Start Shooting These People

I just don't know how we, as a country, improve the quality of life for everyone here when shit like this happens basically with impunity.

Is our starved regulatory state so... bereft of any institutional pride that it can't even get it up to execute a couple of the most egregious of these motherfuckers a few times a year?

Of course not. Republicans want to point to this shit to say "see, this is why gov't providing ANYTHING is bad" but on the other hand it's their best buds who are usually pulling these scams in the first place so they don't wanna completely shut it down.

You see, they actually DO believe in taxation. Just not that it should ever effect them. They should be allowed to force the government to subcontract every service they allow it to still perform to private parties that they run, and then those private parties are to be allowed to operate with minimal oversight and charge as much as they care to to private citizens to provide (usually dogshit, broken, incomplete) services that citizens are obliged to have.

This is all known, but it's infuriating at how obvious they've gotten about it and how resistant to acknowledging this the average right-wing/centrist voter is. 40 years of the Reagan-rebooted Republican Party telling people that the government is the problem has really fuckin' worked, up there with "Like a rock" and "Just do it" as far as successful ad campaigns go.

I think the only way back from this is to have a healthy journalism industry that can keep shit like this scam front-page news for days, with deep reporting on how it happened, which politicians worked against the regulations or budgeting for enforcement that would've prevented it, naming, addressing and shaming every person who benefited from the scam along the way. And, yes, getting Maoist about it and issuing capital punishment on the ringleaders.

I am not joking in the slightest. We rarely send the biggest white collar criminals to jail for any length of time anymore, and we certainly don't use the death penalty against these guys, some of whom have literally financially ruined thousands of lives in their scams. And being financially ruined in this social net-less gutter of a country is just a slow death sentence itself.

But we've removed all disincentives to acting like this. I'll be searching say every quarter to find out if any of the perpetrators of this grift suffer any penalties at all, much less meaningful ones. I'm not optimistic at what I'll find.