McCain's wife vows to give her fortune away to Lehman & Merril Lynch victims

Cindy McCain gives away her fortune to bankrupted Merril Lynch clients

In a scene reminiscent of It's a Wonderful Life, John McCain and his wife Cindy appeared at a Merrill Lynch office and passed out cash to investors who had lost their life savings in the firm's crash.

As investors clamored at the teller's window, Cindy dumped out a suitcase of money, began to ask how much each one had lost, and gave each piles of freshly printed money.

"There's plenty for everyone!" Mrs. McCain said.

Later she told reporters that her husband was despondent when he saw the news of the Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch crashes. "Not just because they were his biggest donors and lent him their corporate jet, but because of what it would do to the little people who put their trust in their social betters, the wealthy."

She said presidential candidate and senator McCain felt guilty for supporting decades of deregulation and carrying water for Wall Street.

"John thought if Wall Street did well, it would trickle down on the little people, the voters. Instead of a trickle of pure, life-giving water, it was more like the trickle out of John's diaper when he forgets to take his incontinence medication."

Concerned that her husband's despondency could accelerate the deterioration of his health and mental faculties, or spark a temper tantrum that would take several of their household staff to contain, she struck upon the idea repaying bankrupted investors out of her own personal fortune.

"Daddy left me oh-so-much money when he died, and since John is a senator, we don't have to spend it on ANYTHING. People are always giving him meals and trips and airplane rides. People that visit politicians are ever-so-generous!"

McCain gave away $30 million before the Merril Lynch office closed, and said she will make it right with every investor, or give away every penny of her $200 million personal fortune trying.

Senator McCain smiled soporifically throughout the proceedings because of a heavy dosage of xanax.

"Karl Rove is taking the day off, and he said it would be best if John was drugged since that's what they did to President Bush to keep him out of trouble when Karl was busy."

Mrs. McCain said if an bankrupted investor needs money before she can get to them, they can go to a nearby McCain campaign headquarters and make a withdrawal.

"Or any Republican candidate," she added. "I'm sure they all feel just awful about how this whole deregulation thing turned out and want to make amends, not just with words, but in the one way that counts: money."

The Sopranos, Bush, & collapse of Lehman Brothers

The collapse of Lehman Brothers made a story from a couple of weeks ago float to the surface: Lehman Brothers hired Jeb Bush as an "advisor."

This reminds me of how Tony Soprano ran protection rackets on construction sites. In addition to a cash pay off, the contractor was expected to provide a certain number of "no work" jobs, where his guys showed up but didn't have to do any work, and "no show" jobs, where they didn't even have to show up.

The purpose was to give Tony's henchmen some legitimate income to make it less obvious that they were full time thugs.

In exchange, the construction company avoids missing supplies or massively inflated prices on them, vandalism, strikes by certain unions, or even extra grief from building inspectors who are on the mafia payroll or whose bosses are.

When a corporation hires the wife, child, or brother of a politician, in this case the president of the United States. A business that hires someone in that capacity might find the investigations of regulators or even law enforcement suddenly becoming less aggressive or even going away--in this case, at least long enough to hide money off-shore and burn the books.

Donations are the more obvious way of doing it, as was the case with Charles Keating and the five senators (including presidential candidate John McCain) he bought to chase regulators away from finding out he was robbing his S &L by making loans to friends who wouldn't pay back the loan, but would figure out a way to cut the loot with him. Depositors were robbed since their money was what was loaned. Keating's S & L ended up costing taxpayers $3 billion for the portion of their deposits that were federally insured. Overall, the looting caused by deregulating S & L's cost taxpayers $125 billion minimum.

Charles Keating's scam is a lot like a bust out on the Sopranos. That's when they get their hooks in a business, use the business to buy things they have no intention of paying for, and sell them for 100% profit, run up the credit cards, and give all the proceeds of the business to their friends and not employees, and once the business is bankrupt, sell everything in the store and the fixtures. It is done in such a way that the Sopranos are not responsible for any of the debt, but the original owner is destroyed financially.

That is also what the Bush administration is doing to us.

They have run up a massive debt to transfer wealth to their corporate cronies in contracts in Iraq and "no work" weapons systems like missile defense. Once our credit is destroyed, they will tell us we need to privatize and sell off everything from our police forces to our education system, to the water from our tap.

Once they have drained everything of value from us, they will move to the Cayman Islands, Paraguay, Dubai, or simply build the walls around their gated communities that much higher and hire more Blackwater mercenaries to protect what they have stolen.

