Corruption In America

http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/corruption-in-america

In the United States today, it is not just the economy that is crumbling. The entire fabric of society is coming apart as well. Literally almost wherever you look you can find rampant corruption in America. Our federal government is corrupt, our state and local governments are corrupt, our corporations are corrupt and unfortunately average Americans seem to become more corrupt all the time. As corruption becomes widespread in America, trust is breaking down. It is very difficult to know who to trust these days. But a society cannot function without trust. So what are we going to do when all the trust is gone?

The SEC announced today that JPMorgan has come to an agreement to pay out 153 million dollars to settle charges related to the sale of a controversial collateralized debt obligation back in 2007. It turns out that a hedge fund that helped pick the underlying assets for the CDO also bet very heavily that it would fail. JPMorgan marketed the CDO as a good investment when they knew that it was garbage.

Robert Khuzami, the SEC's top enforcement officer, summed up the charges against JPMorgan this way....

"J.P Morgan marketed highly-complex CDO investments to investors with promises that the mortgage assets underlying the CDO would be selected by an independent manager looking out for investor interests"

So is anyone going to go to jail for this?

Of course not.

In fact, not a single bank executive has gone to jail for anything that happened during the financial crisis.

So how are we supposed to have faith in the system if nobody is ever held accountable?

Are little slaps on the wrist supposed to make us all feel better?

The truth is that what JPMorgan did was far from an isolated incident. If you doubt this, just read the following article....

"How Goldman Sachs Made Tens Of Billions Of Dollars From The Economic Collapse Of America In Four Easy Steps"

Our system is totally sick and corruption is everywhere.

Cronyism has become so endemic to our system that nobody really seems bothered by it anymore. For example, just check out this example that was recently reported in The New York Times....

In 2009, a judge in Manhattan had a lucrative appointment to hand out: oversight of a diamond district building that was drifting into foreclosure.

Nearly 600 people in Manhattan had been approved for such work. But the job went to a lawyer named Mark D. Lebow, who is the husband of Patricia E. Harris, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s most trusted aide.

Since then, Mr. Lebow has earned $352,000 in fees, more than $5,000 a week, according to court records.

It sure is nice to be "politically-connected", eh?

It is not by accident that so many of our politicians (and their family members) become incredibly wealthy.

But it is not just among the wealthy and powerful that we are seeing an increase in corruption.

All over the United States, thieves are stealing copper wire, train tracks and even drain covers. People are stealing stuff that nobody would have ever dreamed of stealing in the past. Just consider the following example from the Atlanta area....

Kids in two Atlanta communities won’t have their neighborhood pools to help beat the summer heat, at least for now. Thieves used what is believed to be sledge hammers to bust walls and break fixtures in bathrooms at Adams and South Bend parks to steal copper, brass and steel.

This is how desperate people throughout America are becoming.

In another example from the Atlanta area, thieves recently busted into a southwest Atlanta beauty supply store and took off with $30,000 in hair extensions.

America is becoming a really crazy place.

When times get really hard, people will do whatever they feel they need to do in order to survive.

One elderly man down in North Carolina was so desperate that he actually robbed a bank so that he could be put in prison and be given free health care.

Yes, you read that correctly.

59-year-old Richard James Verone walked into an RBC Bank in North Carolina, handed a clerk a note demanding $1 and sat down and waited for the police to arrive.

It turns out that he has a growth on his chest and two ruptured disks but he does not have any health insurance. So he robbed the bank so that he would get free health care in prison.

The truth is that our country is rapidly coming apart. As I have written about so many times before, the American Dream is in an advanced state of decay.

Once upon a time, cities such as Detroit, Michigan were the envy of the entire world.

Today, they are a joke to the rest of the world. Many of our biggest cities have become war zones. There are dozens of homes that you can purchase in Detroit right now for literally next to nothing.

For example, 14769 Liberal Street in Detroit is listed for sale on Zillow for just $100.

Not that anyone would actually want to live there. Many homes in Detroit are literally being ripped to pieces by looters, vandals and thieves.

Of course many Americans are just taking their cue from the government. Washington D.C. is drowning in so much corruption that it is almost hard to describe.

One of the biggest offenders in Washington D.C. is the Federal Reserve. In a recent article for Rolling Stone, reporter Matt Taibbi exposed some of the folks that the Federal Reserve sent money to during the financial crisis....

The Fed sent billions in bailout aid to banks in places like Mexico, Bahrain and Bavaria, billions more to a spate of Japanese car companies, more than $2 trillion in loans each to Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, and billions more to a string of lesser millionaires and billionaires with Cayman Islands addresses. "Our jaws are literally dropping as we're reading this," says Warren Gunnels, an aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. "Every one of these transactions is outrageous."

Did we really need to send billions of dollars to "millionaires and billionaires" in the Cayman Islands in order to save the U.S. economy?

Something really stinks, but since our politicians are too gutless to authorize a comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve we may never know what has been going on.

So who does get probed in America today?

The American people do. The ridiculous airport security measures that we have to put up with have gotten completely out of control.

In the name of "national security", we now allow security goons to feel up our women and children.

Recently, one video of a 6-year-old girl having her private areas touched in public by the TSA went viral on YouTube. You can watch the video right here.

The little girl was also apparently drug tested.

How perverse is that?

A 6-year-old girl has to go through all of that, but the corruption of the Federal Reserve and the big Wall Street banks is allowed to continue.

Even the mainstream media is deeply corrupt. As I wrote about recently, they love to get the American people obsessed with the latest celebrity news or the latest "Twitter scandal", but they often purposely ignore some of the most important news stories that are happening because they do not fit in with the agenda that their corporate owners are trying to push.

Of course one of the worst examples of corruption in America is the U.S. Congress. A new scandal involving Congress seems to erupt almost weekly, and almost everything Congress tries to do ends up being corrupt in one way or another.

The sad thing is that Congress is not even working most of the time. Most Americans have no idea how much time off members of Congress get. Just check out the video posted below. This is going to shock you....

As noted earlier in the article, without trust a society cannot function. That is why all of this corruption in America is such an important issue.

If we do not reverse this trend, society will continue to break down. When faith in our major institutions is gone, it is going to be incredibly difficult to get back.

Please pray for the United States of America. We really need it.