Sen. John Kerry emerges as an Obama foreign policy bargaining chip as he travels to Afghanistan to negotiate the runoff elections there. (WSJ)

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says some TARP programs will be shuttered, but the administration will continue to target the core problems of the financial crisis. (Reuters)

Emails show that Bank of America execs recognized Merrill Lynch losses as early as last November, a month before CEO Ken Lewis revealed the drop to shareholders. (Bloomberg)

Small Business Administration head Karen Mills is touting the health care bill as good for small businesses to offer broader coverage to their employees. (WSJ)

A Goldman Sachs adviser and former Margaret Thatcher aide Lord Brian Griffiths of Fforestfach defends inequality of pay as an economic stimulus of sorts. (Bloomberg)

Sen. Max Baucus says the public option is still “alive” in the Senate. (WSJ)

Sen. Harry Reid and others are inserting provisions into the health care bill to protect their own constituencies. (Bloomberg)

Wall Streeters may decrease monetary contributions to Democrats as they try to cap executives’ pay. (NYT)

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn offers to bail out CIT Group with a $6 million loan. (Reuters)

Morgan Stanley is resuming contributions to its political action committee now that it has paid back its bailout funds. (Bloomberg)

As you may know, LittleSis is built entirely with open-source software, out of necessity as well as out of principle. Over the years the growing OSS movement has given budget-strapped organizations an ever-expanding suite of free and powerful tools to implement ambitious technology projects, as well as the support of a generous community of developers always eager to teach and counsel.

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Sen. Chris Dodd says he and key Democratic leaders in the Senate haven’t given up on a public option yet. (Reuters)

Health insurance CEOs are firing back against the Senate Finance Committee’s health bill, saying it will cost them more in the long run. (WSJ)

White House aides David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel are calling out the latest round of Wall Street executive bonuses. (NYT)

Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski from Alaska has indicated she may back a “cap and trade” climate change bill. (Reuters)

Raj Rajaratnam, the hedge fund manager arrested last week in the U.S.’s largest insider trading case, may have given money to fund Tamil Tiger rebels. (Reuters)

Earlier this week, AHIP caused quite a ruckus when it released a report critical of the Baucus plan and its costs. The insurance group had hired PricewaterhouseCoopers to write the report, which concluded that premiums would increase under the plan. A number of experts proceeded to debunk the report’s findings, the White House and reform advocates were infuriated, and the firm (PwC) later issued a statement clarifying its methodology.

My question: who actually wrote the report? We know it came out of PricewaterhouseCoopers shop of “experts,” but it lists no authors. Which individuals actually worked to put this thing together? Were they too ashamed to identify themselves?

You’ll notice that this November 2008 healthcare reform report from PricewaterhouseCoopers lists a lot of names at the end. So it’s not standard practice to issue authorless reports into the void.

I’m particularly interested in the authorship question because Baucus’s chief tax aide, Cathy Koch, used to work for PricewaterhouseCoopers. Koch is likely to have crafted the tax/financing schemes at the heart of the Baucus proposal. She was a lobbyist at the firm until 1999, when she joined Washington Council Ernst & Young (as we’ve detailed in earlier posts, she lobbied for insurance and pharmaceutical companies, as well as an insurance industry front group, before going back to work in the Senate).

Did Koch’s former colleagues turn around and criticize the very financing schemes that she had designed?

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Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis will forgo his 2009 pay, after urgings from Pay Czar Kenneth Feinberg. (Reuters)

Senate Democrats come together to work out their internal concerns on health reform. (NYT)

Sen. Max Baucus says if health coverage is widened, there will be a scramble to pay for it all. (WSJ)

Sen. Jay Rockefeller says Democrats can’t compromise items on the health bill just to keep Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe happy. (Bloomberg)

Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced advertising is finally back up at Google, which will hire 2,000 new employees. (FT)

Lobbyists Groups Hired in 2009 ($80,000 or more):

• American Continental Group
• Cassidy and Associates

Board of Directors: Noteworthy Members:

