How crooked is it?

Much was written about the U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff's decision on September 14, 2009 not to approve Bank of America settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission regarding the bank's purchase of Merrill Lynch.

In a nutshell, the judge said that the charges listed in the SEC complaint are too serious to be ignored and the settlement is "not fair, nor reasonable, nor just."

One side of the story was not well covered in the media. That is a collusion between the Bank of America and the SEC, the bank's regulators, essentially, the cops, who suppose to enforce the law.

Here is an interesting reporting that I have not found in printed form. National Public Radio correspondent Louis Story talking to John Hockenberry on "The Takeaway": http://www.thetakeaway.org/stories/2009/sep/15/judge-sec-bofa-trial/

Here is a partial transcript:

John Hockenberry: A federal judge is saying that the Securities and Exchange Commission - chief regulator in the financial industry - is colluding, in a sense, with Bank of America in the middle of a merger using taxpayer money.

Louis Story: That is implication...

John Hockenberry: Wow!

Louis Story: ... you can draw from this ruling. It did not totally surprise me because I've been following this closely more than a month and I tell you at the hearing more that a month ago when the SEC presented the settlement with Bank of America to the judge it was striking because the judge would ask the SEC basic factual question about the merger and the SEC would not know the answers and Bank of America's lawyers kept going whispering the answers to the SEC in front of us and you watching this and you are saying - "wow, this is justice at work."

What is amazing is that these people are not even hiding what they are doing!!! And this is "new SEC" under leadership of Obama's appointee Mary Shapiro, not the "old" one, which did not want to investigate Madoff...