Over the last year or so we’ve had a banking crisis, a mining safety crisis, an auto safety crisis, and now an oil spill crisis. Other than pure greed on part of the controlling entities, the commonality between all four of these crises is the incompetence of government regulators.

As these disasters happen, the first response of the federal government is to look for ways to close loopholes in current laws or provide additional regulation that would help fill the gaps. But this overlooks a major issue – our regulators don’t regulate. If the regulators weren’t watching porn at work, or doing coke and having sex with the people they were supposed to regulate, they were simply ignoring the laws and providing as little oversight as possible.

Was anyone fired for this ineptitude? In most cases, no. Instead, the guilty parties were put on paid leave or reassigned. Many go to work for the companies they were supposed to regulate, with new inflated salaries.

I would argue that even firing is not enough. These people should go to jail.

If a police officer gets caught taking a bribe, they go to jail. If a soldier goes AWOL, they go to jail. Why should our government regulators be any different? As a basic tenet, police, soldiers, and regulators all perform the same job function, protecting the welfare of the citizenry. Any corruption of that duty should be considered a crime.

Recently, the Senate voted 98 – 0 to audit the Fed, in an effort to see how bailout funds were allocated and determine whether or not the toxic assets our government bought will make us as insolvent as Greece. I am sure the results of the audit will raise some eyebrows, but I wonder if any heads will roll. As congress meets to talk about additional regulations for the banking, mining, and auto industries, I hope they decide to look inward and ask if they should also be regulating their regulators.
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Joe Payne

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  1. Trucking Industry is in the transformation according to analyst. Less than Truckload ( LTL ) companies have been hard hit by the recession. Satish Jindel of Pittsburg based SJ Consulting says that the average operating margins of LTL carriers fell by 5.5 percent last year.

    I think that trucking carriers will increase their prices sooner or will go under. Instead of going under they will increase prices like the Airline Industry. Right now Airlines charges fee for the baggage a person carries ( depending on the airline from $ 20.00 to $ 35.00 ). For example, trucking carriers will tell clients that for certain pound of weight there will be certain amount of surcharge levied. Also like postal service, for certain dimensional box there will be certain fixed amount of charge regardless of the weight. Something like that. This is an idea.

    -Yagnesh out!

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  2. To quote Ron Paul: "I am outraged. The Senate just voted down the Vitter Amendment and against a real audit of the Federal Reserve. My entire team and I are going to work very hard to make sure the American people know who voted right, and who voted with the banking special interests."

    Eric Lach noted Tuesday, "Late last week, in a move that defused the opposition, and may have saved Wall Street reform legislation, Sanders agreed to limit the scope of the audit to emergency lending only, exempting other Fed activities."

    So, in other words, this one-time audit is just a farce. The language in the original audit proposed by Ron Paul been extremely stripped down on its way from the House to Senate. The Amendment that passed contains compromises that exempt monetary policy decisions, discount window operations, and agreements with foreign central banks from the GAO.

    In other words, they can't audit anything that really has any impact on anything. This entire thing is a dog and pony show, and that is why it was passed unanimously.

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