The Treasury and Energy departments today announced $503 million in stimulus grants for "clean energy" projects. And while the energy may be clean, the politics may remind some of the soot belching from an old-fashioned smokestack.

Of the $503 million, $294 million went to a Spanish wind power company, Iberdrola SA, the Wall Street Journal reported. A quick search of the Federal Election Commission database shows the company's executives donated to the Obama campaign, with executives Brent Alderfer contributing $2000, Brent Beerley $1750, Eric Blank $2775, Jennifer Bradford $250, Melissa Erickson $250, Jon Fischer $250, Anders Glader $250, Kevin Helmich $250, Kevin Lynch $2300, Kourtney Nelson $450, Carolyn Plemons $250, Timothy Seck $250, and Peter Toomey $300 — a total of $11,325. An additional $10,250 from Iberdrola executives went to the "Obama Victory Fund," a joint fundraising committee allied with the Obama campaign.

"Ten years ago, Google started out as a small business in Palo Alto with just 8 employees," the Google public policy blog reminds us in the course of a post about how it is going to sponsor an event with the National Federation of Independent Business, which (though the blog doesn't say it) is an advocacy group that generally tends toward free-market positions. What a dazzling reminder of the possibilities of growth and value creation through technology and capitalism. We tend to think of Google today as a giant, often failing to remember that 10 years ago it barely even existed. At year-end 2008 it had about 20,000 employees.

The chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, said Monday that "No bank should be allowed to become so big that it can blackmail governments," the Financial Times reports.

Amity Shlaes has an intriguing column up on the Bloomberg wire urging Republicans to back the idea of "sunsetting" -- either limiting the life of federal programs or giving them a regular review. She reports that Senator Thune of South Dakota is "sponsoring legislation that would establish a one-year timeframe to end government ownership of private entities acquired under the Troubled Asset Relief Program and block further acquisitions." And she says "John Chachas, a Republican who is running for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's seat, argues that 'the federal government should accelerate its exit of ownership of banks, insurers and car companies and reveal its plan to accomplish this by the end of 2010.'"

Private, for-profit enterprises sometimes manage to achieve goals that non-profit enterprises are striving for, but without asking for charitable dollars. To give one example, Yivo, the National Yiddish Book Center, and the Forward Association all exist in part to promote Yiddish language and culture. They are all worthy institutions with impressive accomplishments. But none of them came up with a Web-based program that can immediately translate to and from Yiddish. Today, Google, a for-profit company, did, and announced it. Pretty neat. (To see this page in Yiddish, free, thanks to Google, click here.)

In this morning's New York Times, Paul Krugman gets the history of corporate influence in Washington wrong. Mr. Krugman writes: "I find myself missing Richard Nixon...The Nixon era was a time in which leading figures in both parties were capable of speaking rationally about policy, and in which policy decisions weren't as warped by corporate cash as they are now....There's another reason health care reform is much harder now than it would have been under Nixon: the vast expansion of corporate influence. We tend to think of the way things are now, with a huge army of lobbyists permanently camped in the corridors of power, with corporations prepared to unleash misleading ads and organize fake grass-roots protests against any legislation that threatens their bottom line, as the way it always was. But our corporate-cash-dominated system is a relatively recent creation, dating mainly from the late 1970s."

One of the arguments that often gets made in favor of government regulation is that without it, capitalists will pursue short-term profit at the expense of the long-term. It's doubtless true that without the government regulation some businessmen will put short-term profits ahead of other considerations, to the detriment of their customers. But it's also true that, even in a lightly regulated or unregulated market, other businessmen will forego short-term profits to build a longer-term reputation for integrity and service, and, they hope, win long-term profits. How do I know this?

Over the weekend the Wall Street Journal editorial page ran a reverential profile of Eli Broad, the California businessman who now gives away money in the art and education sectors. It concludes, "Paraphrasing Andrew Carnegie, he tells me: 'Who dies with wealth, dies in shame.'"

Posting will be light-to-nonexistent this week as the editor takes one last gasp of summer.

John Hempton of the Bronte Capital Blog writes about the effects of a government health-care overhaul in his home country of Australia, and says that much of the savings come from a monopoly buyer (the government) squeezing suppliers: "Doctors (not specialists) are middle income in Australia now – earning about 1.5 times average earnings. Thirty years ago doctors earnings were maybe 5 times average. The medical schools are now majority female reflecting in part the career aspirations of women versus men."

The Bloomberg wire has an report with some interesting detail about Robert Benmosche, the new $7 million a year CEO at AIG, the insurance company that has taken a government subsidy estimated at about $35 billion, with the overall assistance clocking in at significantly more than that. Mr. Benmosche says he was goaded into taking the job by a Bosnian friend who told him, "How does it feel, here we are moving forward, and you guys are becoming socialists." American companies, Mr. Benmosche said, have to "start rebuilding themselves, without government regulation, government control, government decisions on how you pay people."

The New York Times has a long, front-page article today headlined, "Rise of the Super-Rich Hits a Sobering Wall." The article reports, "The Obama administration has not proposed completely rewriting the rules for Wall Street or raising the top income-tax rate to anywhere near 70 percent, its level as recently as 1980." Somehow they missed that the Obama administration has proposed completely rewriting the rules for Wall Street ("Today, my administration is proposing a sweeping overhaul of the financial regulatory system, a transformation on a scale not seen since the reforms that followed the Great Depression.") And somehow they missed that the Rangel health care bill the White House backs would bring marginal rates in New York City up to 58.68%, which is near enough to 70 percent to make some people nervous.

In today's Wall Street Journal, the Cato Institute's Alan Reynolds tries to debunk the notion that the government spending "stimulus" is responsible for what economic recovery has taken place in America:

Even those who think government borrowing is a free lunch can't possibly believe the government has already done enough "stimulus spending" to explain the difference between depression and recovery.

CNNMoney recently calculated that the stimulus plan has spent just $120 billion—less than 1% of GDP—mostly on temporary tax cuts ($53 billion) and additional Medicaid, food stamps and unemployment benefits. Less than $1 billion has been spent on highway and energy projects. Commitments for the future are much larger, but households and firms can't spend commitments.

Senator Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, is pressing the White House for more information on the email address it set up to gather reports on "fishy" information being circulated about its plans for a health care overhaul. He wrote to President Obama:

The Chinese state-owned Bank of China is expanding in the British home-mortgage lending market, Bloomberg reports. We noted earlier a Financial Times article reporting that "the three largest banks in the world by market capitalisation are all Chinese." One wonders whether the presence of state-owned firms as full participants in ostensibly capitalist and free-market economies tends to erode the expectation or norm that firms will be privately owned.