William K Black is one of the good guys. A lone voice in the wilderness crying out for justice from the white collar crime involved in the current financial crisis. He was the main man in charge of prosecuting the perpetrators of the earlier S&L crisis with over a thousand indictments.

He has been very critical of the lack of prosecution of current fraudulent activity, but in this article he not only rips Geithner a new one, but the current president as well as the previous ones for not going after the crooks. And he gives ample evidence, based on past studies, to back up his assertions.

We should be a lot more outraged than we are. Here is the article. It is long. If you read the first portion of it and skim the rest, reading the summary at the end you will get the gist of it without taking so much time. It is worth the read to read it all if this type of stuff particularly interests you. How can we have a sound financial system with so much corruption?

The following quote came to mind:

The Roman Republic fell, not because of the ambition of Caesar or Augustus, but because it had already long ceased to be in any real sense a republic at all. When the sturdy Roman plebeian, who lived by his own labor, who voted without reward according to his own convictions, and who with his fellows formed in war the terrible Roman legion, had been changed into an idle creature who craved nothing in life save the gratification of a thirst for vapid excitement, who was fed by the state, and directly or indirectly sold his vote to the highest bidder, then the end of the republic was at hand, and nothing could save it. The laws were the same as they had been, but the people behind the laws had changed, and so the laws counted for nothing.
–Teddy Roosevelt

John