I wish this was just a dystopian, science fiction fantasy, but in fact, it is what we did to South America since the 1970's, starting with Pinochet in Chile, Russia and the former communist countries after the the fall of the Soviet Union (actually LOWERING life expectancy and the standard of live from Soviet times), and just before the turn of the century, we did to Asia, causing an economic meltdown there. It is called neoliberalism by those who invented it, but increasing called "the shock doctrine" by those on the Left who survey the damage.

None of this helps the middle and working class, but instead robs them to put money in the pockets of thugs in Brooks Brothers suits.

How many more times do they have to steal workers pensions, do the "bust out" on some financial institution like savings & loans or mortgage banks, or their attempted raid on social security, before we treat these guys like what they are: criminals.

More on Sopranos & Bushies

You can get Sarah Palin's foreign policy experience in just 2 seconds!

All you have to do is look at these photos of Russia's Big Diomede Island, which can be seen from Alaska.

The Russian island has been uninhabited since World War II. The American one has a population of 146.

The island on the left is part of the United States.
The one on the right is Russian.

Here's a better view of just the Russian one:


And our rock island and Russia's from space:

Man, I don't know about you, but after looking at those photos, I feel much more qualified to talk to Vladimir Putin about strategic nuclear weapons, which countries to let into NATO, and whether we are risking a world war by trying to encroach on Caspian Sea oil or by attacking Iran.

Don't you feel it too?

Thank you, Sarah Palin, for helping so many of us to become foreign policy experts by looking at a rock that happens to belong to another country.

McCain ethics reform: Dept. of Lobbyists

John McCain gives a "thumbs up" to his proposed Department of Lobbyists

Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain introduced a sweeping ethics reform proposal today that included the creation of a new Department of Lobbyists in a speech before the Chamber of Commerce in Velva, North Dakota.

The text of his speech follows:

My friends, I have said many times that I am a maverick who is not afraid to take my colleagues in the Senate to task for their lack of ethics, whichever party they belong to. The problem of how those in Congress relate to big business and corporations is shameful.

Everyday, corporations or wealthy individuals will make contributions to our campaigns and our shell foundations and PACs , or even give high paying jobs to our wives or children, fully expecting tax or regulatory relief, government contracts, or even subsidies in return.

Too often though, elected officials fail to keep their end of the bargain. They make half-hearted attempts to service their donors, then abandon even that effort if some newspaper or website starts to ask questions. Worse, some don't even make the effort in the first place, pretending that the donation was given out of some idealistic agreement with a candidates ideology, not a fee for service.

My friends, there is a word for not doing what you are paid to do, and that word is FRAUD.

Those in Congress must be held accountable and must be forced to do their patriotic duty for those who supported them financially.

Therefore, I will create a new Department of Lobbyists that will exist solely to expedite service to political donors. They will keep a central database of donations and inform donors of the level of service their donation entitles them to, from a letter to a regulator telling them to back off, to five senators showing up at the regulators office to give him an attitude adjustment.

This will also make life easier for lobbyists. Currently, to seek favors, they have to visit each and every politician they will need on their side, wine and dine them, or provide escorts of their preferred gender. With the new Department of Lobbyists, they will only have to make ONE stop. The DOL will then give the marching orders to the relevant congressmen and senators.

The Department will also serve a valuable function for retiring legislators. We all look forward to working as consultants, lobbyists, CEO's, and board members for our past donors when we leave office, but actually negotiating for the job can be awkward and time consuming. There is nothing more embarassing than asking for a CEO job when a defense contractor thinks you only rate a couple of paychecks as a consultant. Just as there will be a set schedule of expected favors for past donations, there will be a set schedule of after-office jobs for favors done in office. If an elected official has his heart set on a certain position but hasn't done enough favors to qualify for it, the Department could tell him how to make up for his shortcomings.

The best person to run this new department would of course be a lobbyist. Any number of the members of my campaign staff would be qualified to be Secretary of Lobbyists, but for his outstanding service in inciting the Georgia-Russia conflict, Randy Scheunemann, a lobbyist for Georgia, has shown himself to be head and shoulders above his peers.

My own story with the Keating Five should be a tragic reminder of why this new department is needed. Savings & Loan owner Charles Keating made good faith donations to myself and four other senators, fully expecting that we could end a regulatory fishing expedition into his business practices. Because there was no streamlined process, we failed to intervene soon enough or thoroughly enough to protect Mr. Keating from eventual criminal charges.

