Capitalism is failing, Republicans are proposing a $700 billion bailout that sounds remarkably socialist, and John McCain blames Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox, once a Republican congressman from Newport Beach, California.

President Bush appointed Cox to the SEC job in 2005, when I was editor of OC Weekly, the Village Voice paper in Orange County. By then, my colleague R. Scott Moxley had already worked like a blacksmith on Cox—that is to say with great energy and just manly attention to the details of Cox’s dark career as, first, a low-level attorney in the Reagan White House, a private sector attorney defending the invariable and (to Cox) inviolable rights of publicly traded companies to hacksaw the limbs of investors, and a congressman whom Bush plucked from the backbenches to head the federal agency charged with protecting private investors.

I could go on at great length about Moxley’s great investigative work on Cox—bottom line of which is that Cox would destroy capitalism if he got the SEC job—but you can read it for yourself right here.

Tags: christopher cox, collapse, finance, moxley, OC Weekly, Orange County, regulation, sec, securities and exchange commission, wall street