I’ll believe corporations are people when one is declined the chance to pay a fine instead of face criminal penalties. Imagine OJ Inc or Pistorius Inc or Bernie Madoff being able to pay off US marshalls instead of going to jail. Next question, who is the beneficiary Toyota’s $1.2 Billion payoff?
You and I fight traffic tickets, Phil Spector fights charges that he put a gun to a woman’s mouth and pulled the trigger, he fights for years. Everyone fights against the long arm of the law, except Bernie Madoff. Does that make sense to you?
The biggest economic fraud ever perpetrated by one man, and that man pleads guilty. Hmmm.
We are told that as a consequence, Madoff doesn’t have to tell anyone where he buried the treasure. Meanwhile his accomplices are being charged and are proclaiming themselves innocent.
Okay, I didn’t know that not plea-bargaining means not having to say you’re sorry, or divulge where you took the loot. I didn’t know that when Kenneth Lay died, it meant that because his appeal could then never be exhausted, his wife and family got to keep the money. An appetizing pattern emerges…
Can you imagine a parade of white-collar-criminal bunkmates sidling up to Madoff in prison, hoping to learn the whereabouts of his vanished bullions (who saw that pun coming)? Nor can I. Michael Milken –now a financier and philanthropist–had plenty of business suitors waiting to hire his larcenous consultation when he was released. Paper crimes don’t garner severe prison sentences. Whether Madoff has a felony on his record or not can hardly hinder his future prospects.
Madoff has a very good reason to plead guilty. It’s a bit like the Kenneth Lay play-possum legal strategy. Let’s remember Bernie Madoff couldn’t even afflict himself with jail. He remained out on bail in his luxury penthouse, until his day in court. Since then where has he been? Have YOU seen him? Are you sure he’s where authorities say he is?
I’m convinced that Bernie has a plan to stay out of the penal system. And it doesn’t involve a jury verdict.
I’d guess with just a fraction of his loot, he can pay off the very few administrators involved to handle the paperwork to incarcerate someone in his place. No visitors, no outsiders to know. It won’t be Bernie doing the time, it’ll be a stand in. Maybe as simple as a real inmate, written off as released, but reissued Bernie’s ID. No cosmetic surgery necessary, what’s the probability that prison guards know what Bernie Madoff looks like anyway.
If Bernie had to go back and forth to court, he’d have to do be there himself. Being seen by too many people.
In prison, rather, not in prison, Madoff can live the rest of his years on a private estate, miles from onlookers, his fence-line probably abutting Kenneth Lay’s.
I thought there was something odd with a headline about a recent break in a 2001 murder case: Arrest of inmate imminent. Probably it makes perfect sense to hasten with the arrest of someone already incarcerated. Meanwhile, Allan Stanford, suspected of an $8 Billion dollar fraud, is “laying low” and not under arrest. And Bernard Madoff, of the $50 Billion fraud, is free in his penthouse.
Really. It’s probably too soon to know how the Guinness Book of Records will rank these crimes, but we might guess these are the biggest, even if you include the S&L heists. Although record keepers will note the bank “bailout” heist, the GWOT military industry heist and the Tax Cuts For The Rich heist will eclipse all.
What distinguishes the earlier crime record holders, from these break-the-bank blockbusters, is the urgency expressed, in familiar days, about bringing the guilty to justice.
If asked to name the biggest heist of all time, most of us think of the Great Train Robbery, maybe just because it still has a ring to it. The take was peanuts by today’s standard. Buster Edwards and company stole $3.7 million from the mail train, (today it would be equivalent to $58 million). Still the offenders were undone.
The record before that, thirteen years before, was the 1950 Brinks Robbery for $2.7 million.
Since then: Brinks Mat; Société Générale heist, Nice; Lufthansa, $6M; Heathrow Airport security vehicle $6.5M; the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston 1990 $300M; the Oslo National Museum, Oslo 1994 $58M; and the Carlton Hotel Jewelry store, 1994 $44M.
This millennium there was: the Northern Bank Robbery, Belfast, Ireland 2004 $50M; Fortaleza, Brazil bank, 2005 $65M; Securitas Depot robbery, 2006 $92.5M; and I’ve gone a little out of order to list last, the only heist to reach one billion: the Central Bank of Iraq, Baghdad March 2003 $1B;
Does that explain why Messrs Stanford and Madoff are reclining in the luxury of their own abodes, except to illustrate that the rich are different from you and me?
Sure, Tex Al calls himself ‘Sir Allen’ Stanford and likes to host cricket tournaments, but he’s a fifth generation ordinary Texas business crook and not some Grand British Lawdy. He’s going to jail soon!
US tycoon charged over $8bn fraud.
And there he will most likely join the aging Bernard Madoff, whose white crime haul was well over $50 billion. Oops! ‘Bernie’ still is not in jail despite stealing more than anybody else ever did from duh people! He is free on bail but must stay at his Upper East Side apartment. America really is a get tough on crime country, aren’t we?
‘Sir Allen’ specialized in robbing the Latin American ‘investors’. Hundreds line up at Stanford offices in Venezuela So how did our ever so lert SEC and FBI find out about this guy? He’s a tricky Texas business class criminal, sin’t he? Strangely enough, the answer may well be because Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, investigated him first? Yes he did!
