I wrote a short piece last week in which I tried to remind Congress that we need to have hearings on the financial meltdown for obvious reasons:

Just a reminder.

I know we've asked for a Truth Commission on torture over and over again, but what about the financial catastrophe the world just experienced? When will hearings be held to uncover the facts that led us and the world to financial ruin? I know we have many basic facts of what happened, but when will an actual hearing take place? If nothing is officially uncovered then how can we stop another one from taking place?

Bill Scher of CFAF heard a little birdy and it sounds quite promising on that front now:

Word is circulating in Washington that members for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission will be named this week.

The commission is supposed to resemble the 1930s Pecora commission that dug into the culprits behind the Great Depression and laid the groundwork for major bank reform. But that will only be true if the commission is run by aggressive seekers of truth, independent of the financial industry, willing to use their subpoena power, knowledgeable enough to have warned us of impeding crisis in the first place despite market cheerleading from the political and media establishments.
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Speculation from Reuters last week on who might be named was not terribly encouraging, though most of the names floated clearly were coming from conservative circles, as Republican leaders will pick four of the 10 members.

Cut...OK, here's where we come in. Updated: No members of Congress can be on the commission, but
I think an Alan Grayson or Henry Waxman type would be good choices for the commission. . We do need a panel of brilliant minds that has real progressive representation, but what we also need are people that have an appreciation for the "dramatic." That is, they should know how to ask questions with their allotted time in such a way that it will be highly informative and entertaining at the same time. These are the moments that can really educate Americans, but the commission needs members that understand how to use their valuable time---not to pontificate---but to educate and uncover. And it needs to be riveting while getting to the truth of this mess.

Please ask Speaker Pelosi and Harry Reid to make sure they put together a great panel. Nancy was almost scheduled to do a live chat on C&L last week, but because of my family issues, we are rescheduling. However, I think if we let her know how strongly we feel about the new Pecora Commission and ensuring that progressives are solidly represented, she'll come through.

Here's her contact info.

Harry Reid is another story. Here's Reid's office info, so please let him know too.

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From Bill Moyers Journal April 24, 2009.

Like thunderheads roiling on the horizon, the clamor has been building as more and more Americans want to know exactly what, and who, brought on the worst economic crisis since the great depression. What happened and how do we keep it from happening again?

Congress has finally acknowledged the outcry and is supporting some 21st century version of the "Pecora hearings."

"Pecora hearings?" That's right, as in Ferdinand Pecora, the savvy immigrant from Sicily who became a Manhattan prosecutor with a memory for facts and figures that proved the undoing of a Wall Street banking world gone berserk with greed and fraud.

In the early 1930's, during the Great Depression, and under threat of subpoena, one tycoon after another, including J.P. Morgan Jr., was hauled before the Senate Banking Committee and grilled by Pecora, the committee's chief counsel.

Here he is on the cover of TIME Magazine in June 1933. "Wealth on Trial" reads the headline inside, where Pecora is described in ethnic stereotypes of the day as "The kinky-haired, olive-skinned, jut-jawed lawyer from Manhattan." To their shock, pompous financiers, unaccustomed to having their actions or integrity questioned by anyone, much less some pipsqueak legalist making $255 a month, were no match for his cross examination.

The revelations of the Pecora hearings and the public's anger led to sweeping reform, reining in the high-handed, free-wheeling banking industry. Those reforms stabilized our financial world for half a century, until the titans of finance and friendly politicians began to dismantle them.

Ferdinand Pecora, your time has come again. Your biography is being written by this man, Michael Perino. A scholar of Law and Securities Regulation, Michael teaches at St. John's University here in New York, and has been an advisor to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the government agency that was created because of the Pecora investigation.

And, returning to the JOURNAL is Simon Johnson, former Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund who now teaches at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Just this week Simon Johnson co-founded "The Hearing," a new economics blog at washingtonpost.com.

Transcript below the fold.

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