Call it Wall Street greed fatigue. You say there is a group of devious men (and they are usually men) who lost or stole the money from a large group of trusting and trustworthy people and then enriched themselves for their atrocious behavior? And we're supposed to be surprised? As a news story, the MF Global bonuses is familiar. The headline "Vultures Flourish in the Great Recession" reeks of 2009. Besides, what can you do about it?  Not a single executive responsible for the crash of 2008 has gone to jail or even visibly suffered. After a while the story gets tiresome.

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Just rigorously enforce the law. Dodd-Frank, to be exact.

A little-noted provision of that 2010 law, which was passed in reaction to the 2008 financial crisis, requires an even littler-noticed federal agency, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, to establish “position limits” for commodity and swaps traders. I’m something of an obscure-securities-law buff, but even I wasn’t aware of that Dodd-Frank provision until this week, when the dependably progressive Vermont senator, Bernie Sanders, got 67 congressional signatures on a letter calling on the CFTC to do its job.

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The answer is a rousing “maybe.”

On Friday, the CFPB inserted a 17-page rule proposal into the Federal Register, in a major step toward getting a grip on the out-of-control debt collection business, as well as riding herd over consumer credit bureaus.  But this was just the first step on a long and perilous journey into one of the most nauseating back alleys of free enterprise. It’s an open question whether the CFPB, under its new director, Richard Cordray, is up to the task of corralling these corporate snakes. It’s almost certain to run into stiff opposition from the debt-collectors’ pals in Congress.

But let’s look on the bright side. This is Cordray’s big opportunity, a chance to really make a difference in an area that matters to millions of consumers. Let’s hope he doesn’t blow it.

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His strong showing against Mitt Romney in Maine is further proof that the libertarian Texas congressman is not going away. So this is as good a time as any for those of us who view him as an off-the-charts extremist to come to grips with two larger questions presented by his candidacy: Why do so many people like this guy?

And even: Do Paul’s followers have a point?

My credentials in the anti-Paul camp are unassailable, and I have the hate mail to prove it. I haven’t changed my mind about his views. I still think that he’s a phony populist, because his positions would favor the 1 percent more than any other Republican candidate. I haven’t changed my mind that his “end the Fed” campaign is diversionary, and that his advocacy of the gold standard would put us in another Great Depression were it ever implemented. I’m concerned by the cult-like fervor of so many of his followers. I don’t buy his excuses for the racism that appears in newsletters that were published under his name.

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Seeing these two covers side by side, you’d think that Bharara was Wall Street’s Great Emasculator. The Time article is subtitled “Prosecutor Preet Bharara collars the masters of the meltdown,” while the New York piece describes how the Street is reeling from “a crisis that would not be flip to call existential.” Yet nowhere in Gabriel Sherman’s well-researched piece in New York is there even one mention of Preet Bharara.

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Since President Obama has hardly been God’s gift to the 99 percent when it comes to regulating the financial industry — just look at his dreary appointees, such as Wall Street favorite Tim Geithner as Treasury secretary — it’s purely a frying pan vs. fire situation. But let’s be clear that Wall Street regulation is one area where the old political expression “not a dime’s worth of difference” doesn’t apply. All the Republican candidates would be much worse than the incumbent. The  big question post-Florida is: How bad would the front-runner be?

The subject hasn’t come up very much in the debates, and Romney hasn’t volunteered much on his stance toward financial regulation, certainly not as much as Newt Gingrich, who gave a little-noticed speech pledging his fealty to Wall Street’s agenda, in detail, in 2006. We know that Romney opposes Dodd-Frank, as do all the other GOP candidates, so he’d roll back the only steps Congress has taken to heighten scrutiny of the financial industry. But that’s about it.

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Judging from those remarks and the brickbats he has thrown at Mitt Romney, ripping into his record as a former slash-and-burning private equity guy, you’d think that Gingrich doesn’t much like Wall Street. Au contraire. A testimony before Congress in 2006, when he was still in the “consulting” business, shows that Newt Gingrich is a passionate defender and advocate of the interests of the securities industry, and passionate about making life hard for consumers, investors and anyone who has a beef against Corporate America.

