Lady Black defends ‘kulak’ bankers

Barbara Amiel, the spendaholic wife of Lord (Conrad) Black, the former proprietor of the Daily Telegraph who is currently serving a six-and-a-half prison sentence in the US for corporate fraud, has leapt to the defence of the banking community. In a breathtakingly audacious article for the Canadian current affairs journal, Macleans, Amiel likens the persecution of the pin-stripe brigade to the ordeals suffered by the intelligentsia in Mao's China and the kulaks in Stalinist Russia.

"Those 1960s and 70s marches, complete with stops at which foul intellectuals would kneel and allocate [sic] to the mobs, are not so different from the modern American perp walk," writes Amiel, referring to the US police practice of parading an arrested suspect through a public place.

"These days it's the pointy-head intellectuals and the media class that are the Red Guard, and Wall Streeters the accused. Every night, some TV station posts photos of the day's addition to the Top 10 Business Villains and another fund manager is added to the list of foul CEOs... We are living through a collective madness, all part of the mob, finger pointing, judging, some driven by fear of economic chaos, others enjoying the schadenfreude express."

Perhaps with her husband in mind, she goes on: "I suspect current economic criminals resemble past ones in that they come in two varieties: the ones who really commit economic crimes and the ones who are elevated by political fashion to the status of criminals.

"Stalin's taste made economic criminals of the entire kulak class; kulaks in today's America would include CEOs and Tom Wolfe's Masters of the Universe. Certain titles such as 'hedge fund manager' have become terms of disapproval that trip off the tongues of people, at least half of whom I suspect have utterly no idea what a hedge fund is."

Amiel concludes, "Driven by old fears and left-wing hates, we are moving to notions, a la Bertolt Brecht, that all wealth is suspect. If, as I suspect, the economy is a psychodrama, anti-market hysteria is unlikely to restore equilibrium." ·