Madoff: Not Quite A Hero

With the Wall Street debacle in matinee performances and making the media marquee every business day, and weekends too, television soaps have been upstaged--who needs fiction with credit default swaps and Timothy Geithener in leading rolls? Theater of the Absurd is back and it is real!

Bernard Madoff is a fall guy, a cover for the looting of the U.S. Treasury by a politically connected financial sector. Madoff is a petty thief made into an mastermind, arch-criminal, who literally ventured out on his own to pick the pockets of those within his own socio-economic class. He was the fox watching the hen house, in plebeian imagery. He is not quite a Robin Hood. Madoff is no socialist! He wasn't going to transfer monies from those who had questionably acquired it, to those good citizens who unquestionably had it taken from them; but nevertheless, he is a hero of sorts in a Wizard of Oz setting.

A bilker of the rich by one of the same, is an example of the cliche, what goes around, comes around. The karmic consequence of greed. The rich sinking their fortunes into something to make them even richer; and, doing so because they followed the lead of one of their own! There's justice in that, is there not? Madoff's ponzi scheme is the stuff of my childhood fables. Whom among the poor and oppressed will shed a tear for anyone who had his or her pocket picked by Bernie? And he will go to prison, with luxury accommodations, to be sure. With reduced incarceration time, he will probably be out in less than five years! Of course, no one in the Wall Street Mob will suffer jail time. The Mob is too big to be guilty of anything other than having made some mistakes. In fact, the Mob continues to be rewarded by the Obama Administration, following the Geo. W. path.

If Geithener, Summers, Ruben, Paulsen, Greenspan and all the other Wall Street suspects and their Congressional accomplices can extract several trillion dollars from the National Reserve, why should anyone fuss about some fat cats losing fifty billion dollars? The rich usually get to where they are financially by government largesse of one form or another. The real concern is that all the money going to insolvent banks is lost to the public forever. We can forget about rebuilding America.