Ethel the Blog

Matt Taibbi delivers the rant of the day:

“Here’s the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore.

“And none of it matters, so long as you remember a few months before Election Day to offer them a two-bit caricature culled from some cutting-room-floor episode of Roseanne as part of your presidential ticket. And if she’s a good enough likeness of a loudmouthed Middle American archetype, as Sarah Palin is, John Q. Public will drop his giant sized bag of Doritos in gratitude, wipe the sizzlin’ picante dust from his lips and rush to the booth to vote for her. Not because it makes sense, or because it has a chance of improving his life or anyone else’s, but simply because it appeals to the low-humming narcissism that substitutes for his personality, because that image on TV reminds him of the mean brainless slob he sees in the mirror every morning.

“Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she’s a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power. Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she’s the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV – and this country is going to eat her up, cheering every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.”

The Memory Hole has finally completed its digitization of all four volumes of the Kerry hearings of 1988. The background:

In 1987/8, two subcommittees of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations held three 14 days of hearings on drug trafficking. Headed by Sen. John F. Kerry (D - Mass.), the panel heard evidence of official corruption in Central America, South America, the Caribbean, and the United States. The next year, the government published the transcripts in a 4-volume set that has remained a touchstone for anyone interested in narco-corruption, particularly as it involves US intelligence agencies.

The trouble is, this 1,800-page goldmine of information has been incredibly hard to find. The Memory Hole’s copy was given to me by a friend of the family—Lorenzo Hagerty—who told me an interesting story. As soon as the Kerry Report was published, Lorenzo ordered a set of the transcripts from the Government Printing Office. When it arrived, he began reading it and realized how important it was. He immediately called the GPO to order another set. He was told that the set was already out of print and would not be published again. It had been available to the public for one single week.

Small portions of the Kerry Report transcripts have been published online, but they are only a fraction of the entire four volumes. The Memory Hole has scanned and posted the entire thing.

The National Security Archive has additional information about the hearings, e.g.

Diaries, e-mail, and memos of Iran-contra figure Oliver North, posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive, directly contradict his criticisms yesterday of Sen. John Kerry’s 1988 Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee report on the ways that covert support for the Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s undermined the U.S. war on drugs.

Mr. North claimed to talk show hosts Hannity & Colmes that the Kerry report was “wrong,” that Sen. Kerry “makes this stuff up and then he can’t justify it,” and that “The fact is nobody in the government of the United States, going all the way back to the earliest days of this under Jimmy Carter, ever had anything to do with running drugs to support the Nicaraguan resistance. Nobody in the government of the United States. I will stand on that to my grave.”

The Kerry subcommittee did not report that U.S. government officials ran drugs, but rather, that Mr. North, then on the National Security Council staff at the White House, and other senior officials created a privatized contra network that attracted drug traffickers looking for cover for their operations, then turned a blind eye to repeated reports of drug smuggling related to the contras, and actively worked with known drug smugglers such as Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega to assist the contras. The report cited former Drug Enforcement Administration head John Lawn testifying that Mr. North himself had prematurely leaked a DEA undercover operation, jeopardizing agents’ lives, for political advantage in an upcoming Congressional vote on aid to the contras.

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Mark Ames writes about the stiffy that McCain and the rest of the neoconvicts have for starting an extended guerrilla war in Georgia, wherein thousands of Russians and Georgians will be slaughtered while the chickenhawks sponsoring the conflict rattle their keyboard sabres with the one available hand.

Ames engages in the journalist task of interviewing those who aren’t Saakashvili or on his payroll, e.g. John McCain’s chief foreign policy advisor - a task that apparently presents insurmountable obstacles for the rest of the hack transcribers that masquerade as the free press in the USofA. Unsurprisingly, reality is a bit more complicated than the black (Putin’s Russia) and white (Saakashvili’s Georgia) morality play being spoonfed to the masses by the usual useful you-know-whats.

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“If America goes to war against Russia, that would mean nuclear war,” said a bewildered Alexander Rondeli, president of the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank closely tied to the government of President Mikheil Saakashvili. “As for Georgia becoming like Chechnya, Chechnya is a disaster. What the Russians have done there is a genocide, so Chechnya is not a good scenario for us. We Georgians want to live normally. No, our country is not in favor of starting an insurgency.”

