Mr Spitzer, the prosecutorial actions you suggest in your piece are dangerous.

1. You want the commission to invent false motives for – excuse me, “investigate” - various executives and board members by analyzing the accuracy of the information they received and any potential conflicts of interest contained therein. The point of these “investigations” not being to determine whether there was any wrongdoing, since that has already been presumed, but to create the appearance of business decisions made in bad faith, which although wholly implausible yet impossible to disprove, the commission can use to:
2. Create prosecutable criminal behavior where none existed. But because enforcing banking legal violations relies on the attribution of bad faith – essentially, fraud – to business decisions, the first step is really the only one you need. So even though every action a board took may have been legal, if the commission determines that it’s possible that the board’s incentives were wrongly aligned, all those previously legal actions become criminal.

What you’re suggesting is that Angelides use emails, compensation metrics, etc. – all of which were written, devised, and worked well for years before this confluence of economic events exposed them as potentially bad - to criminalize those business decisions. Obviously, many of those business decisions were, but to contend, as is necessary for the commission to do, that corporate boards and executives set compensation structure and determined corporate governance with either negligence of or the actual goal of wrecking their companies is beyond irresponsible.

The scariest thing about your proposal is that you consider your civil suit of Dick Grasso to be a model of investigatory behavior. A case predicated upon “conflicts and aberrant information flow” is a laughably low burden of proof. Your suggestions sound like the DAs on Law & Order who always seem to be more interested in using their extraordinary power to achieve a desired result than actually upholding the law.

Also – I understand that you’re just suggesting the commission go after those companies that received TARP funds, and that the Grasso thing was because the NYSE is a non-profit, so I appreciate that you’re making a distinction. I’m not saying that investigations aren’t warranted, because they are AND any company that accepted bailout money ought to submit to whatever scrutiny the government wants; what I’m saying is that we need an actual investigation that goes in and finds out the truth – not a witch hunt where the outcome is predetermined by the commission’s charter.