The Corrupting of America

Is it any wonder that a nation, which for close to 100 years has increasingly relied on deceit to push policy, would eventually collapse into corruption?

Wherever you look, whenever you hear, and when you read in current news there is corruption. Our local officials, military generals, financial officials like Madoff, election officials, and on and on, are exhibiting the type of ho-hum everyday corruption a banana republic would have.

Our behaviour defines what we are, and that behaviour says we are becoming a corrupt banana republic:

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court said today that it will overturn the convictions of up to 1,200 juveniles in the wake of a corruption scandal that is sending two county judges to jail for more than seven years.

Last month, veteran Luzerne County Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan pleaded guilty to taking $2.6 million in kickbacks to send juveniles to privately run detention centers.

(USA Today, emphasis added [it was censured, so here is the Wayback Machine Copy]). Judges sending kids to jail so corrupt private prisons can profit. That is as low as a banana republic gets.

The FBI director testified this week that the FBI has thousands of corruption investigations going on.

He said that the FBI is saturated with corruption investigations, and has already prosecuted thousands of officials for corruption.

He said that the FBI is running out of resources with which to investigate and prosecute such corruption.

This daily corruption plague has now reached into The US Department of Treasury and again into your tax dollars, to wit:

A top bank regulator has been placed on leave pending a Treasury Department investigation into regulators' approval of backdated cash infusions for troubled thrifts.

The Office of Thrift Supervision said Thursday that its acting director, Scott Polakoff, was placed on leave "pending a review by the Department of the Treasury of the OTS' August 2008 actions related to post-period capital contributions."

(Huffington Post). A year ago in May 2008, under Bush II regime Treasury Secretary Paulson (who was able to receive over a hundred million dollars tax free for coming to Treasury) it became obvious to The Office of Thrift Supervision that IndyBank was going down.

For some reason Scott Polakoff backdated capital infusions that added up to a thousand times more than the AIG bonuses.

That "small" (by comparison to this $18 billion) AIG amount was enough to drive the nation into anger. Will there be a thousand times more anger now?

Anyway, back to the story. This backdating of cash infusions by Polakoff would allow the IndyBank people to spend the $18 billion in the way they wanted to before the FDIC attained the authority to take over and freeze assets and accounts.

They could selectively take care of "special people" but not others. They could pick and choose as if they had done it "a while back".

It does not look good to say the least. Actually no corruption or deceit by the government looks good does it?