Jon Stewart (l.) and Rachel Maddow (r.)(source: Wikipedia)

There is much that should be said about Rachel Maddow’s long interview with Jon Stewart today. I come at it partially as an uncle who has a nephew who claims to get all his news from Jon Stewart.  The interview was a very thoughtful piece, and includes a lot about the nature of “news” vs. “comedy,” and one of the things I learned is that Stewart sees his niche in TV as descending from the Smothers Brothers.

I cannot even begin to do justice to the whole interview, so I’ll just say a few words about a small piece of it. Stewart claims that we on the left have our own conversation-stoppers, just like the Righties do. When Rachel asked him to name one, he offered the claim frequently heard from Lefties that George Bush is a War Criminal. I think that here, Jon Stewart may be more like Barack Obama than most of us. For Stewart, war criminals are defined by people like Pol Pot and what emerged from the Nuremberg trials. He thinks that hurling labels like “war criminals” is a form of demonization, and a conversation-stopper, rather than a serious attempt at dialogue.

There’s some truth to that, but the American way to make that judgment is to have an investigation and see if there is a legal basis for it. That’s not what we’re doing in this country. Instead, the DOJ refuses to conduct any investigation, except for the enigmatic Durham investigation, which seems more like a black hole designed to swallow up any evidence than to produce any indictments. Instead of condemning public confessions of war crimes, as both Bush and Cheney have done, there is a collective ho hum, and nothing is done. Our president remains silent about these atrocities, rather than condemning them. So it should not count as “excess” when our leaders admit to acts which amount to war crimes, and we take them at their word and call them war criminals. The road to Hitler, and to Pol Pot, did not start with the most heinous acts, but bit by bit, and the label of “war criminal” fits even if there is only one crime, rather than dozens. So I am not satisfied by Stewart’s analysis.

There is much more about the interview that deserves discussion. What caught your attention?

Today in church, the sermon was on wisdom. It occurs to me that is a word that is not much used these days, and when it is used, it is more often used in the negative (e.g., “that’s not a wise move.”)

First, let me clarify one thing: I do not use “wise” as a synonym for “smart.” One can be smart but not wise. And I suspect one can be wise without being smart. What’s the difference? Judgment. Good judgment makes all the difference.

Who is wise? That’s a tough question. There are plenty of people who have acted foolishly, but later become wise. Wisdom seems to be expected more among our elders than among youth, although youth can sometimes appear wise beyond their years.

There are people who are wise in some domain of life, but foolish in some other domain.

So here are a few of those who seem wise to me:

Mahatma Gandhi

Nelson Mandela

Bishop Desmond Tutu

Martin Luther King, Jr.– not wise in his personal relationships, but his speeches still seem prophetic to me, on many levels.

Jimmy Carter– his wisdom began to show in his Middle East peace negotiations, but was in question during “Operation Eagle Claw” in  the Iranian desert that was widely blamed on Carter, but failed mostly by freak weather and the failure of the various services to work together with cohesion. To me, his wisdom was shown in his negotiating philosophy– the way he approached the most intransigent and sometimes evil protagonists, and got them to engage in real negotiations. And also, in the work of the Carter Center since his presidency, and in his recent books, such as Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

But I’m not sure there is anyone in the past 5 administrations (including Obama’s) who I would consider wise. Who, or what, am I missing?

Bob in AZ

At 02:59 PM 9/16/2010, Tim Kaine wrote:
Robert –
When we elected President Obama, Democrats made a choice to embrace the fight for change that matters….

The point of the email was to offer me a bumper sticker. Here was my response:

How can I use a bumper sticker for "Change that Matters" when:
* Gitmo remains open
* People who committed war crimes for President Bush remain unindicted and untried
* President Obama wants license to kill American Citizens without indictment, trial or any due process (worse than Bush!)
* Bagram has become our latest hell-hole where there is no accountability, no transparency, and no due process
* President Obama’s DOJ supports, in court, every whack-job extreme position advocated by the Bush DOJ regarding state secrets, suppressing evidence, and appeals to Executive Authority that violate traditional American values and the Constitution.

And there’s more. Here’s the kind of change I could believe in:  . . .

