Also, according to the release sent out, part of the mission will be to involve addressing discrimination in the lending and the financial markets and recovering proceeds for alleged victims.

But I guess what really got me thinking was Attorney General Eric Holder's statement upon the unveiling of this new special unit.

"This task force's mission is not just to hold accountable those who helped bring about the last financial meltdown, but to prevent another meltdown from happening," he said. He pledged that the task force - I'll assume unlike Captain Renault - would be relentless in its pursuit of corporate wrongdoing.

If the AG is serious about holding people accountable for the last meltdown, perhaps someone should direct his attention to a roster of willing enablers in the nation's capital.

For a start, let's hearken back to 1977 and the Community Reinvestment Act, which for lack of a better description basically held a gun to lender's heads and forced them to lend to people and communities who had no semblance of a viable credit history or any method in which to meet payment obligations. The cost of that debacle alone is estimated to exceed $1 trillion.

Exactly 22 years later, we were treated to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act which was passed under the Clinton administration (yet his successor was accorded most of the blame for its aftermath), which repealed critical parts of Glass-Steagall, shattering the wall that had separated a banks' savings and investment channels and allowing commercial banks, investment banks, securities firms and insurance companies to consolidate into financial services conglomerates.

That ushered in a whole new buffet of strange and murky financial instruments like credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations that few understood and even fewer cared to investigate. Wall Street firms were basically allowed to run around like 12-year olds after drinking Red Bull.

Then there was the over-emphasis on home ownership, which swelled the portfolios of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac so far beyond their manageable means, that subsequent billion-dollar accounting frauds of both should have come as a shock to exactly no one, especially current House Financial Services Committee Chair Barney Frank and omnipresent media favorite Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, each of whom gave their stamp of approval to the solvency and long-term strength of those government-sponsored enterprises.

And lastly we had the consumers and borrowers themselves, far too few of whom assumed stewardship of their own personal systemic risk by signing loans without reading or understanding what terms like adjustable rate mortgages meant and later found willing and gullible sympathizers in lawmakers who took their plight straight to the TV cameras.

Realize that this is a rather truncated list of what Captain Renault would call "the usual suspects," but it appears that if this task force is to be taken seriously, it has a lot of work to do closer to home than originally thought.