FIGHT: Fearlessly Ingeniously, Great-Hearted, Honest and Tenacious!
5.5.2025
FIGHT: Fearlessly Ingeniously, Great-Hearted, Honest and Tenacious!
https://youtu.be/CXwQx5LuI2U?si=kQD0mbGo_F2Rctst
Patrick and William K. Black discuss the current turmoil in the United States, reflecting on past financial crises and the need for integrity in all aspects of life. Bill explores strategies for effective oversight and accountability in the political system, emphasizing the importance of compelling stories, legal discovery, and holding firms accountable. What's necessary to FIGHT against corruption to restore democracy.
Financial Fraud and Control Fraud
Bill discusses the history of financial fraud and corruption, emphasizing that it's a long-standing issue dating back centuries. Bill notes that efforts to combat white-collar crime have been successful in the past, but there has been a systematic change to protect elite criminals from prosecution since the savings and loan debacle.
[Transcript,.]
Patrick Lovell (The Producer): Good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning. Whenever you happenstance in this incredible dialogue with the one and only William K. Black. We're recording this on Monday, May 5th, 2025 at approximately 2 PM my time. Boy, is this going to be an important and incredibly enriching and I don't know, fulfilling, validating all of those types of things in terms of this conversation, because I find myself once again, leaning on William K. Black for guidance. And I want to just kind of set this up first before we get into the, the nitty gritty, the bones of it, what it is that we're here to discuss. But currently the United States is in turmoil. Millions of us around the country have come to the streets to protest what is obvious to everyone, which is the antithesis of what we Americans have come to, [indiscernible], what's the word when you take it for granted is what I'm trying to say.. the establishment of the rule of law, the establishment of common sense, of the professionals, of the adults, those that have made us the greatest nation on earth, the superpower that we all believe we are, suddenly is imploded right before our face. We've turned into a massively deceptive government. We've got a president who has, I think as most people would accept, waged war on the law. And the question of course is, well, how can you be the United States if the United States depends on the supremacy of the rule of law where no man or company or person for that matter is above the law. So obviously there's a lot of contradictions that we're all trying to sort out, but there's also a lot of confusion and a lot of people are trying to get a gauge, put their finger in the wind to see which way the wind blows to determine what the next direction is going to be because there's a lot of chaos. And as always, Bill Black to the rescue. But it's incorporated, this idea of what we're gonna talk about is gonna incorporate many more people than Bill Black, of course. But I just want to start for some perspective, Bill, because it is just incredible to be in this situation yet again. I wanna let the viewers know that I think it was 2009 when I just happened to run into an interview that you had done on PBS in the aftermath of the great financial crisis with the great Bill Moyers on PBS. And I remember being stupefied. It's been some time since I've seen the interview, but I've watched the interview a lot and I was stupefied because you were saying things that suddenly made everything else make sense. I had gone through the 2008 great financial crisis. My life had been turned upside down. I was a producer. I'd been in the business for a long time and I was trying to ask questions to try to ferret out what the heck was going on because I had an idea in my head as a producer to try to go on a mission, if you will, to try to determine what I was experiencing in real time, that nothing in the media or anything in my reality could conjure to make sense. It was all completely... it made no sense.. until finally, until suddenly, man, by the grace of God, I just happened to that morning, watch that particular show at that time, and it changed my life forever. Because what you said in that engagement made me understand that, wait a second... my instinct was spot on. I had known that everything that I was in the midst of was a disaster that was predicated on causality that came from somewhere that I just didn't understand, and suddenly you were there laying it all out. And so I don't want to relitigate all of the things that go into this, but I want to use that as a precedent to kind of set the table for who you are.. for the audience that might not understand the incredible battles you've been in your entire career. But I think the first thing that we ought to just address and hopefully you can do it in a way that we don't get too deep into it because I want to cover what the next steps are now considering what we're going through with the Trump administration. But in the beginning... [laughing] I sound like I was writing the Bible.. in the beginning, there was the savings alone crisis, Bill. Can you give us kind of an elevator understanding of, and I know that's not fair to put you on the spot because there's so much to it, but can you give us some bullet points of what the savings and loan crisis was?
Bill Black: Sure. But in the beginning, there wasn't the savings and loan crisis, right? There were many, many crises before the savings and loan crisis that displayed this same dynamic. Indeed, the first five bank failures in America were all looting by their CEO.
Patrick Lovell: Interesting.
Bill Black: Right. So this is a very old story in some ways. And there had been the Texas rent-a-bank scandal just before the savings and loan crisis, the same looting mechanism, some of the same people that came back because they got trivial sentences and looted again in the savings and loan debacle. There were the butchered banks, people forget Tennessee and such, where these two elite brothers highly tied into politics and the richest people in their states, butchered 25 banks, looted them. It's the leading cause historically of massive bank failures throughout history. And to, as you say, go back to the sacred texts of thousands of years ago, all the warnings are there, right? All those that doeth evil, hateth the light.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: You will have honest weights and measures. Well, why do they keep repeating that? Because there were so many dishonest [laughingly] weights and measures, right? They appeared to be scientific, as scientific as you could get in that era. And people who were cheating, merchants would make a big deal out of rubbing the scales clean so that there would be no extra weight from the dust and things like that. But that was just to sell the scam, right? [Begins to laugh] That the scales themselves were fixed. [laughing] That the weights they put on were underweighted, typically, type of thing. So this is a very, very old story in some ways. And it's always a story, when it gets really bad, of the elite folks running the businesses trying to scam the rule of law so they can scam us with impunity. That's what it comes down to, right? They want to get away with it. They want not just economic power, but political power.
Patrick Lovell: Sure.
Bill Black: They want political power for its own reasons, but also be so expressly they can gut the rule of law. And the really bad ones don't just want to gut the rule of law. They also want to use law as a weapon against others. So people like me were sued for 400 million dollars by the nation's leading fraudster and elite highly tied in politically type of folks. He had more than 100 law firms under retainer and it was all about intimidating, destroying, bankrupting any small press that dare to do a story adverse to him. Stop me when this starts sounding familiar. [laughing]
Patrick Lovell: Right, right. Bully tactics, but it's like I learned this stuff on the playground, but it's amazing what happens when you throw a lot of money into the mix, right?
Bill Black: Right.
Patrick Lovell: And smart people.
Bill Black: And we know from economics centuries ago, very conservative economists, right? That this has long been the thing. This is Bastiat, Frederic Bastiat. When plunder becomes a way of life, for men in society. They create a rule of law that allows it and a moral code that glorifies their sins. And that's again, precisely what we see. And we've also seen the Gresham's dynamic, which was first identified in print by this guy named Swift in Gulliver's Travels.. ya know [begins to laugh]. You know, [laughing] it's 1720s or 30s type of thing.. so many centuries ago. He said, you know, that the big threat is not people stealing things directly. The big threat is them lying and cheating you because honesty hath no fence..
Patrick Lovell: Wow.
Bill Black: ..that can protect you from these kinds of thieves.
Patrick Lovell: Wow.
Bill Black: Right.
Patrick Lovell: Wow.
Bill Black: So these are things that the most observant people who were least in league with the crooks..
Patrick Lovell: Yeah.
Bill Black: ..have been emphasizing for thousands of years and then in the modern era for now hundreds of years with the robber barons, of course, being a classic example. And the corruption of these super elites in the corporate sphere inevitably is going to corrupt the public sphere as well. In the savings and loan debacle, my joke was, and it was a joke from bitter reality, the highest return on assets for a fraudster is always a political contribution. It is absolute chump change from the perspective of a CEO looting his firm, remember, his firm in quotation marks, and.. and the firm pays the money [ <- said emphatically and laughingly] the political contributions [laughing], and the CEO gets the benefits. So these things in the criminology biz, and as you know, I went back after the Clinton administration drove me out with their lack of integrity for going after these crooks, and got a PhD in criminology in my research specialty is elite fraud and corruption. Well, that's precisely what we saw is that you form, we call them control fraud. It's a person who controls a seemingly legitimate entity, but then they don't have to bribe people. Here's the key. They just create compensation. And if you don't give them a clean opinion, from a top tier audit firm, they don't use you anymore. If you don't give a triple A rating, that's the highest credit rating possible for absolute toxic waste that shouldn't even be junk, I mean, it's less than junk status, they simply don't send you any business anymore and your rivals make a fortune. And that's called a Gresham's dynamic. When you gain a competitive advantage by cheating. That's what Swift was talking about 300 years ago. But that's also what George Akerlof got a Nobel Prize in economics.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: And he gave it the name Gresham's dynamic. And again, it's just whenever you gain a competitive advantage by cheating, market forces will become perverse and bad ethics will drive good ethics in the marketplace. Well, what else do we know? We know that there's been a huge effort to take white-collar crime seriously by a few people. And then every time that effort is successful and we put thousands of these elite criminals in prison, which is what we did in the savings and loan debacle and in the FDIC debacle, which is even bigger in terms of the number of felonies. People forget this..
