporatist Democrat and the corporatist Republican.
Failing to understand that kleptocracy is the system means nothing more than advocating solutions to the wrong problems. It means your efforts will be misdirected both in practical and theoretical terms, and as I said, leaves me wondering at what point you become part of the problem, since by willfully and persistently mischaracterizing it you allow it to fester and grow that much more.
You may think this is terribly unfair, but there are real lines being drawn here, and you and yours can no longer temporize about them. You can not have it both ways. You can not in good faith limit your criticisms to what is comfortable to you and your class. You either complete the analysis and act on it or you stand with those you say you criticize. You may not like this choice but it is the choice we all must make. And as you take a leadership role, you should be among the first and not the last to make it.
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Hugh commented on the blog post Live Chat – William K. Black: The Foreclosure Settlement
You have often referred to a criminogenic environment, but this is an incomplete analysis. The problem is not rampant crime in the economic system. It is the system as criminal enterprise, that is kleptocracy.
There is a major difference in these two views. According to you and liberal economists in general, the economic/political system is essentially sound. So you advocate putting “pressure” on Obama and the Democrats to “force” them to take measures and adopt policies to curb and punish criminal acts. But of course this never happens. And the reason it doesn’t is because your analysis is wrong. If you look at things from a kleptocratic perspective, it is axiomatic why reform will never work or even be tried, why the guilty will remain not only free and uninvestigated but made both richer and more powerful.
My question to you is how much longer will be before you and liberal economists take the plunge and address kleptocracy as it is and not in the tentative way you have done so far and most economists have avoided altogether? And if you do not, at what point do you and they become part of the problem?
