Executives from the financial institutions who received funds from the $700 billion banking bailout faced their critics on the House Financial Services Committee yesterday in Washington. The chief executives at the hearing were: Kenneth D. Lewis of Bank of America, Robert P. Kelly of Bank of New York Mellon, Vikram Pandit of Citigroup, Lloyd C. Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, John J. Mack of Morgan Stanley, Ronald E. Logue of State Street, and John G. Stumpf of Wells Fargo - CEOs from the too-big-to-fail banks essentially.

Instead of facing a firestorm, as the regulators at the SEC recently did, they got a "slow burn." One wonders if this happened because the banks are about to endure a "stress test" or because the critics have major employers in their districts who are on the hook to these banks. Maybe they even get campaign contributions from employees of these banks. Even though they were part of the problem, no doubt these CEOs will have to be part of the solution, so perhaps the critics were "looking foward" as Obama would say. Probably it's all of the above.

Robert Reich writes about perp walks at Congress at his blog:

When in 2005 Yahoo surrendered to Chinese authorities the names of Chinese dissidents who had used Yahoo email, and Google created for the Chinese a censored version of its search engine (removing such incendiary wordsa s "human rights" and "democracy," many Americans were outraged. Executives of both companies were summoned to appear before the House Subcommittee on Human Rights. Christopher Smith [(R-NJ)], its chairman, accused Yahoo of entering into a "sickening collaboration." He ridiculed the firm’s avowed justification for revealing the names of dissenters, saying if Anne Frank had put her diaries on email and Nazi authorities wanted to trace her down, Yahoo might have complied if Yahoo’s email system had exposed Nazi Germany to American culture. The late Tom Lantos, a leading Democrat on the committee and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress, asked the assembled executives "are you ashamed? Yes or no?" He called their behavior a "disgrace" and asked how they could sleep at night. James Leach, a Republican from Iowa, accused Google of serving as "a functionary of the Chinese government," adding that "if we want to learn how to censor, we’ll go to you." Smith subsequently introduced a bill to prevent American companies from, among other things, cooperating with censorship, but no one expected it to pass, and neither Smith nor any other member of congress pushed for it.

Perp walks like these may serve a useful public function. Rituals of public shaming are not inconsequential. But they're no substitute for laws and penalties that prevent the conduct in question from recurring.

You have to wonder if Yahoo and Google helped John Poindexter with his - now defunct - Total Information Awareness Program. Hopefully Obama and the new Congress will get tough with laws and penaltites.