You’ve heard it hundreds of times. Sometimes from a friend or parent figure. Sometimes from a con man who has some sort of stupid enticing siren call. As a babe you have to trust. As a teen you want to trust or maybe that is the beginning of mistrust. You know anyone over 25 is suspect. As you get older you just shake your head.

I am a trusting soul and more than once it has proven my downfall. I am not by nature paranoid. I think all people are basically good. It is not naivete but rather a way I choose to live my life. I don’t often lock doors. I don’t like looking over my shoulder. Sometimes I just don’t see it coming.

I am wary of government. Not in a Big Brother sort of way but just seeing the comedy of errors or malfeasance that tells me it is too big for anyone to tame. When the Department of Defense says they could have anywhere between 1-5 million subcontractors and not be sure, my eyes roll. When the IRS spends $40 million on meetings during a disastrous few years in our economic history faith goes out the window. Forget about targeting the Tea Party. These people are idiots.Can’t trust them.

But even further we had Clinton who didn’t have sex. Rummy and Cheney swore there were WMD’s and they even knew where they were hidden. PAC man. PAC money. The fact they gave $1mill to my campaign has no bearing whatsoever on my vote. JFK’s morals. Nixon’s tirades. FDR’s IRS targeting. J Edgar Hoover. Need I say more. Can’t trust this crowd either.

Let’s talk money. Dick Dietz was the president of the Chatham Trust back in New Jersey. We played tennis together and he held my mortgage as well as my savings. Now the banks collude to fix the Libor rate. JP Morgan Chase gets nailed and pays a fine for rigging bids. HSBC launders money and says with a straight face when a used car salesman deposits $25 million in sequential travelers checks in a small branch that they had no idea. They almost bankrupted the country but nobody pays with their freedom. Still no trust.

Doctors? They bill Medicare for services unrendered. Watch the HMA on 60 Minutes. Emergency medics are given percentage quotas to hit for admissions, necessary or not. Gotta keep those beds full. Pill mills? Why not. It makes perfect sense to have 25 specialists seeing a 93 year old woman with stage IV cancer. Ugh! Still looking.

There is $80 billion in Medicare fraud annually. Millions in Social Security checks to people already dead and buried. Disability claims are paid after a doc says that person can’t do their old job. Not a new one just the old one. And the game is played by pros and Joe Average Americans alike. The guy next door taking cash or paying it.
All part of the game.

Enough of this I am just going to watch a baseball game or maybe a bicycle race. Lance Armstrong beat cancer and all his competitors. What? You mean he had help. He swore for ten years he had nothing to do with it. Ditto McGwire, Sosa, ARod, Bonds et alia. Scratch the national pastime.

I’ll just pay attention to today’s youth and their schooling. Wait. You mean they graduate from class to class not knowing how to read at grade level? How does that happen? Don’t they leave anybody back? Oh yeah, now I remember the teachers in Atlanta got together over pizza and beer and changed test results. Man I feel better already. Where do I turn?

Now I am sorry but I have a few questions for all of us. As a country and as a world are we seeing the graying of the lines of morality? C’mon TTG don’t be such a party pooper. You know everyone is doing it. You have to in order to remain competitive. What’s a little cash or fooling around between friends. Don’t be so hard on the kids. They are just finding their way in the world in their teens, well maybe twenties. Thirties? Forties? I guess it depends on what the definition of “Is is.”

My main question is do we give passes because it is just easier to wink and look the other way? Or maybe it just makes us feel less guilty of our own transgressions. I know I have enough of my own and a pass here or there is just what the doctor ordered. Or in the long run are we just kidding ourselves?

I get the sneaky suspicion that somewhere along the line we are really going to have to pay the piper. Fess up and pay up. Sooner or later trust erodes to the point where you really don’t know who to place our hopes and dreams in. My apologies to you secularists and atheists but I have a feeling In God We Trust is the only option we may have. Not a bad one after all.

As always
Ted The Great

Factoids:
The government has revoked the ability of 14,663 providers and suppliers to bill Medicare over the past two years focused on providers in areas that have historically high levels of fraud, such as durable medical equipment, home health care and ambulance services.

California resident Rand Washburn was charged by the San Diego County district attorney with cashing in on more than $300,000 in Social Security checks that were sent to his mother for about 15 years after she died. After burying her body in the backyard, he failed to report her death to authorities, according to the DA’s office.

The term white-collar crime was coined in 1939 by Edwin Sutherland, who defined it as a “crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation”. White-collar crime is similar to corporate crime as white-collar employees are more likely to commit fraud, bribery, Ponzi schemes, insider trading, embezzlement, cybercrime, copyright infringement, money laundering, identity theft, and forgery.

As of 2010, undergound economy in the United States alone was estimated to account for over $2 trillion US Dollars (USD) per year in unreported cash holdings.That’s right your taking or paying cash is just part of it. It has also been estimated that up to 80% of all US $100 dollar bills printed every year end up overseas within weeks of their circulation. The underground economy supports any number of overseas operations, including covert wars, raw drug production, and human slavery rings. All of these illegal activities require an abundant amount of untraceable cash, preferably from a strong government with a stable legitimate economy. Money laundering? Just our biggest banks filling a void in services.

The number of deaths annually from medical errors could be as high as 100,000. These errors probably cost in excess of $35 billion annually. As many as 50 million prescriptions annually may be improperly filled. I think I am going holistic or was it ballistic?

Trust in me.