Obviously the commercial news media tries to get you worked up and terrified so you'll buy products that they're advertising.

Over the years, many in the public have become numb to news of financial corruption, partly because too many of these stories involve banker-on-banker crime.

There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power.

The individual incentive not to commit crime on Wall Street now is almost zero.

To Wall Street, a firm like BP isn't just a profitable energy company with lots of assets like oil rigs and pipelines and gas stations - it's also a corporation that routinely borrows hundreds of millions of dollars to keep its business up and running.

Everything in America is so uniform. In Russia, everywhere you go is completely insane.

The mistake our politicians so often make with these industry leaders is in thinking they are interested in, or respectful of, the power of government. All they want is to keep stealing. If you can offer them the government’s seal of approval on that, they’ll take it. But if you can’t, well, they’ll take that too.