Country's Crime Capital

For years, debate has raged over whether East St. Louis, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Philadelphia, or Camden, New Jersey, for felons not concerned their Pennsylvania peers would think they were slumming, was the nation's crime capital. The recent collapse of the economic structure would suggest that ne'er-do-wells are liberally distributed across the lower forty-eight, with a deeply embedded vein as rich as oil in Alaska and almost surely a surfer's tide of them rolling onto the verdant shores of Hawaii. The recession was not brought forth by sub-prime loans, labor-management rifts, mark to market accounting rules alone or in combination but as Bernard Madoff seems to have aptly illustrated, quite a bit of raw criminality. George Will, I believe coined the term "cleptocracy" to describe the mercantile machinations of malignant African dictators (see Mugabe). These petty thugs have been surpassed in avarice and impact by a group of confidence capitalists who would have made robber barons blush. Their manipulation has gone a long way toward bringing down the world economy. The government agencies charged with oversight were either populated by naifs who would have made Twain's Innocents Abroad seem like jet set sophisticates, which meant they were ill-equipped for their positions and should never have been hired, or they had become so cavalier that they would keep their positions no matter what, that they did not bother to do their jobs (there must be a way to terminate an employee this blase'), or they thought their compensation package as a Federal employee was meager, and they may have been sharing the benefits of the endemic graft to supplement it. A public official would never seek an inducement or accept a bribe-(Blago) would they?