One big American Ponzi scheme
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While Bernard Madoff languishes in jail, bankers continue to profit and the poor lose their homes and hope. Thank you, Bernie, for breaking your silence - even if you are still clinging to that cover-up mode you adopted since you took the entirety of the blame for your crimes.
What is clear is that ripping off the rich is punished far more severely than ripping off the poor. The lengthy sentence you were given spared countless other unscrupulous businessmen from facing the music - whatever music there is.
In an interview - with a reporter from The New York Times who is writing a book to cash in on a man who has already cashed out - we learn, in the vaguest terms, that Madoff believes the banks he did his crooked business with "should have known" his figures did not figure. Keeping with the deceit that has served him well over the years, he names no names.
For years, he went undetected by business journalists, who knew - or should have known - what he was up to. There are even questions about the speed with which he was sentenced, preventing him from being tried - a process which, through diligent cross-examination, would have brought us more information on the details of his dirty deals.
Madoff is still not coming clean about the web of alliances he had established internationally, as well as in New York. As a result, people investigating him are making a small fortune. The Financial Times said: "The army of lawyers and consultants helping to recover funds from Bernard Madoff's $19.6-billion fraud stand to earn more than $1.3 billion in fees, according to new figures that detail the cost of liquidating the huge Ponzi scheme."
The comments of readers to The Times appear to be more insightful than the paper's reports. Here is one from Texas: "I actually, sort of, feel sorry for this man. He was just doing what many investment firms were doing at the same time. He has been imprisoned as a scapegoat, yet many people since then - and to this day - are doing the same thing. Where are the indictments against the thousands of other people who did the same thing - and knowingly led this country into financial disaster?"
The best reporting on the subject is not in the mainstream press but in a music magazine, Rolling Stone, in which Matt Taibbi investigates why the whole of Wall Street is not in jail. "Financial crooks brought down the world's economy - but the feds (federal officials) are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them," Taibbi charges.
By their actions, Democrats and Republicans both appear to prefer the most simplistic understandings - or misunderstandings.
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, like the 9/11 and Warren Commissions before it, avoided key issues. The inquiry commission did not call for a criminal indictment of wrongdoers. While informative, its report was ultimately a dud - telling us mostly what we knew, although there were some disclosures that our tepid press still missed.
