From WaPo:

The Miami trial of a Venezuelan entrepreneur who grew rich doing business with President Hugo Chávez’s populist administration has exposed how some top government officials have profited from a corrosive web of corruption in the oil-rich country.

Kickbacks, bribes and secret payoffs have become a feature in the socialist administration, which had claimed a break from the past but instead has seen several officials implicated in multimillion-dollar corruption schemes, according to testimony and conversations taped by the FBI. The trial has also revealed the Chávez government’s determination to funnel state funds to its allies in Latin America and the lengths it will go to to keep the aid secret…

…Transcripts of the taped conversations reveal intricate details of the collaboration between Venezuelan businessmen and government officials during Venezuela’s recent oil boom as they pilfered public funds through no-bid contracts, kickbacks and secret commissions.

“It’s basically a bunch of guys in their late 30s, all of whom saw an opportunity when Chávez went into power,” said Kenneth Rijock, financial crime consultant for World-Check, a London-based firm that provides risk analysis for banks and other institutions. “They’ve been riding his coattails since, benefiting from sweetheart deals, kickbacks and other corrupt practices.”

Read the whole article. And consider, we’re about to elect a Socialist president who’s former principal financial supporter is in prison for pilfering state funds.

Read the whole thing, but I agree with pretty much everything this guy says:

….From where I sit, the United States government has embarked on two pieces of social engineering in the last few years. One was to make oil expensive as expensive as possible to drive people to greater use of alternative energy sources - because anything less would be irresponsible and destructive to the environment. The other was to enshrine home ownership (i.e., easy-to-obtain mortgages) as a new American right - because anything less would be unequal and racist.

None of us voted on these decisions - indeed, neither was even spoken about directly, much less debated. But nevertheless, both became national policy… and both have sparked national, now international, crises. Then, once they became crises, both were blamed on ‘greedy capitalism’, instead of what they really were: legislative interference into market forces.

Fine. We’ve been through this before, and no doubt we will see similar, government-induced crises again - inevitably accompanied by Administration officials and our elected representatives pointing at everyone but themselves.

But what makes this particular economic crisis so appalling, at least from this vantage point, is the sheer scumminess, corruption, short-sightedness and general incompetence of everyone involved. At least in the business world, especially in the take-no-prisoners world of high-tech that kind of venality and ineptitude either gets you fired or kills the company; by comparison, in Washington, it puts you in charge of the recovery effort.

Nobody in this mess has covered himself or herself in glory. President Bush seems to have had the right instincts on this, but as a lame duck who long-ago burned up all of his public support, he mostly seems dithering and toothless. The Democrats declare that the nation is at risk… then go about as usual turning the bailout bill into another yet another partisan pay-off scheme to fund the next round of crisis-creating social engineering. It is a measure of just how corrupt the Dems have become that Senators Dodd and Frank, who perhaps more than anyone in Washington are responsible for this crisis, not only are allowed to keep their committee seats, but run the press conference on the bail-out. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?…

…As it happens, out here in Silicon Valley, we have been conducting our own social engineering experiments. Three, in fact, have been at least as sweeping as Freddie Mac’s changing of mortgage eligibility rules. One of them has been to wire the entire world in a huge, high-speed global information grid (the Internet). Another has been to restructure the entire entertainment industry and its pricing model (the iPod). And the third has been to empower the citizenry to form groups based upon common interests rather than the limitations of physical proximity (Web 2.0 - social networks).

Here’s the thing. All three of these multi-billion dollar projects have been pay-as-you-go, driven largely by individuals and companies that assume their own risk, they have instantly rewarded smart decisions and punished bad ones, they are tested every millisecond against human nature (i.e., the marketplace), they are biased towards efficiency over seniority, and most of all, they are voluntary.

And they are all succeeding.

We will get out this current financial mess - not by government fiat, but because entrepreneurs and smart corporate executives and hard-working everyday people will innovate us out of it. They will come up with the new financial instruments that restructure this debt, the new technologies that will generate the wealth to make up for this loss (as they did after 9/11) and ultimately create more jobs than are right now being lost.

And if Washington really wanted to help Americans (and there is no indication right now that it does) it would, the instant it passes the bail-out bill, get to work not adding more regulations in response to this crisis, but stripping away the destructive ones we created after the last big one. And a good place to start would be Sarbanes-Oxley, which brilliantly keeps wealth out of the hands of regular workers (by keeping start-up companies from going public), all while costing, by my reckoning, $200 billion over the last six years….

