CNBC has been touting “Porn: Business Of Pleasure” for the last couple weeks, which you’d think would be good news for ratings. However, unfortunately, it looks like the documentary is going to involve a lot of pulling out. Wait, get your mind out of the gutter. I’m talking about ADVERTISERS, silly:

EXCLUSIVE - CNBC’s porn special - yes, a CNBC porn special - is ready for its Wednesday premiere, but not everyone is turned on. “Porn: Business of Pleasure” will give viewers who normally want to know about things like oil futures “an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look inside the multibillion dollar pornography business.”

Sounds fun right? Not for the all-important business of sponsors.

According to multiple sources, Charles Schwab, a regular sponsor of the 5pmET Fast Money program (as well as others) pulled its sponsorship from the program after a preview segment made it seem like Schwab was associated with the sex doc. Melissa Lee, anchor of Fast Money, also hosts the “Porn” special.

Worth noting that Chucky hasn’t bailed on CNBC, just on this particular program. But maybe Schwab would’ve felt better about the special if all the skin-flick actors were rotoscoped?

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Ruth, honey, I need to say some things to you.  We both know you’ve been having some social troubles ever since The Incident.  To make matters worse, The Man took your penthouse, effectively booting you out onto the street, like the newly-minted paupers your husband helped mint, while you’re left with a mere $2.5m to your name. I know, it’s hard out there for the wife of a pimp.  But now I read that you’re thinking of plunking down nearly half a mil on an apartment in the upper east side, and it just makes me sad.

A lot of people would be absolutely crushed if they were thrown out of their fancyhouse, and rightly so.  You, on the other hand, were just handed a golden opportunity, a chance to start fresh somewhere new.  And you threw it away for an overpriced broom closet.

Look, I’ll just get this out of the way. Every single person in New York City knows who you are, and they all hate your guts.  It would be something of a minor miracle if you could find someone willing to deliver a pizza to you, and should you find yourself lowered to taking something as pedestrian as the subway, I wouldn’t stand too close to the edge of the platform if I were you.  So why not leave?

Go to somewhere like Iowa or Kansas or something and pretend you’re living in Central Park, and just imagine what kind of house that $465K could buy you in such a place!  Why, it would dwarf your beloved penthouse.  In fact, for half a million dollars, you could buy Iowa.  The entire state could be yours, and trust me, the US government is desperate enough for money that they would sell it to you.  In Iowa, no one would know who you are.  You could get your hair did again!  Go out to eat at whatever passes for respectable dining there, Olive Garden or maybe even Carrabba’s if it’s a special occasion, and not be turned away at the door!  Seriously, if you show up in Iowa with two million dollars, they will straight up elect you queen, and you can reign over those simple cattle farmers from your spot atop the social ladder, just like the old days, except not quite.  All that could have been yours.

Instead, you’ve set your sights on a 481 square foot hovel whose sole redeeming feature seems to be having two closets instead of none.  Do  you realize that you will have to carry your soiled garments downstairs to the laundry room and do your own laundry, with other people possibly touching you?  Do you know how to do laundry, or load dishes into your dishwasher? What about scraping the dried egg off of your front door, because I have a feeling that’s going to be a daily chore for you. That’s assuming the building’s other tenants don’t vote to block you from moving in, because who could blame them? Life there is going to be tough for you. Any complaint you make will be met with a response resembling, “Yeah, I wouldn’t have to live here either if it wasn’t for your &*#@ing husband,” and you know, don’t even bother replacing your window because it is just going to get broken again later that day.

I did you a solid and looked up what that money would get you in a neighborhood just up the road from me here in Columbia.  Brand-new all brick construction, 3400 square feet, hardwood throughout, granite countertops, stainless appliances in a chef’s kitchen, 5BR, 4 bath, 3 car garage, and lake access.  And you get your very own laundry room, and the other 4 bedrooms can house the help.  Townhome living more your style? Imagine all that in a townhouse, downtown.  Sure, it’s nothing even close to Manhattan, but since you’re persona non grata everywhere except Chinatown, does living up there really do you any favors anyway?  Come on down, we can be besties, and I can even get you a hostessing gig at a nice restaurant if you want to work.

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There comes a time in every Federal Reserve chairman’s life when he must beg to be reappointed to his job.  That time has come for Ben Bernanke, whose current term as chairman is up next February, and the dull process of figuring out who should be chairman after that is underway.