One of the side effects of The Netroots Nation convention was a blizzard of buttons, pocket-sized cards, pamphlets, 8.5×11 paper manifestos, leaflets, and broadsides, and a few magazines. One of those magazines was Tikkun’s July/August 2010 issue, featuring a cover story proclaiming "Queer Spirituality and Politics: Why Gay Rights is a Religious Issue," by Jay Michaelson. The feature article was, no doubt, the motivation for distributing dozens of free copies of this issue. But hidden inside are two other important articles that need our attention: The Second American Revolution, A review of Ralph Nader’s new book, Only the Super-Rich can Save Us!, by Charles Derber, and Barry Schwartz’s review, Prophetic Courage in an Imperial Age, of a book on Jeremiah.

Derber observed that

For most Americans, including most on the Left, system change has become a pipe dream. The truth is that we have become cynical and no longer believe we can transform the capitalist U.S. hegemon. System change is now considered a utopian conceit. Leftist intellectuals have become complicit in this new fatalism, writing endless books and articles critiquing current policies but offering (with some exceptions, as in this magazine) almost nothing about how to imagine and create a revolutionary transformation.

I have noticed this same descent into cynicism here at FDL, particularly in Emptywheel’s corner, where cynicism in the comments has become fashionable, and optimists are mocked. Visionaries are tolerated and occasionally applauded for their idealism, much as one might take comfort in a house pet, but otherwise these visionaries are not taken seriously.

Derber, however, notes the importance of these visionaries, and links Nader’s new book to Edwdard Bellamy’s Looking Backwards,

…a visionary socialist novel that sold one million hardcover books to the mass public. … Bellamy’s utopian best seller spawned a new breed of leftist intellectuals who did not find it silly to paint pictures of a world beyond greed, predatory finance, and robber-baron capitalism. And Bellamy spurred cooperativist, socialist, and radical labor movements that promoted previously unimaginable progressive reform.

It is uncanny how resonant "greed, predatory finance, and robber-baron capitalism" seem today. Derber also makes much of historian Russell Jacoby, who "has described the intelligentsia’s capitulation as one of the great tragic chapters in intellectual history."

In books such as The Last Intellectuals and The End of Utopia, Jacoby ferociously attacks leftist intelligentsia for abandoning the radical imagination. Radical imagination, after all, is not a path toward tenure. The professionalization of the leftist intelligentsia in the university has undercut the temperament and intellectual capacity to even conceive a different world.

Derber also cites Noam Chomsky on the same point:

The fading of the radical, utopian U.S. Left in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has gone largely without notice. Established intellectuals in the Beltway and New York highbrow literary circles live happily in this new world of hegemonic pragmatism, and leftist intellectuals, mainly ensconced in comfortable academic positions, have, for the most part, reconciled themselves to it. In his blistering 1960s critique—titled American Power and the New Mandarins—Noam Chomsky was one of the first to headline the extreme seriousness of this collapse of intellectual vision and courage.

Nader is praised, not so much for the correctness of his vision, as for being a progressive visionary.

Nader breaks completely with the prevailing pessimistic pragmatism, writing of the revolution that might not seem so out of reach if only we believed in its possibility.

Most reviews have focused on Nader’s apparent faith in billionaires. But Derber focuses on another aspect of Nader’s novel:

Nader knows that civic activism by ordinary Americans is the only force that will change the world—and such grassroots activism gets vast attention in the book. Second, the agents of change are secondary to his real message: the urgency of collectively cultivating a visionary consciousness and gut-level belief in transformative change, and then committing ourselves to making radical system change in the real world.

This brings me to step beyond Derber’s review to bring into this discussion Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope. With this book, Obama seemed to position himself as the prophet of a new Progressive optimism, which helped sweep him into power in 2008 with the slogan, "Change you can believe in." But alas, our prophet has proved to have feet of clay. This has prompted our descent into cynicism and despair.

But the real story of Nader’s book Derber writes, is "the insistence on leftist utopianism and transcendence of pragmatic pessimism…. How many leftist books leave you feeling hopeful, even optimistic? How many offer you a picture of a new world that inspires you to act?" To return to his earlier point,

…the urgency of collectively cultivating a visionary consciousness and gut-level belief in transformative change, and then committing ourselves to making radical system change in the real world.

Is the vision of The Audacity of Hope nullified just because the prophet is proven to have feet of clay? No– we must pick up the fallen standard and move it forward, with or without the prophet who articulated the vision. The ancient roles of prophet and priest are irreconcilable: the prophet is inevitably an outsider, while the priest is the quintessential insider. It is important to remember FDR’s exhortation to one of his progressive supporters: "Make me do it."

