Summary: News about banks, Microsoft, Paul Allen's voyages, and Microsoft's funding of the US president

WHAT we often include in our daily batches of links are reports about Goldman Sachs stealing public money to pay obscenely-high bonuses and save managers from atrocious decisions that paid their previous huge bonuses (awards for irrational risk, which they know they can take because of bailouts [PDF]). The resultant outrage has harmed people's trust in the financial sector in general and especially the private banking system, which includes the Federal Reserve (it is not federal).

We have recently shown that Microsoft grows increasingly closer to bankers and adding to its influence in the United States government we have some additional news.

A few days ago in Reuters India we found the following article.

HCL Tech ties up with Microsoft for retail banking

IT services firm HCL Technologies Ltd said on Wednesday it has tied up with Microsoft to provide retail banking solution to help banks in the Asia-Pacific.

For those who do not know, Microsoft uses HCL to gradually abandon US workforce [1, 2, 3].

In the same post about Microsoft and banks we also showed news about Microsoft's co-founder refusing to reveal the purpose of his visits to other countries (and blocking of the press in the process). Now there is this:

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is in town.

How does one know?

By his 127m-long yacht, Octopus, docked in Durban harbour.

What is he up to and why the secrecy? It is obviously unrelated.

Last year, however, we showed that families of Microsoft executives were personally paying Obama. This includes Craig Mundie, Brad Smith, Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, Steve Ballmer, and even his PR-savvy wife, Connie. CNN has another interesting disclosure:

Google managers and employees were some of the strongest supporters of candidate Obama, donating around $803,000 to his presidential campaign, according to the website OpenSecrets.org. Among corporate employees, only staffers at Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500) and Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) gave more.

Suffice to say, Microsoft is also #1 lobbyist in its area. The company is based on government relationships and reliant on such activities. ⬆

“Did you know that there are more than 34,750 registered lobbyists in Washington, D.C., for just 435 representatives and 100 senators? That's 64 lobbyists for each congressperson.”

--CIO.com