The poll, conducted by Zogby International and commissioned by the business-led Committee for Economic Development (CED), surveyed 301 business leaders and presents a somewhat counter-intuitive look at their opinions of the current state of nondisclosure in the political campaign finance system. Highlights pointed out by the Committee for Economic Development include:

Seventy-seven percent believe that corporations should disclose all of their direct and indirect political expenditures, including money provided to third party organizations to be spent on campaign ads. The poll also found that ninety-three percent of business leaders believe that corporate boards should be informed of the beneficiaries and purposes of the company’s direct and indirect political spending. Two-thirds polled agreed with the statement: “the lack of transparency and oversight in corporate political activity encourages behavior that puts corporations at legal risk and endangers corporate reputations.”

“This poll underscores what business people across America already know: the political system is broken and large amounts of money are flooding the system and corrupting the democratic process,” said Ed Kangas, a CED Trustee and the former Chairman and CEO of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, in a statement. “These huge undisclosed contributions that pay for campaign ads are distorting the political process and are a major reason why Congress has become so dysfunctional.”

I hadn’t heard of CED before reading about the results of this survey. The group’s Board of Trustees contains a lot of heavy hitters, however, including representatives from Yahoo!, Delta Airlines, the Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & Company, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, and it describes itself as a “non-profit, non-partisan business led public policy organization.” Whether it has the ability to exert any political weight in a potentially renewed fight in Congress for disclosure is unclear at this point.

It makes a measure of sense, however, why some companies might be upset with the new system: With more opportunities to give, companies that would rather use their treasuries for other purposes might feel increased pressure to keep up with rival businesses or industries in playing the contributions game. This in turn creates an arms race in which more and more business and labor interests are dragged into the political fight when they could be spending their money more productively. With greater restrictions, at least they could be assured of an even playing field.

Overall, lobbying expenses across Washington increased less than 5 percent in 2009 — higher than the rate of inflation, certainly, but nearly half of the average yearly increase in spending seen during the last several years.

The financial sector’s increased commitment to Washington lobbying in 2009 was driven by multi-million dollar budget hikes in the commercial banking, credit union, credit card and venture capital sectors. Meanwhile, securities and investment firms posted a slight decline in their lobbying expenditures, as did private equity companies.

Those companies would undoubtedly insist — in compliance with the Byrd Amendment, which prohibits companies from spending money received from the federal government on lobbying — that there was a strict demarcation between corporate money and federal TARP funds. But when those TARP funds were used to keep the corporation afloat, it’s a paper-thin wall at best.

Case in point: Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf. His compensation for 2009 — if you count the bonus he got mid-year — will be around $24 million. Well Fargo’s profit for 2009, however, was $7.99 billion, far shy of Chase’s $11.7 billion or Goldman’s $13 billion profit last year. Unlike Chase and Goldman, Wells Fargo didn’t pay off its TARP money until the very end of 2009, just in time to free Stumpf from the strictures of executive compensation limits. And while Dimon and Blankfein didn’t get bonuses in 2008, Stumpf took home a cool $13.8 million on Wells Fargo’s $2.66 billion profit in that year, which was less than half of the profit seen under Dimon’s leadership at Chase in the same year.

Dash notes other executives that seem to be getting paid even as their companies continue to founder: Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman is set to get $11 to 13 million for 2009, even though his company posted an annual loss. Bank of America’s highest-paid executive this year is Gregory Curl, who got $9.2 million in stock even as his employer was coming to a deal to avoid prosecution over the acquisition of Merrill Lynch that he led. And Visa’s now-former president, Hans Morris, took home $24 million just for retiring in 2009.

Obviously, there’s only so much begrudging one President can do.

The meeting was always just going to be political theater. Wall Street bankers were supposed to play their part on the public stage in Washington, and submit to a scolding from the president about bonuses and the need to start lending more to help get the economy moving.

But inevitably public perception will issue its harsh ruling, and it goes something like this: If the meeting were really that important to Mr. Blankfein, Mr. Mack and Mr. Parsons, they would have found a way to get there.

Well, they didn’t. But it’s time to move on. Maybe Obama would have gained more ground calling in for a harsh lecture the 27  members of the New Democrat Coalition — a group of moderate, “pro-growth” House Democrats — who voted against his financial reforms. Via Naked Capitalism, Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment strategist who writes for New Deal 2.0., said the fact that some Democrats got away with fighting against their own party’s financial overhaul package shows the Obama administration isn’t really serious about reform, regardless of its populist posturing.

Even positive aspects of the bill, such as the establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, were significantly watered down. New Democrats — the people we used to call “Republicans” — won concessions that give federal regulators more scope to preempt state consumer-protection laws deemed to “significantly interfere with or materially impair a national bank’s ability to do business.” The change was sponsored by Congresswoman Melissa Bean, the most bought and paid for member of the House (not an inconsiderable political achievement amongst our current political profiles in courage). Bean justified the change on the basis of having “robust national standards and enforcing them uniformly”, which sounds good until one considers the history of federal regulators, none of whom have historically moved when they plainly should have done so. How many federal regulators do you recall actually blocking the most egregious excesses in the mortgage market over the past 15 years? Preventing the states from moving proactively means that we will likely repeat the experience of the 1990s. Historically, the reform impetus has emanated from the states, not the federal government — Governor Eliot Spitzer’s administration being a prominent illustration.

