Corruption everywhere

OK, after every election, there is a cleaning up factor plus of course rumors that are shown later to be untrue. But I cannot remember an election followed by the discovery of so many bad guys in so many high places and in so many fields (I do not claim that these bad guys belong to any political party, I am just surprised that we got so many popping up).
There is of course the wave of investment schemes like Madoff followed by Allen Stanford. We are over 60 billions dollars for these two, which explains that the many millionaires recently arrested by the FBI do not make headlines: Canadian George Georgiou (a fraud of only 26 millions so far), David Gwin from Colorado (only a multi-million dollar fraud scheme), Niketa Williams, of San Francisco, California (condemned for wire fraud to reimburse 1.6 million dollars), Robert Miracle, of Bellevue, Washington, Mukhtar Kechik and Fahimi Fisal (operating a $65 million Ponzi scheme, five people in Oklahoma (for a fraud over 41 millions), Scott Luster from Missouri (only a 4.5 million fraud) all of them arrested in February alone. What is a million dollars nowadays? Not much, of course, it is easy to spend, but in my neighborhood it is still the value of about ten houses. All these frauds add up to a lot of money lost by innocent people. On the budget I am on, I could feel the difference when a thief took off with my purse and less than 100 dollars in it. Ponzi schemes are very common at all financial levels: here in Savannah GA I find that I frequently have to explain it to naive and uneducated people in my neighborhood: there is always a false prophet or a false friend ready to take advantage of the poorest people.

We are all aware of the housing problems, but there is also a lot of pure mortgage fraud. In the first 20 days of February alone, we see cases popping up in Missouri, in Maryland, in Florida and in New York.

I have been surprised to see educators on the take too. It ranges in the last few months from a Professor of Western Kentucky University misusing Federal money to people accused of embezzlement, bribery, corruption, kickback and racketeering.

And to top it all, we now get judges on the take in activities so mean that it is hard to comprehend. Two Pennsylvania judges have been charged in a fraud scheme involving the placement of juveniles in juvenile detention facilities. The two judges "jailed juveniles for profit". You can read that story in the New York Times here and here

And there are the things that we seem unable to correct: dishonesty in sports, 30 million Americans on illegal drugs, enormous frauds in medicare-medicaid, and the horrible abuse of the military by their suppliers (The military are easy victims: it is the same all over Europe).

I am not claiming that we, ordinary people, are perfect, just saying that we, ordinary people, do not want to hurt other people. Some of the public sense of morality has degenerated in the US since the 1980s. Maybe too much easy money- easy credit produces that. Maybe it is a side effect of women having to work instead of staying at home, maybe it is linked to increases in separation and divorces, maybe it is the increasing disparity between the poor and the rich so lavishly exposed on TV. Maybe all of it. What I do know is that it starts early: most kids, according to surveys, cheat at school. But we got to reduce this corruption before we fall like the Roman Empire or the British and French Empires once dominating the world and brought down by their own rot.
This corruption is going too far.

Michael Phelps' mistakes

It was not his first pipe, was it? I would not even know how to hold the stuff. I doubt very much his apology: it was written by a lawyer and a press agent (2 allusions to his young age in a few sentences are a dead give away).
But his main mistake was to consider all that money coming in as a reward. It is just a JOB, buddy.
Princess Diana made the same mistake too: marrying a prince is not a fairy tale: it is a job.
Any job comes with a few do and don't, and if you are a public figure, the list of don't is not difficult to understand.

The bizarre ways of Detroit: no cheap car?

A car for less than $ 7,000? I keep wondering why we do not have a simple cheap car. The Europeans have one: it is called the Chevrolet Matiz.In fact there is a French one that is cheap but looks sleek too: Renault has a nice car called la Logan.

Fiat has a smaller, cheaper car and India has promised a car for about $ 3,000 (the Tata Nano) but it has been delayed by trouble with the recession and with their factory site.
I used to have the funniest small van when I was in France, it was a GME with Japanese and German parts sold by Opel. It was perfect: you could access your stuff from the sides, the front, the back and it had an incredible capacity for accepting weird shaped objects, dogs and cats: I filled it up when I moved to the US from France and went gaily to the airport with all my stuff. It was so narrow that you could touch the right side window without moving from your seat. The van was also high. As a result, if there was wind, you felt like sailing rather than driving! Apart from that, it was a little marvel. But as long as Detroit is convinced that everybody loves big SUVs except me, there is little hope to have a fun car around here.