Manana Kochladze, who founded Green Alternative, a leading NGO backed by the US Embassy, the European Commission and others, agreed: “Maybe there is some crazy Georgian–like my president–who would support this, just to save his seat in power. But this would be a disaster. It wouldn’t just be about Georgia and Russia and the US, but it would be about a Third World War. I hope your citizens understand that.”

She added, “I really hope that John McCain won’t win the elections. We understand all the problems we have in Georgia that have come from the Republican Party.”

In our conversation, Kochladze raised the most important issue that no one in America will talk about: Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili’s anti-democratic credentials. The false spin on Saakashvili as the Jefferson of the Caucasus has driven the hysterical talk of going to war with Russia. Maintaining this false image of Saakashvili has also been key to McCain’s candidacy, given McCain’s tight relationship with the controversial Georgian strongman.

Jefferson he is not. A former senior US diplomat who served in the former Soviet Union and the Balkans told me, “What Saakashvili has done since coming to power–controlling the television media, rigging elections, attacking opposition protesters and driving his opponents out of the country and now launching a war against an ethnic minority–I’ve seen this before. Saakashvili is just another Milosevic. He’s the kind of guy who will do anything to stay in power for life.” It’s not like Saakashvili’s authoritarian credentials are the world’s biggest secret. Freedom House this year downgraded Georgia’s freedom rating to the lower end of the “partly free” category, placing it on par with such beacons of democracy as Venezuela–yes, that’s right, Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela–and Guinea Bissau.

Georgia’s freedom index dropped below even such basketcases as Sierra Leone and Papau New Guinea, where nearly a third of the registered voters for last year’s heavily-criticized elections were found to have been long deceased. What’s more, Georgia’s slide towards authoritarianism has only gotten worse, as Freedom House reports:

Georgia’s political rights rating declined from 3 to 4 due to the restrictions placed on political opposition following the November 2007 emergency declaration, and the civil liberties rating declined from 3 to 4 due to the circumscription of media and expression in the aftermath of the November protests.

Georgians took to the streets to oppose President Mikheil Saakashvili in October and November 2007, turning out in the largest numbers since the 2003 “Rose Revolution,” which swept Saakashvili to power. The authorities violently dispersed the demonstrators, causing hundreds of injuries, and imposed a state of emergency on November 7. The next day, Saakashvili called a snap presidential election for January 5, 2008. The state of emergency, which remained in place until November 16, banned all news broadcasts except state-controlled television and restricted public assembly. Also in 2007, former defense minister Irakli Okruashvili, a onetime Saakashvili ally who subsequently emerged as a principal political rival, was charged with corruption, jailed, and then quickly released.

That report came out a few months ago. Since then, things have deteriorated even further. The OSCE’s election monitoring arm just released a damning report about May’s parliamentary elections. As Reuters reported last week:

Ballot-box stuffing, beatings of opposition activists, biased news coverage and government officials campaigning for President Mikheil Saakashvili’s party tainted Georgia’s parliamentary elections this year, Europe’s main election watchdog said on Tuesday.

And yet McCain, whose top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, was paid nearly one million dollars by Saakashvili to lobby his interests, described Georgia last month as a “tiny little democracy.” Saakashvili, meanwhile, bragged that he speaks to McCain “several times a day.” One wonders, what do they speak about? Do they avoid touchy issues like the recent Reporters Without Borders report denouncing Saakashvili for stomping on the media and restricting access to the internet?

Almost all of the Georgian TV stations support President Mikhail Saakashvili and the only opposition station, Kavkasia, is having difficulty broadcasting.

One person who knows all too well how seriously Saakashvili has undermined Georgia’s democracy is David Usupashvili, leader of the Georgian Republican Party. Usupashvili used to be an ally of Saakashvili’s until his strongman tactics pushed him into opposition. Last October, Usupashvili was in Washington meeting with government officials, warning them about Saakashvili. Shortly after he returned to Tbilisi, Saakashvili sent his troops on protesters and declared martial law. “This man is very dangerous for Georgia and for the world,” said Usapashvili, whose party is pro-American and supports Georgia’s entry into NATO.

“Any aid packages from the US and EU for Georgia should be accompanied by strict conditions for democratization in our country: that means opening up the electronic media to all sides, increasing the parliament’s power [Georgia’s constitution gives even more power to Saakashvili than Russia gives to its president, he says], and organizing parliamentary elections under very close observation by the OSCE. Unfortunately, the situation with Georgian democracy is so bad that we need the OSCE to administer the elections, just as we had to do in 2003.”

