How Corrupt is America?

Thomas Friedman has an excellent OpEd column regarding just how corrupt this country has become. I've avoided writing anything lately about the government, Wall Street and the mess we now find ourselves wallowing in, but he says things very well, I respect his opinion and it is worth reading the entire article. Here is just a piece of it.

"The stranger, a Western businessman, slipped into the chair next to me at an Asia Society lunch here in Hong Kong and asked me a question that I can honestly say I’ve never been asked before: “So, just how corrupt is America?”

His question was occasioned by the arrest of the Wall Street money manager Bernard Madoff on charges of running a Ponzi scheme that bilked investors out of billions of dollars, but it wasn’t only that. It’s the whole bloody mess coming out of Wall Street — the financial center that Hong Kong moneymen had always looked up to. How could it be, they wonder, that such brand names as Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and A.I.G. could turn out to have such feet of clay? Where, they wonder, was our Securities and Exchange Commission and the high standards that we had preached to them all these years?

The Madoff affair is the cherry on top of a national breakdown in financial propriety, regulations and common sense. Which is why we don’t just need a financial bailout; we need an ethical bailout. We need to re-establish the core balance between our markets, ethics and regulations. I don’t want to kill the animal spirits that necessarily drive capitalism — but I don’t want to be eaten by them either."

No,I don't want to be eaten by them either. What I do want to see is some kind of honor, morals -- whatever you want to call it return to the way this country operates, the way it treats it citizens. Is that asking too much? I surely hope not and I hope that with Obama's leadership we will see that "new day" in our country. I think the rest of the world is hoping for that, too.