NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- A couple of months ago, I detailed how states in our own nation were facing their own debt crisis, in the same way as Europe's PIIGS (Portugal, Iceland, Ireland, Greece and Spain). Our "PIIGS" are California, Illinois and New Jersey.
Yup, you read that right. My home state (Parkway Exit 44) has been sued for securities fraud. While peddling bonds to unsuspecting investors, New Jersey apparently forgot to let them know that two of the state's largest pension funds were more or less Ponzi schemes. These funds weren't even close to being properly funded, and you can only guess where the money from these bonds was heading. In terms a caveman could understand, a Ponzi scheme uses money from new investors to pay old ones. Now if I were to take a play from the Obama administration, I would place the blame squarely on former governor Jon Corzine and the Democrats for turning the Garden State into a cesspool of unions, kickbacks and out-of-control spending. After all, the current governor Chris Christie has only been in office for seven months. So it's all Bush's ... errr, I mean ... Corzine's fault. But I wouldn't stoop so low as to employ Obama's "not my fault" excuse matrix. Christie recently battled the state legislature and wielded his veto pen to attempt to put New Jersey on a financial crash diet. But this is his mess now, and he better get cracking. He also needs to fire whoever was responsible for this fraud ... unless of course they're in a union. Speaking of the president, where is he on this issue? When Goldman Sachs(GS) came under fire for the Abacus deal (where alleged clueless institutional investors were "defrauded" by the evil Death Star), the president used that case as one of his torches for his populist attack on Wall Street. The SEC case against Goldman was used to help ram through "financial reform." Apparently this was financial reform only for Wall Street and not the government. I for one am looking forward with interest to when the SEC charges the federal government with the same charges that it leveled at the Soprano State. 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