"Bernie" Maddoff's family-run brokerage appears to have engaged in the largest financial fraud in history, apparently with plenty of help from family-connected contacts in the Security & Exchange Commission and from politicians of both parties whom "Bernie" shoveled cash to.
"Bernie" has another set of friends too, it seems, in the paper of record. Yesterday they ran a breaking story: the rest of "Bernie's" family "according to a person briefed on the case" is in the clear, and Federal investigators have found no evidence so far that members of Bernard L. Madoff’s family helped him "
There's just one problem: the Time's story, given pride of place on page 1 of the business section, is crap. It's nothing but a collection of assertions that appear to have come straight from Maddoff family lawyers, breathlessly packaged as the words of a condfidential source 'who was not at liberty to comment publicly "
If we understand why the Times will publish a crap story like this, we'll understand alot about why our country is in the trouble it is.
Clearly the Times -- along with putting out critical investigative journalism -- is no stranger these days to presenting "confidential sources" to trumpet the agenda of an elite person leaking to them: this was the whole Scooter Libby-Judy Miller axis: Scooter leaked "secret data" about Saddam's biological weapons program or nuke program, for example, Judy and Michael Gordon would put it on page 1 as the report of a "confidential source", just in time for Dick Cheney to confirm for the now-sainted Tim Russert "because it's just been leaked in the New York Times" - with no mention that it was a load of crap leaked by Cheney's staff precisely so that Cheney could spread it over the airwaves with Russert's assist.
But why is the Maddoff gang - who have committed a massive fraud and destroyed thousands of lives, shut down any number of largely Jewish philanthropies, benefiting from the Cheney-Scooter velvet PR-spout treatment?
I suspect that the answer lies in "Pinch" Sulzberger's (hereditary heir to control of the NY Times) ties to the same intensely local circle of elite family-run financial and real estate empires that -- hey, come to think of it, that "Pinch" himself is part of. It's the same elite that passionately supports right-wing Israeli policy, and embraces the absolute commitment of US military resources to prop up Israel's incremental annexation of the West Bank and Jerusalem. It's the same reason that an idiot like William Kristol has an op-ed gig
The Times report nearly weeps with sympathy for the Maddoff sons, who are referred to by their first names.
Meanwhile, those kids are no fools. TPM reports that those poor innocent kids took care to see that their own cash was safely held outside the family firm. TPM also links to a 2005 report preciently titled "The World's Largest Hedge Fund is a Fraud" which the kids have to have seen, which presents a clear and sophisticated analysis to back up the thesis.
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmem...
http://www.slideshare.net/...
The Maddoff scam succeeded because the family had help in high places. Major institutions, including the SEC and the New York Times, were corrupted.
This is symptomatic of a deeper and wider corruption in our society. Tom Ricks, author of Fiasco, makes a good point about the Iraq fraud: while the Bush administration bears responsibility for the catastrophic policy failures in Iraq, it was only able to proceed because other critical institutions in the US also failed: congress, the upper-echelon military, the press.
If the Maddoff scandal is truly investigated - and we're already seeing a push in powerful places to tar "Bernie" as the "lone gunman" and close the rest of the investigation down -- we're going to see something very, very ugly about our society. We're going to see major Democrats as well as Repubs implicated. We're going to see how a tight circle of pals look out for each other, all the way to the brink of disaster - and right over the edge.