Follow the money

Profits from two very large financial institutions have been in the news lately. Its amazing how that can happen in an environment where taxpayers have been subsudizing those institutions and others like them since last Fall.

One, JPMorgan Chase, just paid back its TARP money, but there has been not accounting for the funds advanced by the Fed.

Goldman Sachs, on the other hand, did not take TARP money, and again, there is not any accounting, one way or the other, for any funds advanced by the Fed.

Goldman, however, was the primary beneficiary of the bailout of AIG, receiving $12.9 Billion dollars of taxpayer money passed through AIG.

One might ask why them....why not Lehman Bros., too?

One of the things learned early in my career in politics was that when you have questions like that, you "follow the money."

OpenSecrets.org is a site where one can do just that. I highly recommend it to you.

If one checks campaign donations to the big shots, one can learn a lot. Take Obama's biggest contributors last year:


"University of California
$1,564,490

Goldman Sachs
$994,795

Harvard University
$854,017

Microsoft Corp
$833,617

Google Inc
$803,436

Citigroup Inc
$699,790

JPMorgan Chase & Co
$695,132

Time Warner
$589,334

Sidley Austin LLP
$588,598

Stanford University
$586,557

National Amusements Inc
$550,683

UBS AG
$543,219

Wilmerhale Llp
$542,618

Skadden, Arps et al
$530,839

IBM Corp
$527,572

Columbia University
$526,802

Morgan Stanley
$514,881

General Electric (NBC)
$499,130

Latham & Watkins
$493,835

US Government
$491,420"

Now these are contributions that are aggregated by the particular entity employed by the giver. Any of them look familiar?

Note that the two companies in this discussion are high up the list. Also ABS was a beneficiary of AIG bailout as well.

Now for the McCain contributors:


Merrill Lynch
$373,595

Citigroup Inc
$322,051

Morgan Stanley
$273,452

Goldman Sachs
$230,095

JPMorgan Chase & Co
$228,107

US Government
$208,379

AT&T Inc
$202,438
Wachovia Corp
$195,063

Credit Suisse Group
$183,353

UBS AG
$183,079

PricewaterhouseCoopers
$167,900

Bank of America
$166,026

US Army
$165,370

Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher
$159,596

Blank Rome LLP
$154,226

Greenberg Traurig LLP
$146,437

US Dept of Defense
$143,605

FedEx Corp
$131,974

Lehman Brothers
$126,057

Bear Stearns
$117,498

Hmmm. The same guys appear both places, and near the top. Note that the two in last place on McCain's list didn't make the Obama list, and they are no longer with us. That and what is below may point out why Lehman Bros., Goldman Sach's biggest competitor was allowed to fail. Of course, Obama was not elected yet.

Now Goldman Sachs did have more going for it than campaign contributions. They have actually been in charge of making policy at least since Robert Rubin was Clinton's Sec/Treas. Then we had Summers, then Paulson, and now Geithner, with Summers making sort of a re-run in the White House. All from Goldman Sachs.

Goldman Sachs was there at the creation of the bubble, and at the end, and now at the "recovery."

Basically, what we have is the coyotes guarding the henhouse.

Isn't this a wild way to run a government?

Turn out the lights?

Is it time to sing the old Willie song for Hillary? Hard to say for sure, but it's getting close to closing time. Maybe she is hoping that it's true that "all the girls get prettier at closing time."

Seriously, she is near the end of the primaries without having knocked out that upstart from Illinois, and will have to decide whether to have a convention fight. My view is that that is a lose-lose proposition, but it is probably her only chance.

Her campaign has gone much the same way as Rudy and Fred's. It appears she thought Obama would be easy to knock out, and she did not gear up for the long haul. Now she is short of money, short of delegates, and short of much hope.

Will she win Texas and Ohio and then Pennsylvania? The Wisconsin results don't seem to give her a lot of hope in Ohio, and my thought is that Obama is rising rapidly in Texas. If I were to bet, it would be on Obama here.

It is apparent that the Clintons never expected Obama to do so well, and that he would surely be out of it by now. Surprise, surprise. Now the Clintons don't have much of a plan for Texas, and their prospects are declining rapidly.

Just last week they had Bill in Texas, and he spent a day out in West Texas, where there are very few Democratic votes. He ended up that day in Austin, but his time would have been much better spent in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio or the Valley. It was a waste out here.

That is just an example of how mistakes have dogged the Clinton campaign. I suspect we will see more. The whole campaign has lacked the professionalism one would have expected from Bill and Hillary.

Now, it is almost certain to come down to a floor fight at the National Convention. No candidate will have the votes to win before then. There is going to be a lot of horse trading between now and convention time.

This is going to be fun to watch.