“Fraud rolls across American history like waves move onto a beach” (Bob Jensen, History of Fraud in America).
Some years ago at a symposium at Oxford University, I listened to Sir Alfred Sherman, one-time adviser to Lady Thatcher, describe America as a deeply corrupt nation. At the time, I wondered how this very British gentleman, a brilliant thinker on the state of the world, could justify that statement. After all, it was well known that fraud and under-the-table payoffs were endemic to certain Asian countries. It was simply the way that one did business there. That was taken as a given. But America? The “city on the hill”? The bastion of Judeo-Christianity, this exemplar of free democracy and free enterprise, “deeply corrupted”? Surely Sir Alfred should have chosen his words more carefully!
Well, a decade or so later, Sir Alfred’s words are ringing in my ears.
It seems that each week, sometimes even day by day in any given week, the Wall Street Journal publicizes yet another case of corporate, financial or government fraud in America.
In July, Economist.com ran a headline, “A Tangled Web,” with the quip, “A huge corruption investigation leads to a string of arrests in New Jersey.” Following an intensive 10-year investigation, the fbi and irs unveiled a huge money-laundering operation that extended from the streets of New Jersey and New York across the Atlantic into the Middle East. The great surprise to those uninitiated in the ways of 21st-century America was the societal ranking of those involved (July 24):
A mayor, a rabbi and an organ trafficker sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. But the mayors of the New Jersey cities of Hoboken, Secaucus and Ridgefield, a council president, two state assemblymen, numerous other public officials and political operatives, and five rabbis are not laughing. They are among 44 people charged in criminal complaints filed on Thursday, July 23. The arrests were part of a 10-year federal investigation of both public corruption and an international money-laundering conspiracy. And, indeed, some organ selling.
The problem is, this one example is but the tip of an iceberg below which floats a huge, very deeply entrenched perverse way of life that has become endemic to American society. It’s a disease, peculiarly American in its depth and the scope of its penetration from the mansions of Beverly Hills, to the trailer parks and ultimately the cardboard boxes and filthy dens of the street people of inner cities.
To be sure, in the English-speaking world, graft, fraud and corruption is not restricted to America only. Publicized recently in the United Kingdom was the revelation of that nation’s most senior public servants’ exposure in fraudulent use of public monies through false and extraneous expense claims. What is different in America is the sheer size, scope and depth of the problem, which has now reached epidemic proportions. It’s just part of the whole system, politically, economically, commercially, industrially, in health and education and the arts; no segment of American society remains untouched by this deep-seated sickness.
Most educated people are aware of the famously corrupt Democrats of Tammany Hall. But that is part of pre-fdr, New Deal, early 20th-century American history. What Sir Alfred Sherman was commenting on was the sheer unstoppable depth of fraud and corruption in American society. Corruption of a type that had become so deeply entrenched within America, nationally, by the closing years of the 20th century that it has since led to a literal explosion of a whole string of record-breaking cases of corporate fraud.
The intriguing aspect of this is that the whole unsavory mess triggered by the subprime loans and financial derivatives fiascoes of the past two years occurred on the beat of the new generation of mbas that had flooded into business, commerce and banking, not to mention Wall Street, over the past decade or so.
What was the moral compass of this great pool of bright young things, and, in particular, their mentors of a generation or two earlier?
Well, if you know your 20th-century history, the majority of the oldest of their teachers graduated from the years of a Woodstock, godless evolutionary Marxist-Leninist liberal-socialist thinking, Dr. Spock-style child-rearing, peacenik antiwar street-rebelling, civil-rights-asserting, law-breaking, gender-bending “no-absolutes” amoral pseudo-philosophizing, bearded, pot-smoking academia possessing little or no moral backbone.
Little wonder that the most recent products of that academic sausage machine has turned out the least moral generation of businessmen, bankers, financiers and assorted snake-oil merchants within both commerce and government in recent Anglo-Saxon history.
It’s simply a case of cause and effect. The numerous failed and fraudulent financiers, brokers, bankers and merchants of the day are but the products of their education.
In 1929, stock-selling scandals on Wall Street led to the Crash of 1929. In the 1930s, the U.S. government enacted new securities laws and brought into being the Securities and Exchange Commission (sec) to oversee them so as to prevent the exploitation of the public by securities fraud.
The problem was that when an amoral generation both entered business and penetrated the Securities and Exchange Commission, it gained “a solid failing grade in terms of its oversight of stock exchanges and related market institutions. The sec simply looked aside when it came to an ever increasing flood of Wall Street frauds of the 1980s and 1990s” (Jensen, op. cit.).
Jensen points out that “The high-water mark of frauds came in the 1990s when the media finally got wind of ‘infectious greed’ in investment banking, stock trading, bond rating, mutual fund, and other industries rooted on Wall Street” (ibid.).
Bob Jensen points to the condemning case made by Frank Partnoy in his book FIASCO: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader, in which Partnoy “shows how corporations gradually increased financial risk and lost control of an overly complex structured financing deals that obscured the losses and disguised frauds [and] pushed corporate officers and their boards into successive and ingenious deceptions. Major corporations such as Enron, Global Crossing, and WorldCom entered into enormous illegal corporate finance and accounting” (ibid.).
Perhaps most frightening of all to the American public are the more recent revelations of the fraud and corruption that is exhibited in the backgrounds of many an appointee to influential office in the team assembled to govern the country following America’s last presidential election.
Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin has published a masterful expose of the “Culture of Corruption” rife in Washington in her explosive best-selling book by that name. She claims that corruption in government stretches across “wealthy power brokers … ethically challenged, bailout-bungling money men,” to “crime-coddling lawyers.” Malkin renders a case-by-case liturgy of lying, deceit, deep-seated corruption and fraud in the backgrounds of many who now hold senior office within the upper echelons of this government that boggles the mind.
America is sick at its heart.
Terminal moral disease eats at its vitals from the very top of its government machine to the common drug pushers on its decaying city streets. This is a nation for whom the writing is on the wall. Akin to the ancient kingdom of King Nebuchadnezzar, America is “weighed in the balances and … found wanting” (Daniel 5:27).
Just as the great Creator powerfully corrected the haughty king of Babylon, so Bible prophecy declares, the Anglo-Saxon nations, led by example by the Babylon of America, are destined to be profoundly corrected for their fraudulent, corrupting ways.
The time for the Anglo-Saxons to give account for their deeply entrenched sins is so close at hand. And the means of that correction, to be rendered by Almighty God, is going to be a great SHOCK to the self-indulgent, hedonistic American and British peoples, for, believe it or not, it will be delivered to them by a third round of warfare instigated by the very same nation that triggered the last two world wars!
To the uneducated in biblical revelation, this sounds completely off the planet. Yet it is as sure as tomorrow’s sunrise.
You need to educate yourself in the reasons why the once greatest single nation on Earth has sunk to the level of the most fraudulent and corrupt. It is becoming an extremely urgent need for as many people as possible to be warned of the consequences of this Anglo-Saxon slide into the pit of moral depravity, deep-seated fraud and endemic corruption.
Read and study our booklet Lamentations: The Point of No Return. If ever there was a book written for our time today, it is this book. You need to at least be acquainted with its message, even if you do not agree with it at this moment. For the chances are, you will recall and agree with its message when the prophecies that it contains are fulfilled, most dramatically, in the very near future! •