Barry Schwartz, in his review of Mordecai Schreiber’s new book, The Man Who Knew God: Decoding Jeremiah, quotes Abraham Joshua Heschel on the essence of the prophetic persona:

prophets [are] those who combine "a very deep love, a very powerful dissent, painful rebuke, with unwavering hope"

Heschel went on to lament that the books of the prophets in the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the "Old Testament,") are little known today. Most people, if they remember anything about Jeremiah, remember him as a sourpuss, a constant complainer whose very name (in the form "Jeremiad") has become an erudite synonym for "rant." Schwartz wrote,

Jeremiah’s life story is compelling, and his powerful challenge to domestic hubris and colonial imperialism resonates in our age: "See, you are relying on illusions that are of no avail. Will you steal and murder and commit adultery and swear falsely … and then come and stand before Me in this House, which bears my name and say, we are safe?" (7:8-10)

…when all is said and done, what strikes us most deeply in our kishkas about Jeremiah is his resolve in the face of suffering and his true embodiment of prophetic courage. Jeremiah would have none of the pseudo-religious revivals sweeping his country. He decried hypocrisy at every level and paid for it in years of emotional torment, scorn, imprisonment, and exile. The personal cost is hard to fathom; Schreiber even posits that Jeremiah broke with his own father and never married due to his relentless pursuit of the truth. Through it all, he did have his loyal disciple and scribe Baruch ben Neriah by his side. He told Baruch to keep writing. And that is why Jeremiah, a pariah in his own day, lives for the ages.

We need our Progressive prophets, and we need to honor their vision, even when they seem to have feet of clay.

Bob in AZ

First, if you haven’t read the recent diary by Selise at dKos or The Seminal, do that now, and then come back. She provides information about a conference where economists and others are not afraid to explore territory forbidden by the Deficit Hawks. Remember that recovery from the Great Depression was originally stalled because the deficit hawks of the day inhibited the kind of recovery efforts that eventually succeeded.

Next, listen to the great interview of Bill Black by Bill Moyers last night. Black argues that there has been massive fraud on Wall Street, fostered by 8 years of non-regulation by the Bush administration, which resulted in a "criminogenic" environment on Wall Street.

In other news, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has issued its first subpoena: Moody’s Slapped With Subpoena: Credit Rating Agency Not Cooperating With Crisis Investigators (First Posted: 04-21-10 06:00 PM | Updated: 04-21-10 07:49 PM), and widely reported in the MSM (NYT, MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan, etc.). The FCIC’s next hearings, on May 5 & 6, will be on the Shadow Banking system.

In Congress, Blue Dog Blanche Lincoln has surprised just about everyone by proposing a strong bill regulating Derivatives that may be the best part of the Senate bill ("Senator Blanche Lincoln’s Derivatives Reform Bill Must Pass")

But to understand the legislation moving through Congress, everyone needs a score card. I’ll provide one based on the Roosevelt Institute’s Mike Konczal’s "Six Critical Elements of Financial Reform." Here’s the lede:

Financial reform is moving fast and it is likely to pass the Senate within days. Much of the action will take place on the floor, where amendments will be debated and voted on. What should progressives fight for at this point, and what amendments accomplish these goals?

See Konczal’s handy two-page summary & chart(pdf). So let’s review.

1. Are financial conglomerates allowed to get Too Big To Fail? Does the proposal allow bank/non-banks to get too big to be allowed to fail, e.g. merely creating two kinds of banks: the monsters, and the normals? How is TBTF defined? The Conglomerates get TBTF by combining bank and non-bank businesses– The sort of thing that Glass-Steagall used to prohibit. The "Volcker Rule," to restrict banks from making certain kinds of speculative investments if they are not on behalf of their customers, is also relevant here, but is covered explicitly in #6 below.

2. Is there a Hard Leverage Cap? Konzcal explains,

A major reason why our recession is so deep, with unemployment so high, is that the SEC allowed the largest players to significantly increase their leverage during the bubble. Though a leverage cap won’t replace a full regimen of proper capital reserving — which the administration is leaving to the international community to figure out — as citizens, we should demand a hard cap on how risky the financial sector can get. This would supplement good prudential regulation, not replace it.

There is currently a 15:1 leverage cap in the House Bill, though there currently isn’t one in the Senate. Senators Brown, Kaufman, Casey and Whitehouse have introduced their Safe Banking Act of 2010, which would require that banks to set into law a 16.67:1 leverage limit.