If it seems like just yesterday that Benny came into our lives, it really was.  A chairman’s term is four years, and Alan Greenspan held the post for something like sixty years, despite having died in 1998.  He just kept getting re-appointed by president after president in spite of his efforts to ruin the economy, which is why Ben will also keep his job forever.

Ben’s only real competition for the job may well be Larry Summers, and wouldn’t that be an unprecedented disaster on so many levels.  Timmy is said to have the president’s ear on who should be nominated, and with two current vacancies on the Board of Governors, anyone could be named to the Board and to chairman, kind of like John Roberts on the Supreme Court.

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Citi does some rearranging this morning, asks their former CFO to GTFO:

Citigroup says its former chief financial officer and current chairman of Citi Holdings, Gary Crittenden, is leaving the company as part of a broader shuffling of management.

Crittenden took over as chairman of Citi Holdings in March when the New York-based bank split some of its riskier assets from its more traditional banking business. Citi Holdings contains the riskier assets. His departure was disclosed Thursday.

Edward Kelly, who was serving as CFO since Crittenden switched positions, will become vice chairman of Citigroup. John Gerspach will take over as CFO.

Eugene McQuade is joining Citigroup to serve as CEO of the retail banking business.

Of these folks, I know Kelly is a Bandit darling and that McQuade joined C after not getting the CEO gig at Freddie Mac, which is kind of like dodging a bullet but not really.

Crittenden didn’t exactly have the most pleasant job in the world, being chair of the holding company C created back in January when they realized they had to split their “special asset pool” - and we mean “special” as in “assets that ride the short bus” - away from their banking business. But he did a pretty good job tidying things up at AmEx, so Team Bandit must’ve thought he was up to the job. Guess not. Or maybe Crittenden spoke too much truthiness:

In the book, “The Trillion Dollar Meltdown,” author Charles R. Morris says “Gary Crittenden, Citigroup CFO, may have been the first to tell analysts the truth [about the subprime writedowns in late 2007]. At a November analysts’ call, he was asked if he would confirm the truth that the writedowns were finally over. He said he could give no such assurances. His valuations of the complex instruments involved, he said, were just a ‘reasonable stab’ and no more indicative of ‘where we are going to come out at the end of the quarter than where we would be two weeks from now.

LoLo, Esq., and I don’t think this puts Citi any closer to divesting themselves of Citi Holdings, because we are pretty sure no matter who is in charge it is still going to get a big fat DO NOT WANT from any prospective buyer.

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What’s a better way than beefed-up regulation to prevent mischief by banks and their employees?  Making it a crime to engage in business practices that destroy a bank.  Hooray!

Paul Collier, a very silly person at UK’s Guardian, has proposed a completely sane and workable new class of crime, to be known as “bankslaughter” (it’s like manslaughter, see, except with banks instead of people because corporate personhood is both fun and profitable).  When a bank fails, an investigation would ensue and the person or persons responsible would be punished with jail or whatever the criminals are getting these days.  Chain gangs, maybe?  Did those ever come back in style?  This is some kind of horrible idea, and the guy who thought of it should be taken out back and beaten with sticks or a sock full of wood screws or something.  Clusterstock explains, for the peasantry:

Let’s try to cure his blindness. In the first place, Collier doesn’t seem to have given much thought to the costs of over-deterrence. Bank executives faced with the prospect of a criminal investigation and possible conviction would likely be overly cautious. We’d lose a lot of socially beneficially risk taking by criminalizing bank failure.

There’s also a serious fairness issue. Only those executives whose risky bets blow up get investigated, prosecuted and punished. Those whose bets pay off are untouched. This means that being unlucky in the markets becomes a criminal matter.  Criminality becomes a kind of lottery.

Worst of all, can you just imagine the inevitable Law & Order spinoff?  Jesus, that show is boring enough when it involves sexy crimes like murder, having to sit through an hour of the danger-filled world of forensic accounting might actually be the death-knell of broadcast television.  The police are on the scene, in a dimly-lit office, papers strewn about as if to suggest a struggle - a struggle of conscience, perhaps - and the two leads (Sam Neill and Laura Dern, reunited from Jurassic Park, in my pretend world) are engaged in a conversation absolutely dripping with sexual tension, like you wish they would just throw down on the plushly carpeted floor and get it on right THERE in a writhing mass of weird accent and nepotism, if you actually had any desire to see any more of Laura Dern than you already have to.  A beat cop off in a corner sifting through some rubble pipes up, “Sir? I think I’ve found something.  You’re gonna want to see this.” Sam walks over to the crowd of officers hunched over something on the floor.  Slowly, he parts the sea of blue uniforms to reveal…a junk CDO. *L&O noise* Cut to commercial.

