Jamie Dimon shows that crime does pay, and how!

Put this in the Cheater Nation file, copied to the TBTF file. Crime does pay, as long as you do it wearing a tie, with an expensive education under your belt.

In any kind of just country, Jamie Dimon would be walking the plank, breaking stones in a gulag, or wallowing in a dungeon, but in the US of A, he is a very rich and well-respected -- I daresay fawned over -- man.

Crime Doesn't Pay? JPMorgan Chase Begs to Differ

By Richard (RJ) Eskrow

January 24, 2014 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/1e25mCs

Cheater nation: The scam that is the U.S. nonprofit sector

In the U.S., charity is becoming big business:

More than 1.6 million nonprofit groups are registered with the federal government, and they control more than $4.5 trillion in assets.... From 2000 to 2010, the number of registered nonprofits increased by 24 percent, according to an Urban Institute study. Annual revenue at such organizations, adjusted for inflation, grew by 41 percent.

And just as in Big Business, cheating is rife.

According to a Washington Post analysis, from 2008 to 2012, more than 1,000 nonprofits declared to the IRS that they had "significant diversion" of assets -- theft, fraud, embezzlement, etc.  And those are only the ones that owned up!

Moreover, the IRS is pretty lax about what "diversions" must be disclosed: only amounts more than $250,000 or those identified as having exceeded 5 percent of an organization’s annual gross receipts or total assets. 

We're talking hundreds of millions of dollars being misspent or just plain stolen.

We'd be better off trusting the U.S. Government to do the poverty-alleviation work of many of these nonprofits. With it comes Congressional oversight, stringent public procurement rules, rigorous accounting and Inspector General audits.

Inside the hidden world of thefts, scams and phantom purchases at the nation’s nonprofits

By Joe Stephens

October 26, 2013 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/1bqGqAN

Cheater nation: Easy colleges = entry to grad school

Yet another example of how the fix is in: U.S. higher education is becoming a racket. 

Conservatives say they believe in incentives. So where is the incentive at colleges to be "tough" or honest with grading? When colleges get tough, tuition-paying parents, students and alumni donors complain (justifiably, unfortunately) to the administrators that they're making the school less competitive.  

The young winners in this racket go on to become our nation's leaders.  And on and on it goes....

Colleges With Lenient Grades Get Six Times as Many Grads Into B-School

By Louis Lavelle

July 30, 2013 | Bloomberg Businessweek

URL: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-07-30/colleges-with-lenient-grades-get-six-times-as-many-grads-into-b-school

More cheating at U.S. business schools

Another entry in the "cheater nation" file. Notice how many of these stories happen at U.S. business schools, you know, those prepping grounds for our future business leaders, who are mythologized as the smartest and ablest among us. Yeah, right.  

Then these business whizzes go on to do great things like muni fraud, securities fraud, loan fraud, selective amnesia, and made-up LIBOR rates.

"Cheaters prosper," that's today's lesson.

Tulane University Sent False Information To U.S. News & World Report For College Rankings

January 2, 2013 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/S4VorX

Studies: Americans lie about skipping church

So 45 percent of Americans surveyed say they attend church every week, but more accurate Time Diary studies reveal that only about 24 percent do.  Unlike Europeans, who are honest about their low church attendance, Americans lie about it, just like they lie about how often they floss and work out.

I'm tempted to put this story in my "cheater nation" file, but on second thought, I think it just shows America's high level of religiosity, not religion.  Just like we're lectured about how flossing and working out are the "right" things to do, people don't do them because they (gasp!) don't feel like it.  But anyway when surveyed, they feel embarrassed and lie about it.  

But things are changing.  (Or going to hell in a hand basket, depending on your point of view.)  One out of five Americans is ready to tell Pew Research that they have no religious denomination.  This segues to my "spiritual not religious" pet peeve, but I'll save that for another day....

What We Say About Our Religion, And What We Do

By Shankar Vedantam and Steve Inskeep

October 24, 2012 | NPR

URL: http://n.pr/QVXNyp

Cheater nation: 'The world is going to hell'

But no, it's not going to hell for the reasons people usually cite, like gays getting married, abortion, or Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.  

We know America is going to hell because one eccentric researcher has been keeping track, and counting all the little ways in which we all cheat and steal, from disregarding the 10-item limit in the express checkout lane to rolling through stop signs to taking candles at church without paying.  And we're getting worse, demonstrably so.

He is business professor John Trinkaus and you can find some of his work here.

I have a few ideas about why America is becoming a nation of cheaters and scammers.  I doubt it has to do with our turning away from worshiping God, as many conservatives complain.  Nay, I think it has to do with our increasing worship of wealth and success (often by those very same values-preaching conservatives), and our culture's contempt for "losers."  The absolute worst thing in America is to be labelled a loser.  (But logically, how could everybody possibly be a winner?)  

Meanwhile, how you win isn't important, nobody seems to care, it's only the outcome that matters.  And if cheating is OK when it comes to the big things, then it's doubly permissible when it comes to the small things.  Hence Prof. Trinkaus's noticing our increasingly frequent fibs, fudges and infractions.

Learning From the Things That Annoy Us

By Flora Lichtman

October 19, 2012 | NPR

URL: http://n.pr/T35GC3