May 1, 2009

• Time Magazine Gets Radical!

  Hard to imagine that Time Magazine would actually publish something written by Michael Moore, but here you are.  You heard it first here.

  Oh, yeah.  I had a birthday a couple days ago, too.

  "Bernie Madoff, Scapegoat" by Michael Moore (for Time magazine)

  The following piece written by Michael Moore appears in this week's Time magazine (and in full at Time.com) as part of their annual "Time 100" issue highlighting their choices for "The World's Most Influential People."

  Elie Wiesel called him a "God." His investors called him a "genius."
  But, proving correct that old adage from the country and western song,
  you never really know what goes on behind closed doors.

  Bernie Madoff, for at least 20 years, ran a Ponzi scheme on
  thousands of clients, among them the people you and I would consider
  the best and brightest. Business leaders, celebrities, charities, even
  some of his own relatives and his defense attorney were taken for a
  ride (this has to be the first time a lawyer was hosed by the client).

  We're clearly in one of those historic, game changing years: up is
  down, red is blue and black is President. Aside from Obama himself, no
  person will provide a more iconic face of this
  end-of-capitalism-as-we-know-it year than Bernard Lawrence Madoff.

  Which is too bad. Yes, he stole $65 billion from some already quite
  wealthy people. I know that's upsetting to them because rich guys like
  Bernie are not supposed to be stealing from their own kind. Crime,
  thievery, looting — that's what happens on the other side of town. The
  rules of the money game on Park Avenue and Wall Street are comprised of
  things like charging the public 29% credit card interest, tricking
  people into taking out a second mortgage they can't afford, and
  concocting a student loan system that has graduates in hock for the
  next 20 years. Now that's smart business! And it's legal. That's where
  Bernie went wrong — his scheming, his trickery was an outrage both
  because it was illegal and because he preyed on his side of the tracks.

  Had Mr. Madoff just followed the example of his fellow top
  one-percenters, there were many ways he could have legally multiplied
  his wealth many times over. Here's how it's done. First, threaten your
  workers that you'll move their jobs offshore if they don't agree to
  reduce their pay and benefits. Then move those jobs offshore. Then
  place that income on the shores of the Cayman Islands and pay no taxes.
  Don't put the money back into your company. Put it into your pocket and
  the pockets of your shareholders. There! Done! Legal!

  But Bernie wanted to play X-games Capitalism, run by the mantra
  that's at the core of all capitalistic endeavors: Enough Is Never
  Enough. You have the right to make as much as you can, and if people
  are too stupid to read the fine print of their health insurance policy
  or their GM "100,000-mile warranty," well, tough luck, losers. Buyers
  beware!

  It would be too easy — and the wrong lesson learned — to put Bernie
  on TIME's list all by himself. If Ponzi schemes are such a bad thing,
  then why have we allowed all of our top banks to deal in credit default
  swaps and other make-believe rackets? Why did we allow those same banks
  to create the scam of a sub-prime mortgage? And instead of putting the
  people responsible in the cell block in Lower Manhattan, where Bernie
  now resides, why did we give them huge sums of our hard-earned tax
  dollars to bail them out of their self-inflicted troubles? Bernard
  Madoff is nothing more than the scab on the wound. He's also a
  most-needed and convenient distraction. Where's the photo on this list
  of the ex-chairmen of AIG, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup? Where's the mug
  shot of Phil Gramm, the senator who wrote the bill to strip the system
  of its regulations, or of the President who signed that bill? And how
  'bout those who ran the fake numbers at the ratings agencies, the
  lobbyists who succeeded in making sleazy accounting a lawful practice,
  or the stock market itself — an institution that's treated like the
  Holy Sepulchre instead of the casino that it is (and, like all other
  casinos, the house eventually wins).

  And what of Madoff's clients themselves? What did they think was
  going on to guarantee them incredible returns on their investments
  every single year — when no one else on planet Earth was getting
  anything like that? Some have admitted they did have an inkling
  "something was up," but no one really wanted to ask what it was that
  was making their money grow on trees. They were afraid they might find
  out it had nothing to do with gardening. Many of Madoff's victims have
  told investigators that, over the years, they have made much more than
  the original investment they gave Bernie. If I buy a stolen car from
  the guy down the street, the police will take that car from me
  regardless of whether I knew it was stolen. If I knew it was stolen,
  then I go to jail for receiving stolen property. Will these "victims"
  give back their gains that were fraudulently obtained? Will the head of
  Goldman Sachs reveal what he was doing at the meetings with the Fed
  chairman and the Treasury secretary before the bailout? Will Bank of
  America please tell us what they've spent $45 billion of our TARP money
  on?

  That's probably going too far. Better that we just put Bernie on this list.

  
  Moore's new documentary on the wonders of capitalism will be in movie theaters this fall.

  • 7:37 pm
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