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I was tooling around the internet for awhile yesterday, looking for a transcript of the Congressional hearings that featured Goldman Sachs executives and traders as the star witnesses, before I realized that nowhere in print was there any real sense of what had gone on. Congressional hearings may have been effective at some point in the past, but these days, the witnesses are usually far too polished and used to dissembling for hours at a time to be of any real value, and the senators and congressmen who are asking the questions are usually too polite to do more than ask questions of little or no value. Senator Carl Levin tried to deviate from that formula on Tuesday. He was harsh, unyielding and relentless. "Your clients lost. Goldman profits" rang out several times during his opening address. But Senator Levin didn't have enough of an understanding of the business to really pin back the ears of any of the witnesses, including Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs chairman. I couldn't figure out for the life of me why his staffers didn't line up a few disgruntled traders and insiders to give the senator a three or four day crash course on the business. His gambling analogies were something that might appeal to my grandmother, who puts gambling of any kind up there with the cardinal sins, but missed the mark when it came to characterizing Wall Street's shenanigans.

"Crotty, James The Bonus-Driven "Rainmaker" Financial Firm: How These Firms Enrich Top Employees, Destroy Shareholder Value and Create Systemic Financial Instability (revised) Publication Date: 4/26/2010"

"Pollin, Robert "Roots of Capitalist Stability and Instability," a review of The Value of Money by Prabhat Patnaik Publication Date: 10/20/2009"

Long, comprehensive, illustrated, well-written (somewhat outdated) article on a paradigm for business where shareholder profits were balanced by social value. Clearly spells out that profits and wealth are not the antithesis of ethics and social responsibility. Rather, they are mutually-interdependent, even synergistic.

"The Illusion of Money Liberation from subservience to Wall Street begins with a recognition that money is just a number of no intrinsic value. "

Healthcare Industry Gets Great Value from its Contributions to Blue Dogs (Centrist Democratic Senators)

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell almost 1000 points in ten minutes today, wiping out $1 trillion in equity values as algorithmic trading by high-speed computers spun out of control.

"If you were intentionally trying to chase the last of the individual investors from this market you couldn't have written a better script than "accidental trade vaporizes trillions in value from US stocks". People are just disgusted already."

If anyone still believes we must drill, baby, drill offshore -- aside from Bill Kristol, that is, who wants to sink wells even closer to precious coastal wetlands -- then perhaps it is time to consider again the potential benefits of nationalization. After all, there is one country that has established an unrivaled record for environmental safety while exploiting its offshore petroleum reserves. That would be Norway, which created the company now known as Statoil Hydro as a fully state-owned entity and still controls nearly two-thirds of the company's "privatized" shares.