Something else the mining and financial industries share: the revolving door between regulators and those they're supposed to be regulating.
Government officials, [Barofsky] says, eagerly served Wall Street interests at the public's expense, and regulators were captured by the very industry they were supposed to be regulating.
First, start at the beginning: what subject would Congress be regulating, pursuant to which enumerated power, that would need such a silly regulation to effectuate that power?
"What I would really like is the Gore administration to be regulating my competitors and the Bush administration to be regulating me".
Many of the people who are supposed to be regulating this don't want to know".
It has said it intends to apply but has not yet said which, if any, publishers it will be regulating.
Should the state, for instance, be regulating the environment if the federal government is already doing that?
Tomorrow we would be regulating the driver who is trying to discipline her children, someone trying to put on lipstick, the smoker trying to reach for the ashtray".
Among the financial firms that the S.E.C. was supposed to be regulating were the three largest that collapsed in 2008: Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch.
But offstage was an equally urgent matter: the government would now be regulating the financial system more rigorously, and the question of who in government would be in control was resolved dramatically in the Fed's favor.
It is tempting to see corruption in all this, but it seems more likely that, over the past decades, politicians as well as regulators have come to identify themselves with the financial sector they are supposed to be regulating.
