...a scathing indictment of Wall Street and the unseemly conduct of the practitioners of financial transactions that continue to defy any accountability to the few regulatory agencies that were intended to give them oversight. The SEC is unveiled as an ineffective agency, albeit an accomplice to corruption, and N.Y. Senator Chuck Schumer is derided as a stooge of the finance industry.

It think this article is good journalism for a number of reasons. 1) A lot of shoe leather (or the electronic equivalent thereof) went into the research. 2) Though he doesn't include opposing quotes and facts that would support the argument that these Wall Street folks are innocent lambs, nothing smacks of bias. 3) The article was so well reported and written that I felt compelled to send the link to others.

This opinion piece has moderate journalistic merit. There are a couple of serious problems with it. First, the huge campaign contributions to Obama and Schumer are only mentioned at the very end. Second, Barney Frank, D-Massachusetts, and Chris Dodd, D-Countrywide, are not even mentioned! Frank indeed should be in jail at least for his sex abuse of minors crimes, but both bear the major blame for the housing and banking crises. And their names are on the monstrous (literally: more than 2000 pages!) banking bill passed last summer. A lot of space is wasted on in-jokes about government agencies and not enough is said about the actual criminals. Even Franklin Raines, who drove Fannie Mae into the ground, is not mentioned by name. ... More »

Nice telling of Gary Aguirre's frustrating saga trying to interview John Mack. Taibbi could've used any of dozens of other examples of the past decade, from the "deferred prosecution" arrangements designed by Bush's "Corporate Crime Task Force,' headed by former Providian director Larry Thompson, to the curious malleability of the FASB's accounting standards. But Aguirre v. Mack is just about the perfect summation of our system as it stands. The quotes from the SEC-prosecutor/defense bar confab at the end are just icing.