Were the big banks all knowingly running Ponzi schemes? That's the question that arises from the stunning hearings held this week by the Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations, chaired by Senator Carl Levin, on the collapse of Washington Mutual, the largest thrift failure in the U.S. Faced with looking like fools or knaves, the barons of the big banks -- from Robert Rubin to Lloyd Blankfein to WaMu's Kerry Killinger -- have chosen, not surprisingly, the fool. But the WaMu hearings -- and Zach Carter's stunning running commentary on them -- suggest that while Bernie Madoff may have been the extreme, he wasn't the exception. (Note: Carter blogs for the Campaign for America's Future which I co-direct)  More from The Huffington Post here.