Patrick Lovell: Wow.
Bill Black: ..entirely. But collectively, we were getting, you know, five thousand criminal convictions through a huge work effort. So fraud isn't in economic jargon idiosyncratic. It isn't random, you know, one or two things happen. When you systematically create a criminogenic environment, and that's just one where there are perverse incentives, which is essentially you can cheat and get away with it. Because again, you don't have to bribe anyone. You just don't pay them, you know.. hire them.. unless they give you the answer that you want. And for centuries, we've seen that this works. It doesn't work with everybody, but it doesn't have to work with everybody. Right? You get all three of the big credit rating agencies. Here's the number of times that the credit rating agencies refuse to give a triple A rating. That's the highest possible. Supposedly the no risk of default, essentially. Here's the number of times they refused to give it to CDOs, collateralized debt obligations, backed by liars loans.
Patrick Lovell: Big fat donut.
Bill Black: Zero.
Patrick Lovell: Yep.
Bill Black: This doesn't just succeed, it is a sure thing.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: It succeeds overwhelmingly. And that's an understatement. And again, it's 100% successful.
Patrick Lovell: Yeah.
Bill Black: They were 100% successful in getting clean opinions from the most prestigious audit firms.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: In other words, we have a business community that is deliberately corrupted itself by these fraudsters who set up these perverse dynamics, but then also share predatory networks that overlap. And again, it doesn't require collusion. No one has to go to in a room and say, I want you to do the following three sleazy things and in return I will give you $20 million. Right? We don't have to have that discussion. You just.. are offering in the modern era crypto.. and I just buy a lot of crypto.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: You don't have to have the discussion that says I want you to do the following things. And that brings us back to the rule of law.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: Because what we've had systematically changed since the savings and loan debacle, which scared the bejesus out of the elite criminals because there were more than 5,000 elite criminals convicted out of the contemporaneous savings and loan and banking scandals. And they said, we can't have that kind of world [laughing] where we could go to prison.. how are we ever going to succeed without fraud? [laughing] We don't want to go to jail. Jail is a really unpleasant thing. And again, we did this against the best criminal defense lawyers in the world. So what did they do? They created a system.. and we don't have time, but time after time after time, including the official Clinton Gore stuff on reinventing government, the terrible thing. The worst possible thing you could do as a regulator was treat the CEO of a seemingly legitimate firm as a crook because he was a crook.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: That was considered derangement. Right? So both parties valorized, just like Bastiat warned.
Patrick Lovell: Yeah.
Bill Black: These folks, after all, they were successes. How did we know they were successes? They claimed to be successes and they got AAA ratings, you know, as I've gone through and such, and they believed this crap. Even when they were backed by liars loans, which we objectively knew had a 90 % fraud incidence. Now, how is something that is 90% fraudulent get a AAA?.. through precisely this process. Right. Right. So if you explain this, they start going, oh, you're just a conspiracy theorist.. literally doesn't require a conspiracy at law.. it's just a commonality of interest.
Patrick Lovell: Absolutely.
Bill Black: Or in economics jargon, as you know, my primary appointment was in economics and then at the law was you align the interests, and that is super simple to do if you were the CEO. So anyway, this is what we learned was that the CEOs were the key actors and we had to go after them. And just what you said, we said what they're doing, the way they're making investments makes no sense
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: ..for an honest business person.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: But then we worked through the dynamics of looting and what would make sense to optimize looting. And we said, oh yeah, it's precisely the things we considered crazy are the things that optimize looting. So these folks aren't nuts. In fact, that's part of their protection. Nobody can quite believe that the folks who wear these super nice suits would do liars loans, knowing that they were at a 90% fraud incidents. And by the way it inflates the borrower's income, not deflates it. So this wasn't about DEI or anything like that.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: It's quite the the opposite.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: So that was the world that we learned. Plus, the world we were in as savings and loan regulators was objectively impossible for us to succeed. Right. When we started to re-regulate, remember, we did this under the Reagan administration. And to re-regulate was to be A, a moron and B, a traitor to the Reagan administration.
Patrick Lovell: It was the go-go 80s after all.
Bill Black: The go-go 80s and the head of our agency was a close friend of the Reaganites, of the Reagans, both the president and his wife. So we had this staggering road to Damascus change where he simply, he, this is Ed Gray, the chairman of the Thrift Regulatory Agency, said, no, this is fraud by people in nice suits. If Ronald Reagan knew what I knew, we would stop it. Okay, so he starts re-regulating. Here's what happens next that's so critical both to the helplessness and to the fact that none of us ended up being partisan in all of this. Charles Keating, again, the most notorious fraudster in the savings and loan crisis, began lobbying. And again, it's super cheap. You're looting the firm, so who cares that it's even more insolvent, right? And congressmen and senators come cheap. It is literally chump change from the perspective of a large institution what will put you on a first name basis with any Senator in America, much less congressmen, such that they will instantly pick up the phone if you call them. And so within two weeks, Keating got a majority of the House of Representatives to co-sponsor a resolution calling on us to stop the re-regulation of the savings and loan industry. And the signatories of that resolution, the co-signatories, included the entire leadership, House leadership, of both the Republican and the Democrats. Zero defectors. And we still went forward. Think of that. Can you imagine any modern regulators do this? So here's what we learned. You've got to fight. It's going to seem hopeless as you're doing it. It might objectively be homeless.. hopeless. It will be in the parlance of the big law firm I started at, a CLG, a career limiting gesture.
Patrick Lovell: [laughs]
Bill Black: But we took our inspiration from the incredible Dutch struggle for independence.
Patrick Lovell: Can I fill in the blanks?
Bill Black: Go for it.
Patrick Lovell: Because my friends, I have been mentored by the Michael Jordan of justice as it relates to especially white collar fraud in the United States. And I like to call you the Michael Jordan of criminology, because people don't really get anything other than sports references, quite frankly. But I can tell you this, even though we're putting.. pushing up this boulder up to the top of the mountain by ourselves on this righteous grind. What you're saying is it's not necessary to hope... to persevere.
Bill Black: That's right. That is exactly it.
Patrick Lovell: So I got to pick up on it.
Bill Black: And, and, and this is also relevant to what I'm pitching.
Patrick Lovell: Yeah.
Bill Black: now... Never chase mice while lions roam the campsite.
Patrick Lovell: Amen.
Bill Black: So we kept our eyes on the lions.
Patrick Lovell: Yeah.
Bill Black: And we went after the lions.
