The Hightower Report

New Elephant-in-Chief?

The worst job in the circus, I'm told, is cleaning up after the elephants.

So, poor Barack Obama! Coming into the White House after the Bush-Cheney circus means he's the custodian-in-chief who has to try tidying up the huge human rights messes that were left by that herd of pachyderms. So many piles, so little time.

How's the cleanup coming? Only so-so. On the plus side, Obama recently stripped the CIA of its lead role in what the Bushites called "enhanced interrogations." Torture is what it was. The FBI (a somewhat gentler agency in the interrogation field) now takes the lead role, using stricter rules and getting more oversight.

But the same day Obama announced this, he made his own mess of sanitizing a disgusting mess known as "extraordinary rendition." In last year's presidential race, Obama pledged to end this practice of, as he put it, "shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries."

Instead of ending rendition, however, Obama is extending it, though he promises a more spick-and-span version. U.S.-held prisoners still can be zipped away to God knows where in the dead of night to be interrogated by foreign agents, but Obama says he will seek "diplomatic assurances" from those governments that they will not torture our prisoners.

Isn't that sweet. He might ask Maher Arar how effective these little diplomatic niceties really are. In 2002, this detainee from Canada was dispatched by the U.S. to Syria, which promised no abuse. Officials nodded, smiled, winked – and Syrian agents then proceeded to beat Mr. Arar with electric cables.

You don't clean up a nasty mess like extraordinary rendition by just stirring the pile. It has to be completely removed.

Man vs. Wall Street

The White House hasn't pushed it. The chairmen of the Senate and House oversight committees have been too polite to inquire. And, of course, Republican leaders don't even want to know.

Don't you wish that someone in authority, someone with an ounce of chutzpah, someone with his head screwed on right, would direct a few obvious, pointed, even rude questions to the Wall Street honchos who have ripped off America? Questions such as: Who, exactly, in your bank directed the rip-off? Who made these stupid decisions? Who – by name – is accountable for this mess?

Well, at last, one guy has dared to demand answers. He's Jed Rakoff, a federal judge who's been grilling bankers and regulators about the outrageous bonuses that Merrill Lynch slipped to its top executives in the midst of last fall's Wall Street meltdown. Having lost $27 billion last year, Merrill was taken over by Bank of America – a deal financed with a $45 billion bailout from us taxpayers. Yet, as the deal was unfolding, Merrill secretly paid $3.6 billion in executive bonuses!

Neither shareholders nor taxpayers were told, much less given a chance to stop this rip-off. The Securities and Exchange Commission, which has been more of a Wall Street lapdog than watchdog, did nothing but slap the culprit's wrist with a measly $33 million fine. Come on, some of Merrill's bankers got bonuses bigger than that!

The SEC's wrist-slap had to be approved in Judge Rakoff's court. No, he said – not yet. He's demanding the names of the individuals who made the decisions to pay these bonuses and keep them secret.

The merged banks and SEC officials are squirming and squawking, but so far the judge is standing firm, insisting that corporate executives must be held accountable for their actions. Imagine that!