NORTH POLE (AP) -- Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said Friday that his website had gained access to financial records, memos and other records of the global operations of Santa Claus, including the highly classified Naughty List.
Assange said the Naughty List would be posted on the Wikileaks site on Christmas Day to expose what has become a corrupt system in which powerful figures have been able to buy their way off the list.
He said that when the entire Naughty List of 85.6 million names was made available it would be apparent that obviously naughty individuals had been left off.
“How does Dick Cheney not make the Naughty List?” Assange asked. “And yet his name is nowhere to be found. Likewise, a search for ‘Bank of America’ or ‘Swedish prosecutors’ comes up empty.”
Assange claimed that North Pole operations had been hijacked by right-leaning investors who last year succeeded in a campaign to break the Elves Union and transfer toy production to Indonesia.
A North Pole Inc. spokesman issued a statement Friday saying the charges of right-wing influence were ridiculous and condemning the release of the Naughty List.
“The release of the Naughty List makes it much harder to hold responsible those who have expanded government and reward those who have cut taxes and worked hard to roll back socialist programs,” the statement said.
Other North Pole documents being released bolster Assange’s claims that Santa’s centuries-old mission of spreading joy and happiness had been compromised:
Financial records show years of payments from the Republican National Committee to keep key GOP legislators off the Naughty List. The payments started in 1948 with a $10,000 payment submitted on behalf of Strom Thurmond through 2010 with a $28.6 million payment to ensure that no mention of Haley Barbour or the White Citizens Council would appear on the list.
Payments to North Pole Inc. from BP that sealed a deal halting shipments of lumps of coal to those on the Naughty List and instead substituting globs of oil mixed with beach sand.
Internal memos show that more than 6,500 elves were laid off in 2002 when North Pole Inc.’s electronics division was outsourced to China.
Bonuses to top elves doubled in 2009 after North Pole received a $652 billion federal bailout. Memos indicate that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner approved the bailout, arguing that North Pole Inc. had become too big to fail and a collapse would severely impact retail markets.
Governments around the world reacted sharply to the news that the Naughty List would be posted. Several threatened to restrict Santa’s access to their air space.
North Korean media threatened war with the North Pole if Kim Jong Il’s name appears on the list.
But the biggest potential impact on North Pole operations could come as those named on the Naughty List bring lawsuits and governments move to tighten regulations and impose standards for how individuals can be named to the list.
“Oversight was clearly lacking,” said one congressman who plans to introduce reform legislation. “There also needs to be an appeals process and a right to a hearing.”
“It’s obvious that once the list was made,” he said, “nobody bothered to check it twice.”