After years of harassing the Obama administration about specious scandals such as Fast and Furious (Begun by Bush), Benghazi, NSA spying (begun by Bush), and IRS targeting of tea partiers (who eventually received non profit status, despite politicizing), Darrell Issa is faced with a real scandal perpetrated by his own brand, corporate America, the 7-Eleven plantation system.

For those unfamiliar with what happened, 10 stores in Long Island and seven in Virginia are accused of stealing the wages of undocumented Pakistani workers and forcing them to live in store-owned housing. In other words, they hit them with a double whammy. The stores were also charged with wire fraud and identify theft, having created twenty fictitious names, using other people’s identities. Sometimes they used them twice. Corporate headquarters got their cut of the money wrung from the illegal aliens and seemed to have missed evidence that two people had the same social security numbers.

As many as forty other stores are under investigation in seven states. Are we supposed to believe 7-Eleven didn’t know about this? Colonel Sanders used to travel around to his franchise stores and make sure personally they were using his pressure cookers and his recipe for their chicken and that the stores were clean. One would think a huge corporation would have some kind of security system. I mean, this went on for thirteen years before somebody finally complained.

Meanwhile Wall Street is at it again. Morgan Stanley should’ve known what a bad investment derivative mortgages were/are. Somehow they managed to lose nine billion dollars only last year, well into the recovery period from the original mortgage debacle. Morgan Stanley maintains they lost their own money. How does that work? The "muppets" invest their money in your financial systems, you charge them for making profits (even if you sometimes lose their investment) and that's your own money?

Meanwhile Congress, namely the Republican party, is blocking financial regulation. But there’s finally some good news on that front. The chairman of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Richard Cordray, seems finally about to be confirmed after the GOP was threatened with the nuclear option and senator John McCain swung a deal with Harry Reid. You’d have to be living under a rock not to be aware of the filibuster votes the senate minority has been using to prevent Obama’s picks for federal judgeships and other positions from being confirmed. Cordray has been serving as the temporary head of the bureau for some time, and Wall Street actually likes him, but a confirmation would have been a victory for Obama, and Boehner and McConnell seem determined to deny him even a small one, hence the immigration reform imbroglio. No, they didn’t want that nuclear option to go through. There’s no assurance the Tea Party caucuses won’t pick somebody crazier than the last menagerie (remember the Delaware witch?) to run in Montana and other states where they seem to have the edge. GOP hardliners don’t even want to run Chris Christie for president in 2016 because he complimented Obama during the Sandy disaster. And he might have a chance to win in 2016 if the Tea Party crawled back under their rocks.

McCain and others with some degree of intellectual acuity know the GOP might just lose the House if they don’t do something about immigration and stop overreaching on abortion. There’s evidence a path to citizenship might even help balance the budget, and that’s their baby, isn’t it? Only when they’re not in the Oval Office.

Okay, so why aren’t we hearing more about the 7-Eleven investigation? Does Rupert Murdoch own the mainstream media now, too? Seems like it, doesn’t it?

Dave Schwinghammer's unconventional mystery, SOLDIER'S GAP, is available on Authorsden and Amazon.com, new and used. Thank you.