The Freedom House report goes further, decrying Saakashvili’s total control over the judiciary, a brutal prison system and trafficking in women. As Kochladze notes, Saakashvili’s Georgia looks disturbingly similar to Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Even Saakashvili’s closest allies have turned against him. Nino Burjanadze, a major figure in Georgian politics who led the Rose Revolution with Saakashvili, quit his party this past May, criticizing his democracy credentials.

Last week, Burjanadze dropped a bombshell when she called for an investigation into how last month’s war really started–sharply implying that Saakashvili was at least as responsible as Putin for launching the war, and letting it be known that she is considering running against her former ally. “I consider it very important to hold a serious investigation into what led to those events,” Nino Burjanadze told a news conference. “The time to ask questions has come.”

McCain, however, is so deep in bed with the increasingly unpopular Georgian strongman that he will do whatever it takes to keep word of Saakashvili’s Putin-like record a big secret. Usupashvili recounted a disturbing and revealing episode from McCain’s famous trip to Georgia in August, 2006, which shows just how blind–willfully or otherwise–McCain is to Saakashvili’s authoritarian nature.

That year, Georgia’s local elections were to be held in December. But on the day that McCain arrived in late August, Saakashvili signed a secret presidential decree calling for local elections in forty days. According to the Georgian election laws, the decree should be published immediately, since parties only have two days to submit their candidate list.

“Instead, Saakashvili kept the decree in his pocket, without telling anyone, including McCain,” said Usupashvili. “Saakashvili introduced McCain as ‘the next president of the United States,’ while McCain praised Georgian democracy. Meanwhile, he kept the presidential decree in his pocket for two days, which is against the law. We were only able to register our candidates at the very last second, thanks to help from people I knew in some ministries who kept the door open for us.”

I asked Usupashvili if he’d ever met McCain or Scheunemann; he only indicated that he once met Scheunemann at a party. It was clear that McCain has intentionally avoided contact with Georgia’s pro-democracy opposition. That’s what one million dollars in lobbying fees will get you.

Given this spin-free account of the real Mikheil Saakashvili, what we have is one of the most absurd apocalypse scenarios imaginable: McCain and Palin are ready launch World War III and turn us all into moose burgers in order to support a Mini-Me version of Vladimir Putin against the real Vladimir Putin. Because you know, Mini-Me is just so darned cute!

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Ames continues to explain the wholly unsurprising huge network of conflicts of interest amongst the McCainistas vis a vis their calls for war! War! WAR! in Georgia. They’re in it so deep they’ve even chanced further confusing their lipsticked attack gerbil with the names of foreign countries.

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The issue of “conflict of interest” takes on a new and apocalyptic meaning when you consider the role of energy giant BP in all of this. Palin’s husband has spent most of his adult life, eighteen years, working for BP. The company is even more important to his wife, as BP owns Alaska’s (and America’s) largest gas and oil fields. BP hates Russia at least as much as their tools Palin and McCain: the company has been locked in a nasty battle over its 50 percent stake in Russian energy giant TNK–BP’s stake in that company is key to BP’s stock price. If BP loses TNK to Putin’s goons, then billions could be wiped off the stock price. That’s something to go to war for.

Meantime, BP all but controls Georgia thanks to the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, in which BP is the largest stakeholder. As Manana Kochladze explained, the pipeline was supposed to bring in huge benefits to average Georgians, raising the country out of its dire economic straits. Instead, “very little if any of those revenues have gone to social programs or environmental protection. Instead, the military budget has massively increased to 25 percent of the state budget. The BP pipeline has militarized the country.”

One provision of Georgia’s agreement to allow the BTC pipeline to pass through its territory was that Georgia is obligated to protect and secure the pipeline–which, Georgians allege, was bombed by Russian pilots during the August conflict.

“From the beginning, we said that Georgia would pay more defending this pipeline than we’ve received, and now look at our situation,” Kochladze lamented.

Another figure tied to BP is, surprise surprise, Randy Scheunemann. He earned handsome fees lobbying for BP in 1999-2000, during McCain’s first run for President. More recently, Scheunemann lobbied for the Caspian Alliance, which represents one of the oil majors that pumps oil into BP’s pipeline.

