The NYT discovers what FDL readers have known for quite some time: the SEC is a doormat outside the banks and financial institutions of Wall Street.

But it’s not just people outside the SEC who see this. The Partnership for Public Service took data from annual OPM employee surveys of government workers and discovered that in 2011, the SEC ranked at or near the bottom in the “large agency” category, dragged down by abysmal ratings for the employees’ views of the effectiveness of the leaders and the leaders’ strategic management.

Whether seen from the inside or the outside, the conclusion is the same: the SEC is failing at its mission. For the banks, this is a feature, not a bug.

The recess appointment fight nominally only concerns Richard Cordray, the nominee to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Republicans want to block his confirmation because they stop the agency from gaining regulatory powers over non-bank financial institutions if they remain without a director. But a number of other nominees are caught in the crossfire of this fight, in particular nominees to lead other key financial industry NLRB regulators.

The finance lobby wants to weaken the Volker rule that limits proprietary bets by regular banks. They find the weakest link in the regulatory chain and ride that link to achieve their ends. And the weakest link is usually the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, colloquially known as the Office of Bank Advocacy.

With more rumblings of a foreclosure fraud settlement in the air (you’ll notice that the New York Post’s not-believable figure of a $60 billion settlement has been revised down to $25 billion, and that none of the AGs who have repudiated the deal are quoted here), the more significant actions are happening, paradoxically, at the federal regulatory level.

The White House appears finally ready to make a number of financial regulatory picks, readying nominees to replace the heads of the FDIC and the OCC, who have left or are in the process of leaving.

I am definitely looking forward to tonight’s 60 Minutes special on foreclosure fraud. In it, the head of the FDIC, Sheila Bair, will call for a cleanup Superfund to cleanse the country of toxic mortgages.

The Great Muddle Through Plan of the Obama Administration lets banksters off the hook for everything and sticks the costs of the Great Crash on the innocent. The US Attorneys’ role in the Great Plan is to refuse even to investigate the possibility that there were crimes.

This is really the first attempt at the federal level to hold responsible the executives who made the decisions that crashed their own businesses and the greater economy. The Angelo Mozilo lawsuit by the SEC ended up going nowhere, and former Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis could face a lawsuit by the New York Attorney General’s office. But the FDIC’s action, which they are under a legal obligation to bring if they find wrongdoing at a bank they wind down, clearly takes this up a notch.

There’s more about a potential settlement in the foreclosure fraud scandal, which once again looks to be a civil rather than criminal matter. This hasn’t stopped bank executives from whining and screaming about it, however. And they’re joined by the OCC, which might as well be the “Office of Bank Advocacy” at this point.

Apparently, the banksters think that $20 billion is just a “crazy figure” that will never be imposed. The actual homeowners affected by the banksters’ crime, however, believe it is “chump change.”