More and more voters are beginning to believe this façade of reform is deliberate — a cynical act of kabuki theatre by the President to mask his own reticence to deal with the problem in an honest manner.It was clear to many of us that the president may not have been serious about reform when he picked Tim Geithner and Larry Summers as the leaders of his economic team a year ago, and essentially relegated any genuine progressive to the Cabinet equivalent of Siberia, as Matt Taibbi recently highlighted.

In the end, on Friday, as Auerback pointed out, bank stocks actually rose, after the administration-backed, high-profile effort to enact the most sweeping financial regulations since the Great Depression passed the House.

That should tell you how worried Wall Street is about the prospects for reform from Washington, where its New Democrat friends are strong enough allies that a scolding from the president means little more than a quickly forgotten moment in the news cycle.

Here are the numbers:

So far this year, the top six U.S. banks have set aside $74 billion to pay their employees, up from $60 billion in the corresponding period last year.

Not surprisingly, this development has sparked plenty of outrage:

The increase in set-asides for employee pay has raised the ire of Washington, where lawmakers denounced financial leaders for returning to old habits and vowed to enact measures governing executive compensation.

“It strengthens our commitment to getting legislation passed,” Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview Wednesday, adding that a committee vote on a bill to increase oversight of Wall Street pay has been scheduled for Tuesday. “The amounts are troubling.”

Troubling is one way to put it. There are two big problems with Wall Street compensation that looks out of line with the nation’s grim fiscal reality. First, unemployment keeps rising and the prospect of a jobless recovery appears more likely every month. If ever there were a recipe for Main Street resentment, this would be it: jobless Americans watching the traders and executives they blame for the crisis raking in huge paychecks. No nuance here.

Second, as Clusterstock points out, when Goldman Sachs reports blowout numbers, as it just did — a record $3.4 billion quarterly profit — and Morgan Stanley records a $1.2 billion loss, analysts tell Morgan Stanley to take more risk.

It’s all clear. The fear is not insolvency. That’s long gone. The fear is not capturing enough upside.

At Time, Justin Fox explains that there are more substantive reasons to criticize Goldman or JPMorgan Chase than just the profits:

The teams at Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase avoided giant missteps in the lead-up to last fall’s panic and are now wresting market share from wounded competitors and raking in billions. They’ve already paid back the bailout funds they got in October, which means they’re exempt from compensation limits and can disburse their gains to employees in the form of titanic end-of-year bonuses. That’s how capitalism is supposed to work, right?

Well, yeah, except that Goldman and JPMorgan played right along with many of the Wall Street practices that led to the crisis. They fought regulation — of derivatives, for instance — that might have prevented it. And their big profits can be traced not only to skill but also to the government’s decision last fall to bail out the financial sector just as the troubles that toppled Lehman Brothers and WaMu and forced Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch and Wachovia into shotgun marriages began to endanger Goldman and (to a lesser extent) JPMorgan. “No one should be confused about the extent to which the public sector has provided a foundation for financial recovery,” White House economic czar Larry Summers said after Goldman and JPMorgan reported their stellar second-quarter earnings.

Now the question, as Fox notes, is whether Goldman and JPMorgan will repeat their past practices and put their highly compensated employees to work once again, fending off financial regulation from Washington.

Should that occur, it would provide the fuel for the return of pitchfork populism, even beyond huge profits and excessive compensation. The backlash won’t be subtle. And should bailed out banks leverage their taxpayer dollars to sway Washington in their favor, it won’t be the wrong approach, either.

In response to expected bonus restrictions, officials at Citigroup Inc., Morgan Stanley and other financial institutions that got government aid are discussing increasing base salaries for some executives and other top-producing employees, people familiar with the situation said.

The crackdown, part of the economic-stimulus package passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama last month, limits bonus pay for the top five executives of any recipient of taxpayer capital through the Troubled Asset Relief Program, plus the 20 next-highest-compensated employees.

The discussions are at an early stage, partly because the government hasn’t yet issued specific rules on the bonus payments that will be allowed at companies that received TARP aid. The talks also are proceeding cautiously because of the political volatility of pay, bonuses and perks on Wall Street, including outrage over American International Group Inc.’s promise to pay $450 million in bonuses to employees in the insurer’s financial-products unit.

Nice to see patriotism in action. Per my earlier post, it’s time to demand that these companies operate in the open. Maybe it will take subpoenas, or public hearings, or a scolding from the President. But whatever it takes, it’s time to get more aggressive in making these firms accountable for the way they’re using public money. There’s plenty the government could do here, such as requiring a detailed and public accounting of compensation payments, so the people can see — and judge — for themselves, or imposing some kind of penalty for companies that try to cheat the public.

The Journal notes that these companies are proceeding cautiously, because they are sensitive to public outrage over their actions. But they’re still apparently forging ahead to flout the pay limits, which were put in place for a reason.. They’re playing us for fools. The question is, what are we doing about it?