Patrick Lovell: OK, can I insert a couple of things here real quick? Just as it.. because we're I.. I want to transition to where we need to get. But just a couple of more things to fill in that I think are absolutely crucial here. So first and foremost, my friends, we're in 2025. What Bill just described was literally out of the 80s. Of course he prefaced Reagan. He prefaced Ed Gray. I'm going to have links down at the bottom. So hopefully you can go through your own discovery. Like I had to do when I just happened to walk into Bill Black on Bill Moyers that fateful day for me, because another problem is that I'll bring in my own metaphor because I'm an 80s or 90s film guy and 90s film buff. One of the greatest films that projected what Bill's saying that many of us might remember came out of the usual suspects when Kevin Spacey's character said, the greatest trick the devil ever played was to convince the world he didn't exist. It's a parlor trick. There's a lot of dimensions of deception that can go into this control fraud that became the eureka for people like myself to suddenly go, now it makes sense. But to hit the quick rewind, Bill, because this is absolutely imperative to people's understanding. So I came from a very honest family. I came from a family where my father lived by honesty and integrity and everything had to make sense. There was a process that filled our home when I grew up. And so I had an understanding that there's a right and wrong way to do things. So I just had that fundamental thing, which I think was pretty much the national character for.. at least I thought it was. Maybe I was living in a bubble. So maybe that's a silly statement, but I understood the nature, the valor of character, of honor. But when I came out of the 2008 great financial crisis, when I discovered you on that fateful day, I kept asking myself, okay, I had to have this construct in my mind. I was like, wait a second, nothing makes sense. But if a building stands, obviously it has integrity. If a building falls, it doesn't. So I knew very simply, you know, in like an elementary level education of common sense, that if something isn't working, there's a reason for that. And I developed an understanding and a real significant interest in the word fraud. Because at that time period as well, I recall, and this is very unfortunate looking back, the Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States, particularly in 2016, had been asked on a number of occasions why she, and I was referring to Hillary Rodham Clinton, was taking offerings from Goldman Sachs on the lecture circuit where she was getting high fees to just simply give a speech and that sort of thing. And she just said it was what they offered. And along those lines at that time period too, the word fraud was described as shenanigans. Now I would interpret the word shenanigans as, you know, in my 80s sort of worldview, like Blutarsky from Animal House taking off with Mandy Pepperidge at the end of the Dean Wormer, you know, parade where, you know, the guy gets the girl and all the silliness that goes with it. That's shenanigans. Fraud is something entirely different. Can you please give us a definition of fraud?
Bill Black: Yeah. Fraud is when you lie to somebody in order to cause them to give you something of value, right? So it's an intentional act of theft through deceit.
Patrick Lovell: Is it shenanigans or is it a crime?
Bill Black: It is a crime, but.. this is again what Bastiat warned us. When the criminals are in charge, they will create a legal code that authorizes crime and an ethical code that valorizes it. So is it always a crime? No, because that tells you the society has been truly corrupted, that the elites have become so corrupt that they allow that. And by the way, the Supreme Court has been doing that for 30 years. For 30 years overwhelmingly, the case law development of the Supreme Court has been to make it much harder to convict elite white collar criminals and public officials of corruption. And the very first things that Trump did upon becoming president is take all of the things that are threats to corruption and fraudsters and attempt to destroy them. So he said, oh, we're no longer going to enforce the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. That told you, you're going to be doing sleazy deals with sleazy people outside the country. And we're going to get rid of the inspector generals. Well, the inspector general's job is to prevent corruption directly. But they also have a specialized task, and that is protecting whistleblowers. And whistleblowers are the folks that make possible these crackdowns on the corrupt disclosure of who's being corrupt and such. So William Barr in the first iteration of Donald Trump, you may recall he was the third attorney general.
Patrick Lovell: Yeah, and he came out of Contragate as well, going back to the 80s and Reagan.
Bill Black: But famously Barr hated the law that's often called the Lincoln law..
Patrick Lovell: Oh yeah.
Bill Black: ..the False Claims Act that was passed in the Civil War
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: ..because the folks doing government procurement, they were being bribed to take unsafe food that was killing and sickening huge numbers of Union soldiers, right, we try to get this across.. fraud and corruption ain't just money. They end up killing people and making people very sick as well. And, you know, that brings us to USAID. Right. That was the first agency he went after. What is USAID famous for in my part of the world? It's anti-corruption efforts. People forget this. Internationally, it was a major, very successful force. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is the one that creates the pressure that gets CEOs to come forward and say, hey, we've been part of this illegal price cartel. And they get a slight reduction in their sentence in return for ratting out the other folks. So having vigorous enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is critical to creating the incentive structure where we learn about these frauds. And again, that's precisely where Trump began and said, we're not going to enforce that at all. The False Claims Act allows people who blow the whistle on corrupt efforts against the government to get a share of the recovery. It's a win-win because we wouldn't otherwise have learned about the fraud scheme, right? And they're gonna go after that as well. What else did they do? Well, they try to keep whistleblowers from talking at all. They do that through non-disclosure agreements, NDAs and such. And for example, recently the Meta, Facebook whistleblower, they.. Meta, slash Facebook, Zuckerberg went to this.. you don't go to a real judge. You go to an arbiter who are notoriously pro-corporation and have all kinds of conflicts of interest. And that person said he would bankrupt her if she testified.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: Right. And proceeded to issue orders designed to do exactly that. So as bad as the circumstances were when we dealt with this epidemic of fraud..
Patrick Lovell: Yeah.
Bill Black: ..things are even worse today because of the changes that I've talked about.
Patrick Lovell: Right. Hold on. Before you go there, can I insert this real quick? I apologize.
Bill Black: Yeah.
Patrick Lovell: So look, when I discovered you, Bill, look.. and we want to put this into perspective, you gave that incredible interview with Bill Moyers, I believe in 2009. Is that about right? I think that's about right. So I really didn't get around to working with you in detail because of the nature of what you laid out in that interview, what you would express, what I took from that, which drove me to the ends of the earth and back to get into a situation to be able to produce the con. And we did that with your guidance, with your consultation, with your inspiration, because in that interview with Bill, you had said what I thought I always knew.. going to most of the movies that I had ever seen growing up, for example, The Untouchables, right? That battle between Eliot Ness and of course, the organized crime of Al Capone and so forth. But it's not like I was foreign to organized crime. I was not aware of organized crime and what was seemingly legitimate business. And what you had laid down that has never left my psyche is the notion of the investigation. You have to get the facts to understand what exactly is happening. And so one thing leads to another. We go on this incredible odyssey. We find you, you're so patient and.. with us.. and you guide us and we pull in all of the whistleblowers. And so when you were talking about the importance of whistleblowers before, that's how you make the case, that and the evidence and everything else that's going to be able to make you understand the dynamics within the construct of the law and all of these other elements so that if we are indeed a nation of laws where the law is supreme, there's always a remedy for absolute power which corrupts absolutely, which is what we're talking about..corruption. So we go on this massive odyssey. It takes us years and years and years. I think I reached out to you initially, I want to call it in 2014-ish when you were on your way to South America, I'll never forget because we talked for four hours at that juncture and it took me years to understand exactly what I needed to understand. But it got us to a point where we put the investigation together that was actually a sort of reflection, if you will, of a great investigation that took place after the Great Depression in the form of a gentleman by the name of Ferdinand Pecora, which I know you're going to mention at some point in this dialogue. But we were able to put this whole thing together that created all of the elements that you would learn during the savings and loan crisis, where that was news to me that you were able to get 5,000 prosecutions in addition because of the FDIC scenario, because I knew there was 1,700 high-level white-collar executives that you guys were able to convict as a result of your investigation that had 30,000 criminal referrals. This was a huge undertaking that you guys were involved with to..
Bill Black: ..put together there about 5,000.
Patrick Lovell: OK, but it was a huge undertaking that was nationwide, was a dragnet that led to these outcomes, that we learned the lessons and you did the work on behalf of a government of for and by the people, right? That's the takeaway. That's the world that I thought I had inherited until I was upside down as a result of the 2008 great financial crisis. So we go through all of this methodology. We learn the lessons. We try to get the information to the American people because what takes place after the fact, because instead of using what we learned that was right, to move forward instead, like you said, from the Clinton administration, we practically gutted regulation and the ability to investigate and hold white collar fraud to account. And the result was the 2008 great financial crisis that literally blew up the world. Millions of people got destroyed by this. All sorts of calamity happened as a result of that. We didn't put the whole thing together until 2020 to get it to the public. And it got quashed because of the situation, but we're in 2025. And as a result of what we just saw from the last hundred days of DOGE to transparent corruption with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, because of the nature of Bitcoin and the ability for anybody to just behind the scenes without having any sort of auditing or forensics to understand who paid for what.. gets underneath this, this, this mammoth corruption with Trump in addition to everything else that's going on. And so we're in the part of the conversation now, given the nature of your background, what you and your colleagues and people that you've been involved with for literally decades have been on the front lines for, have developed a, you specifically, have developed a remedy that could potentially turn the tables on all that is this massive onslaught that has people, you know, like the sky is falling and it's the end of the world because it feels that way. And it's called FIGHT. What does that acronym mean?
