Word reaches me Lloyd Bankfine was allegedly out on the town at the weekend, having some fun and issuing his usual ration of racial slurs against the President. You might say that Goldmans lost the moral high ground, and I might counter that they were always in the ethical sewer anyway. Lloyd’s main delight was at the insulting level of the fine. ‘Screw what Warren thinks’ wrote a Huffpost threader last Friday, ‘For we shareholders, this is great news’.

“They [the SEC] have won against the most powerful adversary on Wall Street,” said John Coffee, a professor at Columbia Law School, yesterday, “They see this as a vindication of the principle that you have to make adequate disclosures. They now consider this a precedent.”

Well bully for them Columbia guy, but we need to establish the principle of not hiding the scam behind the deal? Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

A Calfornian lawyer comments: “Goldman was the big, bad shark to catch, but you could find dirt in every organisation”.

So, lots of bad guys still to apprehend, then….but nil desperandum, because one of them is leaving jail to make more room for the next lot.

The decision to release Conrad Black by an appeals court yesterday followed a ruling by the US Supreme Court in June; it found that prosecutors wrongly applied the the so-called “honest services” law in their case against the former Daily Telegraph owner ‘Lord’ Black. I’m at a loss to understand how that matters given the entire range of charges – especially as the original Court Judge observed:

“I cannot understand how somebody of your stature could engage in the conduct you engaged in and put everything at risk. In this country, no one is above the law.”

Sorry Judge Amy old duck, but clearly you were wrong.

Meanwhile, people are still trying to get to the bottom of BP’s barrel in relation to whether the oil-giant had anything to do with al-Megrahi’s release. The Lockerbie bomber is (you may recall) the man with terminal cancer who is expected to die during the next twenty years. Did BP lobby for his freedom, and if so what favours were they looking for from Gadaffi – “Please bail us out in the event of causing a major spill in the Gulf of Mexico”?

When it comes to this ‘story’, I’m completely on the outside: but as Libya is where BP’s sailing holidays generally take place, I couldn’t possibly comment beyond observing that it all looks happily circumstantial for the company trying to move Beyond Petroleum.

The problem from here on in is that, after the last two years, myself and millions of others simply don’t believe anything anyone in banking, business, politics, government and the police says any more.

In a beautifully performed own-goal from fifty yards, the Establishment has managed to unite a few thousand conspiracy-theory crazies with middle England and mass America. And to add some petrol to the fire, they demonstrate with insouciant regularity that there is absolutely no equality before the law.

Perhaps the most glaring example of selective egalitarianism is Harriet Harman, who wants equality for women, and above-the-law privileges for one woman when she hits somebody else’s car through careless driving. “You know where to find me” (her statement to a police officer as she drove away) was up there with the African leader reputed to have remarked in the 1980s, “I believe in one man, one vote – and I am that man”.

I must confess to getting a tad rattled when self-styled worldly cynics comment thread stuff like ‘Yes but it’s always been like this’ – as if that might have any relevance. I really don’t care if the important folks have been on the take since the Sheriff of Nottingham: it shouldn’t happen, and it’s getting exponentially worse.

There is far too much relativist nonsense in the UK, all of which is hugely outweighed by the evidence which those relativists persist in denying. In 1962, John Profumo’s public life was ended because of one lie he told the House of Commons about a call-girl of no significance whatsoever (it eventually turned out). Had one suggested even twenty years ago that Ministers were routinely selling their influence to business, people would’ve imagined you were either mad or working for Private Eye.

To repeat the point: the Eye may very well have been right when it printed that sort of stuff, but the vast majority of even media folk thought it was bollocks. I’m not saying “Let’s keep it secret, then” I’m saying “Let’s restore some trust” – and only actions will cut it in the future. Thanks to Wanglesum, Blair, Bush, Paulson and the whole ghastly coterie, words, promises, undertakings and pledges are become worthless movements of air sleazed out into the atmosphere by human pollutants.

I rather suspect now that the very term ‘moral hazard’ may have been invented to cushion the blow of needing laws that say ‘tell the truth’ – which is effectively what Goldman Sachs and the SEC between them achieved last week. Laws are not the answer, people are the problem.

You have to change the people and how they think. It’s the culture, stupid.