Saturday, December 24, 2011

Corruption in high places

I saw this in the December 2 edition of The Week. Quoting from Woman Gets Jail For Food-Stamp Fraud; Wall Street Fraudsters Get Bailouts:
You get busted for drugs in this country, and it turns out you can make yourself ineligible to receive food stamps.

But you can be a serial fraud offender like Citigroup, which has repeatedly been dragged into court for the same offenses and has repeatedly ignored court injunctions to abstain from fraud, and this does not make you ineligible to receive $45 billion in bailouts and other forms of federal assistance. . . .

A normal person, once he gets a felony conviction, immediately begins to lose his rights as a citizen.

But white-collar criminals of the type we’ve seen in recent years on Wall Street – both the individuals and the corporate "citizens" – do not suffer these ramifications. They commit crimes without real consequence, allowing them to retain access to the full smorgasbord of subsidies and financial welfare programs that, let’s face it, are the source of most of their profits.
I urge you to read the whole story because the contrast between how Citigroup and Anita McLemore have been treated is far bigger than what the few words I have quoted could signify.

The injustice of the U.S. federal government is beyond imagination.
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