“It’s all about integrity” TX St. Rep. Debbie Riddle

Happens all the time, been going on forever. At every level of govt from municipal to federal.

Legislators not following the law? Well, Americans do have a poor reputation around the globe for misunderstanding irony.

Want more irony? Malik Nadal Hasan specialized in traumatic stress.

Wordy

Peak Ethanol?

The Great Ethanol Scam

Not only is ethanol proving to be a dud as a fuel substitute but there is increasing evidence that it is destroying engines in large numbers

More than one major transportation-based industry in America besides Detroit is on the ropes. For the fourth time in our history the ethanol industry has come undone and is quickly failing nationally. Of course it’s one thing when Detroit collapsed with the economy; after all, that is a truly free-market enterprise and the economy hasn’t been good. But the fact that the ethanol industry is going bankrupt, when the only reason we use this additive is a massive government mandate, is outrageous at best.

Then again, the ethanol lobby and refiners have a solution to ethanol’s failure in America: Hire retired General Wesley Clark as your point man and lobby the government to increase the amount of ethanol in our fuel to 15%. The problems with that proposition are real—unlike ethanol’s benefits.

Don’t let anybody mislead you: The new push to get a 15% ethanol mandate out of Washington is simply to restore profitability to a failed industry. Only this time around those promoting more ethanol in our gas say there’s no scientific proof that adding more ethanol will damage vehicles or small gas-powered engines. With that statement they’ve gone from shilling the public to outright falsehoods, because ethanol-laced gasoline is already destroying engines across the country in ever larger numbers.

[BW]

…

–
Systemic risk is the pretext used to rush any and every sweetheart deal through legislative bodies and into the waiting lap of the president.

More the cushion, better the pushin’

Who knew a discussion about Mark-to-market accounting could be so infotaining?

[Hat tip]

Allen Grayson [Wikipedia]

Even their own analyst says so

Bank of America’s Bernstein Says Bank-Rescue Plan Won’t Work

Feb. 11 [Bloomberg] — The U.S. Treasury’s bank-rescue plan won’t repair the financial system or revive credit markets, Bank of America Corp. strategist Richard Bernstein said as he recommended avoiding the industry’s shares.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner pledged up to $2 trillion in government financing yesterday for programs aimed at spurring new lending and addressing mortgage assets that are difficult to value. The government’s prior measures to prop up financial institutions included backing $118 billion of Bank of America securities and injecting $45 billion into the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank after it bought Merrill Lynch & Co.

“Financial stocks are likely to be as toxic to portfolio performance as banks’ assets are to their balance sheets,” New York-based Bernstein wrote in a research note. They plunged yesterday, driving the Standard & Poor’s 500 Financials Index to an 11 percent drop, on skepticism the rescue package will work.

Bernstein said the government should increase deposit insurance, seize assets, shut “large” banks and encourage takeovers.

“The history of bubbles clearly shows that the significant consolidation of the financial sector is inevitable,” the strategist wrote. “The latest Treasury program is simply another attempt to stymie the consolidation process.”

15 ways to delay foreclosure

And live rent free indefinitely!

[Hat tip]

Bankers first

The Economist says that this photo is “one of the most apt visual metaphors for the crisis yet”. I’m not sure that it isn’t literally true. After all, Charlotte is a banking center, and 23 of the passengers worked at Bank of America alone. I’d say that the passengers in the 12 first-class seats at the front of the plane were disproportionately likely to be bankers, no? -Felix Salmon

Crowtelligence

Pithy

Random thoughts this fine Sunday afternoon:

If Obama and his party are going to copy F.D.R.’s policies, why are they not starting with restoring Glass-Steagall?

I expect most Americans HOPE Obama will be at least as good a president as Sully is a pilot.

The military is the USA’s biggest social welfare program.

The bubble bailouts etc. should not be construed as being about markets. It’s about people. Lots and lots of people getting themselves into trouble, in every walk of life.

Obama has the perfect program for an America that no longer exists.

Geithner, Hanky Panky, Benron Bukkake, etc. are the not the right people for us to rely on to solve the financial crisis. They ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM, bailing out their frat bros nasty asses in the grandest cover-up of all time- even blowing the bubbles up to historical proportions in the very beginning.

Recovery? What recovery? There will be no recovery.

Change. Hope. Geithner. Summers. Rubin. Clinton. Biden. Panetta. Holder (wasn’t Janet Reno available?). Gates. Daschle (Daschle? Yep.) Iraq. Afghanistan. War on (some) drugs. Patriot Act. Homeland Security. Suspension of habeus corpus. Same old same old.

–
It is neither “Federal” nor “Reserve.”

Coup!

More:

The Plot of 1933

Smedley Butler bio

American Liberty League

Hat tip

–
God how I miss William Proxmire.