This…
Members of a posh Upper East Side synagogue suffered a $2 billion bloodbath in Bernie Madoff’s epic Ponzi scheme.
The Fifth Avenue Synagogue ranks with the decimated rolls of the Palm Beach Country Club in terms of members scorched by the scam.
And this…
Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff’s family is coming apart at the seams, with his two sons refusing to talk to their parents and one getting hit with divorce papers the day of his dad’s arrest.
…The one missing thing from these and many other reports concerning the scam of the decade indicates that, in the financial world, shame in the age of Bush is not the same (or as sharp) as shame in the age of Coolidge. The missing thing is not constituted by an absence but a presence. That presence is Madoff. He as a breathing and heart-beating being. In our time, his hands are free from doing the one thing that, 90 years ago, the hands of an exposed deceiver would have done immediately: take their own life out of the hot spotlight of the scandal and leave the world with a cold corpse to denounce. What vanished in the Bush years was a code of honor with any real meat in it. Now we see that night and day is what separates the investment banker of the Bush age from the samurai of the Sengoku period. 
Does this effect me?
I heard that prosecutors will cut you a special deal if you commit suicide shortly after arrest.
Since when have con men traditionally killed themselves on being found out? The original Ponzi Schemer, Charles Ponzi, pled guilty 88 years ago (close enough to 90) and promptly jumped bail and fled to Florida where he started up a new scam selling swampland. On his deathbed, he expressed no remorse, saying “It was easily worth fifteen million bucks to watch me put the thing over.”
Even if they look relatively harmless, I still think I’d simply deny the request if a failed financier requested to commit hello kitty in my courtyard.
i think the comparison of skeazy financial workers and samurai is a bit rude to samurai.
I think that, at this point, if the @ssholes won’t jump voluntarily, we should be flinging them off the roofs. Seriously, it should be a stipulation of the bailout; The CEOs have to jump for cash, and it has to be a building 4+ stories too, not some wussy 15-20 ft. leg-breaking jump of a mini-mart. A real freakin’ high building. If they can walk (or crawl) away afterwards they’re pardoned.
@4, as a lover of samurai cinema, your post made me laugh and laugh.
This topic is too depressing, and reading about it is confusing. I’m trying to figure out our seating arrangement for when the neighbors come over for the TV inauguration special in January. It has to be just right; this is the highlight of the media soap-opera so far. Pens and paper will be laid out on each person’s chair and a game of catchy criticisms will award the winner of some tacky gift relating to Warren. So please, enough talk of these criminals and the economy. Priorities!
Every time I read a slog post that starts out with news and tailspins wildly into incomprehensible prose poetry, I think “Charles Mudede?” then scroll back up to the byline, and sure enough…
i’ve been to a wedding at that synagogue. the reception room in the basement is hella sweet.
I think that’s a good arguement to kill these fuckers and their families. Wipe them out, even the kids. Purification by fire.
You know, the Romans did it too.
Just sayin’.
As entertaining as it is to watch Madoff, the reality is that he is a drop in the bucket compared to the larger scams perpetrated upon the public by the financial industry.
And as a Democrat, I still hold Clinton accountable for a good deal of the deregulation that led to the current financial crisis, specifically, 1) the repeal of Glass Steagal and 2) the signing of the Commodities Futures Modernization Act – both took place under Clinton.
That has cost this country a great deal more than schmuckhead Madoff.
Further, to continue to portray this as hitting only Palm Beach Country Club Jews, while also entertaining, is missing the larger point – the more recent victims were the Saudi Investment Authority, the wasp morons who invested with Madoff through Fairfield Sentry because Walter Noel was one of their gentile own, and Banco Santander, BNP Paribas, large numbers of FOF’s…
Et cetera. But you don’t need to know that if you can make a weakass comparison to samurai.
And btw, I don’t see Bush with the samurai sword, so forget it. The crimes of Madoff pale in comparison to the crimes of Katrina, iraq, Abu Ghraib, failure to provide proper support for returning veterans, and so on.
And further – when the mafioso in Godfather II slits his wrists in federal custody (after Bobby Duvall suggests it to him) in the bathtub… THAT was fiction.
This is reality.
As was said by the real hero of Godfather II:
“And I said to myself, THIS is the business we have chosen. And so I didn’t ask who ordered the hit. Because it had NOTHING to DO with BUSINESS.”
@13, amen.
It’s almost enough to make one think that Jews have some kind of thing for money and cheating…
Some have suggested that Madoff is actually doing exactly what you suggest, i.e., falling on his sword to save other family members from the consequences of their own culpability. It is preposterous to suggest that he perpetrated this fraud while keeping all of his associates completely in the dark. If there aren’t more indictments in this case, it will only be further proof of the utter incompetence of the SEC. (And speaking of the SEC, I would say that Madoff is a good bit more honorable than the execrable Chairman Cox, who is busy trying to pin the blame for this debacle on everyone at the SEC but himself.)
#6 — one floor per billion dollars. So Bernie would be looking at a 50-story drop.