From BP’s perspective, things look very grim. It’s in danger of losing its largest source of booked reserves via its stake in Russia’s TNK. And now with the war, investors are worried about the BTC pipeline. What better way to kill two birds with one stone than by fomenting a war that would bleed Putin’s Russia until the regime finally collapsed–thereby securing BP’s position in both countries. No wonder Big Oil is throwing its weight behind the McCain-Palin ticket. Those two understand the meaning of “Better dead than having BP in the red.”

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Michael Hudson writes about how parallels being drawn between Henry Paulson and Alexander Hamilton are correct, but not in the way the brain-dead media cheerleaders of the bidness press want you to think.

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The two most appropriate parallels are the government’s redemption of “continentals” – paper money issued by the colonies during the Revolutionary War – and the Yazoo land grants. During the Revolution, states had issued paper currency to pay the troops and meet other basic expenses. These paper notes had depreciated, hence the term “not worth a continental” (not least because of large-scale counterfeiting by the British to cause economic disruption here). In the crisis, men with hard cash went around buying continentals at a great discount. In one of the most notorious and debated acts of the Constitutional Convention, the new United States Government redeemed this depreciated paper currency at par.

It was like the Treasury today buying junk mortgages at face value. But it is in the ensuing Yazoo scandal that we find a perfect combination of financial and real estate fraud on a magnitude that helped establish some of America’s great founding fortunes, creating dynastic wealth that has survived down to the present day.

The Yazoo land fraud in Bourbon County, Georgia is one of the most notorious incidents of our early Republic. In January 1795 the state sold 35 million acres to four land companies for less than 1½¢ an acre. This was the result of bribery arranged by James Wilson – whom George Washington subsequently rewarded by naming him to the Supreme Court. (Moral: Crime pays.) To add insult to injury, the state was paid in depreciated currency, the “continentals.” So great was the outcry that a new state legislature was elected, and revoked the sale in February 1796, accusing its beneficiaries of “improper influence.”

But a month before this new legislature was convened, one of the companies (the Georgia Mississippi Land Company) sold over 10 million acres, nominally at 10¢ cents an acre, to the New England Mississippi Land Company, which was quickly organized for just this purpose by some eminent Bostonian speculators, headed by William Wetmore. Only part of the money actually was paid in cash, and the transaction was largely a paper one. The company quickly hired agents to began selling shares to the public. Widespread speculation ensued in many states, each new investor becoming a partisan urging the national and state governments go along with the original fraud.

New fraudsters jumped on board. Patrick Henry (“Give me liberty, or give me death”) headed up the Virginia Yazoo Company, which made a deal with Virginia Governor Telfair to buy twenty million acres of land at a penny an acre – paid for with the worthless continentals. The public was furious, but the “free marketers” of the day asked, what was wealth, anyway, but a reward for risk-taking.

After the Yazoo land was turned over to the federal government in 1803, a series of Congressional investigations reported that the Boston company actually had paid little if any of the purchase price. (This is now called debt leveraging.) But the company sued, and lobbied Congress for over a decade to get compensation for its paper losses – that is, its lost opportunity to profit from the transaction. In 1814, in the turbulent aftermath of the War of 1812, Congress passed an indemnification act compensating them and other Yazoo investors with $8 million of public funds.

This settlement helped establish a fateful legal precedent known as the doctrine of innocent purchasers possessing certain vested rights. The ruling was steered through the Supreme Court by James Wilson, who in 1782 (along with Robert Morris as the bank’s president, and Gouverneur Morris) had obtained from Pennsylvania’s legislature a charter for the Bank of North America on terms similar to those of the Yazoo land claim.

As Charles Beard has pointed out in his classic Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, James Wilson, the two Morrises, and two other bank directors (Thomas Fitzsimmons and George Clymer) acted as delegates to the Constitutional Convention, where they shaped America’s laws so as to facilitate their de-accessioning of public property and obtained special rights and charters for banks and other monopolies. (The word “privatization” would take nearly two centuries to enter the lexicon.) After the Bank of North America was so mismanaged that a money panic ensued, Pennsylvania revoked it’s charter. Wilson sued, arguing “that the original act was a grant of a VESTED RIGHT. That the charter could not be repealed without ‘IMPAIRING VESTED RIGHTS, and the rights of innocent parties.’ The legislature yielded, and in 1787 it reincorporated the bank. Thus originated the clause that Wilson had inserted in the present constitution forbidding any state to pass legislation impairing the obligation of a contract. And out of it has come Supreme Court decisions that have given this country the blackest record of validated land frauds and bribery known in history,” for it blocked state legislatures and Congress from undoing the results of overt bribery. (The story is told in Thomas L. Brunk, American Lordships, or A Brief Insight into the Suppressed History of Land Sharks and Their Control Over Government and Industry (Sioux City, Iowa, 1927, p. 84).

