What The Hell Is Up With That?

So you swindle people for a living, not just the rich, not just the upper class but you also involve the lower class as well. You touch upon so many lives that there is no way you could have acted alone. In fact I would hazard to guess that you had a small army of people helping you.

Bernie Madoff, this guy is no better than a child molester and needs to be treated so. He was considered by many to be a “third market” so we need to create a “second legal system”. We need to go after this guy and everyone that is complicit. The government needs to intervene, take over the investigation and prosecute. They need to do so in a 60 day time frame. I want them to follow our laws, but I also want them to shoot first and ask questions later. It needs to happen so fast that anyone who is starting, in the midst or considering doing some sort of Ponzi Scheme sits straight up in their seat and takes notice. At the end of the 60 day investigation anyone who was implicated, complicit and outright involved should have everything seized and liquidated and the proceeds should be split among the people that were duped by Bernie Madoff and his crew. This is no joking matter and it needs to be dealt with as such. Over his years Madoff and his gang of merry robbers took money to the tune of 50 billion dollars – that’s bailout money, a measurable difference in the federal deficient. I have to believe at some point it even stopped being about greed and became “for the love of the game”, much like when an athlete doesn’t exit the sport he or she plays while they’re up.

Bernie Madoff’s admission of guilt a few days ago was no great surprise. He knew he was going to jail, but when he made that ridiculous plea that his wife be allowed to keep her 65 million dollars in assets – pu-lease! Madoff has maintained throughout that his family knew nothing about his Ponzi Scheme, I for one don’t buy it for an instant. How do you bilk that much money out of that many people without some “trusted” family and friends helping you, you can’t. Even simple schemes need assistance. Here’s a for instance – when I was in college the college itself was turning 150 years old. So the administrators decided to have a big celebration and we though it would be great to somehow have Jimi Hendrix’s Star Spangled Banner play right in the middle of the whole thing. Now it wasn’t as simple as getting the kid with the loudest stereo on campus, we had to have the Schools President Trigger the event. Our window of opportunity – we knew that at the mid point the were going to play the pre-recorded bells that fired at high noon everyday all we had to do was swap out the bell recording for the much more patriotic Hendrix tune. It was executed flawlessly and raised the blood pressure of every booster and administrator but it also took about 12 of us to do it. Also a nickel never changed hands and unlike Bernie we were never caught, but if we had been trust me we would all gotten into a pile of trouble. The morale - To pull off something big you can’t do it alone, you have to have help. So here’s what I suggest. Again streamline the investigation, I mean really fast track it. The first 20 days should be spent identifying everyone that might be involved, the next twenty bringing charges, the next ten – bringing them all to trial and convicting them, then the last ten days, selling off all of their assets and anything that was purchased with monies made from the scheme. I mean everything must be liquidated – EVERYTHING! Then cut everyone that lost their savings a check. The long and the short of it is – we as a country need to scare people into never doing this again. Create a precedent that states “if you play you will pay” no and, ifs or buts about it. What the hell is up with that?

This entry was posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.