In case you believe that there are only "a couple of bad apples" in the United States, here is an off-the-top-of-my-head list of corruption by leading pillars of American society:
- Senior military officials stole approximately $125
billion dollars out of Iraq reconstruction funds, dwarfing Madoff's
$50 billion Ponzi scheme (in turn, the looting
which is now occurring
under the bailout/stimulus programs will far surpass $150 billion)
- Texas billionaire Robert Stanford ran a multi-billion dollar fraud scheme of his own
- Senior judges in Pennsylvania have pleaded guilty to falsely convicting and imprisoning hundreds of youths (they got kickbacks from the prisons).
- The government-endorsed ratings agencies which were supposed to
accurately rate the credit-worthiness of companies and nations committed
massive
fraud
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There are hundreds of similar stories of corruption which have come
out recently.
But surely government employees would have done something to stop such corruption if had known about it, right?
Well, actually:
- Whistleblowers alerted the government about the looting of Iraq reconstruction funds, but nothing was done
- A whistleblower "gift-wrapped and delivered" the Madoff scandal to the SEC, but they refused to take action
- The Pennsylvannia Supreme Court refused to hear a case regarding the corrupt judges. A month later, only after the judges confessed to criminal wrongdoing, did the Supreme Court change its mind and take any interest
- Instead of insisting on accurate books, the government encouraged
fraudulent bookkeeping. For example, as
of 2006:
"President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar ... broad authority, in the name of national security, to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations."
- The government knew about mortgage fraud a long time ago. For
example, the FBI warned of an "epidemic" of mortgage fraud in 2004.
However, the FBI, DOJ and other government agencies then stood down
and did nothing. See this