‘Officials from Venezuelan military intelligence raided a branch of Sir Allen Stanford’s offshore bank over claims that its employees were paid by the CIA to spy on the south American country.’ …taken from Cricket tycoon Sir Allen Stanford caught up in spying row That happened early last November and now our lert American Federal officials nabbed the big guy! Crime ever pays, Bernie! Psst… (that’s Sir Allen with another man’s wife on his knee in the pic…. Bad Boy, Sir Allen!)
Today on the public radio, I heard PRI’s Matthew Bell pose a question for the program The World. “Is President Bush underrated?” His verdict: “Absolutely!” Well the answer wasn’t Bell’s, actually. But the attribution fell outside the sound bite: Bell went on to say: “At least that’s what President Bush believes.”
Now, did the story go on to be about Bush’s delusion? Or his weeble-wobbleness, take your pick? No. It was about whether Bush had been the worst president in the last 50 years. There followed some arguments:
Historians will judge Bush to have been right, etc, etc. “According to Bill Kristol.” Again the attribution was not prefaced, but footnoted. Nor was Kristol disclosed to have been a close friend and Neocon mentor. Etc.
Contrary opinions on the other hand, were introduced oppositely, by citing the source of the voice before the quote. To my ears, this has the effect of dampening the listener’s receptivity to an argument. It muddies the ear-waves to foil a pithy phrase. When you have no intention to deliver a clear sound-bite.
You tell me which grammar communicates the most vitality:
“It’s ALIVE!” says mad scientist and Island proprietor Dr. Moreau.
(or)
Avowed antagonist and legend in-his-own-mind Dr. Moreau says “It’s ALIVE!”
This technique resembles the leeway newspapers have with their headlines. Most readers won’t go past the headline, or read bellow the fold, so a newspaper can take liberties with the headline when there’s an editorial slant to deliver, warranted or not.
The newspaper business was founded for that advantage, and ownership consolidation continues with the mass media, precisely to consolidate that power.
I believe an extreme example of this unscrupulous literary device is the retraction. Newspaper publishers know they can print a falsehood, or an oversimplification, and run a correction in a later issue. Their audience for the former is a hundred fold larger than for the latter.
That’s what I think the public radio hooligans are doing with their manipulative grammar.
Here, I’ll compose an example they can use for Bernie Madoff:
Has Bernie Madoff earned our forgiveness? Absolutely.
At least that’s what Bernie Madoff believes.
Historians will ultimately look favorably at Madoff’s actions.
According to Mistress X, nephew Z, his friends and supporters.
[But] shirtless man, [a critic of Madoff], says Madoff’s scheme to defraud investors will have a lasting impact on… [trailing into complexities which exceed the bound of a sound-bite.]
Ponzi shmonzi. You be the judge.
What do Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and Bernard Madoff have in common? They are both Democratic Party kingpins, the likes of which Barack Obama climbed his way to White House power with. Bernie Madoff ran a $50 billion ponzi scheme from Wall Street but he also poured money into the Democratic Senatorial Campaign war chest ($100,000 between 2005 and 2008) and made large contributions to important Democrats on the Finance Committees, like Rep Henry Waxman and Senator Charles Schumer.
See “It’s Kristallnacht Two!” An Ethnic Cleansing in America By ALEXANDER COCKBURN for more about Madoff. And keep your eye on Governor Blagojevich’s hair piece, too, since this scandal has hardly but just begun. His defense should be, that selling of favors is actually the standard in our 2 corporate party system of American corruption, not a deviation from it! That’s just the simple truth.
These 2 corruption scandals are just the tip of the iceberg in regards to the overall corruption that Barack Obama’s Administration represents and governs through. Barack Obama has yet to even take over the Presidency, yet he and his party have been cooperating with the Republican Party to give away literally trillions of US government money to be used in bailouts for the profit making of the super rich, more war making for the military industrial complex, and cover-up for the torture regime of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. These two criminal conspiracies, the Democrats and Republicans, co-govern this country, and it really is hard to distinguish the corruption of one group of these gangsters from the corruption of the other group. They are simply in it together.
Corruption is the element that is collapsing The Empire, and the whole world hopes the collapse comes sooner, instead of later. Meanwhile, at home here in the US, there has been no bailout from this corruption that our country has yet to pay the full price for. One thing is for sure, a Democratic Party awash in corruption itself can play little part in moving things forward for the American people. We are caught between a rock and a hard place. Simple as that. Time to get over our ‘lesser of two evils’ buy in to all this top dog corruption and criminality at the very top. Time for patience is coming to an end.
A shoe? The entire world should mark the end of the Bush Error by burning him in effigy on January 20. I know I plan to.
Hang him. Dick Cheney confesses he’s a war criminal.
Confirmed: we’ve been punked. The Wall St. bailout was a scam.
Obituary: Satanic NeoCon Paul Weyrich finally burns in Hell.
Stabbed in the back, by the president-elect. Gays can just forget about hoping in Obama. He’s chosen a notorious anti-gay preacher for the invokation at his inauguration. He’s defending his choice by saying he wants a “spirit of dialogue,” but I don’t see any racists who got invited for that reason. Just take a look at his appointments so far, Republicans and conservative Democrats, nary a liberal to be found. His is clearly going to be a right-wing administration, and the sooner the left wakes up to that, the better.
Republican “government.” SEC knew about Madoff’s $60B fraud, but didn’t do a damned thing about it.
Excerpts from Thomas McCullock’s Dec 18 notes, thomasmc.com.