The Supreme Court had ruled (in response to John Marshall’s pleading the Fairfax land-fraud case in Virginia) that what mattered was not the methods used to obtain a grant or contract, but the fact that innocent purchasers would be injured by repealing such contracts once they had been entered into (Chandler 1945:74,390). Even outright frauds were held irrevocable by subsequent legislation, on the ground that once a business claim was sold to an innocent purchaser, undoing the deal would be unfair. The unwitting buyer would be left holding the proverbial bag. Myers (1936:217) finds this to be “the first of a long line of court decisions validating grants and franchises of all kinds secured by bribery and fraud.”

The new doctrine provided a motive for privatizers to cash in quickly by selling out shares of fraudulent transactions to speculators and other buyers, who could then ask the state to “make them whole” for having injured them in revoking their wrongful purchase! Likewise today, polluters and real-estate holders are suing the government to be compensated for public laws that prevent them from making money by violating ecological and other real-estate regulations. Their demand is to be made whole for gains they allegedly would have been able to make had such public laws not been passed!

The “innocent purchaser” and “vested interest” doctrines made it hard to undo fraud, if only because the alternative was to restore the misappropriated asset from the stock-buying public to the state. The Supreme Court ruled it preferable to let the first thief legitimize his fraud, leaving the “innocent buyers” in possession of the stolen property. Possession became, ipso facto, nine-tenths of the law. The moral of this story was that once you obtain public assets, even through bribery, it is yours, at least if you make the transaction complicated enough and involve enough “innocent parties” to make any restoration of the status quo ante hopelessly complicated.

The Yazoo incident is only exceptional for its size and the fact that it became a precedent for future practices. In 1835 the Senate Committee on Lands reported: “The first step necessary to the success of every scheme of speculation in the public lands, is to corrupt the land officers, by a secret understanding between the parties that they are to receive a certain portion of the profits.” Sixty years later, in 1895, Iowa’s Governor William Larrabee wrote on how the system had been perfected (largely by the railroad robber barons): “Outright bribery is probably the means least often employed by corporations to carry their measures. … It is the policy of the political corruption committees of corporations to ascertain the weakness and wants of every man whose services they are likely to need, and to attack him, if his surrender should be essential to their victory, at his weakest point. Men with political ambition are encouraged to aspire to preferment, and are assured of corporate support to bring it about. Briefless lawyers are promised corporate business or salaried attorneyships. Those in financial straits are accommodated with loans. Vain men are flattered and given newspaper notoriety. Others are given passes for their families and their friends. Shippers are given advantage in rates over their competitors. The idea is that every legislator shall receive for is vote and influence some compensation which combines the maximum of desirability to him with the minimum of violence to his self-respect. … The lobby which represents the railroad companies at legislative sessions is usually the largest, the most sagacious and the most unscrupulous of all. … Telegrams pour in upon the unsuspecting members. … Another powerful reinforcement of the railroad lobby is not infrequently a subsidized press and its correspondents.”

Gustavus Myers’ History of the Great American Fortunes (1936, pp. 218ff.) gives the details of this and other frauds that have shaped American history. The moral is that great gifts to insiders have effects that will last centuries. That is what is being threatened today with Mr. Paulson’s “clean” giveaway to his Wall Street clients.

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Max Keiser supplies the fun rant of the day:

“We have a treasury secretary in America - Hank Paulson. I’m afraid he’s gone insane. He’s become like the Colonel Kurtz of Treasury Secretaries. He’s gone native. He’s co-opted trillions of dollars of American taxpayers’ money and he’s playing hedge fund like a rogue trader. We have got a rogue trader in the Treasury Secretary’s office. He’s being aided and abetted by Ben Bernanke who’s been discredited as the entire Federal Reserve Bank has been utterly discredited. We’re looking at a possible inflationary depression in America and the worse is yet to come, much worse is yet to come.”"To pay for all this insanity from Hank Paulson, they have two options. They can either raise taxes or they can inflate the money supply. They can destroy these things US dollars [waves a dollar bill at the camera]. Dollars 30 years ago used to be backed by this stuff - gold [waves a gold coin at the camera]. Now thanks to Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke US dollars are backed by these - bananas [waves a banana at the camera]. They’re absolutely worthless. Anyone buying US dollars today is going to lose money.”