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ABC said it reviewed documents showing  that Romney deposited  millions of dollars of his personal wealth “in investment funds set up in the Cayman Islands, a notorious Caribbean tax haven.” Let’s be clear: this is perfectly legal. It’s also, for a businessman, perfectly ethical. The tax laws allow it, as long as it isn’t used to evade taxes—as Romney’s people insist. But it also stinks, as Romney is utilizing the same kind of offshore havens that organized crime and white-collar criminals use to avoid detection. In other words, it’s very much like pretty everything else Romney did at Bain Capital: it looks dreadful to the people who lines up at the polls on Election Day.

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I don't mean to call people names.  I speak as a bona fide expert on these subject, having covered business and written a book about a sociopath and having known many professionally through the years. I’m merely trying to provide a dispassionate analysis of Romney’s life and career, especially (but not exclusively) his record as a job-destroying corporate warrior at the Bain Capital buyout firm.

Romney’s tenure at Bain, which he ran from 1984 to 1999, is currently being raked over the coals in the media and in a TV spot paid for by the stunningly hypocritical Newt Gingrich, but I’m not seeing much about what this says about him as a human being.

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A number of commentators I respect greatly are finding aspects of Paul’s platform to be compelling. Among them are Glenn Greenwald on this site and Matt Stoller at Naked Capitalism. Greenwald points out that “Ron Paul is the only major candidate from either party advocating crucial views on vital issues that need to be heard, and so his candidacy generates important benefits” [his emphasis]. He goes on to provide a long list of Obama’s shortcomings that, he points out, are not shared by Ron Paul. Stoller argues that “the anger [Paul] inspires comes not from his positions, but from the tensions that modern American liberals bear within their own worldview.”

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In Fed-speak, this is known as cutting in half the Fed’s “dual mandate” to curb inflation and unemployment, by taking out the “unemployment” part — the nation's persistently high jobless rates notwithstanding. The ranking Republican on the Joint Economic Committee, Kevin Brady, disclosed this week that he is drafting legislation that would turn the Fed’s long-standing “dual mandate” into a single mandate.

This great leap backward isn’t likely to happen as Democrats remain in control of the Senate. But what it does show is the extent to which Ron Paul’s fixation with the Fed has infected the Republican Party. Anti-Fed rhetoric, once the province of ultra-right groups like the John Birch Society, has gone mainstream with the rise of Paul, who has been surging in the polls and now ranks third behind Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. He is actually leading in Iowa, and a victory there would really rev up his famously loyal followers.

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The fraud charges against Syron and other executives of Freddie Mac and the other government-sponsored mortgage-trader, Fannie Mae, who were charged with concealing subprime sludge from their shareholders, will fuel the right-wing narrative of the financial crisis. Rightists contend that Fannie and Freddie, not the banks, were responsible for the financial crisis by monopolizing the market for subprime loans that eventually went bust, dragging down the entire housing market. What this bogus argument ignores is that these two hated government-sponsored enterprises did not actually make loans, but just bought them after they were issued.

But let’s put aside the political hot potato for the moment. My focus is on Dick Syron. And my question to the SEC is this: What took you so long? Syron should have been put on the securities-enforcement hot seat a decade ago, long before he put his mitts on Freddie Mac, whose decision to name him as CEO always baffled me.

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I am, of course, referring to the congressional ritual known as the “no-cost inquisition.” Others will appear, but Jon Corzine is the star attraction. Sometime during the afternoon he will raise his right hand, swear to tell the truth, and then be subjected to impressive cross-examination by the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations in Washington. Corzine has been to several of these, so he knows he has a role to play.

His job will be to once again explain how MF Global became the Frankenstein of financial scandal, with elements of every financial scandal in recent years (without it being his fault in any kind of punishable way!). He will do his best to show humility, contrition and, above all, lack of scienter.  This and the other MF Global hearings are useful exercises, shedding light on a grotesque example of Wall Street run rampant. They are unarguable Good Things. They keep up the decibel level, raise public awareness, and are fine for journalists, prosecutors (for they lock the witnesses into their stories) and any actual regulators out there. It’s a fine thing for Congress to exercise its oversight function, until you consider that no legislation of any value ever seems to emerge from them, because Congress is simply too corrupt and ideologically paralyzed.