• Reed E. Hundt: according to an official Federal Communications Commission biography, Hundt was named Chairman of the FCC by President Clinton and was sworn in by Vice President Gore in1993, a position he filled for five years.  A graduate of Yale Law School, Hundt also served as a business analyst for Latham & Watkins, and continues to serve as an adviser to McKinsey & Company.
• John J. Donahoe: President and Chief Executive Officer of eBay, the online marketplace conglomerate which now owns PayPal, Skype, Half.com, and 28% of Craigslist.
• Susan L. Decker: President of Yahoo! and member of board of directors at Berkshire Hathaway.
• James D Plummer: long-time professor and dean of the engineering school at Stanford University.  Plummer also served on the board of the International Rectifier Corporation, the director of which is Robert S Attiyeh, who served as Senior VP and CFO of Amgen, Director of McKinsey and Company, and Director of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.  (Another board member at International Rectifier named Thomas Lacey served as a GM for Intel and Vice President of Sales and marketing between 1998 and 2003.)
• Frank D. Yeary: Current Vice Chancellor of UC Berkeley.  Interestingly enough, this guy’s biographies seldom reference his 24-year career as a financial banker and merger executive for Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, Salomon Brothers, and the Carlyle Group.

Philanthropy

• Intel Corporation Contributions Program gave $66,622,752 in 2008
• Intel Foundation gave $36,186,253 in 2008

Top Five Government Contracts in 2009:

• $662,852 – Department of the Navy
• $377,556 – NASA
• $91,075 – Department of the Air Force
• $32,560 – Department of the Army
• $6,720 – Environmental Protection Agency (Source: USASpending.gov)

NNDB Visualization

Intel Map

Sen. Harry Reid leads Democratic support in the full Senate for the health bill. (Reuters)

Republican Sen. Susan Collins reaches across the aisle to work with Democrats on health reform. (WSJ)

Rep. Barney Frank leads the House Financial Services Committee to tighten financial regulations, even as he is one of the largest recipients of money from the financial sector. (NYT)

President Obama is pressing Congress to give a $250 payout to seniors to supplement social security payments. (WSJ)

As their profits increased over $3 billion last quarter, Goldman Sachs is working on a charitable giving program. (Bloomberg)

The Senate Finance Committee approved Sen. Max Baucus‘ health bill yesterday with a 14-9 vote. (Reuters)

In a key Republican vote, Sen. Olympia Snowe votes for the health reform bill. (NYT)

Unions are lashing out against White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who asked organized labor not to publicly oppose the health bill. (Bloomberg)

White House Pay Czar Kenneth Feinberg is trying hard to prevent AIG from dispensing employee bonuses, but can’t legally do so. (NYT)

Some of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s closest aides are former Wall Street execs who earned millions a year. (Bloomberg)

***Analysts: Click through to the Bloomberg story and help us beef up the profiles of these Geithner aides. We need to know who these key people behind the scenes in the Treasury Department are!

Last October, in a stunning turn of events at the height of the Wall Street crisis, Wachovia backed out of a deal with Citigroup and agreed to a $15 billion merger with Wells Fargo — the biggest bank merger ever. The Charlotte-based Wachovia had recently collapsed under the weight of its own mortgage portfolio and Citi had come to the rescue, offering a rock bottom $1/share that Wachovia accepted in order to avoid bankruptcy. A few days later, Wells Fargo swooped down with an offer worth seven times as much, and Wachovia gladly accepted.

The Wells Fargo deal confused most observers, infuriated Citigroup, resulted in weeks of intense legal wrangling, and ultimately went through. It was an odd marriage, pairing a Charlotte-based bank that had financed the sun belt’s housing bubble with a San Francisco-based bank that had largely avoided it.

How did the two banks come together? What was the real story behind this deal?

As it turns out, a Birmingham, Alabama-based construction aggregate supply company appears to have played a key role in this merger. Last week, I blogged about this bizarre discovery (part of our Spot.us research project) without offering too much detail. Today I’ll make my case.

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