The bailout bill resulted in $700 billion of taxpayer funds, much of it going to Wall Street firms who will pay out an estimated $70 billion in bonuses this year.  So what do people from Wall Street buy with their profits from engineering housing bubbles and the resulting bailouts?  Check out the top contributors to the two leading candidates…

John McCain: Barack Obama:
Merrill Lynch $359,070 University of California $909,283
Citigroup Inc $296,151 Goldman Sachs $874,207
Morgan Stanley $262,777 Harvard University $717,230
Goldman Sachs $228,695 Microsoft Corp $714,108
JPMorgan Chase & Co $215,042 Google Inc $701,099
US Government $195,505 JPMorgan Chase & Co $581,460
AT&T Inc $185,063 Citigroup Inc $581,216
Credit Suisse Group $178,053 National Amusements Inc $543,859
PricewaterhouseCoopers $166,470 Time Warner $508,148
Blank Rome LLP $161,826 Sidley Austin LLP $492,445
Wachovia Corp $159,107 Stanford University $481,199
US Army $158,170 Skadden, Arps et al $473,424
UBS AG $147,465 Wilmerhale Llp $466,679
Bank of America $143,026 UBS AG $454,795
Greenberg Traurig LLP $142,137 Latham & Watkins $426,924
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher $141,446 Columbia University $426,516
US Dept of Defense $129,725 Morgan Stanley $425,102
FedEx Corp $125,654 IBM Corp $415,196
Lehman Brothers $115,707 University of Chicago $414,555
Bear Stearns $113,050 US Government $400,819

Learn more at opensecrets.org

12 Comments

  1. I’m reading this topic, and the related ones about the overall financial coup d’etat. Looking at Obama and his utter lack of experience, I’m wondering about George Soros. I thought I’d heard, during the 2008 election, about a “billionaire’s club?” It presumably was a few individuals who were trying to take over the system along the lines of the “one-world government” conspiracy theories.

    But now, reading all this, I’m not so sure it’s a wild conspiracy theory anymore. Is Soros actually behind a lot of what’s happening? If there’s any credibility to it, then the next step would be to engineer the collapse of the US dollar for the purpose of initiating a new currency. But I don’t see the advantage. If everyone loses their money around the world, where does “wealth” continue to exist?

  2. Genvieve:

    There are several reasons, many of which are not explictly understood by the people involved.

    First most large universities are large government contractors, particularly defense contractors. If you look at the rankings of the largest federal contractors and defense contractors that I have posted, you will see that University of California has ranked high in the rankings for years.

    Second, universities such as Harvard are part of a private business. Harvard University is part of Harvard Corporation. The University is a cost effective way of building a personnel network that feeds the Harvard Endowment, including with access to knowledge that comes from government
    contracts. In essence, the university goal is to support and feed the intergenerational investment capital and syndicate that it serves. It is worth studying the Harvard model as it is one of the most successful business/organized crime models on the planet. For more on Harvard, start with searches for Harvard plus authors Linda Minor, Jon Rappoport and myself.

    FYI — Coast to Coast’s owner Clear Channel was sold this summer by the Mays family, who were large Bush supporters, to two venture firms. If we had access to their investments, I suspect
    that we would conclude that Clear Channel was now owned and controlled by the Harvard Endowment.

    If you do a search on my blog for “Clear Channel” you can pick up some of the background.

    Catherine

  3. Dear Catherine,
    WHY would academics at universities give so heavily to Obama, WHAT do they hope to gain by supporting him? I know they are liberals, but what financial benefit accrues to them? It is interesting that McCain drew NONE of his support from that demographic and Obama was heavily supported by these people, who, by the way, are always poor-mouthing about the salaries, etc. It isn’t a quid pro quo situation, at least not on its face, unless these donations were made with university/federal money and just laundered through the academics’ names by a “bundler”. It is most peculiar.

  5. Catherine, thank you for publishing the list of contributors to both candidates’ campaigns.

    It’s extraordinary that so many of the major banks and mutual funds contributed anywhere between 2x and 3x more to Obama than to McCain. What do you make of it?

    It’s not that they were hoping to garner goodwill from the winner, because by their contributions they made the winner. So – is Obama a closet republican or what?

    Frank Michael

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