Time for a Grand Inquest on the Financial Crisis
OPS_admin | Apr 02, 2009 | Comments 0
Time for a Grand Inquest on the Financial Crisis
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has called for “sweeping regulation” of the financial community, beginning a discussion of how we restructure the banking system—in and out of the shadows—as we emerge from what Robert Kuttner calls the Great Collapse. Literally trillions have already been committed in loans, guarantees, swaps, direct equity to stave off a complete financial collapse, even as the real economy declines.
But before we decide on the salvation, we need a public probe of the fall. What caused the Great Collapse? We need a grand inquest—either a special congressional committee or an independent commission like the 9/11 Commission armed with subpoena power—to expose misbegotten policies, malpractices, and mistaken ideas that allowed the wizards of Wall Street to transport us over the cliff.
In the 1930s, the dramatic hearings by the Senate Banking and Currency Committee became known as the Pecora Commission, after Ferdinand Pecora, the fierce former assistant prosecutor from New York who served as general counsel. Born in Sicily, the son of an immigrant cobbler, Pecora was a crusader. As counsel, he hauled the barons of Wall Street before the committee, and took them apart with often withering cross examination. By the time Pecora was done, the hearings had captivated the country’s attention and, as historian Ron Chernow reports, Senator Burton Wheeler of Montana was comparing the bankers to Al Capone and the public began calling them “banksters,” rhyming with gangsters.
The Senate committee unearthed the assorted frauds, the abuses, the Ponzi schemes that led to the 1929 crash. And in doing so it provided both the case for reform and built a public demand in support of it.
via Time for a Grand Inquest on the Financial Crisis | OurFuture.org.
Filed Under: Crime, Legal Issues
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If we don't change our ways soon...
A new report by the Royal Society, chaired by Nobel prize-winning biologist Sir John Sulston warns that world population must be stabilized and consumption in wealthy nations must be reduced or the entire planet is in big trouble. As the report reads: "The number of people living on the planet has never been higher, their levels of consumption are unprecedented and vast changes are taking place in the environment. We can choose to rebalance the use of resources to a more egalitarian pattern of consumption... or we can choose to do nothing and to drift into a downward spiral of economic and environmental ills leading to a more unequal and inhospitable future."This is the same warning that President Jimmy Carter gave Americans back in the 1970's - but it was ignored when Ronald Reagan came to power with a "more positive" message basically telling Americans we can do whatever we want. And then after 9/11 - Bush told us all we should go shopping and consume ever more.And now with corporations calling the shots in Washington - long-term sustainability of the planet takes a back seat to short-term profits. If we don't change our ways soon - and embrace clean, alternative energy and educate women around the plant - then we all could be headed for a rough century.-Thom(Is there any chance we will learn in time? Tell us here.) -
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The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. 
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