3. Should Risky Banks Pay For Their Own Cleanup?
The bills currently allow a fund of $50 – 150 B., built up from bank funds ahead of time, to allow for the orderly liquidation of out of control banks. The Republicans have pounced on this as proof of future consumer-funded bail-outs (they say that the costs will be passed on to consumers.) The Republicans have been blowing a lot of blue smoke on this, which puts this fund in danger. Progressives should defend this mechanism.

4. Should Derivatives be regulated?

Strong derivatives language crafted by Senator Lincoln has passed through the Agriculture Committee. Her bill might be the most important part of the emerging bill. Fighting to keep loopholes out of it is essential for financial reform.

5. Should there be a change in how Off-Balance Sheets are disclosed?
Konczal writes that

There needs to be a change in the way off-balance sheet products are disclosed. In particular, liabilities should include, but not be limited to, liabilities associated with swaps and VIEs. And there should be a private right of action for failure to comply.

There is not extensive language on off-balance sheet reform in the House. Senator Menendez has announced an amendment to address these issues, and it is essential to the integrity of our markets that it is incorporated into the Senate bill.

6. What about the Volcker Rule? Konczal wrote,

The Volcker Rule is essential for restoring the stability and integrity of what our financial system does.

The Volcker Rule was announced after the financial reform bill left the House, so it is not present in the passed House bill. Senators Merkley and Levin have proposed an amendment that not only solidifies the Volcker Rule, but also specifically targets the conflict of interest that we have seen with Goldman-style bets against clients.

As the news comes fast and furious in the next few days, these are 6 good things to keep an eye on, and to write to your Congresspersons about.

Bob in AZ

The FCIC is holding three more days of hearings April 7-9, 2010 devoted to Subprime Lending and Securitization and Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs). The 10-member FCIC panel is investigating banking executives’ involvement in risky mortgage debt investments that helped trigger the 2008 financial collapse. The hearings were carried by CSPAN. There were these advance billings:

The Meltdown Men: Greenspan, Rubin, & Prince to Testify before Financial Crisis Commission  (Monday, 04/5/2010 – 11:15 am) by Jeff Madrick

Financial Crisis Inquiry Wrestles With Setbacks, by Sewell Chan and Eric Dash (Published: April 5, 2010)

On Wednesday (April 7), there were three sessions.
Session 1 was the one you probably saw excerpts from on the evening news:

Session 1: The Federal Reserve

Mr. Alan Greenspan, Former Chairman, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.  Testimony (PDF) |Video

This session got major play in the print media and Internet:

Greenspan Testifies To Financial Crisis Commission, Blames Fannie, Freddie For Subprime Crisis (LIVEBLOG, VIDEO). Huffington Post. Shahien Nasiripour and Ryan McCarthy (First Posted: 04- 7-10 09:10 ).

(The HuffPo promised to run a live blog of the testimony at the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s latest round of hearings in Washington, D.C. Check back to the link above for regular updates and video.)

Richard (RJ) Eskow: In the Dark: A Good Prosecutor Would’ve Pinned Greenspan Down (Huffington Post, April 8, 2010)

FCIC Hearings: Greenspan Grilled, Madrick Validated (Wednesday, 04/7/2010 – 2:30 pm) by Justin Lutz, Roosevelt Institute

Greenspan Grilled Over Role in Financial Crisis, by John C. Mckinnon and Randall Smith, Wall Street Journal (April 8, 2010)

Greenspan reflects on crisis, deflects blame, by Dana Milbank, Washington Post Staff Writer (Thursday, April 8, 2010)

As the WSJ noted, "Former Fed chief Alan Greenspan faced some of the toughest questioning yet about his role in the financial crisis at a hearing Wednesday marked by tense exchanges with a longtime foe." Who might that be? WaPo has the answer:

A particularly sharp exchange occurred between Mr. Greenspan and Brooksley E. Born, a panelist and former regulator who clashed with Mr. Greenspan and members of the Clinton administration over derivatives regulation – and lost that battle.
In tough questioning on Wednesday, Ms. Born called on Mr. Greenspan to defend his longtime deregulatory bent.

"The Fed utterly failed to prevent the financial crisis," she said. "The Fed and the banking regulators failed to prevent the housing bubble. They failed to prevent the predatory lending scandal. They failed to prevent our biggest banks and bank holding companies from engaging in activities that would bring them to the verge of collapse without massive taxpayer bailouts."

"Didn’t the Federal Reserve fail to meet its mandates, fail to meet it responsibilities?" she added.

Mr. Greenspan replied that there was a failure: an underestimation of the "state and extent" of financial risks and the ability of private counterparties to assess them.