Bill Black: Well, that's the idea of fighting back, right? And I can go through the words that form the acronym, but you know, so you've got to be ingenious and you've got to be ferociously ingenious. We didn't do things the way they'd always been done. We realized we had to change everything. Right. So forget the old and forget the old guys [laughing], and I am an old guy now, find out what's actually happening. So our mantra was the simple one. If you don't look, you don't find. And what they kept on saying is, oh, and it's out of Star Wars. These aren't the droids you're looking for. [laughing].. right. These guys are well dressed. They're CEOs. They can't be criminals. Anyone who thinks they might be criminals, they're the problem, not the CEOs. And that's what we had to reverse. And of course, all through history, not just in the United States, it has been these elite white collar types that have been not just the apex predators, you know, like the lion is the apex predator, but maybe a male lion kills about 20 prey animals a year. They're about paramount predators. They do the overwhelming bulk of the fraud and the predation that is done, is these folks. They are in jargon, the distribution, the entire statistical distribution virtually is their stuff. So there was no, when we came in, again, as you said, this is the 80s, 84-ish, there was no criminal referral process. There was no process by which the agency would formally tell the FBI and the Justice Department, these guys are crooks and you need to investigate them. And here's the case for why you should do that through a criminal referral. You talked about the numbers and they're very large, of convictions. We made over 30,000 criminal referrals in just our little agency. The FDIC made, I'm sure, at least as many referrals as well. There was no chance that the Justice Department would ever have the resources to go after all of those folks, but what they did do is prioritize the absolute elites. And in the great financial crisis, that whole idea was anathema in the reinventing government of Clinton Gore.. that was anathema. So I left the government when they came out to train us in the new reinventing government approach and said, here is the key takeaway. You are to treat the corporation, the bank, in our case, as your customer. And being a quiet type, I of course immediately jumped up and said, surely you mean the American people. And they said, no, we considered that, but rejected it. And I realized I could do nothing in that environment, and I went back to school and got a doctorate in criminology to add to the degrees in economics and law at that point, because I knew it would just be useless. There would be no way internally to fight that. You had to fight it externally. That's what happened.
Patrick Lovell: Can I point something out really quick? So just recently we saw, of course, Elon Musk pull out the chainsaw. To your point, when this was happening with reinventing government, didn't we see the same exact corollary with what we called chainsaw Gilleran? And they were not very subtle in the idea to introduce what you taught us to be three D's.
Bill Black: Right. And indeed, that's exactly the point.. in both the Musk case and the Gillern case. They were no longer hiding it in the shadows. And that told us how criminogenic the environment had become, that they were working together these days and they were doing it openly, and they were making a joke and a demonstration of it.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: And so it's precisely like Elon Musk and the moronic head of state of Argentina that gave him the chainsaw.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: So what's going on there is the head of the thrift agency, thrift regulatory agency, but of course it's no longer regulated... is standing next to the number two guy at the FDIC, who will soon become the number one guy at the thrift agency, and the three leading bank lobbyists in America, which is to say the world. And they're all holding giant pruning shears, you the kind you could take somebody's wrist off with. And they are poised and posed over a pile of federal regulations. And if that's too subtle.. the regulations are tied up in red tape.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: But Gilloran is going to top all of them and have a chainsaw, which is, of course, not exactly a precision cutting instrument, particularly in the hands of an incompetent. And this is the demonstration, they're going to get rid of all the regulations, all the protections for the public.
Patrick Lovell: I was going to say, the regulations...
Bill Black: And again, not only were they not ashamed of it, the reason we have this picture is they put it in the annual report of the FDIC. They were so proud of it.
Patrick Lovell: Right. And you know, Mark Twain says that history doesn't repeat, it rhymes.. in this case with DOGE and the incompetence of Elon Musk. No, it was an exact step in a repeat, Bill.
Bill Black: Yeah, except that in this case, Musk was also looked like he was absolutely high on something.
Patrick Lovell: True. Ketamine probably.
Bill Black: So it was it was the new era perfectly captured in which people are treated like they're geniuses and they know all about technology. And they're just... losers, right?
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: He just failed at everything and be rewarded and made rich by the federal government for every failure.
Patrick Lovell: Right. Which is..
Bill Black: And which is social people now are promoted not despite their failures, but because they are serial failures.
Patrick Lovell: So it's upside down, inside out, perverse, all of these different methodologies that if anybody's been around the block or been paying attention to what we've been putting out there for some time, you know, this is shorthand for the reality, but it still amazes me how few people understand how things actually work, even those that are protesting by the millions, Bill. And so the acronym that you had posed for FIGHT because of this insanity that we're in the midst of is fearlessly ingenious, great hearted, honest and tenacious. Look, I'm a sports guy, right? And I also like, you know, history and the history of wars and battles and that sort of thing. So I understand that the best defense is a good offense. Is that not what you're proposing here? And what is that?
Bill Black: Absolutely. And again, you want stuff that's even older than the religious texts. Sun Tzu..
Patrick Lovell: [laughs]
Bill Black: ..the art of war, right? he had a one-word answer to what the art of war was. Deceit! Okay, that's what we're fighting. People whose area of expertise is not technology, it's not engineering. Musk is not an engineer. He is not a physicist. He is someone whose expertise is deceit. Right?
Patrick Lovell: It's a lie, yeah.
Bill Black: Well, yeah, deceit is a particular kind of lie..
Patrick Lovell: Ok.
Bill Black: that, you know, the he connotation is it's a more
Patrick Lovell: Sure
Bill Black: sophisticated form of the lie. But it comes back to another mantra we learned. And that is it ain't genius.
Patrick Lovell: It's audacity.
Bill Black: It's audacity.. that is the real defining trait. And with both Trump and Musk, it's audacity. And it is sure as hell not genius.
Patrick Lovell: Well, I mean, not to mention the fact that it's just so transparently ridiculously corrupt. I mean, Donald Trump isn't even good at that, Bill.
Bill Black: Again, that was my point of they were proud. Once they, these are tells, right, like in poker. How can you tell that the criminal class, the elite predators believe they have triumphed entirely. It's when they no longer follow that part of the Bible or Torah. Right? All those that do with evil, hateth the light. No, roll out the Klieg lights, baby. Show that our eyes are dilated. We'll put on sunglasses if they're too dilated type of thing. We'll drop F bombs left, right and center that say F our customers.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: The advertisers.
Patrick Lovell: Who in business says F our customers..
Bill Black: Right.
Patrick Lovell: and then gets treated as if they were a genius. It is is much if you fall for this, you are a moron or otherwise called maggots.
Bill Black: So I've had it with the maggots type of thing. And it is essential that we fight them and we're fighting them dumb. Right now.
Patrick Lovell: Yeah.
Bill Black: ..and we're fighting them down and it comes back to Pecora. Why was Pecora so successful? Basically two reasons. One, he did the questioning, not the moronic legislators. What do legislators want to do in a hearing? They want their picture taken. They want to find something that, you know, gets replayed on the 6 p.m. news and such. Cross-examining people is hard work. It's what we litigators, I'm retired from that biz, but that's how I spent much of my early life. That's what we do for a living. We're really good at it. Right? These are dilettantes. These are dilettantes who have perverse incentives... to talk and think they got some damn clever line through.
Patrick Lovell: Right, but the perverse incentives, aren't they working for, know, we call them, Bernie likes to call them oligarchs, but I like your terminology. I mean, they're plutocrats with predatory interests.
Bill Black: Yes
Patrick Lovell: and they own the lowest return on investment, which are who you're describing, right?
Bill Black: They ain't just rich. They're terrible business people.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: They're terrible human beings..
