Joe Conason Joe Conason is a national correspondent for The New York Observer, where he writes a weekly column distributed by Creators Syndicate. He is also a weekly columnist for Salon.com and is editor of the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute. His books Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth and The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton , with Gene Lyons, were both national bestsellers. His most recent book is It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush . He is also the author of The Raw Deal: How the Bush Republicans Plan to Destroy Social Security and the Legacy of the New Deal . His writing and reporting have appeared in many publications in the United States and abroad, including Harper’s, Esquire, Glamour, The Guardian and The Nation, and he also appears frequently on television and radio. He lives with his wife and children in New York City.

Pelosi’s Toothless Watchdogs

Roosevelt Institute Braintruster Joe Conason warns that Congressional Democrats must not abandon their heritage and lose an historic opportunity to expose the facts of the financial crisis. This article was originally published on Politickerny.com.

Very soon, Congressional leaders are expected to announce the creation of a new commission to investigate the real causes of America’s crippling financial disaster. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has reportedly told Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner that this investigative panel will be modeled on the legendary “Pecora Commission,” which held a series of hearings on Capitol Hill in 1933 that arraigned the nation’s biggest bankers and stock swindlers before…