"The notion that somehow my views on regulation were predominant and effective at influencing the Congress is something you may have perceived," he said. "But it didn’t look that way from my point of view."

Session 2: Subprime Origination and Securitization

Mr. Richard Bitner, Managing Director of Housingwire.com, Author, "Confessions of a Subprime Lender: An Insider’s Tale of Greed, Fraud & Ignorance" Testimony (PDF) Video

Mr. Richard Bowen, Former Senior Vice President and Business Chief Underwriter, CitiMortgage Inc.Testimony (PDF) | Video

Ms. Patricia Lindsay, Former Vice President, Corporate Risk, New Century Financial Corporation   Testimony (PDF) | Video

Ms. Susan Mills, Managing Director of Mortgage Finance, Citi Markets & Banking, Global Securitized Markets,
Testimony (PDF)Video

Session 3: Citigroup Subprime-Related Structured Products and Risk Management

Mr. Murray C. Barnes, Former Managing Director, Independent Risk, Citigroup, Inc.,
Testimony (PDF) | Video

Mr. David C. Bushnell, Former Chief Risk Officer, Citigroup, Inc. Testimony (PDF) | Video

Mr. Nestor Dominguez, Former Co-Head, Global Collateralized Debt Obligations, Citi Markets & Banking, Global Structured Credit Products  Testimony (PDF) | Video

Mr. Thomas G. Maheras, Former Co-Chief Executive Officer, Citi Markets & Banking Testimony (PDF) | Video

News coverage of Sessions 2 & 3 included:

Fed Reviews Find Errors in Oversight of Citigroup, by Sewell Chan and Eric Dash,
New York Times (Published: April 7, 2010)

Day 2 (April 8): The bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) continued to hear testimony today from several former Citigroup executives including ex-CEO and Chairman Chuck Prince and Robert Rubin, the former Treasury Secretary who headed Citigroup’s executive committee.

In his statement this morning, former Citigroup President & CEO Chuck Prince apologized for the impact of the financial crisis on Americans. His comments came as he and former Citigroup Board Member Robert Rubin testified before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. Later, Comptroller of the Currency John Dugan spoke on his office’s oversight over Citigroup during the financial crisis.

Session 1: Citigroup Senior Management

Mr. Chuck Prince, Former Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, Citigroup, Inc. Testimony (PDF) | Video

Mr. Robert Rubin, Former Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors, Citigroup, Inc. Testimony (PDF) | Video

Prince and Rubin testified side by side, and questions were directed to them alternately, so there is one video for both of them. Rubin blamed "excesses and abuses," but defended CRA, and strongly recommended consumer protections. He was questioned about Fannie and Freddie Mac. Rubin, as many others, complained that "nobody knew" what would happen, and said "we didn’t understand the downside." As if the Great Depression wasn’t enough to show him the downside.
When challenged about this, Rubin said, yeah, there were a few people who understood the larger picture, but "nobody" at the larger institutions did. See The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, by Michael Lewis.
Brooksley Born’s questions begin about 2 hours and 13 minutes into the video. She got Rubin to agree that over the counter derivatives should be regulated. In the final questions of the session, Rubin claimed that he was NOT opposed to regulation, contrary to previous reports. Rubin had a pad of paper and was taking notes. Angelides was struck by how little Prince and Rubin knew about what was going on in their own organization, even though they were on site and frequently engaged. It is as if they were insulated (my word) from what was really going on. (Angelides: You were either pulling the levers, or asleep at the switch.) They delegated almost everything, but did little oversight.

Session 2: Office of the Comptroller of the Currency

Mr. John C. Dugan, Comptroller, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency     Testimony (PDF) | Video

Mr. John D. Hawke Jr., Former Comptroller, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency    Testimony (PDF) | Video

News coverage of the session includes:

• Ex-Citi exec says he warned Rubin on mortgage risk, DANIEL WAGNER, AP
  (Published: April 7, 2010)

  Ex-Citigroup Chiefs Pressed On Roles In Risk-Taking, NPR/AP (April 8, 2010) Robert Rubin, a senior adviser to Citigroup Inc. at the time of its deep losses from subprime mortgages, and former CEO Charles Prince said Thursday they learned belatedly that Citi had $43 billion in high-risk securities on its bookson CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 (AC360.com)

  o Citigroup official on the hot se…
  (4^th video in the podcast): Robert Rubin faces grilling over Citigroup’s financial problems. CNN’s Jessica Yellin reports.

  o Cooper interviewed Andrew Ross Sorkin about this session, but I can’t find a link for it on CNN.

