FOLLOWING THE MONEY

If there was ever any doubt in your mind that your friendly neighborhood Hippie is a complete political dork, this should eliminate it. Just for fun, I was touring around in one of my favorite sites, opensecrets.org, and searching for relevant info on campaign contributions. (how am I doing so far?) When I stumbled upon a few tasty facts.

Now, I know President Obama has said that we need to look forward and not backward, but I believe that we do need to know what the heck went wrong before we can correct it. Plus, Barack unfortunately has to play in that arena, and therefore is a little too dirty to point at someone else's hygiene. I, however, am not so burdened.

As I'm sure all of you know by now, our country has been shoveling money in every direction to stop a complete financial meltdown. The majority of the money that has been handed out has been in the form of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or as it is more commonly known, the TARP fund. This fund was created by the Bush Administration and pushed through Congress with next-to-no over site in the waning days of G.W's last term. Since then, we have seen top CEO's of the very organizations who caused this mess write themselves giant financial parachutes as the economy was speeding toward the Earth.

Out of curiosity, I decided to see who was writing big checks to the Bush campaign of 2004 long before anyone supposedly knew of our impeding doom. Guess what? The names of a lot of the top contributors match the top TARP recipients, whata surprise! Morgan Stanley leads the pack of Bush contributors and gave the G.W. Campaign $600,480.00, In second came Merrill Lynch with a tidy $580,004.00. For it's efforts, Morgan Stanley was handed the 8th largest handout from the TARP fund-$10 billion dollars. Merrill Lynch was bought out by Bank of America who then used their polluted ledger to rake in the biggest payout from TARP, $45 billion taxpayer dollars.

Now, keep in mind, this was way back in 2004 when supposedly no one knew anything of the impeding crisis.

If you want to get even more nauseous, check out the huge sums of money thrown in Bush's direction by the lobbyists for these firms. Bank of America gave $8,790,000, and Morgan Stanley gave $3,120,000.(Some money was given after the crisis began.) The average return on their investments and the investments of other financial giants? According to Opensecrets it was 258,449 percent!

After viewing some of these stats I have to come to one of two conclusions;

A) These companies knew nothing about our financial crises and this was an incredible coincidence. Or;

B) These rats knew we were in trouble and were lining up their exit plan long in advance.

A thinking person has to ask himself a question. Why would financial institutions such as Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley be the biggest contributors to the Bush Campaign if they had nothing to gain? Were they hoping for even more deregulation when they were already pulling every shady accounting scheme known to man totally unregulated? Or, were they way ahead of the curve and already planning how the government would bail them out. My guess is you know the answer, as well as you now know what a dork I really am. H.C.