CORRUPTION
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
July 21, 2010
Fights against corruption are inherently corrupt. Take Secretary Clinton’s latest diatribe against corruption in Afghanistan. As leadership of Goldman Sachs controlled her husband’s treasury secretariat, so Goldman Sachs veterans now predominate in President Obama’s White House and Treasury Department. Wisconsin Senator Russell Feingold refused to vote for the financial regulation bill Mr. Obama signs today, on grounds that Wall Street speculators (aka investors) have bought off the US government. Even the Supreme Court is in their pocket—witness the “conservative” Court’s overturning a hundred years of banning corporate contributions to state and national candidates for political office. And higher management in Wall Street are being paid gigantic bonuses for putting up with the current economic turmoil. For their part, all but 2 Senate Republicans held steadfastly against giving extensions of some $330 per week to those who have been out of a job longer than six months, on grounds that these unemployment checks might deter people from getting jobs. Happily, that bill will pass, barely. In the United States, it is who’s who that most counts, and the private corporate sector controls the politicians. Now isn’t that corruption? Secretary Clinton, who are you to preach? Love and peace--hal
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I spent the night reading through "Peacemaking: Reflections of a Radical Criminologist", "A Criminologist's Quest for Peace" and other writings of yours. I listened to you.
ReplyDeleteI learned that you are far more dangerous than I had imagined. You're not a danger to the privileged & powerful, much as you'd like to be, but rather a danger to the safety and wellbeing of "the masses" - to plain working folk and their loved ones.
I had imagined you to be a criminologist who got seduced into championing the tiny fragment of victim claimants, advocates & therapists who are liars, frauds and con-artists - but now that I've heard you clearly I see that you are in fact ONE OF THEM. You are an RA/MC apologist, exploiting the valid concept of restorative justice and masquarading as a "peacemaking criminologist". I'll have to write reviews of your work and make this reality explicit.
It's astonishing, actually, how all of your supposed "peacemaking" concepts revert back to "listening" to RA/MC victim claimants, (by which you mean: hearing their stories, uncritically accepting them in their entirety and then repeating them to others). YOUR version of "peacemaking criminology" is just a mask, a front through which you promote the RA/MC cult and their goal of insinuating their personal/group mythologies into concensus reality without objective verification of their individual claims. In fact, your own writings mimic this disdain for evidence, proof, verification. They are simply storytelling with little pretense of adherence to academic rigor.