Quite apart from that horror, Jon posits that it might actually make the boom-and-bust cycle of our economy lean more towards the bust than the boom.

Bankslaughter would also be pro-cyclical. As failures multiply during an economic downturn and prosecutors begin to launch bankslaughter investigations, banks would be reign [sic] in their own risk-taking. If you think the credit crunch is bad now, imagine how much worse it would be if Jamie Dimon thought he might go to jail for allowing his bankers to authorize loans to consumers and business already burdened with debt.

All I have to say to that is that if Jamie Dimon commits a crime, he does not go to jail.  When jail commits a crime, it goes to Jamie Dimon.

And remember, you can’t spell “bankslaughter” without “laughter”.

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One would think that after everything that’s gone wrong for Bernie in the past twelve months or so, he wouldn’t even be left with a pot to piss in. One would be wrong, as he has enough money sitting around to hire a consultant to shop for the best prison.

Granted, if you’re going to be spending 150 years somewhere, you’d like for that place to be as pleasant as can be. Being a prison, it can only be so pleasant, but there’s still a world of difference between Sing Sing and a Club Fed, and that world of difference is best summed up by whether or not your fellow inmate has been paid to shiv you in your sleep. Now, some of you who have even a barely-developed sense of justice may be wondering just how this prison-shopping business works.

Madoff’s judge recommended that he be tossed into the clink at a low- or medium-security facility somewhere in the Northeast, to make it easier for his victims to come spit on him.  But the judge only decides what the sentence will be, while the location is left solely up to the Bureau of Prisons, who would generally take the judge’s recommendation under advisement. The prison consultant Madoff hired would basically lobby the Bureau of Prisons to set Bernie up in a nicer, lower-security prison because he’s an old man and not a violent criminal and blah blah blah.

So far, Madoff has spent his time in a maximum-security environment at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York. Hoelter said, “He has been incarcerated under very difficult conditions in these past months. Anywhere he goes is likely to be better than where he is now, unless they throw him into the Supermax . . . He will be able to get exercise. He will be able to do something that makes him productive. He may be able to tutor other inmates.”

Tutor other inmates? This can only end well. But the point is well-made that anywhere he goes will be better: look at the 8×8 cubicle you’re sitting in right now, and imagine being locked in there 23 hours a day. And the light’s always on. And it’s really friggin’ hot.

Bernie’s prison helper has done this before, for such notables as insider trading champion Ivan Boesky, insider trading silver medalist Michael Milken, and Sotheby’s price-fixer Alfred Taubman, so he’s ridden this pony before.

Boesky served his time at the Lompoc Federal Prison, aka Club Fed West. Mike Milken served 22 months at a minimum-security prison in Pleasanton, California. Taubman spent his nine and a half months at the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota, getting medical care on the government dime.

So with any luck, Bernie will be sentenced to 150 years of couch-surfing in lieu of actual jail time.

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You may be fortunate enough to not know about Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt, MTV/E! reality show stars who never miss a single publicity opportunity - but now, they’re making entreaties into politics and finance so that everyone can know who they are.  Despite the attention whores they are, though, we think if you see Heidi and Spencer trussed up and tossed in the back of a black Town Car any time soon, it may not be a stunt for the paparazzi.

The two appeared on Alex Jones’ InfoWars recently to discuss “Waking Up To the NWO”:

“The Pratts told Jones — who is known for his conspiracy theories of a “New World Order” (or, as he feels, code for “totalitarian world government”) — they found out about him after a music producer gave them a copy of Jones‘ movie, The Obama Deception.” And here I thought music producers just handed out cocaine. Hmm.

Now, Spencer has moved on to take on the Federal Reserve. His most recent post to Twitter:

spencerpratt: Americans don’t even realize the Federal Reserve is as private as Federal Express!

Look out, Ben Bernanke. Heidi and Spencer are on to you like whoa, and they’re letting the Twittersphere know all about it.

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