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: It's the worst of the worst, there's a fancy name, Greek name for it, kakistocracy. But it comes from the fact that once you start lying about everything, nothing can work. You can't have a relationship based on lies. If you hire people because they lie, they will lie. They will screw up everything. It is inherent in the nature of the beast. So.. Pecora did the questioning as opposed to the moronic congressman, and Pecora wasn't a banking expert. He was a criminal expert. He'd been a prosecutor and a judge. So he didn't get into all the stupid jargon and da da da da da da da da. He went and got to the heart of the matter that humans could understand. And he revealed it because we work hard, we get the documents in advance, we get the key witnesses, we learn from them and we do very focused questioning and then we're good at improvising when somebody tries to throw a wrench or gives you a unique opportunity because they do a stupid lie and think they're really clever. That's where we really make our bones, right? when you get stupid government witnesses or big oligarchs, which is what he was talking to. He was investigating the most elite bankers of the era. But he was successful. The original two investigations of the banks just failed utterly. He was successful as well because he had a president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who famously said, and I'm paraphrasing, never in history have the bankers hated a president as much as they hated me, and I revel in their hate. Woo. Can you imagine a modern democratic politician?
Patrick Lovell: Well, no, because that's the question that everybody's asking now. First of all, of course, that was what I was inferring when I was growing up was this notion of American character, which meant courage. That's what I would, you know..
Bill Black: Yeah.
Patrick Lovell: replace with one another, because one requires the other and vice versa.
Bill Black: ..so pick up on your story and make it my, you know, from my perspective, I come from a military family. All my relatives were in the military. I wasn't. I'm not claiming any valor, you know, from that, but all of my uncles volunteered for World War II, four of them, right?
Patrick Lovell: Yeah.
Bill Black: Both of my brothers volunteered for the U.S. Army, met his wife who was in the U.S. Army. One of their daughters is in the U.S. Army. I'm the only one didn't go into the military.
Patrick Lovell: But boy, did you fight for America.
Bill Black: What was drilled into us.. and I was the eldest son, right, was you had a duty to speak truth to power, right? And so I'm a Democrat, right?
Patrick Lovell: Yeah.
Bill Black: Of the six enormous elected officials that I blew the whistle on, the five senators who became known as the Keating Five and the Speaker of the House, Jim Wright, that's six of them. Five of them were what?
Patrick Lovell: Democrats.
Bill Black: Democrats. And as I said, I left government because of the frigging Democrats who weren't actually Democrats, you know, who were all in on the pro-banker stuff. So I got no love for, you know, for these politicians, but we can tell them how to succeed. Now, you saw anyone who watched the investigation of the attack on the Capitol.
Patrick Lovell: Yeah.
Bill Black: That they only typically had one person do virtually all the questioning.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: They didn't stop every five minutes and switch and such where you can't get any effective cross-examination or even a direct examination. You can do that if you become chair. So one of the first things is you got to get Dems back in the majority in the House elections in two years. But before then... they got it almost sort of, kind of, a little bit right. They held a quasi hearing, right? Did it in the actual capital formal room and such, got like eight different Democratic legislators and did the same moronic five minutes, you know, for folks.. and made a big deal of that. They got a nice audience. Okay, fine. But you can only do that if you can coordinate the schedules of at least 15 people.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: And that means you can hold one of these maybe a month.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: Screw that.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: Talk to a whistleblower. Get young people, link the whistleblowers to really good lawyers who know how to do testimony, direct testimony, but also will kick the tires so that we're not sponsoring the testimony of somebody that's lying, right? Because that could discredit the whole thing. So when we prep people, we don't just say, oh, tell them some story. We test it to see whether it's real, whether they the bona fide goods, whether they've got some weird biases. Now, many of us have biases and you say, yes, I have the following potential bias, but here are the documents showing that what I'm saying is right. Okay. You don't have to be pure as driven snow. You just have to be honest about these presentations. And we could do hundreds of these hearings every month. We've got 435 districts, congressional districts, voting congressional districts, more if add DC and such. There should be these kinds of quasi hearings going on on a monthly basis in every district..
Patrick Lovell: To deal with the flood..
Bill Black: ..in the United States of America.
Patrick Lovell: To deal with the flood of all of the illegal acts of the Trump presidency from DOGE to the other elements that might involve crypto in the corruption, the panoply of what we're seeing, the response to that will have to be, as you're suggesting and I'm hearing, outside of congressional inquiries because of some of the fault lines that you've identified.
Bill Black: You get nothing done in the congressional hearings..
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: ..unless and until you retain control. And even then, you're going to have to change if you want to be effective.
Patrick Lovell: But this is all over the country, and I would imagine then that that would have to involve state AGs, correct?
Bill Black: Doesn't have to. But state AGs could also be doing other things. So there was a problem recently. We had an example of a whistleblower, very rare testifying in front of this Republican controlled Congress. She was the whistleblower on Meta. Why did it occur at all? because they had her focus her testimony entirely on the evils of the PRC, the People's Republic of China.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: And that meant the Republican agenda and it meant the Democratic agenda and the Venn diagram had this little overlap and that's what they did. But they didn't order her to testify about the vastly broader scandals that she's revealed in a book she just did.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: And that meant that this private arbiter who, they're not worthy of the word arbiter. The conflicts of interests are enormous. They overwhelmingly rule for the big companies. It's just a disgusting scam. But this guy just literally said that he would bankrupt her if she testified. Well, if you testify under subpoena from state attorney generals, federal prosecutors, or legislatures, then you can give that full testimony and the arbiter can't punish you for it.
Patrick Lovell: Got it.
Bill Black: So that is a key role where both state AGs and state legislatures, where you have legislatures that will actually operate to do these things. And again, under their own rules, if they were to change them, the state legislatures could also do real hearings as opposed to this nonsense of you get four minutes, you get four minutes, you get four minutes..
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: ..you get four minutes as well.
Patrick Lovell: Right
Bill Black: But in these quasi hearings in the districts and you can have subject matters that are a particular concern..
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: ..in that district that the whistleblower knows a huge amount about and you can invite the media in. And because you don't have to get the coordinated schedules of 15 legislators and key staffers and such, you can actually do these things quick. Right? The prep work is the hard work, but that's about three weeks to a month at most to do that careful prepping by the lawyers. And when they're really important ones, you could do it quicker. Plus, you find the stars. These are tryouts. They're very low risk tryouts. You find the folks that are great at this. And you have them appear not once every six months. You have them appear 25 times.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: You get them on all kinds of social media.
Patrick Lovell: Yeah.
Bill Black: You don't just talk to the geriatrics set, hi, me. You get them talking to young people. These are fantastic opportunities.
Patrick Lovell: And you can align it..
Bill Black: And they are just passing them up.
Patrick Lovell: Yeah, you can align it with also newcomers that may run for the midterms in some of these districts.
Bill Black: Exactly. People who are simply, want to get into the primary process.
Patrick Lovell: And in some of these cases, they could be anything from a victim of libel that maybe have been destroyed by these awful plutocrats that are predatory, that are using these sorts of scenarios like we see Elon Musk do every day to where suddenly there's some representation and pushback using the law against all of these elements of, whether it's corruption, whether it's libel, whether it could be anything under the sun, but you're building the scaffolding, the engineering to be able to get these outside of the realm. Because, you know, the first question that would pop in my head if I didn't go down the path that I had to, that I was forced down, and what I've seen concurrently for the past three administrations is, wait a second, isn't this the job of the Department of Justice? if there is,
Bill Black: ..of course it is.. right. So again, that's your point. When you do these things right, you're telling a story. And I don't mean that in a pejorative sense. I mean, it's an understandable, compelling human story. You do films. Right?
Patrick Lovell: Yeah
Bill Black: Interviews. That's what people identify with. But think of the next stage. Think how berserk Trump and Musk and the Republican incumbents are going to go in response to this whole series of quasi hearings.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: In which there is a drumbeat pounding them.. every month, maybe every week in some of these places, if you're really doing this stuff right. Right? They will go berserk. know they are, A, they all have glass chins, right, in boxing parlance.
Patrick Lovell: Yeah.