If we had the Department of Lobbyists to help us help Mr. Keating, he might have retired to Bermuda to live off of kickbacks from loans he gave his friends, who had no intention of repaying, which left depositors holding the bag. Instead, he ended up in prison.

My friends, if I am elected, the Department of Lobbyists will be just the beginning of my ethics reform. If I have to, I will go to the gates of Hell to serve my donors, whether they are trying to outsource jobs, loot their employees pensions, pollute the air and water with coal or nuclear plants, or secure oil reserves in some God-forsaken Middle Eastern backwater.

That is the way America is supposed to work, and under a McCain presidency, that is how it WILL work, so help me God.

McCain prepares concession speech for Republican convention tonight

John McCain is putting the finishing touches on the concession speech he will give at the Republican National Convention tonight.

Normally, such speeches are given after the election when enough votes have been counted to convince a candidate he has lost.

The McCain campaign says they already see that they have lost months before a single vote has been cast.

"We hoped that adding Sarah Palin to the ticket would shore up our religious right base and rope in some women swing voters," said a top campaign official speaking off the record.

"We got the religious right back on the bus with Palin, but our polling and focus groups show we lost the few conservative Democrats we had, lost swing voters, and even lost some Reagan Republicans like Peggy Noonan. We shot ourselves in the face."

Another long time confidante of McCain said he is conceding not so much because he is certain he will lose but because he is afraid he may win. "The party has all kinds of tricks to pull the rabbit from the hat from ginning up military conflicts like Georgia to terror alerts to rumor emails about Obama to purging Democrat voters in states where the Secretary of State is GOP," said the confidante.

"But John's basic views have not changed since 2000. He still believes the religious right are 'agents of intolerance' as he said back then, and when party insiders forced him to take one of them as his VP, and one who has all the worst qualities of the Bush administration, the religious hypocrisy, corruption, profound ignorance about foreign policy and the Constitution, and using political power for personal vendettas, John said enough."

McCain will throw his support behind Barack at the end of the speech, and wish his presidency well.

The move is not without precedence since McCain twice approached the Democrats about switching parties during the Bush years.

The McCain confidante said, "John really believes in our fight against fundamentalist fanatics in the Middle East. He doesn't want to see the same thing happen here if he dies in office and the presidency falls to someone just a few steps to the left of the Taliban."

The confidante concluded, "John hopes tonight will be the GOP's greatest moment since Lincoln freed the slaves." The confidante seemed unaware of the irony since the Republican Party platform includes the repeal of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

Iraq's China Oil deal neuters Bush's thuggery for American big oil

Iraq just signed a 22 year oil service contract with China without the profit sharing that American companies have been been demanding with the help of the Bush administration.

This is a stunning setback for the Bush administration in Iraq.

One of the goals of the war was to set up contract's for drilling Iraq's oil on terms American oil companies dictated. The first draft of the Iraqi Hydrocarbon Law, written at the Bush administration's direction by an American consulting firm, Bearing Point, gave 88% of the oil profits for new fields to the oil companies.

In stark contrast, Iraq has just signed an oil service contract with China that includes NO profit sharing, just a set service fee--less generous terms than China got under Saddam.

American companies have signed similar deals, but on short term contracts of one to two years, not 22 like China's, in hopes that Bush would do through coercion what would be impossible through fair negotiations.

This China deal is probably meant as a message to the American oil companies and the Bush administration, who are continuing to pressure the Iraqis for an oil law that gives away most of their oil income, and contracts that do the same.

The message is that no Iraqi government will betray their country by giving their wealth to foreigners, not even with a gun to their head.

This also undercuts the key argument for giving oil companies the bulk of the oil profits, which is that it is not worth the effort unless oil companies get most of the profits. China thinks those billions of dollars of service fees are worth the effort.

By succeeding at his stated but insincere goal of establishing a democracy (Bush once threatened to fire the Iraqi prime minister if the oil law wasn't passed), Bush has frustrated his real one: giving Iraq's oil reserves, the second largest in the world and worth tens of trillions of dollars, to friends at ExxonMobil, Chevron, & BP.

This also shows that the Iraq War had nothing to do with securing access to oil supplies to run our economy. If that had been the goal, Bush would have pushed the oil companies to accept terms the IRAQIS wanted to insure friendly long term relations and access to their oil. Instead, he risked that to put more money in the pockets of his friends.

This is the problem with having a petulant, spoiled, dim-witted rich child for a president. He thinks if he stamps his feet, raises his voice, and slaps some people around, he will get what he wants because of course it always worked on his families butlers and maids.

