Heather Booth from Americans for Financial Reform gives us the State of the Financial Reform Movement and lists ways you can get involved.

SEIU makes it easy for you to contact the FCIC and ask why, when families are being forced into the street by foreclosures, are big banks giving employees the same old big bonuses?

Taxpayers in Iowa delivered a clear message to the big banks during a showdown at the statehouse: give up your bonuses to help meet our budget budget crisis. Isn't Iowa too big to fail?

Americans United for Change is petitioning Congress to support President Obama's financial reform package and put an end to Bush-style economic policies that endanger our pensions, retirement funds, and college savings.

-The news this week has been pretty grim, but we all know when the going gets tough, the tough gets going. Here are a few ways you can get going in the tough fight for financial reform:

- Welcome to the inaugural "In Case You Missed It", our weekly look around for interesting happenings in the fight for financial reform. This week we mostly focus on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission's first hearings:

Want to feel like you were you in the hearing room? Catch up with liveblogs from Campaign for America's Future and SEIU.

Mary Bottari at Bankster.com reminds us accountability, and an active Department of Justice, was a key component to our coming to grips with the Keating 5 and Savings & Loan scandals of the 1980s. Too big to fail doesn't mean too big for jail.

New Deal 2.0 has a great collection of posts from the FCIC hearings. They seem to think the Bankers gave flimsy excuses for their sociopathic nature (could there possibly be a good excuse?).

Public Campaign and Common Cause joined forces to give us some raw numbers about the four Wall Street CEOs that testified before the FCIC: their employees & PACS gave more than $43 million to federal candidates since 2000, and the four companies spent an astounding $109 million to lobby Congress during the same period.

Do you have a question for the fat cats that testified before the panel? Huffington Post is collecting questions from their readers and promises to deliver them to the Commission.

Lastly, this one isn't related to the FCIC, but it's nice to take a break and recognize the US Chamber of Commerce had a pretty bad 2009, and 2010 isn't really looking much better for their PR department.

The Securities & Exchange Commission is responsible for enforcing securities and financial regulatory law in this country. In the lead up to and during the beginning of the global financial crisis three men were asleep at the wheel: former SEC head Christopher Cox, former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and current Fed Chair Ben Bernanke.

Accountable America Chairman Tom Matzzie said that these three men must answer for their actions:

It’s about time. Chairman Angelides is right to call Cox and Greenspan. If they decline to appear they should be subpoenaed.

Cox macheted the law enforcement functions of the SEC—one of the reasons Bernie Madoff was never caught.

Cox in particular allowed the banks to over-leverage themselves by neglecting his role as SEC chair to protect the public. An SEC bank supervision program, started in 2004 by his predecessor, was abominably managed by Cox and has been called one of the single greatest factors contributing to the financial crisis. Cox’s 17-year record and demeanor as chairman was always to protect the Wall Street banks rather than investors, the public and the economy at large.

It is easy to forget that Alan Greenspan ran the Fed for most of the period when the housing bubble was being inflated. He sat by as the bubble grew with few critical words until after he left his post.

The last two days, Accountable America has run newspaper ads calling on the Commission to investigate the regulators who failed to protect the public and the economy. Support our efforts.

If you're sick and tired of the unaccountable banksters paying themselves record bonuses after their actions helped usher in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, you should support the Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee. Heather Booth of Americans for Financial Reform does and explains why you should too:

Americans for Financial Reform, and our more than 200 coalition partners, applaud President Obama’s proposal for a Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee as an important step in protecting taxpayers and ensuring that Wall Street is held accountable. The fee the President proposes will help taxpayers recoup some of the money used to bail out the big banks and financial institutions, and it reaffirms the basic principle that the biggest lenders cannot gamble recklessly and then expect taxpayers to pay their debts.

The President is right, that to get our economy back on track, we need that principle—and accountability and fairness-- to be the ground rule for the financial markets.

This is a good first step - but, more needs to be done. Much more. Heather Booth has a good idea:

Passage of a Financial Speculation Tax (FST) is another important piece of such reform. An FST, in addition to raising $100- 150 billion a year would also rein in Wall Street by discouraging excessive speculation.

Robust financial reform, including an independent CFPA, exchange trading of derivatives, and rigorous, democratic, and accountable systemic risk management is also vitally important to meet these goals.

If you really want to send a message to the banksters who messed up this economy, discourage them from making risky investments. We've seen what happens when risky investments go bad: the global economy is brought to it's knees. Millions lose their jobs. Millions are forced out of their houses. People suffer.

The Financial Speculation Tax (FST) will cause the banksters to think twice before risking the entire global economy on the equivalent of a game of roulette again. Let's get it passed.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is meeting to start their review of what happened during the crisis that has dragged our economy into what some are calling the Great Recession. (You can watch a LIVE Webcast of the Commission hearings on C-SPAN or online at www.fcic.gov--January 13 and 14.) Today Accountable America released a new print advertisement--appearing in Politico and Roll Call in Washington, DC--urging the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission to hold ALL the parties involved in the crisis accountable. The ads highlight the failure of former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox to catch the fraud of convicted Ponzi-schemer Bernie Madoff, despite significant warnings to the SEC.

The Commission's hearings are an important first step--they'll feature some of the most prominent bank executives in the industry. But as the chief regulator overseeing the securities industry before and during the crisis of 2008, Cox failed to do anything that prevented the crisis. Cox appeared to be more committed to his long record helping Wall Street banks than protecting America's investors, the public or the economy at large. The SEC was too docile and ineffective. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, chaired by former California State Treasurer Phil Angelides and former U.S. House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas, should investigate the role that officials at the SEC, Federal Reserve and elsewhere played that allowed the foxes to get into the henhouse.

Ultimately we need real financial reforms that prevent a crisis from happening again and put a new cop on the beat protecting investors, the public and the economy. But we also need accountability.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission will meet on January 13 and 14 in Washington, DC in their first investigative hearings of the year. The media is reporting today that the Commission will bring high profile witnesses to the hearing.

From Dow Jones today,

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. chief executive Jamie Dimon, Bank of America Corp. chief executive Brian Moynihan, Morgan Stanley chairman John Mack, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. chief executive Lloyd Blankfein and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair are expected to be among those testifying at the two days of hearings next week.

Panel chairman Phil Angelides, a Democrat, and vice chairman Bill Thomas, a Republican, said they also planned to bring Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to testify under oath later this year.

The Commission has a website now and will reportedly webcast their proceedings.