If BS were poetry we would all be millionaires. That’s what my aunt would say.

In September 2007, with Wall Street confronting a crisis caused by too many souring mortgages, Citigroup executives gathered in a wood-paneled library to assess their own well-being.

There, Citigroup’s chief executive, Charles O. Prince III, learned for the first time that the bank owned about $43 billion in mortgage-related assets.

That was one signal of incompetence.

Here’s the second.

He [Prince] asked Thomas G. Maheras, who oversaw trading at the bank, whether everything was O.K.

Mr. Maheras told his boss that no big losses were looming, according to people briefed on the meeting who would speak only on the condition that they not be named.

For months, Mr. Maheras’s reassurances to others at Citigroup had quieted internal concerns about the bank’s vulnerabilities.

And, finally:

…a risk-management team was dispatched to more rigorously examine Citigroup’s huge mortgage-related holdings. They were too late, however: within several weeks, Citigroup would announce billions of dollars in losses.

Normally, a big bank would never allow the word of just one executive to carry so much weight. Instead, it would have its risk managers aggressively look over any shoulder and guard against trading or lending excesses.

Complete incompetence? Or, greed?

And as the credit crisis appears to be entering another treacherous phase despite a $700 billion federal bailout, Citigroup’s woes are emblematic of the haphazard management and rush to riches that enveloped all of Wall Street. All across the banking business, easy profits and a booming housing market led many prominent financiers to overlook the dangers they courted.

And, let’s not forget that Citigroup was neck deep in Enron.

Citigroup was ensnared in murky financial dealings with the defunct energy company Enron, which drew the attention of federal investigators; it was criticized by law enforcement officials for the role one of its prominent research analysts played during the telecom bubble several years ago; and it found itself in the middle of regulatory violations in Britain and Japan.

Apparently, Citigroup was the only one who didn’t see it coming home to roost on Citi’s doorstep.

To some, the misery at Citigroup is no surprise. Lynn Turner, a former chief accountant with the Securities and Exchange Commission, said the bank’s balkanized culture and pell-mell management made problems inevitable.

“If you’re an entity of this size,” he said, “if you don’t have controls, if you don’t have the right culture and you don’t have people accountable for the risks that they are taking, you’re Citigroup.”

We see a similar scenario all up and down Wall Street and Park Avenue. Are they, the Wall Street Welfare Group, being asked to submit a plan for better management before receiving taxpayer dollars?

I guess I’m feeling a little hustled. Paulson demanded money for his bailout buddies, with little explanation. In fact, Paulson seemed to pull off a pretty good hustle. Confuse the issue, say that it is too complicated for the average man to understand, engage in fast talk and double-speak, stare down your Congress. The rule of the sale is whoever breaks eye contact first loses. Congress blinked. We lost.

That was round one. Is Congress going to step in and stop the give-aways? Or, are they going to continue to cower when Paulson walks in? Frankly, I would like for Congress to stand up to the bankers and Paulson the way they did to the automakers.

That won’t happen. Congress has cars. But, they may need more money from the banks someday. They just don’t have the balls to end the Wall Street Welfare plan.