Day 3 (April 9) had sessions devoted to Fannie Mae, and the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight.

Session 1: Fannie Mae

Mr. Robert J. Levin, Former Executive Vice President and Chief Business Officer, Fannie Mae

Mr. Daniel H. Mudd, Former President and Chief Executive Officer, Fannie Mae

Session 2: Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight

Mr. Armando Falcon Jr., Former Director
Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight

Mr. James Lockhart, Former Director
Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight

Advance billing for this session included:

Ex-Fannie Mae executives to face special panel, by ALAN ZIBEL | April 9, 2010 12:19 AM EST | AP

In these hearings, there were many questions about "Mark to Market" accounting.

Lutz, in the piece on the Roosevelt Institute’s page, concluded with this assessment:

Even at his toughest Phil Angelides,  former California State Treasurer and Chair of the FCIC, at his toughest failed to elicit any admission of fault from Greenspan.

Angelides’ lead role in the investigation has been called into question
recently; a recent New York Times article notes that,

"a few commissioners said they were concerned that Mr. Angelides was more interested in holding prominent hearings than in selecting a few targets for deep examination. For example, the chief executives of four Wall Street banks testified in January, and Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, will testify on Wednesday. The commission has issued no subpoenas even though it has the power to do so."

This is unacceptable. We hope that as the testimony progresses, the Commission is able to turn up the heat in order to get down to the real, tangible causes of the worst financial crisis in most people’s memory.

The New York Times article has much more on this subject.

There is now quite a lot of news coverage on the hearings so far, many more than included here, but conveniently gathered on the FCICI website at http://www.fcic.gov/news/

Finally, the previous set of hearings (February 26-27, 2010) has been reviewed by Shahien Nasiripour at HuffPo: Lively Debate, Hard Truths Emerge During Debate On Financial Crisis.
This set of hearings interviewed academics and other experts, but no stars and hence little coverage. Nevertheless, there’s much substance there that merits attention (see transcripts and videos for these sessions on the FCIC website

Bob in AZ

P.S. I’ve been working on this diary for more than a day. I need an easier way to compile and publish diaries with many links, bullet points, etc.

The hearings of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission last weekend got little attention in the press. Perhaps this was because no one famous was testifying– it was "just" a bunch of academics! After the hearings, HuffPo published what may be one of the best press articles, Lively Debate, Hard Truths Emerge During Debate On Financial Crisis:

Some of the country’s top financial scholars met over the weekend with the panel charged with investigating the causes of the financial crisis. What followed was the kind of open, honest debate that is so rare in Washington….

But rather than the kind of staid or theatrical hearing often seen in Congress, in which talking points are repeated and participants talk past each other, the academics and the commissioners engaged each other in a running debate in which theories about the origin of the financial crisis were questioned and defended.

The academics pointedly confronted one another, scoffing openly at various points. The commissioners, who include among their ranks powerful former House and Senate committee chairmen, were politely corrected on some points, and not-so-politely interrupted on others.

The article provides a useful abstract of the two-day hearing. Keep an eye on the FCIC website for the transcripts of the discussion. The presentations themselves have already been posted on that website.

The Roosevelt Institute did not provide any coverage or commentary on last week’s FCIC hearings, but they are providing a star-studded conference on the Financial crisis, starting early tomorrow (Wednesday):

Soros, Stiglitz, Warren, Johnson, Chanos, Turner, Greenberger, and other top financiers, economists and former regulators gather for conference on financial reform.

Read the report and watch the conference here.

This Wednesday, March 3rd from 8:00 am – 11:00 am ET, the Roosevelt Institute will host a meeting of some of the nation’s leading financiers, economists, and former regulators to release a report outlining critical actions needed to reform the nation’s financial system.

Report authors include: Elizabeth Warren, Simon Johnson, Rob Johnson, Frank Partnoy, Lynn Turner, Michael Greenberger, Mike Konczal, Josh Rosner, Richard Carnell, Raj Date, and Lawrence White.

Responding to the report are George Soros, Joseph Stiglitz, Jim Chanos, Bowman Cutter, Peter Solomon, Lynn Turner and Judge Stanley Sporkin.

Portions of the conference will be broadcast by Bloomberg TV and CNN.

Click here to learn more about the authors and view the report

Questions? Email mehrlich@rooseveltinstitute.org

This should be a very interesting report.

Bob in AZ