The Obama administration has released their Financial Regulatory Reform Plan. The various political and pundit responses are being broadcast. I could not get past the introduction without choking over the the misdirection of poli-speak. I guess my hopes are for plain speaking and accountability. I do not see either reflected in this document.

Below is the introduction to the report - just the introduction because it forms the framework and tone for the rest of the plan.

Over the past two years we have faced the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression. Americans across the nation are struggling with unemployment, failing businesses, falling home prices, and declining savings. These challenges have forced the government to take extraordinary measures to revive our financial system so that people can access loans to buy a car or home, pay for a child's education, or finance a business.

While the first two sentences are accurate, the conclusion is questionable. The problem for most in the United States is not getting loans, but what is happening to the loans that they already have. Credit card rates jumping through the roof, mortgage loans resetting, the popping of the housing bubble devaluing homes below the loan levels.

The roots of this crisis go back decades. Years without a serious economic recession bred complacency among financial intermediaries and investors. Financial challenges such as the near-failure of Long-Term Capital Management and the Asian Financial Crisis had minimal impact on economic growth in the U.S., which bred exaggerated expectations about the resilience of our financial markets and firms. Rising asset prices, particularly in housing, hid weak credit underwriting standards and masked the growing leverage throughout the system.

While the roots of the current crisis does go back decades, there have been crashes that should have caused caution - such as the crash of 2000 and the long "jobless recovery." What this indicated was that financiers were gaining, but the American people were not. A recovery that does not include the people is not a "recovery," it is profit-making.

I do not believe that the "exaggerated expectations" were about "resilience" but about the ability to accrue excess value indefinitely.

Rising home values signalled a housing bubble, and all honest economists knew that. It did not "mask" the growing leverage in the system, it depended on the growing leverage in the system

At some of our most sophisticated financial firms, risk management systems did not keep pace with the complexity of new financial products. The lack of transparency and standards in markets for securitized loans helped to weaken underwriting standards. Market discipline broke down as investors relied excessively on credit rating agencies. Compensation practices throughout the financial services industry rewarded short-term profits at the expense of long-term value.

It is clear at this point, that risk management systems were not trying to keep pace, but rewriting their risk calculations to facilitate the process of limitless profit-taking.

While "lack of transparency" was (and is) a problem, it was no accident. The negligence was deliberate and systematic. Saying that "market discipline broke down" assumes that the market could ever discipline itself. It is clear, and has been clear since the early 1900s that the market has no discipline. Given the opportunity to act in an unfettered manner, it will follow the greatest opportunities for profit.

Households saw significant increases in access to credit, but those gains were overshadowed by pervasive failures in consumer protection, leaving many Americans with obligations that they did not understand and could not afford.

Households saw significant increases in access to credit as wages fell further short of the ability to increase consumption. The people took on massive debt to support a system that was extracting greater and greater profit with the facilitation of federal deregulation. There were not just "failures in consumer protection," but passage of legislation that removed those protections.

While this crisis had many causes, it is clear now that the government could have done more to prevent many of these problems from growing out of control and threatening the stability of our financial system. Gaps and weaknesses in the supervision and regulation of financial firms presented challenges to our government's ability to monitor, prevent, or address risks as they built up in the system. No regulator saw its job as protecting the economy and financial system as a whole. Existing approaches to bank holding company regulation focused on protecting the subsidiary bank, not on comprehensive regulation of the whole firm. Investment banks were permitted to opt for a different regime under a different regulator, and in doing so, escaped adequate constraints on leverage. Other firms, such as AIG, owned insured depositories, but escaped the strictures of serious holding company regulation because the depositories that they owned were technically not "banks" under relevant law.

This is a disgusting soft-peddling of the realities of this situation. Legislation was passed that allowed financial related industries to merge and expand in unprecedented ways. The boundaries between types of financial institutions were removed. Controls and oversight were weakened or removed. The Federal Reserve under Greenspan, and a series of representatives in Washington, took a "hands off" approach to the financial sector - purportedly under the theory that markets could regulate themselves better than government could regulate. It was the ultimate test of laissez faire, and it failed.

This collapse was facilitated. It was not a "failure." If one gets a car, removes the brakes and the steering wheel, and hops up the engine, it is not a "design flaw" when the car crashes - it is sabotage.

We must act now to restore confidence in the integrity of our financial system. The lasting economic damage to ordinary families and businesses is a constant reminder of the urgent need to act to reform our financial regulatory system and put our economy on track to a sustainable recovery. We must build a new foundation for financial regulation and supervision that is simpler and more effectively enforced, that protects consumers and investors, that rewards innovation and that is able to adapt and evolve with changes in the financial market.

One has to ask "Restore whose confidence"? And one has to ask "What integrity"? There was not been integrity in the financial sector forever. Whatever "integrity" there has been is in keeping the financial sector in check and honest. Whose confidence do we wish to build? Is it the confidence of the populace that they will not be bilked, exploited, and stolen from? Or is it the confidence of "investors" that they will return to a market that will get them high gains? Is the plan to restore the failed system yet reduce the amount of profit taking, or is it to build an economy that works for the people? All signs point to the former.

Institutions that were too big to fail are now fewer, but even larger. Institutions were bailed out (and continue to be bailed out) while the people are totally neglected. Why have people in Detroit lost their homes while those same homes are sold in blocks to investors for as little as $8000 a piece? If financial institutions are going to take that kind of loss, then why not refinance to the existing owner at that same valuation? Why remove the mark-to-market valuation on banks so their books look better, and then let them steal people's homes and sell them for a song.

What is happening here is a massive and direct transfer of wealth. It is being facilitated and subsidized by those same officials who are "stabilizing" the market.

The basic premises of this plan are troublesome to me. There is an assumption that everything was working fine and then some unfortunate things happened. There is an assumption that "things just changed too fast" for regulations to keep up. We all know that this is not the case. We all know that there were deliberate actions and decisions which brought us, and our economy, to this collapse. Many would argue that simply patching up the system that failed is not adequate. In fact, that such an attempt will result in a duplication of the collapse we are still in.

Mr. Obama, welcome to the "no mud sticks if you don't throw it" world of corporate owned Washington D.C.