Maggie's Farm

--wonder, did no one at the Obama campaign realize he was officially opening his campaign on Karl Marx's birthday?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx

slightly o/t, but --

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/23/lehman-brothers-investigator-60-minutes-fudged-numbers_n_1445421.html?ref=business

I missed this ''60 minutes'' news when it emerged some weeks ago, just watched it yesterday. It's short --a segment on the show. It's an interview with the investigator who filed his report some two years ago, and is being interviewed here for the first time.

Besides the meta story --CBS is digging into the truth, even if it --Taibbi-fashion --directs heat away from DC, this interview dropped two bombs on me --perhaps not on you, but news to me --that the SEC and the NY Fed had taken offices within the LEH HQ during the year before the bankruptcy --to monitor the company's performance, of course, on the grounds that it needed supervision --and somehow totally missed the Repo scam at the heart --even tho the repo was a replay of the very same scam Enron had used and that Sarbox had specifically outlawed.

The second bomb is that this very act, of the govt officing and close-supervising LEH in its final year, regardless of the fact that it did nothing material re the scam and merely made it worse by adding confidence to LEH's counterparties about LEH's integrity, has made LEH perps nearly invulnerable to criminal prosecution, on the grounds that the govt was inside the operation already and as such cannot now prosecute what it was in effect helping do.

And of course, the NY Fed furnished Geithner, and the SEC furnished Madoff, and all the top players in both entities rolled right out of the debacle into fresh new promotions in the new Obama administration.

And they are still there.