“For the average American, this is what they will experience. The price of food and oil are going to skyrocket due to hyperinflation. The only way they can possibly pay for all these bailouts is to inflate the money supply. This means hyperinflation in America like you had in Germany in the 1920s. This is what the average American will experience: destitution, poverty, social unrest due to flagrant bank mismanagement - and it could have been avoided. But unfortunately the banks in the USA are run by greedy, insane private marketeers and this is the result.”

“It’s not really a doomsday scenario for the rest of the world. Take Iran for example, you’ve got a lot of oil and gas. Those prices are going to go up. China has huge savings. The Indian people have huge gold reserves. For the rest of the world this is actually a fantastic thing. Only the US and Britain are going to experience this horrible disconnection with the rest of the world economy. So it’s a doomsday for them but there’s a certain symmetry here. They spent 20 or 30 years with this neoliberal model hoisting trillions of dollars of debt onto themselves and now it’s gone belly up.”

“Well if you go back to the 1970’s when a similar inflationary spike hit the country you had Paul Volker who was an excellent Fed Chairman, probably the best of the past 100 years - much better than Alan Greenspan or Ben Bernanke who have really discredited the Federal Reserve Bank. Paul Volker at that time did what had to be done which was which was to raise interest rates. You’ve got to force the recession’s last depression onto the American economy but it’s necessary. This is what the next president is going to face - a choice which is not going to be tenable for the American people. They’re going to have to experience a severe economic contraction so that there is some balance restored to the economy.”

“Unfortunately the fear at this point is that is that the laws have been changed. Hank Paulson has done a power grab. When George Bush came into office he did a power grab. When 9-11 happened they did another power grab. They have dictatorial powers now. So now you’ve got this lunatic, Hank Paulson with a multi-trillion dollar hedge fund who’s basically running the economy like a rogue trader.”

“Hank Paulson has a multi-trillion dollar hedge fund and he doesn’t appear to be in control of his own mental faculties. He appears to have gone insane.”

“There wasn’t really ever a strong American economy. There was a lot of debt over the past 30 years and this debt has built up. Just look at the average American. They weigh 300 pounds, they waddle around the malls shopping all day. They’re not healthy. This is because there’s too much debt in the system, too much easy money. Cheap money is what created this problem and it’s been going on for 20 or 30 years. Unfortunately the labor movement in America has been decimated. They’ve been told for 20 or 30 years that it’s a trickle down economy and that everyone can get rich in America.”

“The problems are here but the people who created this nightmare are gone. Cheney has already got his Halliburton corporation headquartered in Dubai. He’s already out of the picture. All these crooks are going to be leaving this country. They’re not going to stay for all of the rioting there’s going to be in America.”

“Remember in Karachi a few weeks ago there was rioting at the Stock Exchange because of the very same thing that Paulson and Bernanke are doing today on the New York stock Exchange, imposing price-fixing and government intervention.”

In a developing story that’s developing, we’ve learned from confidential McCain insiders that the so-called “Bridge to Nowhere” was actually built by the big-spending, big-government liberals. We’re told that a secret black-ops team led by Nancy Pelosi and Ted Kennedy parachuted into Alaska and built the bridge over the course of three nights during which maverick Governor Sarah Palin had been tricked into a shopping trip to Vancouver. Upon returning, maverick pit-bull Palin learned of the newly built bridge, and in a mavericky rage tore it down with her bare hands, vowing eternal revenge on the wasteful tax-and-spend liberals who’d forced it down feisty, independent Alaska’s throat. “The day Alaska accepts one penny from you ultra-liberal Rooseveltniks down there in Washington, D.C. is the day pigs will fly over the snowdrifts in heck!”, the mavericky, feisty, pit-bully Palin is reported to have said. The scrap metal was then feistily sold on ebay and the huge profits used to shore up the wall used to keep the Russians from invading via Bering Strait. In an interesting (and developing) side-story, we’ve also been told that Chuck Norris personally flew to Alaska to keep Barack Obama from raping the feisty Governor’s children while she tore down the bridge. Developing…