Bill Black, a former bank regulator, has been writing about financial fraud in high places at least sine the S&L scandal in the early '90s.  His book about that is The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry.  Here he talks with the Old Mole's Bill Resnick about the chicanery that led to the financial collapse of 2008.   

 The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is the title of a new book by longtime civil rights advocate and litigator, Michelle Alexander.  In this episode of the Old Mole's The Left and the Law, attorney Mike Snedeker and Jan Haaken sum up and discuss the book's central thesis: that the mass imprisonment of black men for crimes that go mostly unpunished among whites has created a new form of racial segregation.  

Michelle Alexander will appear soon on KBOO's A Deeper Look. 

 Is Goldman Sachs "little better than a criminal enterprise that earns its billions by bilking the market, the government, and even its own clients in a bewildering variety of complex financial scams"?  Or is "Goldman guilty of [nothing] except being "too smart" and really, really good at making money?"  Drawing on articles by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone’s political reporter; and Dean Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic Security, the Old Mole's Tom Becker lays out the case that (as Taibbi puts it) Goldman is "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity."

 Novelist Ian McEwan is able "to display clearly how brilliant accomplishment in one area of a life can be, and very often is, combined with absurd ineptness (or worse) in other areas."  Our Book Mole Larry Bowlden discusses McEwan's new novel Solar about a man whose personal life is a mess and yet is engaged in the fight against global warming. 

Read more of Larry's reviews here.  

Hosted by Bill Resnick, this program deals with crime in the suites that goes unpunished and crime in the streets that is punished if committed while being black.  We hear from a former federal finance regulator about the snowballing malfeasance in the finance industry; and from two incisive journalists about Goldman Sachs' raids on the public and the US Treasury.  And our Book Mole reviews Ian McEwan's new novel about the intersection between enviornmental and personal disasters.