Madoff: Fall Guy or First of Many?

from OurFuture.org:



Madoff: Fall Guy or First of Many?
By Eric Lotke

June 29, 2009 - 4:08pm ET


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Bernard Madoff has been sentenced to 150 years in prison for one of the biggest investment frauds in Wall Street history. The punishment seems to fit the crime....

But there is no closure here. We can’t let Madoff’s sentence distract us from the underlying problems.

This isn’t just about Madoff. This is about the system in which Madoff’s scam took place. This is about systemic fraud and malpractice, the cultural trade of due diligence for easy profit. It’s about conflicts of interest where companies paid ratings agencies for their ratings. It’s about ideological blinders that let regulators and the Federal Reserve look the other way while banks turned into betting parlors.

So Madoff got 150 years for breaking into the bank. Fine.

But what about the guard who was asleep out front? What about the clerk who forgot to lock the door? What about the $300 billion that Citigroup walked out with from one vault, and the $200 billion that AIG took from another? Does anybody know where that money went or what we got for it? Don’t they get in trouble too? Did you know that, or do you know why, Goldman Sachs is paying its biggest bonus payouts in its 140 year history?

That’s why we need a Pecora Commission. We’ve been calling for a “grand inquest” in the spirit of Ferdinand Pecora, the fierce New York City prosecutor who investigated the crash of 1929 as general counsel of the Senate Banking and Currency Committee. Pecora hauled the robber barons into daylight and dismantled them on public cross examination. He subpoenaed the documents, dug behind the deals and took testimony under oath. His efforts paved the way for the regulatory reforms — the Securities Act of 1933, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 — that held the house together until modern conservatives took them apart in the name of efficient deregulation. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009062729/madoff-fall-guy-or-first-many

If the MSM hadnt had Madoff's ponzi scheme to report on for months on end they might have found themselves with no choice but to cover the real corruption embedded deep within Wall Street that cost everybody far more than Madoff ever did.

Just because there's a burglar operating on one street, and an armed robber operating on another, doesn't mean they're part of a network or even associated in any way. And the term "fall guy" is used for people who were victimized and used by higher ups.

Madoff was a fucking crook who stole from people. He was also a great con artist. AND he had a network of pals who fed him suckers--and they need to go down next.

The relationships are deep and incestuous.

People with power got hurt--maybe not the biggest powerbrokers, but enough.