Glenn, if you want to connect the dots, you ought to go past innuendo. As it is, people are free to draw the wrong conclusions and misunderstand the nature of what is and was going on from this accounting, which is a problem in general.

For one, Goldman claims it held collateral on the underlying obligations owed it by AIG- and it did- and therefore that it was not the beneficiary of any bailout, but instead was indifferent to its occurrence. It furthermore did not request nor did it really need TARP funds thanks to proprietary trading activities that are more than a little fishy, (if you want to look at where their influence in all probability breaches legality, see this area in particular).

That's their story (excepting the implication of inside information), it is factual and it rather refutes all the impropriety you have cited as the cause of its profits. What doesn't refute is the fact that the collateral it had recourse to in the event AIG busted, including direct hedges, was insufficient, impaired and illiquid at the time of AIG's bailout, and would've been all but worthless if had AIG been allowed to go under. The latter is why systemic risk is called systemic risk. Enough losses and everything/everyone is bust irrespective of which balance sheet was nominally in the charge of those losses.

Given that reality, it's fair to say Goldman's shareholders and highly paid employees were not owed 100¢ on the dollar of AIG's guarantees. Or 1¢ for that matter. The same can be said for all institutions more or less (the Bear Stearns bailout was also a preemptive bailout of JP Morgan, and of course, the system as a whole). However, the salient nuance here is that there was a tradeoff between fairness of the bailout and its short-term efficacy, and one of which policy makers are well aware.

Not lost on that group is that the entire credit edifice, (by which wealth is effectively funneled to what Buffet calls the 'helpers', i.e. financiers, and has been for decades), is built on effective risk intermediation. The credit crisis threw sand in those gears as previously good credits like AIG and GE and Citi, etc. were (or effectively were) bankrupted. Hedges didn't hedge and the continuous finance required to make the system run came to a screeching halt.

The 'solution' to that was for the government to pledge its own balance sheet to those guarantees (including those that Goldman purchased on the cheap for trading in risk) in ways heretofore unimaginable. In ways that people of prior generations would've found proof positive that this country was effectively an ex-parrot.

In any case, now the government is making trading situations favorable to the banks to recapitalize them without the inconvenience of Congressional hearings. This is where these latest bumper profits are coming from. Not, strictly speaking, the bailout of AIG. That more or less was used to keep the attendant losses that arose from the bumper profits of prior years from bleeding it dry.

As with the Israel lobby and many other lobbies (e.g. the NRA, Insurance, Big Pharma, Coal/Oil, etc.), I suspect that the bank lobby sees its interests as indistinguishable from those of this country (they are, just not in the way these myopic gluttons would have it). And, as in each of those cases, as I have illustrated above, a highly credulous case can be made (is being made, will continue to be made, etc.). The fact that the case is built on cherry picking, unsupported assertion and other logical fallacy will most certainly not be made by Republicans auditioning campaign ads while Rome burns.

PS There is an interesting subtext to much of this pro-business rhetoric. Goldman and Co would have us believe in the myth of the economy as merit based sorter of winners and losers; that somehow it was rotten apples rather than a rotten system. 'The untermenschen at Citi and Countrywide and Fannie and the monolines screwed the pooch', etc. Right. The only differentiator here is the preordination of policy that favors the select few who can return favors.