An old friend who is a lawyer -- yes it is possible for me to be friendly with a lawyer -- said that Bernard Madoff was a petty thief and a pickpocket. He compared the Madoff felonies to the wholesale robbery that financial institutions enabled their people to pull off in 2008.
Those perpetrators should get the hundred years in prison, but only after having been tortured and humiliated. Madoff worked for twenty-five long and hard years in order to rip off a paltry 15 or 16 billion dollars.
The anonymous guys on Wall Street have ripped off at least 3 trillion dollars, cost millions of people their jobs, ruined the lives of many, and put our economy into the toilet. How trivial is that?
It is a fundamental outrage that instead of shame and prison they are allowed to retreat to their estates in Greenwich and elsewhere and live on the profits they generated while sinking the economy solely to satisfy their insatiable greed.
There is no justice.
There never has been a comparable crime.
There is no equity in the system.
Poor petty criminals go to prison.
Rich big time criminals go to Palm Beach!
There is no GOD!
In my opinion the word fair like so many other words depends upon "agreement" among people and I will not attempt here to define the meaning of agreement. Fair, however, is defined as: "free from bias, dishonesty, or injustice, proper under the rules: a fair decision; a fair judge".
Is there a lesson to be learned? You bet there is.
Start out by assuming: that people in the system will very often attempt to "scam" the system.
Those that are scamming the system should first be humiliated and then incarcerated.
All of the rules passed to prevent people from scamming the system must be enforced, and enforced big time.
We have for the longest time been awash with a deregulatory fever. The notion of the glories of a free marketplace making the "deserts bloom" is a fallacious one.
We are all victims of a deregulatory Tsunami that has been in process in order to make the "big guys bigger."
Our country is decaying and sinking into three oceans because business and politics are so corrupt. We spend a gazillion dollars a year enforcing laws that end up incarcerating people for victimless crimes like drug use. As and until we can at least reduce these activities we are doomed.
We are as a nation being "screwed" and what reports do we get from the mostly deregulated and consolidated media?
Michael Jackson
How sad.