Money or life, which is more important?

***************Boston Globe

Tensions ran high in the hearing yesterday when SEC officials Andy Vollmer, the agency's acting general counsel, and enforcement director Linda Thomsen, refused to respond to questions about the Madoff investigation posed by Representative Gary Ackerman, a New York Democrat.

"You've told us nothing," Ackerman shouted. "You have totally and thoroughly failed in your mission, don't you get it?"

***************Washington Post

"If anyone could make the case better than Mr. Markopolos, and I didn't think they could, about you people being completely inept, you have made the case better than him," Ackerman said.

***************

"... men more quickly forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony."

------ The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli

I still vividly remember that after 9/11, a lady from the CIA straightforwardly refused "the finger pointing" in a television interview and there was certainly no law maker threw any harsh words like the above to CIA, FBI and USSS etc. (Some efforts are on the way.)

So, losing 50 billion dollars can get words out of the law makers but nearly 3000 lives gone, forget it.