Bill Black: And they're completely intemperate in the abuse of power. So they're going to start trying to sue people and they'll threaten people and they'll put pressure on the landlords not to allow these rooms to be used for these hearings.
Patrick Lovell: Yeah.
Bill Black: And then you just counterpunch, stay with the boxing metaphor.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: They come in like that. This is where you hit them right in the belly button.
Patrick Lovell: [laughs]
Bill Black: The thing that takes you out by round six.
Patrick Lovell: Right? again, to remind people what we're talking about is they've been flooding the zone. This is this whole Steve Bannon unitary presidency, the executive order, misogas, of course, the Heritage Foundation that's been decades in the making, not to mention all of the billionaire strata within the Supreme Court, and not to mention what we've seen because of what Bernie says a lot, because of we got in Citizens United, legalized corruption, yada, yada, yada, without any, quite frankly, details of how you do that, which we can talk about later. But what I love about this is you're offering this national mosaic response to what's going on that they can't control. Ironically, that we've seen the Republicans make this argument about the state's rights fundamentally forever, have we not?
Bill Black: Yes. And because you're doing it this way as opposed to the super formal thing,m. Who testifies overwhelmingly in congressional hearings? People like me. I've testified in dozens of them. Right? They're very academic. [makes funny noises] That's not what you do. You tell a story, a compelling story that combines character.. your point.. courage, resistance, the awful treatment that these folks got..
Patrick Lovell: Yeah.
Bill Black: ..the enormous lies that they exposed,
Patrick Lovell: Yes.
Bill Black: and then the retaliation.. because the story builds in all of this. And what happens after you start hearing 50 of these stories, and then 250 of these stories?
Patrick Lovell: It overwhelms.. it overwhelms the backend
Bill Black: also it starts going the O-S moment.
Patrick Lovell: That's right. That's what..
Bill Black: these are variants on the same story.
Patrick Lovell: Yes.
Bill Black: This is what the corrupt abuse of power looks like.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: These are not geniuses. These are morons. And you try to get the press. You thought, you don't need everybody. We.. I worked thousands of hours with the press getting across our complaints, which we did in plain English and explaining what fraud is. And fraud is always a story. And then and only a small percentage, maybe five percent of the reporters were worth talking to. Yeah. So you spent much more time with them. But those would actually report and add their own skills in narrative to it and place it in the local community that they were writing and such. So you invite all kinds of media, regular, small, national, state, all the online folks and such. And as I say, we'll be finding incredible stories that all kinds of online folks with huge audiences are going to want to have on. It'll be built for them. They don't have to scurry around trying to figure out the analytics, they'll know why there's a compelling story. They've heard it and they want a broader audience to hear it. So, and that's the first step, this fight. The second step is we need a package of things if the Democrats take back the House of a legislative agenda that is a legislative agenda of integrity. And Democrats have to walk the walk. No more of this crap of going to a non-public briefing, getting information on a company that tells you where you should invest implicitly. If you know that COVID epidemic is going to occur, you can figure out what you should invest in and make a ton of money. We can't have our most senior leaders say, oh, no, no, no. I don't want my husband not to be able to trade on that information.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: He should enjoy the fruits of capitalism.
Patrick Lovell: Right. Oh my God. The absolute corruption. And we know exactly who you're talking about in that instance. But Bill, you'd said in a couple of, you know, discussions ago, which I found fascinating that I'd like you to respond to given what we've talked about thus far, is that the DOJ is in service to a president who we know is a complete buffoon who lies as much as he breathes. And yet they hire lawyers that lie to serve in those positions, which you have demonstrated and you've known your entire career would cave in the courts with the judges that aren't MAGOT, or MA-goat, or how do you want to pronounce it? M-a-g-g-o-t, right?
Bill Black: MAGGOTS.
Patrick Lovell: Well, MAGOTS, right. I was always thinking about MAGA, anyway. The judges that had been obviously committed to MAGA, but outside of their districts, outside of those courtrooms, there are honest judges that if you were able to get, you know, these lying DOJ, you know, sycophants, because of this insanity that's hijacked the Department of Justice, you could easily expose them in courts on these cases, could you not?
Bill Black: Yeah, so I'm emphasizing two things that are intensions, but both of them could be huge strategic wins for the fight agenda that I've been talking about. So the first thing is, I was a Justice Department attorney. My spouse, June Carbone, was a Justice Department attorney for many more years, and I was an agency attorney at a high level for many years. June and I were both in the federal programs branch, which defends the statutory authority and constitutionality of federal actions and statutes and such. So we, that office, would have been defending a whole bunch of these actions by Trump. But, and that office had roughly 110 attorneys, trial attorneys. ..and very good, hired mostly through the Justice Department Honors Program. I think that at most 10 of them would be willing to actually work for MAGA.
Patrick Lovell: Right
Bill Black: Which is to say overwhelmingly, they will not.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: OK. That means they have the illusion of immense resources.
Patrick Lovell: Yeah.
Bill Black: And the reality of very few.. of those, maybe 10, that be willing to lie. And I'm not sure they're even that.. 10. It's hard to get away with lies against competent opponents. And judges whatever their politics unless they're totally in the bag, as maggots themselves..
Patrick Lovell: Yeah.
Bill Black: ..it's hard to convey to non-lawyers how berserk the judge would typically go.. if.. at lawyers lying. I mean, it is the biggest no-no you can imagine. And you've seen in the early cases, the judge is saying, I think you're lying to me.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: Now, here's the further problem. We're, as Justice Department lawyers, we rely on the department, the agency, to what's actually happening factually, right? We're not at that agency.. we're the Department of Justice. And so if they lie to us, they, the federal department lies to us and then we pass that lie on in a representation to the court..
Patrick Lovell: Yeah.
Bill Black: ..the chances that we'll be blindsided are real good. And you know what judges don't like? I didn't know I was lying. [laughing]
Patrick Lovell: Right.. right.
Bill Black: So you're likely to end up in real trouble. And as soon as that happens, even just a couple times and those Justice Department attorneys get hung up to dry, you know, twisting slowly in the wind as that phrase used to go. They're going to be ultra reluctant to make any representations to the court as to what is happening. You're going to be saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, you.. agency, you send somebody into court and say it.
Patrick Lovell: Right, because they, Okay, got it, because boy, this is drawing a line in the sand, and I tell ya, it just reminds me of the great Westerns I grew up with, the black hats against the white hats, and this is that turning pivotal moment.. but..
Bill Black: That's the first part, but the next part is.. the bar.
Patrick Lovell: Okay, but can I ask you this question before we go into the bar real quick? Because can you just say out loud, because it was always amazing to me when I learned that attorneys can lie. They can perjure themselves, but we all saw in the investigation slash the indictments of Donald Trump that the sum total of what all of these different vectors of the federal government's indictments were trying to achieve that were laying out the cases that Donald had falsified business records over and over and over, hyperinflated assets, was involved with all sorts of cheating, whether it was forgeries or in some manner, shape or form of racketeering, all being you know, played out through his attorneys as well, by the way. Now, is it possible.. and I know that the answer.. and I'm being rhetorical, but can you explain to people what kind of.. what kind of.. what kind of..
Bill Black: Yes, I can. so this comes back to predatory networks. Right. Charles Keating had more than 100 firms on retainer hundred firms. And he put the firms in competition with each other for how much work they'd get as to who would be most willing to push it beyond the ethical realm. And so we got hundreds of millions in dollars of recoveries in the savings and loan debacle from some of the largest firms in America for those kinds of misrepresentations. Yes, so it's a law firm or many law firms are very valuable additions to predatory networks. And the economics of law firms are the thing that shoots you to being a really powerful partner is bringing in clients and expanding the client's use of the firm dramatically.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: So there's a huge temptation to do that. And yes, a number of law firms, big law firms did very bad things for Charles Keating in particular, but some other fraudsters. And collectively, they paid more than a billion dollars, which back in that era was actually real money.. in fines. So yes, some lawyers will do the wrong thing. You're quite right, though, that after that period, and by the way, there were key lawyers in the butchered banks that I told you about.. as well that went to prison.. for their frauds.
Patrick Lovell: Interesting.