MORE ON OIL THEFT MOTIVE FOR IRAQ WAR

KEY EXCERPTS:


The 22-year contract is a renegotiated version of a 1997 agreement between China and Iraq under Saddam Hussein. The original contract included production-sharing rights, but under the new contract China will be paid for its services but will not share in profits.

Before 2003, Iraq had oil agreements with China, Russia, Indonesia, India and Vietnam, three of them production sharing. Iraqi officials have said that they are reconsidering the terms of these agreements because of the increased price of oil, a new government and other changes since the fall of Mr. Hussein’s government. Iraq says that the contract with the Russian oil giant Lukoil for one of Iraq’s largest oil fields was canceled by Mr. Hussein.

The government is also negotiating service contracts with ExxonMobil, Shell, Total, BP, Chevron and some smaller oil companies. The length of the agreements was reduced to one year from two after Iraq drew wide criticism for not putting the contracts out for competitive bidding.

The Ahdab oil field represents only a modest fraction of Iraq’s oil wealth — the field is expected to produce 90,000 barrels of oil a day. Iraq’s overall oil production is 2.5 million barrels a day, but the government wants to increase that to 4.5 million a day over the next five years. Mr. Ulum said that the size of the renegotiated deal with China — the previous contract was worth just under $700,000 — could influence the financial terms of future contracts.

FULL TEXT

Cindy McCain: tear up pre-nup to show us how to trust John

Cindy McCain had John McCain sign a prenuptial agreement when they got married, presumably because she's worth hundreds of millions, and as an admiral's son at the time, he would have been upper middle class at best.

Nothing says how little trust you have in someone like a prenup, and it also shows who is very much the junior partner in the relationship.

If Cindy McCain really wanted to help her husband's presidential campaign, she should be asked to make a big public display of tearing up that prenuptial to show that if she's willing to trust Grandpa Asshole with her hundreds of millions, we should trust him with our trillion dollar budget.

If she doesn't, why should we trust him with not just our money, but our country and security?

Bush says NO WMD in Russia was reason for weak Georgia response

At a press conference yesterday, President George W. Bush said he did not send troops to back Georgia in their brief war with Russia because Russia had no WMD.

"Look, I'm concerned when nations cross the borders of other nations and bomb and kill innocent people, but the fact is, Russia has no weapons that can reach the United States and no WMD. They just aren't a threat to us."

When pressed further, Bush said he had his staff review the public statements of his vice president Dick Cheney, his secretary of defense, Condi Rice, and former secretary of defense Don Rumsfeld over the last seven years and found that only two or three countries in the world may have nuclear weapons and other "WMD."

"Look, we know for sure Saddam Hussein was seconds from getting a nukes which he could have used to blackmail the world, and now Iran is trying to do the same, but no one else has that kinda technology. Not even us."

Asked about North Korea he said, "They might have them, but it's not they got missiles that could fly over Japan or anything. Hell, I don't even think they got the Wii yet."

Reporters asked about the Cold War arms race, Russia's history of nuclear tests, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. After consulting his teleprompter and 3x5 cards for several seconds, touching his ear and saying, "Karen? Karl? You guys fall asleep in there?" He finally replied, "Look the Cold War was decades ago. That's ancient history. We can't let history effect how we act in the present. And we don't know that that conflict had anything to do with Weapons of Mass Destruction."

Later, a senior official at the State Department speaking off the record in her shiny new Ferragamo shoes clarified the president's statement.

"I would like to respond to the unfair and frankly conspiracy theory inspired questions posed to th president about Russia nuclear weapons. First, the Cold War was primarily about ideology, defeating godless communism not any particular 'weapons system.'"

She said the photos of Soviet missiles that were frequently published in newspapers and still survive in textbooks were actually part of a robust space programs that launched thousands of weather and communications satellites. Some had to be stored in hardened bunkers and submarines because of Russia's harsh climate.

US satellite photos of alleged Soviet nuclear missile tests, seemingly confirmed by seismographic and radiation data were actually a wave of large meteors striking the Soviet Union, according to her. "As the world's largest land mass, it is only reasonable & logical that we would see more meteors hit that country than any other."

She said that the Cuban Missile Crisis was about Castro's attempt to develop nuclear weapons, which the United States should have invaded to prevent; however, once Soviet cargo ships and military vessels arrived, it was clear to President Kennedy that it was all a misunderstanding.

"We need to focus on real threats, not hypothetical ones," the source concluded. "If we expended our military resources chasing imaginary nuclear stockpiles we would break our military, bankrupt our country, and alienate all of our historical allies in fairly order."