Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner forcefully denied the claim in a book by Ron Suskind that he ignored a request from the President to work up a plan to dissolve Citigroup. He further added that the entire theme of the book, about infighting in the White House over economic policy issues, bears “no resemblance to reality.”

It really is incredible to see such a concerted effort to rewrite history in front of our faces. There is not much ambiguity in the story of the housing bubble. The private financial sector went nuts. They made a fortune issuing bad and often fraudulent loans which they could quickly resell in the secondary market. The big actors in the junk market were the private issuers like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Lehman Brothers. However, George Will and Co. are determined to blame this disaster on government “compassion” for low-income families.

In The Monster, Michael Hudson gives us a detailed account of the how Roland Arnall created Ameriquest and made it into the giant of subprime lending. In the process the book implicates the major Wall Street firms, most importantly Lehman, who eagerly packaged junk loans into mortgage backed securities and more complicated instruments. He also notes the corruption of the three major credit rating agencies, who received big fees for giving these assets investment grade stamps. The list of aiders and abettors includes Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, California Governors Grey Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and even the community group ACORN.

Shahien Nasiripour’s article about Citibank’s near-bankruptcy in November 2008 shows how silly it is to expect safety by creating a “systemic risk council,” one headed, I might add, by Tim Geithner. He basically applies the Potter Stewart principle to systemic risk, saying that he’ll know it when he sees it. And somehow, I’d guess that he’ll see systemic risk in any big bank that goes down.

And the icing on the cake is reading reports uncritically telling us the White House is, gosh darn it, really upset that Peter Orszag would embarrass the Administration by walking through those million dollar revolving doors at CitiGroup.

Good grief. You’d think this Administration had a stringent policy of not hiring people from Wall Street or allowing those steeped in its ethics from running the economy or defining the limits of financial “reform” and the purpose of HAMP. Please.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Sam and Charles Wyly, two politically powerful brothers and major GOP donors, with $550 million in insider trading and securities fraud.

Letting the giant Wall Street banks collapse would have ended the high-risk, credit-default-swap casino culture, and the culture of multi-million-dollar bonuses.

I don’t want to say this was completely a technical glitch – even with that the market went down 350 points, mostly on European debt fears. But in a sense, what we saw yesterday does argue for stronger regulation of the financial sector. Too much trading is on auto-pilot, too much is invested in the sophistication of a computer program rather than the smooth flow of capital and judging the fundamentals of a company’s product. It’s like a casino populated by robots and automatic black jack machines. And as we saw, that has the potential to be dangerous.

Our lives are filled to the brim; we have literally hundreds if not thousands of pieces of media throw up at us every single day. We don’t have a single moment to spare to figure out what to pay attention to. It’s mind-boggling. So, here, tonight, right on our stage, Aunt Toby is going to give you The Guide to the Un-News using today’s headlines (sort of like “The Guide to the Recently Deceased” only the bodies involved probably stink more).

At present we have an inefficient federal legislative branch with members chosen on the basis of geography and population. What is needed is a bold refashioning of government — a constitutional amendment to replace our present gridlocked mess with a far more elegant and effective system based on the proven efficiencies and priorities of The Market.