You've read the warnings about the proliferating imposter scams: scammers posing as "officials", representatives of utilities or "a close friend of a family member" all exploit the fast-draining reservoir of trust in America to extract financial information out of the unwary marks.

I'm not sure what's more remarkable: the depths of scammer perversity or the fact that some people can still be conned by claims of authority or friendship. Most are seniors, of course, as the elderly still retain an easy-to-scam trust in institutions and officialdom as a holdover from an era before trust was unraveled by wholesale self-serving deception.

The deeper problem is that America is now a nation of imposters. Everything that is presented as august and trustworthy is an imposter organization designed to enrich the few at the expense of the many via deception and the cloaking of self-serving skims and scams.

A useful tool to uncloaking imposters is to ask: cui bono, to whose benefit? Take the nation's central bank, the Federal Reserve. It claims to be serving the public and the common good, but who actually benefits from its policies?