Money Makes the World Go Round

How's your retirement fund doing lately? Unless you bailed from the stock market a while ago and got into gold or oil futures, you're probably looking at a steadily shrinking number.

In the never-never-land of the free market, the "invisible hand" is supposed to whack people who make bad decisions. And if ever there were bad decisions made, the decisions made by the world's leading investment bankers, brokers, and hedge fund managers, starting with the subprime mortgage mess, would be high on the list.

But in the real world, the "invisible hand" only strikes those of us who lack the financial clout to lobby the federal government for bailouts when we make bad investments.

Thus J.P.Morgan's federally guaranteed buy-out of Bear Stearns for $2 a share.

Why J.P. Morgan?

The mainstream media are almost useless in showing us the financial/political connections that actually make the world go round.

But Micah Sifry over at techPresident did a quick little piece of research that shows how financial losers can still be winners, if they just contribute enough money.

Sifry went to that great online political contributions database, Open Secrets, and asked a simple question: how much money had the employees (and their relatives) of J.P. Morgan given to Clinton, Obama, and McCain. This research, which any reporter could have done in ten minutes or less, revealed the following:

J.P.Morgan was the #3 donor to Obama, #7 to Clinton, and #11 to McCain. In terms of the overall contributions of the securities and investment sector overall, the rankings were as follows: Clinton #2 ($6.3 million), Obama #4 ($6.0 million), and McCain #3 ($2.6 million).

Not only that, Sifry notes that Open Secrets database of investments from members of Congress shows that roughly 1 in 10 members own stock in J.P.Morgan! One in TEN!

(The now-essentially defunct Bear Stearns was Clinton's 18th largest contributor ($145,000). Obama got $29,375 and McCain received $43,850 from Bear Stearns.

Looking at these numbers, it's not hard to understand why the government might be so eager to bail out the financial industry, without requiring a single dime of restitution from the men and women who managed their way into this debacle.

I have zero patience with anyone who says that these contributions do not buy policy or votes. Of course they do: these companies are not donating out of their love for democracy. They want access, they want special treatment, they want corporate socialism, and they get it.

[A methodological note from a grizzled opposition researcher. It used to be almost impossible to come up with such insightful numbers. In the late 1980s, I (or my poor unpaid interns) would go down to the Federal Election Commission, armed with roll after roll of dimes, chaining myself to one of the TWO copying machines at the FEC and grinding through thousands and thousands of pages. Back at the office, we would take turns entering all this data (with the likelihood of introducing even more mistakes than the campaigns had already made), and then finally being able to query the resulting electronic database. Needless to say, no one in any political party, campaign, or news outlet ever tried to enter all the data, so you could never get the kinds of results that are at your fingertips today in Open Secrets.]