On a trip to the Soviet Union President Ronald Reagan once quoted from an Old Russian saying that we should, “Trust but verify.” He said that that piece of wisdom should always guide our relations with the Soviets. I believe that it should always guide the actions of our federal government too. Recently we could have avoided a lot of chaos, confusion and damage to the lives of our citizens and to the national economy if we had verified the actions of some of our financial institutions and our industrial sector.
 
For over a decade Bernard Madoff ran a 50 billion-dollar securities and investment fund fraud scheme while the federal regulators of the Security and Exchange Commission looked the other way. Had there been no global financial collapse investors might never have asked for their money back and the fraud would have continued, for how long no one knows.
 
The federal regulators didn’t regulate Madoff because they trusted him and his reputation. They thought that he was far above such criminality and that his clients, supposedly among some of the most shrewd and intelligent investors in the world, would not be taken in by such an obvious hoax as a Ponzi scheme. They found out that they were wrong because they failed to verify before trusting.
 
The Russian adage of “Trust but verify” applies to more than just the financial world. It also applies to government in general. For example, what if two or three years from now  it turns out that President Obama’s birth certificate is really a forgery and that he is not a natural born citizen. All his actions as President would have to be declared to be illegal. The ensuing crisis would literally rip the guts out of the nation. Black Americans would once more feel that they have been disenfranchised by their White fellow citizens and it would not be surprising to see people en masse take to the streets in ugly and violent protest.
 
Let us pray that we are spared such convulsions and that Senator Obama is really a bonafide natural born American citizen. But as with the current financial crisis, are we trusting without verifying? The Democratic Party had an obligation to America's citizens to verify Obama's birth but failed to do so. The U.S. Supreme Court had several opportunities to verify it but failed the nation and the constitution by refusing to inquire into the matter. The Federal Electoral College has also trusted without verifying. Hopefully they are right and there will never be a reason to disqualify him after he becomes President.

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that all of these august bodies have failed to apply President Reagan’s perceptive caution -- “Trust but verify.” If further on down the road it turns out that they have not done their duty, then the current financial crisis and chaos will seem like mere child’s play.