(Washington, DC) On the heels of media reports that required funding for presidential candidates would top $3 billion dollars this year, a sum inaccessible to anyone resembling the "common man," the United States dropped its pretense and issued official lobbying and corruption prices to the world at large.

"Your government is saving you money," said Antoine Philbear, Senate majority leader. "Where other nations require lobbyists to hint demurely at brain-mufflingly ostentatious political functions, or to whisper discretely behind pillars at charity events for people with no help of helping themselves, we've now got a direct pathway to your government for lobbyists, oligarchs and media barons."

In a city where three of four residents are starving low-IQ illiterates, and the dwindling middle class hunker down behind gated communities and hope for the best, the tony Loudoun County neighborhoods seem detached like an orbiting UFO over an earth of mundane misery. Philbear chose this setting for the formal announcement by the US government, which once prided itself in its integrity, but has recently in the interest of greater utilitarian and egalitarian concerns, cut out the middlemen and made a more accessible, equitable form of quasi-third-world corruption.

"You know the beltway," said longtime political analyst Joshua Hamilton. "It used to be you had to go make contacts at ceremonial events for ideals we no longer can believe in, and it took buckets of money and time. They're just streamlining and privatizing the process, which will save Joe Citizen a good chunk of his tax money."

City insiders said this most recent change was part of a spate of cost-cutting measures designed to prepare an oblivious population for transfer to a third-world state in which a vicious elite rules over the poor and stupid masses as a smugly self-deprecating middle class evaporates. Next in line, according to insiders, is a plan to allow direct purchasing for major news story topics.