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In President Obama’s speech in Kansas on Tuesday, he made a passionate reference to Richard Cordray, his nominee as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, now the center of a fierce battle in Congress. “Nobody claims he’s not qualified,” the president said. “But the Republicans in the Senate refuse to confirm him for the job; they refuse to let him do his job.” That’s true enough. But the Death Valley of financial regulation is not a good issue for the president, no matter how atrociously the Republicans have behaved, most recently by their obstructionism on Cordray. Wall Street regulation is a dreary picture, and there isn’t an ounce of populism to be found in it.

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I make that point by way of pleading for mercy for a really good person who has strayed. Her name is Carolyn B. Maloney, and she is a Democratic member of Congress from New York City and sits on the House Financial Services Committee. Do not hate this woman, even though she has joined in the effort to slice away at the ineffectual Dodd-Frank non-market-reform “market reform” legislation, by co-sponsoring a bill that is gutting transparency in the swaps market. She knows not what she does. Well, OK, she knows perfectly well what she does, but she can’t help herself. She’s represents New York, you see.

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Or, like the nice kid who used to get beaten up by bullies, Frank was always unafraid to go on Fox News and mix it up with Bill O’Reilly. The right hated him, pushing the trope that “Fannie and Freddie” were the cause of the 2008 financial crisis, not the banks. Or the Community Reinvestment Act,  not the banks. Always the government, never the banks. The criticisms stung, even though baloney like the CRA yarn had been refuted “up, down and sideways,” as Paul Krugman once pointed out.

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"Let me address that for a minute,” the Republican presidential candidate said, “because if you listen carefully, I’m very much involved with the 99. I’ve been condemning that 1 percent because they’ve been ripping us off --” He was interrupted again, this time by cheers, almost drowning him out.

After the usual chants of "We are the 99 percent" and "There are criminals on Wall Street who walk free," Paul quickly took back the audience, not that he had ever lost it. “Do you feel better?” he asked, to laughter.

“We need to sort that out, but the people on Wall Street got the bailouts, and you guys got stuck with the bills, and I think that’s where the problem is.”

It was a masterful performance. Ron Paul — fraudulent populist, friend of the oligarchy, sworn enemy of every social program since Theodore Roosevelt — had won the day, again.

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That describes the predicament facing the reporters and editors of Dow Jones & Co., publishers of the Wall Street Journal, as they watch asteroid Rupert Murdoch stream their way. The mogul is offering $5 billion to make Dow Jones part of his News Corp. media empire, sandwiched somewhere between the New York Post and "The O'Reilly Factor." While the rest of the world struggles to make sense of that dark blotch in the sky, these unemotional business and financial reporters have it all figured out. They know what's going to happen because they cover this kind of thing all the time -- stodgy, family-owned, "mature" businesses about to be made more "efficient" and "lean," all in the name of God, country and shareholder value.

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The Nardelli parting gift stripped away the sheer bull over executive compensation that pollutes public discourse nowadays, revealing the underlying philosophy. I call it the Falk/Reles Theorem of Executive Compensation. This was set forth not in an academic paper but in a really great 1960 movie, "Murder Inc.," starring Peter Falk as the mob killer Abe Reles.

About halfway through the movie, Falk as Reles sets forth his views on material acquisition: "What you want, take. What I want, I take. Nothing means nothing unless I got it. What've you got hands for, huh? Take!"

If you keep these words in mind, all the obscenities of recent executive compensation make sense. All of them -- the Nardelli sayonara, the $400 million lavished on New York Stock Exchange boss Dick Grasso that was the envy of Wall Street, and the daily assault of eight- and nine-figure compensation "packages" that grace the business pages. CEOs have hands, so they take. Their boards don't care -- it's not their money, after all -- or they're pals of the CEO, so they give.

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All this is true, I suppose, if what we have is indeed a 1950s-style "crime wave," its parameters defined as a grim statistical count of arrests, convictions and sentencings. But that's not what we have at all. Like the pipe-puffing Freudian liberals of that era, I prefer to examine the root causes, the home environment, in which regulatory agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission function in the manner of an indulgent, all-too-forgiving Montessori school headmaster. Corporate delinquents, having failed to respond to counseling, are turned over to the blue-uniformed constabulary of the Justice Department only when they become too obstreperous to control.

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