I’d actually love to see Nicholas Kristoff’s latest suggestion implemented (possibly by Stephen Colbert?):
Whenever I write about Occupy Wall Street, some readers ask me if the protesters really are half-naked Communists aiming to bring down the American economic system when they’re not doing drugs or having sex in public.
__
The answer is no. That alarmist view of the movement is a credit to the (prurient) imagination of its critics, and voyeurs of Occupy Wall Street will be disappointed. More important, while alarmists seem to think that the movement is a “mob” trying to overthrow capitalism, one can make a case that, on the contrary, it highlights the need to restore basic capitalist principles like accountability.
__
To put it another way, this is a chance to save capitalism from crony capitalists…
__
When I lived in Asia and covered the financial crisis there in the late 1990s, American government officials spoke scathingly about “crony capitalism” in the region. As Lawrence Summers, then a deputy Treasury secretary, put it in a speech in August 1998: “In Asia, the problems related to ‘crony capitalism’ are at the heart of this crisis, and that is why structural reforms must be a major part” of the International Monetary Fund’s solution…
__
So I’d like to invite the finance ministers of Thailand, South Korea and Indonesia — whom I and other Americans deemed emblems of crony capitalism in the 1990s — to stand up and denounce American crony capitalism today…
Heck, I’d settle for Colbert (or Matt Taibbi) reading Kristoff’s column to Larry Summers on live television. Not that it would dent Summers’ colossal self-esteem, but I want the bloated toad to be forced to defend himself in front of an unsympathic audience for once in his miserable career of Ever Upwards Fail…
__
Open Thread: Lecturing the Crony CapitalistsPost + Comments (28)