Is there anything left in this country that has not been deeply
tainted by corruption?
By now you
have probably heard that dozens of people have been arrested for participating
in a multi-million dollar college admissions scam. Enormous amounts of
money were paid out in order to ensure that children from very wealthy families
were able to get into top schools such as Yale University, Stanford University,
the University of Texas and the University of Southern California. And as The Economic Collapse blog's Michael Snyder writes, we should certainly be
disgusted by these revelations, but we shouldn’t be surprised. Such
corruption happens every single day on every single level of society in America. At this point
our nation is so far gone that it is shocking when you run into someone that
actually still has some integrity.
The
“mastermind” behind this college admissions scam was a con man named William
Rick Singer. He had been successfully getting the kids of wealthy people
into top colleges for years using “side doors”, and he probably thought that he
would never get caught.
But he did.
There
were four basic methods that Singer used to get children from wealthy families
into elite schools. The first two methods involved bribes…
Bribing
college entrance exam administrators to allow a third party to facilitate
cheating on college entrance exams, in some cases by posing as actual
students,’ is the first.
Bribing
university athletic coaches and administrators to designate applicants as
purported athletic recruits – regardless of their athletic abilities, and in
some cases, even though they did not play the sport,’ is the second.
Because
many of these kids didn’t even play the sports they were being “recruited” for,
in some cases Photoshop was used to paste their faces on to the bodies of real
athletes…
In
order to get non-athletic kids admitted to college as athletes, Singer often
had to create fake profiles for them. Sometimes this involved fabricating
resumes that listed them having played on elite club teams, but to finish the
illusion Singer and his team would also use Photoshop to combine photos of the
kids with actual athletes in the sport.
A number of
college coaches became exceedingly wealthy from taking bribes to “recruit” kids
that would never play once they got to school, but now a lot of those same
coaches are probably going to prison.
The third
and fourth methods that Singer used involved more direct
forms of cheating…
‘Having
a third party take classes in place of the actual students, with the
understanding that the grades earned in those classes would be submitted as
part of the students’ application,’ is the third.
The
fourth was ‘submitting falsified applications for admission to universities …
that, among other things, included the fraudulently obtained exam scores and
class grades, and often listed fake awards and athletic activities.’
Of
course the main thing that the media is focusing on is the fact that some
celebrities are among those being charged in this case, and that includes Lori Loughlin
from “Full House”…
It
was important to “Full House” star Lori Loughlin that her kids have “the
college experience” that she missed out on, she said back in 2016.
Loughlin, along with
“Desperate Housewives” actress Felicity Huffman, is among those charged in a scheme
in which parents allegedly bribed college coaches and insiders
at testing centers to help get their children into some of the most elite
schools in the country, federal prosecutors said Tuesday.
Despite how
cynical I have become lately, I never would have guessed that Lori Loughlin was
capable of such corruption.
After
all, she seems like such a nice lady on television.
But
apparently she was extremely determined to make sure that her daughters had
“the college experience”, and so Loughlin and her husband shelled out half a million dollars in
bribes…
Loughlin
and Giannulli ‘agreed to pay bribes totaling $500,000 in exchange for having
their two daughters designated as recruits to the USC crew team – despite the
fact that they did not participate in crew – thereby facilitating their
admission to USC,’ according to the documents.
As bad as this scandal is, can we really say that it
is much worse than what is going on around the rest of the country every single
day?
Of course not.
We are a very sick nation, and we are getting sicker by the day.
William
Rick Singer had a good con going, and he should have stopped while he was ahead…
William “Rick” Singer said
he had the inside scoop on getting into college, and anyone could get in on it
with his book, “Getting In: Gaining Admission To
Your College of Choice.”
“This
book is full of secrets,” he said in Chapter 1 before dispensing advice on
personal branding, test-taking and college essays.
But
Singer had even bigger secrets, and those would cost up to $1.2 million.
But
like most con men, Singer just had to keep pushing the envelope, and in the end
it is going to cost him everything.
The ironic thing is that our colleges and
universities are pulling an even bigger con. They have convinced all of
us that a college education is the key to a bright future, but meanwhile the
quality of the “education” that they are providing has deteriorated
dramatically. I spent eight years in school getting three degrees, and so
I know what I am talking about. For much more on all this, please see my
recent article entitled “50 Actual College Course
Titles That Prove That America’s Universities Are Training Our College Students
To Be Socialists”.
I know that
it is not fashionable to talk about “morality” and “values” these days, but the
truth is that history has shown us that any nation that is deeply corrupt is
not likely to survive for very long.
Our founders understood this, and former president
John Adams once stated that our Constitution “was made only for a moral and
religious people”…
Avarice, ambition, revenge and licentiousness would break
the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and
religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
Today, we are neither moral or religious.
What we are is deeply corrupt, and America will not survive if we
keep going down this path.
