44 Charged by U.S. in New Jersey Corruption Sweep. New York Times – Front Page, Thursday, July 23, 2009, by David M. Halbfinger. ” A two year corruption and international money laundering investigation stretching from the Jersey Shore to Brooklyn to Israel and Switzerland culminated in charges against 44 people on Thursday including three New Jersey mayors, two state assemblymen and five rabbis.”
To anyone living in New Jersey, those arrested, were only conducting business as usual. What the reports haven’t so far related, (to my knowledge), is that all but one individual were connected to the corrupt New Jersey Democratic party machine.
Having grown up in the North Jersey area of Hudson County, I can tell you from personal experience that these guys are only the tip of the iceberg. The Hudson County party machine, (like the rest of the state), also had shady connections to the mob and big money corporate polluters who used the North Jersey meadow lands as their dumping ground, and everyone knew it. The city I grew up in had a mayor whose brother was a made guy, a superintendent of education, (who sounded as if he was an illiterate – I believe he was a father inlaw to the mayor), who was definitely an old time mob associate and a whole host of other elected officials who were in some way related to the “mob,”again everybody knew it. The point of that little story is to show that corruption at that time, and evidently still, runs from top to bottom.
Democrat New Jersey Governor John Corzine, (a former CEO of Goldman Sachs), knows how the game plays - I would only guess that he most likely has enough layers between him and the rest of the players to stay above the fray, (one of his top aids was rounded up in the sweep.)
These party machines, including the Chicago Democratic party machine all thrive on bribes, nepotism, patronage and any other type of corruption you can imagine….so why be surprised? Our current President came out of the Chicago machine – so it’s business as usual. Corruption knows no party lines, whoever is in power and controls the purse strings is a part of the institutional corruption endemic to our political system – money talks – the rest is all bull. Just my opinion.
Beaudreaux
