'culture of corruption'

We are all familiar with the hard-to-dispute notion that many well-connected folks have been busily looting the US Treasury for the past 6 years, with unprecedented success. The Government is the 'Legal Department' for many big businesses - Oil, Defense, Drugs, Insurance, and Disaster Recovery being the most obvious beneficiaries.

With the frequent evidence that, as one wag put it, "these people would steal Jesus if he wasn't nailed down", I am not surprised that, in this atmosphere of "screw you, I'm going to grab whatever I can", we have the following story, from NPR this morning.

It seems that thieves all over the country are grabbing copper wherever they can, due to its recent significant uptick in value. The NPR story told of property owners whose construction project was flooded when bad guys broke into the basement of their building and ripped out all the copper pipe, and folks in hot places whose air-conditioners stopped working, because a passer-by got into their unit and stole the piping.

But, the reason I am writing this - the reason I am most saddened by our growing kleptocracy, is the news that robbers are prying the bronze plaques off of war memorials - you know, the ones that list names of soldiers who died fighting for Our Freedom.

I guess if the Government doesn't honor our troops, by failing to give them adequate body armour, cutting veteran benefits, sending them to illegal wars, and condemning them to what amounts to involuntary servitude, it's no surprise that that message has filtered down to the less well-connected vultures.

No, nothing is sacred, but the lust for cash, in an atmosphere where "everybody's doing it", has brought down other countries, and now it appears to be our turn.

I always marveled at the stories about home-front rationing during World War II, where kids scrounged for newspaper and rubber, and families reduced their consumption of everything from meat to nylon, to help The Country fight its war on Fascism.

The pResident keeps saying "we're at War", but one look at our TV/consumption culture quickly dispells that notion. Bush's War is his Class's convenient excuse to steal, and everything downstream from him is corrupted by it.