Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Via Felix Salmon, CNBC reports that Phil Angelides is pretty peeved at Goldman Sachs:

Phil Angelides, the chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, said that while the overwhelming number of financial firms from which the FCIC has sought documents or information have complied, Goldman has not. Instead, Goldman has been “dumping” an overwhelming volume of documents on the FCIC, which has a staff of just over 50 people.

“We did not ask them to pull up a dump truck to our offices to dump a bunch of rubbish,” Angelides said during a conference call following the announcement that the FCIC had sent Goldman a subpoena Friday.

….Thomas said Goldman was deliberately delaying because it knows the FCIC must wrap up its investigation and deliver a report on the crisis at the end of the year. Angelides agreed, describing Goldman as making a “very deliberate effort to run out the clock.”

This is such a classic maneuver. Thanks to technology, however, it’s not as common in big class action lawsuits as it used to be. These days, if you dump a million pages of documents on the plaintiff in a big suit, they just hire a bureau with a bank of high-volume scanners to scan every page, OCR it, and then do full text indexing on the whole mess. Sometime during the mid-90s I went to a lecture given by one of the lead lawyers in the Exxon Valdez case where he described how they had done this, and it was pretty eye opening. Today, though, it’s routine.

But it’s only routine if you have (a) the budget to do it and (b) the time to do it. The FCIC has neither, so in a case like this it remains a pretty effective tactic. But the Washington DC area has loads of imaging bureaus. Maybe one of them should offer up their time pro bono to help out with this. It’s only a million pages, after all.

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate