"Being Irish,

he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy."  W.B. Yeats

I guess we're all Irishmen these days.  People often don't believe me when I inform them about how much money the Fed/Treasury has used to backstop the global financial system since the onset of the financial crisis.  It's a staggering number, and sometimes to even type it causes me second thoughts.  Just the other night, as I was talking to a friend about this, he looked at me like I had two heads, one of which covered in tin foil.

When you point people to the General Accounting Office website and to the audit of the Fed/Treasury, eyes begin to glaze over.  Bad enough that the report is long and tedious, but then you have to wade through the appendices to tally up the all the money lent/spent/guaranteed since 2008.  How much, you ask?  Try $28 Trillion.  It's almost unbelievable.  Yet it's true.

Keeping this in mind, you can imagine my delight to see former Rep Alan Grayson talking about this very thing on Monday evening.  Via Mike Norman Economics, here's Mr. Grayson:  

SEC Smackdown

Despite the best efforts of the Obama administration to sweep the financial crisis under the rug (along with trillions of dollars in aid to the banks) there are still officials who care.  Judge Jed Rakoff slapped the SEC silly with a ruling on Monday refusing to sign-off on a cozy arrangement between the SEC and Citibank.  The judge was sweeping in his remarks, reminding the SEC that "of all agencies, has a duty, inherent in its statutory mission, to see that the truth emerges; and if it fails to do so, this court must not, in the name of deference or convenience, grant judicial enforcement to the agency’s contrivances…. for otherwise, the court becomes a mere handmaiden to a settlement privately negotiated on the basis of unknown facts, while the public is deprived of ever knowing the truth in a matter of obvious public importance.”

Sometimes the deck seems so stacked against us that I just don't see a way out of this mess.  I remain convinced that we've reached the limits of three critically important systems that rule our lives - the environmental system is teetering, the economic system is completely corrupted, leaving billions of people in abject poverty, and the political systems are woefully inadequate to deal with any of it.  But, just when I think we are doomed, along comes someone like Judge Rakoff, although it remains to be seen if these objections are straws that break a camel's back, or if they are simply nuisance speed bumps on the road to serfdom.  

This post also gives me the opportunity to share a video of Matt Taibbi, who explains the ruling to Keith Olbermann's viewers.  Matt is an interesting guy - he's a terrific writer doing pretty good investigative journalism for Rolling Stone magazine.  His profanity-laced pieces push him to the peripheral of accepted journalism, however, and as much as I dig that about him (see my post about Winnebago Man!) I think he'd be doing the cause a service to limit his vocabulary to the parlance of the day.