In recent news: Wall Street thief Bernie Madoff, who once ran half of the stock market and finally got caught stealing an enormous pile of cash in a high-end Ponzi scheme, has asked the court to allow him to keep about fifty million dollars in assets.
I confess I did not read the entirety of the article, being otherwise occupied with suppressing the combined nausea and homicidal rage this item engendered. But as with many outrages the fact of it alone needs no qualification.
What is it about these guys that they believe the law shouldn’t apply to them? Where do they get arrogance so monumental? I’ll tell you where: they get it from the rest of us.
Today’s example is the high-ranking Treasury Department official allowed to quietly “retire” –– presumably on full pension –– rather than face charges that he allowed at least one bank to falsify its financial records. The lesson we teach, again and again, is that no fraud is too egregious, no moral bankruptcy too obscene to disrupt the serene bleeding of America’s citizens by those with the power to pull it off.
I guess we have become sophisticated, that must be it. Over the past week I’ve heard two close friends, intelligent and honorable people, dismiss the idea of prosecuting crooked bankers and their inside enablers, or even hauling them before a grand jury to answer questions under oath, because it might distract us from the serious business of rescuing the same economy these lousy bastards have helped destroy.
This “page” we are all called upon to “turn”, in the popular vernacular, cannot be turned, nor the vast cultural sickness be remedied, without nailing these guys. The past is in fact prologue. The new page will be the old page. The lessons will remain unlearned. And so it goes...
Another dear friend has a better idea, I think, which she broached over lunch at Avatar’s, this great restaurant in Sausalito which, if you live in the Bay Area, you ought to check out. We were talking about Madoff and his request of the court. She said that Madoff ought to be allowed to keep as much cash as he could shove up his ass.
I like it. If he was limited to hundred dollar bills, he could still shuffle away with plenty, assuming the bills were rolled tightly and he was fully greased up. I think it should be applied to all of those boys, the bankers, the regulators who were on the take, the insurance mobsters. Whatever they can shove in there they can keep; everything else –– their houses, yachts, private jets, country club memberships, limousines, offshore bank accounts –– is confiscated and returned to the treasury.
The procedure could be featured on MSNBC. Think of the ratings!
The right-wing talks a lot about law and order. All the pompous Senators who are themselves eager recipients of millions in bribe money prattle about locking up felons, but they are talking about blacks and latinos, not their rich, white friends. They want to electrocute people as a deterrence. Consider the deterrent affect of the Madoff Solution on the real criminals in America. Maybe the CEOs of BearStearns and Citibank and the others would think twice before looting the nation if they knew it would all be seized.
The current fraud scandal at Treasury is only a small piece of the story but it is both vivid and illustrative of how the country has been screwed. And I am reminded of a movie called “Rollover”, an Alan Pakula film with Kris Kristofferson and Jane Fonda in which bankers in league with Saudi billionaires lose control over their manipulations and the world’s economy goes down the drain. Life imitates art. Check it out on Netflix, scare yourself to death.
Yes, I am a little bitter these days. The rape of the nation is hurting all of those who didn’t have the juice to buy a corrupt congress, and nobody’s paying the price except the rest of us. The thugs who pushed the Ponzi scheme over the edge, the top dogs in finance and coporate money-moving, are unhappy with the idea that their salaries and other compensation ought to be capped at half a million bucks a year. Evidently, they don’t get it; however, if we apply the Madoff Solution, I’m betting they will get it: their executive pay for 2009 should be limited to the aforementioned bundle of bills wedged where the sun don’t shine.
Bet you that’s the last Ponzi scheme we’d see for a while.