Bill Black: But as you came to the great financial crisis, there were fewer of the law firms willing to go very far out, but they didn't have to because there was no regulatory pushback.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: right? Unless you push in the regulatory rank and make them make either admissions that, yes, the client's done the following things wrong or misstatements claiming they didn't do something wrong, which makes them vulnerable, then they just do this, you know, generalized blah, blah, blah, blah, you can't sue anybody effectively.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: Because it's too general. So you have to force people as a regulator to their proofs. You know, you force them to say, no, no, no, forget the general blather. Did X happen? then things get very different. That's why we need the attorney generals. And that's why we need the bar associations. Because if you lie in court, it's 90 plus percent that the bar is going to have a serious sanction on you. And you are correct that Trump managed first time around because of the election denier crap.. to produce all kinds of lawyers who ended up indicted. They did the dirty work on the secret delegates and things like that. So lawyers can get in actual criminal trouble. Of course, that will not happen as long as Trump is in power because the Justice Department is not about to indict its own scumbags.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: who gave into Trump. And that leaves two things. One, overwhelmingly, not universally, but overwhelmingly, judges, if they are lied to by MAGATS, are going to be outraged, even if they were Trump appointees. And bar associations tend to not be, oh, OK. They tend to be, no, the judge says you lied. And so we're going to take away your ability to practice law for two years.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: That's a big frigging thing.. and a pardon can't fix that as a practical matter.
Patrick Lovell: Wow.
Bill Black: So if that starts happening, you know, that will be much better. That's another reason for my emphasis that one of the things we want to do with the FIGHT strategy is spur the counterattack. Because the counterattack will be by the sleaziest of the politicians and the sleaziest of their lawyers. And we have already seen that when they do the counterattacks, they frequently commit ethical violations, and even criminal violations.
Patrick Lovell: Yep.
Bill Black: Right. But again, unless you push them, they don't have to make those kinds of representations. And at these quasi hearings that I'm talking about, hundreds of them, disclosing all the frauds and the corruption?
Patrick Lovell: Yeah.
Bill Black: That's going to... Well, look, you've seen Musk and you've seen Trump and you've seen a host of his officials. What happens when you criticize them?
Patrick Lovell: They cave.
Bill Black: No, they go berserk. Well, but I mean, they lose their cool, I mean, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, they attack. Yeah, that's the only thing they know.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: And they attack by lying.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: When you as a lawyer attacked by lying, it's one thing to just say it in the press.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: ..although even there you may have a number of libel and slander actions. You know, the data companies, the voting machine companies, of course, demonstrated that, but you get discovery. And these folks can't survive discovery because they do so many sleazy things and they think they can lie in depositions or make statements that just nobody is gonna believe. And they think they're being clever. That that's that phrase too clever by half.
Patrick Lovell: Yes.
Bill Black: This is what we often do. We push and you do something you think is clever in response. And we just make sure we don't smile. But inside, [laughing] we are going, hot damn.
Patrick Lovell: Wow.
Bill Black: Say some more of those stupid things.
Patrick Lovell: Right. OK, so let me see if I can basically recap all that we've covered and make sure that I've got this right so that the audience makes sure that they're tracking on the rest of this, right? So first and foremost, Bill Black, the nation's foremost criminologist that has a track record that is uncontested, I think, in the history of the United States with his colleagues, of course, that have gone up against the most resourced and deep-pocketed and incredibly connected defense attorneys on the planet and was able to defeat them. Ok, that's your background. And then to fast forward.. in retirement, but coming out of retirement, so to speak, to identify all things that were in the midst of just off the first 100 days of this enormous disaster of a lawless president.
Bill Black: Yeah, I'm actually not retired, but I'm retired from University of Missouri, Kansas City.
Patrick Lovell: Oh thats..
Bill Black: And I now teach at University of Minnesota, just one course on crypto.
Patrick Lovell: Ok, I apologize for that, but that's good. I should have known that and I did know that, but I apologize for that. But just to move forward in the sort of, in the conclusion, just to recap, just to make sure I've got the whole thing right.. cause I want to set this up for everybody to kind of really wrap their heads around what we're talking about because of this mass confusion. And I do want to pull into this scenario. Last night, Mark Elias was featured on 60 minutes and it was interesting because Scott Pelley qualified that he was the only attorney that they could identify that could go on camera based on, I suppose, all things that Trump had identified as people he was going to go after. Because..
Bill Black: Right.
Patrick Lovell: ..what's been in the last little while is, of course, the tall building law firms that are capitulating, that are providing hundreds of millions of dollars of work on behalf of whatever the Trump initiative is. But it is not..
Bill Black: to clean coal and killer cops.
Patrick Lovell: Right. Exactly. Oh, my God.. that second part really just hit me because of some other things I'm involved with. But the nature of everything is the perversion of everything that you've taught us from the very beginning from Gresham's dynamic through control fraud. And it's all on display in the most monumental way through this abomination where, like we saw last week, you know, U.S. citizens that are women were targeted by ICE and the FBI and I believe Department of Homeland Security where they were held at gunpoint among other things to where they were being accused and potentially going to be deported even though they were US citizens because that's the bottom of the barrel here for everybody going, my God, we're literally a fascist, dictatorial, autocratic regime and the rule of law has not been able to fight back. Now, meanwhile, there is a lot of different groups trying to meet some of these, you know, DOGE scenarios, head on and so on and so forth, but they're not to the level that you described. They're not as dispersed through the art of war that you described.. to where we can get through all of these different machinations across the country in hearings and let's say gymnasiums across the country, potentially in high school, you know, basketball gymnasiums.. where somebody's running for office, for example, where there might be a Trump sort of, you know, a case to where somebody had been harmed, whether it was based on what I just talked about, like the women who were, you know, wrongful..
Bill Black: Yeah.
Patrick Lovell: ..targeted and that sort of thing, or even our, you know, Kilmar or Briego Garcia, among other things, which I do know Mark Dan is going after. And the one thing that you might want to blend into this answer is that your colleagues, the people that we had met on our journey to put them into The Con, which I refer to as The Untouchables, all come from a background of having done this their entire careers. They're professionals. They can turn the table. The best defense is a good offense. You could flood the zone with things that are important to these specific communities with these victims, with attornies standing up for the rule of law, going directly after this kleptocratic, kleptocracy, I should say. What was the other word that we used in terms of oligarchy? The, uh, you know,
Bill Black: Plutocrats?
Patrick Lovell: ..plutocratic predators, which are the billionaire apparatus, right? That are just basically destroying everything, the dynamics of the rule of law, upward mobility, freedom, liberty and justice, all of those things that we hold dear, literally in this span of, which has taken decades to get to this point, but they're obviously executing at a furious pace. And you're the only person I can hear. And nobody in the Democratic party is offering this sort of defense. Have I gotten most of that right so far?
Bill Black: Yeah, again, I would say what you're identifying is a tell, like in poker. They're not hiding it, right? The techno bros, the crypto bros are openly pushing for Trump, openly pushing for the destruction of democracy,
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: Right?..openly want a rule by them. And what do they want? No regulation, no white collar prosecutions, right?
Patrick Lovell: Yep.
Bill Black: ..and just nothing that they can predate on us with complete impunity. And they.. mock us. You should see the stuff they write about anybody that believes in a rule of law..
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: ..anyone that cares about other people.
Patrick Lovell: Yeah.
Bill Black: They just think that's disgusting.
Patrick Lovell: Yep.
Bill Black: This is how this, empathy, care for other people, is the great sin.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: And why? Because that's the trait that they lack. These are classic dark tetrad people.. that combines psychopathy and narcissism and sadism and Machiavellianism and such. They are the worst of the worst. And the fact that they are so open about their desire to destroy democracy is a tell as to how far they think they are in the road to destruction. Remember the criticism of defund the police?
Patrick Lovell: Yeah.
Bill Black: All the police that do anti-white collar anti-corruption, they ain't just been defunded, they've been eliminated. All the laws they can enforce have been gutted.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: And the only pretense of keeping a sliver left is to go after his political opponents.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: That's the world. That's how far down.
Patrick Lovell: Yeah.
