Top 5 Reasons America is Toast

By Karl Denninger

That's done.  As in baked, cooked, finis.

Let's just look at the charges and specifications of late, shall we?

1. Big US and Global Banks have admitted (that is, have been convicted) of multiple criminal offenses over the last several years.  A partial list can be found here; let me remind everyone that an ordinary person who commits three felonies, even if some of them are very minor in comparison to any of the listed ones here in impact and they take place over a period of decades, goes away for life under long-existing three strikes laws.  All four of the banks listed in that dissent have three or more "convictions" and thus all of them should be dissolved as they are obviously incapable of modifying their behavior.  Nonetheless literally tens of millions of Americans and American corporations not only refuse to stand and demand that these charters be revoked they voluntarily do business with one or more of these firms!
   
   
2. We have a medical and insurance industry in this country that routinely, on a daily basis, engages in behavior that can easily be described as meeting the criteria for fraud, bid-rigging, racketeering and routinely uses the threat of both bankruptcy and violence by government goons to get what it wants.  This "industry" routinely, for example, bills for things they didn't actually do, sends people bills for hundreds or thousands of dollars for someone sticking their head in a door and saying "Hello", allows "off-plan" doctors to treat people without their consent exposing them to thousands (or tens of thousands!) in unauthorized charges and then enforces those "charges", takes drugs off the market that they produce so that the only remaining options are those made by the same company but are under patent and more.  The single most-common cause of bankruptcy in this country is medical debt incurred as a direct result of these practices and these practices are where the so-called "need" for Obamacare, that is now resulting in demands for 50% premium hikes in some markets for the next year, came from.  Yet we, as a nation and as a people, routinely consent to this crap and allow these corporations, institutions and individuals to continue their outrageous acts of pillage daily.
   
   
3. We have a former Secretary of State who now wants to be President but while Secretary of State her private family foundation took tens of millions of dollars in donations from foreign governments that were, at the same time, lobbying the very State Department she was in charge of for permission to buy over a hundred billion dollars worth of weapons.  How this fails to qualify as a federal crime is beyond me given that a foreign agent is unable to buy a Senator lunch.  Irrespective of whether this leads to indictments it is outrageous that such a person can be considered as fit to be President by anyone irrespective of party or other affiliation; that any material percentage of our voting population would cast a vote for such a person proves beyond any doubt that the majority of voters in this country are literally suicidal.
   
   
4. We have law enforcement agencies that actually claim in court through filed, sworn documents that when they throw a bomb into a baby's crib as they attempt to raid a house and the person they are seeking isn't there (because they didn't bother to confirm he was there), leading to the infant being critically injured, that it is the infant's fault that its face was blown off because it failed to move out of the way of said thrown bomb while it was sleeping in its crib.  In other words we, as a nation, sit silently while government agencies claim the right to blow the face off innocent infants because they are too lazy to bother with ordinary police work.  We could indict the government goons who refuse to wait for the person they want to arrest to depart wherever they are and thus make it possible for the police to arrest them without grievously injuring innocent children who had exactly nothing to do with the acts the accused is alleged of committing, but instead we allow innocent children to be grievously injured or killed due to the laziness and malfeasance of these so-called "boys in blue" and even allow to go unchallenged claims that said goons are there to "protect and serve" the public!
   
   
5. We have entire legislatures that engage with lobbyists to let them write and vote on laws they then rubber stamp. When caught by the press (good work, by the way) the members of the press who catch them are literally thrown out of a hotel they paid to stay at by men with firearms who are in fact off-duty cops -- cops that, I remind you, draw their salaries directly and indirectly from that same legislature!

I could go on, but why?

Until and unless we at least resolve all five of the above, and everyone involved wears an orange jumpsuit and has their corporate and institutional edifices closed down with the ill-gotten gains disbursed back to their victims we are, as a nation, DONE.

And more to the point we have all collectively consented as well.

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