From DC Examiner:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats, acting last week behind closed doors, cobbled together a temporary spending bill to keep the federal government running past Oct. 1st. The continuing resolution was needed because Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid simply have not done their jobs.

The 2008 budget year ended yesterday, but Congress hasn’t approved a single one of a dozen annual appropriations bills needed to keep the federal government functioning on a day-to-day basis. Hence the $630 billion stop-gap measure, nearly the size of the failed Wall Street bailout. It passed the House on a 370-68 vote even though, as Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., candidly admitted, “very few people have any idea what’s in it.” Cornered House members had less than 24 hours to review the 357-page bill and 752 pages of accompanying material before being forced to either pass it - or shut down most of the federal government today….

…House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey, D-WI, who helped Pelosi craft the earmark-stuffed bill, admitted that the Democratic leadership deliberately decided to “kick the can down the road” and wait for a new president who presumably won’t veto future earmark-laden legislation….

….Obey defended the Democrats’ lack of transparency, saying “you’re damn right it has [been secretive] because if it’s done in public, it would never get done.”…

That’s $630B money spent, worse than the $700B proposed for buying illiquid securities (i.e. good chance that $700B is recovered in time).

Politicians are convinced this is a time for extreme measures, and we must risk putting a massive obligation on taxpayers to “save” still solvent financial institutions. 

Pretty much everyone can agree that Congress has handled this poorly, and most informed people recognize political corruption and cronyism are largely responsible for the mess in the first place.

So why isn’t this the time to finally pass Congressional term limits? I might even vote for Obama if he promised that kind of real “change”.

From the Boston Globe:

….As a state senator, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee coauthored an Illinois law creating a new pool of tax credits for developers. As a US senator, he pressed for increased federal subsidies. And as a presidential candidate, he has campaigned on a promise to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that could give developers an estimated $500 million a year.

But a Globe review found that thousands of apartments across Chicago that had been built with local, state, and federal subsidies - including several hundred in Obama’s former district - deteriorated so completely that they were no longer habitable.

Grove Parc and several other prominent failures were developed and managed by Obama’s close friends and political supporters. Those people profited from the subsidies even as many of Obama’s constituents suffered. Tenants lost their homes; surrounding neighborhoods were blighted….

….Campaign finance records show that six prominent developers - including Jarrett, Davis, and Rezko - collectively contributed more than $175,000 to Obama’s campaigns over the last decade and raised hundreds of thousands more from other donors. Rezko alone raised at least $200,000, by Obama’s own accounting.

One of those contributors, Cecil Butler, controlled Lawndale Restoration, the largest subsidized complex in Chicago, which was seized by the government in 2006 after city inspectors found more than 1,800 code violations….

Read the whole thing. Pretty incredible this doesn’t get more attention. There’s ample evidence Obama helped some very corrupt people get very wealthy, is there any evidence he ever did anything of note for his poorer constituents?

Tom Wolfe, from Mau-Mauing to the Flak Catchers:

Everybody but the most hopeless lames knew that the only job you wanted out of the poverty program was a job in the program itself. Get on the payroll, that was the idea. Never mind getting some job counseling. You be the job counselor. You be the “neighborhood organizer.” As a job counselor or a neighborhood organizer you stood to make six or seven hundred dollars a month, and you were still your own man. Like if you were a “neighborhood organizer,” all you had to do was go out and get the names and addresses of people in the ghetto who wanted to relate to the services of the poverty center. That was a very flexible arrangement. You were still on the street, and you got paid for it.

Fascists appartchiks at the Supreme Leader’s personal TV network have this to say about our candidates:

• Americans ”don’t understand that (Obama’s) education would enable him to serve them better”
• McCain is a “respectable, humane, honest, and patriotic man.
• Palin “doesn’t have any experience”

Listen carefully to everything this puppet says - is there any idea, any single sentence that wouldn’t sound entirely natural coming from a “mainstream” democrat

I emailed a friend today that the GOP should get Palin to Iraq - visit the troops, give the kind of rousing speech we now know she can deliver, get some photos with her in an army utility uniform.

Actually already sort of happened. Palin visited troops in Kuwait in July 2007.

I mused it might be cool to see her firing a weapon…..yup:

I even wrote it would be cool to get a picture of her with troops and an Alaskan flag….

She might even have been genuinely interested in the troops there - hard to believe this was a VP-prep photo op way back in July 2007.

Important speech: 

…and some good remarks (the previous evening):

NYT website hits for the following searches:

obama and rezko - 4630 Results

palin and daughter - 68,000 Results