Forbes: "Maybe It's Time To Shut Off The Funding" From Wall Street To Democrats

If you've been following our A.I.G. coverage it would be hard to have missed the way we keep calling for campaign finance reform as a way of guarding against this kind of catastrophe-- the Depression in general, not just some unjust corporate bonuses. Wall Street-oriented magazine Forbes has looked at the same data we have-- and come up with a very different conclusion. Forbes thunders that an honest politician "is one who stays bought" and how some of the damn Democrats who took legalized bribes from A.I.G. and the entire FIRE sector (finance/insurance/real estate)-- some $2.2 billion in direct "donations" for federal elected officials since 1990 plus $3,443,208,346 in lobbying-- i.e., indirect bribes often of even murkier legality-- since 1998, are not serving A.I.G.'s "special interests" right now.

"And it wasn't just AIG," bitches Forbes: "Wall Street in general gave profligately to Barack Obama, and to Democrats generally, in 2008. Yet now, when the polls shift [ahh... so that's what they think the difference is, the polls] all of those politicians who were so happy to take the cash are suddenly pretending they have never even heard of Wall Street. Instead they're getting behind punitive taxes, protesters steered to executives' homes and what both the Financial Times and the New York Daily News have called a 'witch hunt' against bankers and brokers."

Well, not a witch hunt-- maybe an investigation-- aimed at criminal banksters and brokers who are misappropriating taxpayers' money. But to the self-entitled Wall Street set and their spokespersons at Forbes and the Wall Street Journal all money belongs to the Masters of the Universe.

If these donations had been given out of love and admiration, Wall Street donors would have reason to feel jilted. But if-- as is generally the case with political donations-- they were more in the order of protection money, then Wall Street donors may instead feel duped. They might want to ask themselves what protection, exactly, they got for their investment.

...[M]aybe it's time to shut off the funding. Politicians are already gearing up for the 2010 election season. That means many of the same members of Congress who are currently running with the lynch mob will be back in search of more contributions soon enough.

Perhaps folks in the financial industry should tell them no and consider donating to candidates who believe in free markets-- and who possess a bit of backbone-- instead. If incumbents' offers of "protection" are illusory, you might as well support people who believe in what you do. A Congress with a sense of decency and a respect for markets would be better protection than the questionable gratitude of politicos anyway.

Well, I agree. It is time to get the bribes out of government-- and to put the Wall Street and K Street and Capitol Hill Culture of Corruption figures on trial and in prison. Duke Cunningham, Jack Abramoff and Bob Ney were all thrown in jail but they were small potatoes compared to the entire culture that expects special interests to be served up to the highest bidders.

Go back a moment to last week's vote on the A.I.G. bonuses. Who were the 93 members of the House-- six Democrats and 87 Republicans-- who voted that wealthy corporate executives are entitled to get hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses from the taxpayers? Let's look it at like this: your average, garden variety House member took in a couple hundred thousand dollars from the FIRE sector. But not the banksters' biggest advocates-- they got much more, in some cases, as much as senators. Take apologist numero uno, Spencer Bachus (R-AL), for example. He's the ranking Repug on the House Financial Services Committee and his bribes totaled close to $4 million dollars, beaten only by the corrupt Chairman of House Ways & Means, Charlie Rangel (D-NY- $4,276,926) who did all he could behind the scenes to water down the tax-the-bonuses bill, although, unlike Bachus he did vote for it in the end. John Boehner (R-OH- $3,045,809), on the other hand, stuck with the banksters, as did a disgraceful array of some of Congress' most corrupt characters, like Pete Sessions (R-TX- $2,730,126), David Dreier (R-CA- $2,118,538), Jeb Hensarling (R-TX- $2,111,371), Melissa Bean (Blue Dog-IL- $1,725,806), Peter King (R-NY- $1,385,668), John Linder (R-GA- $1,337,577), Steve LaTourette (R-OH- $1,271,387), Randy Neugebauer (R-TX- $1,253,775), John Shadegg (R-AZ- $1,191,961), Scott Garrett (R-NJ- $1,156,599), and Buck McKeon (R-CA- $1,015,098)... all House members who got over a million in legalized bribes from the FIRE sector who defended the corporate bonuses. Coincidence? I don't think so. And I know one Financial Services Committee member they're not going to he shoveling money at. Alan Grayson's legislation to limit executive compensation for companies being bailed out with taxpayer money is being marked up today.