Too Embarrassing to Fail.
The biggest individual fraud in history has been uncovered in New York, where the former chairman of NASDAQ, Bernard Madoff, was arrested last Thursday.
I've stated this before and will again: the American business community is rotten through and through. And the higher you go in the conutry's financial heirarchy, the deeper the rot spreads.
The last eight years are simply the culmination of a process of destruction that has taken two generations to bear fruit. And yes, conservative Republicanism is the linchpin of the whole thing. Let's go below.
As if our country's reputation could possibly sink lower:
"There were a lot of very sophisticated people who were duped, and that happens a great deal when you've had somebody decide to be unscrupulous," said Harvey Pitt, a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a regulatory agency in charge of monitoring investment funds like the one Madoff operated.
The extent of the potential damage prompted a leading fund manager in London to lash out at U.S. regulators for failing to detect the fraud earlier.
"I think now it is very difficult for people to invest in things that are meant to be regulated in America, because they haven fallen down in the job," Nicola Horlick, the manager of Bramdean Alternatives, which has 9 percent of its funds invested in Madoff's scheme, told the British Broadcasting Corp.
"All through the credit crunch this has been apparent," Horlick added. "This is the biggest financial scandal, probably, in the history of the markets."
I want to make this very clear: investors across the planet were duped by Mr. Madoff. a former head of one of the world's biggest stock exchanges. European banks like BNP Paribas, Banco Santander and others may stand to lose billions. American tycoons across the country, including prominent owners of American sports teams, are just now beginning to discover the extent of the wreckage. And the forensics will no doubt uncover thousands of smaller investors who have been ruined...
Here are my few key points:
- You won't catch me shedding tears for the likes of Fred Wilpon and Norman Braman (Owners of the New York Mets and the Philadelphia Eagles, respectively). Pretty much all of these guys are Republicans who stupidly bought into the fanatical deregulation ideology pushed by their Party. You suppose they'll start to reconsider now?
- The head of the SEC, Christopher Cox, must immediately resign. A longtime conservative deregulatory ideologue, his tenure in his job sets a new standard for supine incompetence and frankly I think the man needs to be prosecuted by whatever means necessary.
- The American business class en masse deserves to cower in shame. Starting with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, going through virtually every C.E.O and tope xecutive in this country, to the prominent business schools at Wharton, Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley Haas School of Business, ad infinitum to the conservative ideologues peopling The Heritage Foundation and every other organ in their pro-theft Fifth Column, down to the business-school graduate small-fry, our entire business community has a great deal to answer for.
I'm sorry if this sounds drastic, but what better illustration of my point could there possibly be than Mr. Madoff. who single-handedly may cause another financial panic in the banking sector?
There is not a sector of the American economy that is not damaged by the events of the last couple of years. Hocked up to our eyeballs in internationally financed debt, racking up trillions of dollars in federal debt, propagandizing the American public into a pathological buy-now-save-later ideology financed by cheap Chinese labor and massive U.S. securities purchases by Chinese government fund managers and those in other nations as well, and finally watching our most trusted stock exchange officers engage in fraud on a massive scale, the rest of the world justifiably looks on America as the disgrace of the world.
Does American businessmens' greed know any bounds at all? Their greed fractures the firmaments of Heaven.
It is up to us, as Democrats and liberals, to set about forever discrediting this deregulatory conservative ideology and those who espouse it. We are the only people in our country capable of saving it and restoring our reputation in the world.
Republicans cannot be allowed access to power. Ever. Again.