Bill Black: ..the drain they think we are. They think they can come out and just start doing a dance, a victory dance, that we won't fight back, that we can't fight back. And so I say precisely with the victory dance, you know, these incredibly arrogant assholes.. you know.. fight back.
Patrick Lovell: Right, and again..
Bill Black: ..demonstrate to them what the American people can do.
Patrick Lovell: That's exactly right. Led by those who've done it, for decades. And so has all of The New Untouchables that we meet with once a week.
Bill Black: I would say led by a new gen... I think we need a new generation.. you know, I'm happy to talk about what we found that worked and such, but it's a new generation has to come forward and win these battles. And one of the best ways they can do this is to start out and put together this search for whistleblowers..
Patrick Lovell: Yeah.
Bill Black: ..and attorneys. Use the firms that stood up to Trump. Right? Use the heroes, not the failures.
Patrick Lovell: Right. Yeah, because they're deep, aren't they? Some of these law firms that didn't capitulate have got some of the best defense lawyers or just lawyers in general.
Bill Black: Just plain lawyers.
Patrick Lovell: Yes.
Bill Black: And again, the thing that we do best as litigators is tell compelling, understandable stories.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: ..designed for human beings to understand.
Patrick Lovell: Wow.
Bill Black: And to be moved.
Patrick Lovell: Right. Because it's the corruption.
Bill Black: : Yeah. Nobody likes corruption except the corrupt.
Patrick Lovell: That's right. And just give us a definition of corruption, even though we all know what it means. What is corruption?
Bill Black: Corruption actually can be super complicated, but the usual way of defining it is when you sell some kind of government approval or service.
Patrick Lovell: OK. Or there's some kind of quid pro quo.
Bill Black: Well, that is the sale.. a quid pro quo.
Patrick Lovell: Got it. Got it. All right. So just to remind everybody, FIGHT stands for Fearlessly Ingenious, Great-Hearted, Honest and Tenacious. This is the response by the American people through the professionals from the legal system, through this network that Bill has constructed that is a potential response that would also need my fellow podcasters, journalists, everybody to start to tell these stories, to develop these storylines as it relates to local stories in these districts that could lead then to potential candidates for office to be able to create this wave that is intent on purging this disaster of, quite frankly, tyranny, which is corruption, right?
Bill Black: Right.
Patrick Lovell: That's what..
Bill Black: Right, and the second thing that I'm gonna put together, or our group is going to put together, is sort of like minimum standards for anybody that wants to get elected to Congress..
Patrick Lovell: Ok.
Bill Black: ..to restore integrity.
Patrick Lovell: Absolutely. Wow. Yeah.
Bill Black: ..and be part of this fight.
Patrick Lovell: I may as well just ask you, because we started off there just kind of give us some closing remarks, because this is what moved me when I saw you however many years ago 2009 is. I mean, that's 16 years ago, Bill, right? That's incredible. And to me, it was always about honesty. It was always about integrity, because in the vacuum of that, disaster happens. We don't have to think about this, Bill. You've been fighting it your whole career. And now we're staring at, I like to call them chumpinstein, right? Like Frankenstein, this monster that we've created that is really this red carpet reflection of all the fraud and corruption over the course of the last several decades manifested in this transactional con artist who happens to be a moron at the same time, which obviously helps for the electorate that don't know how the country is supposed to run, of by and for the people predicated on the rule of law that requires the integrity of the system. You know, but finally, it's like on behalf of what? On behalf of these plutocrats that have complete control, which may as well just be modern day kings or tyrants or some variation of what our entire country was created to never allow. And yet here we are. What's the problem?
Bill Black: The crypt keeper of the Democratic Party that's been, hasn't won an election with his strategies in decades and is wrong about everything has objected to the whole idea of an anti-oligarchy movement.
Patrick Lovell: That's right.
Bill Black: In the United States.
Patrick Lovell: That's right.
Bill Black: That proves that he's the problem as opposed to the solution, right?
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: Fighting to restore not just democracy, but an end to control by the oligarchs is the absolute minimum essential to restoring America. And that is exactly where we should be aiming. We succeeded and none of us thought we were geniuses.. in impossible circumstances.. in the savings and loan debacle, right? In military terms, the correlation of forces was preposterously against us. That wasn't our focus. Our focus was not ever whether we were going to win or not. Our focus was fighting. We do the absolute best that we can, right? With complete dedication. And none of this when they go low, we go high.
Patrick Lovell: [laughs]
Bill Black: But we wouldn't do unethical things to beat them.
Patrick Lovell: Sure.
Bill Black: That was the point. If you gave in and become unethical yourself,
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: then you defeat yourself.
Patrick Lovell: Right.
Bill Black: So yes, integrity.
Patrick Lovell: Yeah.
Bill Black: We're here to restore the best things. And we're going to have to rebuild this country.
Patrick Lovell: Yeah.
Bill Black: The amount of damage that is done is staggering. And the damage is growing every hour. That's why you fight. That's why you make America better every day through the coordinated, but not some grand plan where you have to have somebody's approval. Nothing I've said requires approval, right? We're not setting ourselves up as some group. Well, you should, you know, but it's got to accord with us.. so it's got to come through us. No, go out and do this.
Patrick Lovell: That's Right.
Bill Black: in your local community, in your region, develop organic national efforts or local efforts or all of the above and such. Just fight.
Patrick Lovell: Well, I am honored. I'm so grateful to be able to bring you to the attention of many people out there. Please, if you're watching this, watch it again. Share, like, subscribe, share, share, share. Write questions, reach out to me. I'm always available. We've got to build a network. Like Bill said, this is organic, but there's the scaffolding, which we've just introduced. Bill and the new Untouchables can be available to interact and have, you know, be involved with questions and also guidance where it makes sense and that sort of thing. But we're building the plane while we're flying it, people.. We've got to respond.. and this is the American response to tyranny. This is what we are. This is what we do. And Bill, thank you for being who you are.
Bill Black: So let me emphasize, that, your point.. the things we accomplished in the savings and loan debacle were all about we.
Patrick Lovell: Yeah.
Bill Black: It was a group of folks that grew into hundreds, indeed, thousands of individuals eventually doing the right thing. And the group we have assembled, that's been doing these podcasts, as you say, has a couple of.. several things in that I think that people will like. First, it's a group of people that have succeeded. Second, it's a group of people that succeeded by working together with other folks. And third, it's not an arrogant group of folks, right? And they don't want to end up in leadership positions and controlling things, and they don't want to make money off of this process. They have some pretty old fashioned things, you know, like integrity. [laughs] You actually should tell the truth and you should actually be kind to people that aren't trying to ruin the world. People that are trying to ruin the world, you need to fight against them. And you need to fight tenaciously and honestly. Go for it baby.
Patrick Lovell: Amen. Amen. And like I always like to conclude every time I think about this, because it is the righteous grind.. onwards and upwards. Thank you again, William K. Black, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for your time, your expertise. I look forward to speaking with you and June and the rest of the group on Friday. Thank you for your time. All the best. Thank you.
Bill Black: Take care.
Refs:
The Interview that changed my life:
• BILL MOYERS JOURNAL |
https://youtu.be/Rz1b__MdtHY?si=tmd7GL6tLqbZrOae
Which led to us making this:
www.thecon.tv
Which led to this:
www.thecleannewdeal.org
More:
A single whisper is faint, but millions banding together can roar loudly enough to topple a kakistocracy and demand The Clean New Deal
https://pc93.substack.com/p/a-single-whisper-is-faint-but-millions?r=55nkvn
We the People, petitioning for redress [Clean New Deal] in the millions, should include:
1. Create a new Glass-Steagall Act to prevent too big to fail banks and our financial system from gambling with other people's money through fraud to then having the backing of the full faith and credit of the United States at their disposal
2. End Citizens United and dark money corruption
3. Demonstrate how $71 trillion was looted illegally by a tiny percent of our country which represents our financial system
4. End Qualified Immunity
5. End Judicial Immunity
6. End Presidential Immunity
7. Increase SCOTUS to 13 justices
8. End the Electoral College
9. Execute term limits