[lbo-talk] Is Wall St. full of criminals?

brad babscritique at gmail.com
Wed May 18 06:55:59 PDT 2011



>Couldn't we similarly ask whether advocating prosecution of an accused male >rapist for rape - say, just for instance, the head of an international financial >institution - diverts our attention from the need to overcome patriarchy?


>To which I'd want to answer: "Who do you mean 'we,' white man?"


>Seriously, isn't it a false (and disempowering) binary?


>"History unfolds functionally within a structural context." - Michael Parenti
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
That's a terrible analogy and doesn't apply at all. Sure there are some who did break the law but they did not cause the financial crisis. The cause was the very nature of the law that allowed certain things to happen, all perfectly legal. Therefore the only people who should do the perp walk, apart from the few who did engage in illegal activity (even though they did not cause the crisis), for the crisis are the regulators who did not do their job and the politicians who created the laws as such (of course you cannot hold someone accountable for breaking a law through their action of creating one).

Your rape comparison does not hold because we all live in a patriarchal society but we don't all rape. Therefore, patriarchy doesn't in itself cause a man to rape. While everyone in finance was engaged in or connected to the RMBS. The system of laws put in place did cause the financial collapse. By focusing on those who deviated from the norm you do in fact distract from the overall source of the problem when dealing with finance.

What's the Marx quote about our enemy is capitalism, not individual capitalists.

Brad



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