Monday, June 29, 2009
150 years is about right
If Bernie Madoff had been caught or confessed early in his ponzi scheme, he'd have served his time & been out of prison long ago.
I watched a documentary about Madoff. Evil. Bernie, his higher level employees & accomplices, the SEC, the greedy super-rich investors who couldn't be bothered to investigate why Bernie was so mysteriously profitable. I didn't feel so sorry for the European counts & dukes. I did feel very sorry for the people who entrusted their life savings to financial planners who in turn invested the money with Madoff. Those unfortunate folks didn't know Madoff had their money until it was gone. They didn't get the Madoff personal treatment, the arcane explanations of Bernie's "system," the tour of his headquarters with all the computers showing the neat columns of numbers. No, those smaller investors just woke up broke one day. They're upper middle class professionals having - or expecting to have - a comfortable retirement they'd worked toward for 40, 50 years. They have their social security, their basic pensions (if they weren't self-employed), & maybe some property if they didn't sell the house, move into a cheaper condo, & invest the difference. If Bernie felt the cumulative pain & loss of these people, he would find himself in the next-to-lowest ring of Dante's Inferno, among the fraudulent advisors, the Eighth Circle, deeper than the gluttonous & avaricious & lustful. It would be unbearable. In a NYT piece, Ralph Blumental places Madoff at the bottom, among the frozen betrayers, in the icy pit, an allegory of those who violate trust. An oddity of the Ninth Circle is the presence of souls whose bodies are still alive, now inhabited in world above by demons.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
I watched a documentary about Madoff. Evil. Bernie, his higher level employees & accomplices, the SEC, the greedy super-rich investors who couldn't be bothered to investigate why Bernie was so mysteriously profitable. I didn't feel so sorry for the European counts & dukes. I did feel very sorry for the people who entrusted their life savings to financial planners who in turn invested the money with Madoff. Those unfortunate folks didn't know Madoff had their money until it was gone. They didn't get the Madoff personal treatment, the arcane explanations of Bernie's "system," the tour of his headquarters with all the computers showing the neat columns of numbers. No, those smaller investors just woke up broke one day. They're upper middle class professionals having - or expecting to have - a comfortable retirement they'd worked toward for 40, 50 years. They have their social security, their basic pensions (if they weren't self-employed), & maybe some property if they didn't sell the house, move into a cheaper condo, & invest the difference. If Bernie felt the cumulative pain & loss of these people, he would find himself in the next-to-lowest ring of Dante's Inferno, among the fraudulent advisors, the Eighth Circle, deeper than the gluttonous & avaricious & lustful. It would be unbearable. In a NYT piece, Ralph Blumental places Madoff at the bottom, among the frozen betrayers, in the icy pit, an allegory of those who violate trust. An oddity of the Ninth Circle is the presence of souls whose bodies are still alive, now inhabited in world above by demons.
