The only problem I have with Stephen Martin Kohn’s new book, The Whistleblower’s Handbook, is that it hadn’t been published when I was trying to decide two years ago whether or not to take the risk of speaking out against the health insurance industry.

I enjoyed the 60 Minutes story last night on the mortgage mess, because it actually went beyond robo-signing and touched on some of the more fundamental ways in which banks have committed fraud on state courts. Sheila Bair, in suggesting that individual homeowners could be paid off as a make-good for this trouble, and also suggesting that the banks could somehow cure this problem if they put enough time and effort into this, either displayed a misunderstanding of the issues or a not-very-credible recitation of the Administration line. In fact, some of these things cannot be fixed retroactively. The individual homeowner would have to give up due process rights for a cash payout that would result in them leaving their own home, and I simply don’t know who would agree to such a setup in the real world.

You may not know that there’s a new round of stress tests for the banks on the horizon. The Federal Reserve announced these stress tests late last year, designed to determine whether the banks could handle another downturn. The last stress tests were plagued by actual bargaining between the administrators of the tests and the banks to get them to a relatively healthy position. They simply weren’t a real assessment of the health of the banks. Similarly, these tests probably won’t include any contingency for mass putbacks of soured mortgages by investors, for example. Therefore, these stress tests won’t be entirely legitimate either.

Whether the even richer Arianna Huffington and her new venture represents the public remains to be seen, but in asking these questions thus far, it most certainly has. And there is an army right behind her if she fails to continue.

In a sometimes contentious call, Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission representatives Phil Angelides and Brooksley Born acknowledged that we might still be in a financial crisis, and that their report should not be seen as the last word on an event that still has the capacity to significantly damage the global economy.

At FDL News, David Dayen covers an article on Elizabeth Warren in which she argues, correctly, that if the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had been up and running years ago, much of the banking/mortgage fraud could/would have been prevented.

That’s fine as far as it goes. But there’s something missing from the polite Ms. Warren’s telling.

While everyone’s attention is on the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, there are far more nefarious sections that demand the public’s attention and action.

When Steven Rattner published this piece on the GM IPO in HuffPo, he had not yet been sued by NY’s Attorney General for allegedly being “willing to do whatever it took to get his hands on pension fund money including paying kickbacks, orchestrating a movie deal, and funneling campaign contributions,” nor had he yet settled–with no admission of guilt–the SEC investigation that alleges he, “delivered special favors and conducted sham transactions that corrupted the Retirement Fund’s investment process.” Thus, it would go too far to call the Steven Rattner that published that piece a fraudster, or even an alleged fraudster.

But a big part of this victory lap is fraudulent.

GMAC, the struggling financing arm of General Motors, whose mortgage arm holds $26 billion of mortgages, just suspended foreclosures in 23 states in a harried, chaotic policy shift. The only thing I can think of to elicit that kind of reaction is the noose tightening around foreclosure fraud.

The Small Business Jobs Act, poised to pass the Senate this week, contains provisions that will do more to damage small businesses than all the decent provisions combined. The bill is another swing-and-a-miss for Democrats trying to bolster their small business creds…