Candace

Talmadge

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January 2, 2009

Bernard Madoff: The Best Justice Money Can Buy

Bernie. Bernie. Bernie. Whatever was he thinking? Ripping off the rich and famous? He will be fortunate if his private parts remain intact when the feds ship him off to the slammer for the shrinking remainder of his days.

Financier Bernard L. Madoff stole in a big way – an estimated $50 billion in a decades-long Ponzi scheme brought down not by AWOL regulators, but by market turmoil in an ailing economy.

Among Madoff’s fleeced flock are the charity foundation of director Steven Spielberg, along with his DreamWorks partner, Jeffrey Katzenberg; acting couple Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick; and screenwriter Eric Roth, whose credits include Forrest Gump and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Not to mention dozens of big-name banks and investment firms in this country and abroad.

The elites don’t like being on the receiving end of a scam and they have the clout to do something about it.

Call it the best justice money can buy.

It’s another way of stating this inconvenient truth: We value some victims more than others, pure and simple. Although we are loathe to admit or even to acknowledge such disparities in our wildly varying estimations of others’ personal net worth, that’s just the way it is.

Despite decades of talk about equal rights and equal treatment before the law, we still value the rich more than the poor, the powerful more than the disenfranchised, whites more than non-whites, heterosexuals more than homosexuals, men more than women. These beliefs and the resulting attitudes certainly affect the kind of justice we mete out. Rape, for example, remains wildly underreported and rarely prosecuted when it is revealed. Convictions are few and far between.

Unlike Madoff, there are criminals who chose their victims with care and got away with, well, murder. Take serial killer John Wayne Gacy. As long as this amateur clown preyed on teen transients or male prostitutes, his death spree remained secret. His undoing was to choose a white boy from a local middle-class family as a victim.

Then there are all those bigamists who romance middle-class women out of their pitiful life savings and promptly skip town, never to be seen again. The public resources devoted to finding these small-time con artists are also small-time, consisting primarily of local police or sheriff’s departments without the staff to do anything other than take down the sordid details and file them away.

But a federal court just agreed to apportion $28.1 million from the remaining assets in Madoff’s investment firm to oversee its liquidation costs. The tax-funded resources of the SEC (better late than never) plus the tax-subsidized Securities Investor Protection Corporation are being brought to bear in a costly investigation that will cover the world.

Now that’s big-time payback – all accompanied, of course, by an ongoing frenzy of media wailing, hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing. The rich and celebrated defrauded? Heaven forbid!

Meanwhile, despite the finger-pointing and tut-tutting in Congress, the Bush Administration has completely gutted the already toothless Wall Street bailout provisions limiting CEO pay, and the entire exercise in shoveling taxpayer money out the door has no credible oversight. (It’s eerily reminiscent of Baghdad in 2004, during the waning days of the Coalition Provisional Authority, when pallets and pallets of shrink-wrapped taxpayer greenbacks disappeared off the backs of trucks, destination unknown.)

Failed executives of failed corporations thus enrich themselves and their enablers at the expense of current and future taxpayers. And members of Congress, having declined to vote down their automatic annual pay hikes, sank bailout legislation for Detroit with demands that workers give up yet further wages and benefits than they already have conceded in labor contracts that are phasing in over the next year.

Something has to give. A society of sharp disparities, whether in income, education, access to justice or some other critical way, is ultimately unsustainable. If we sink as a nation, it will be precisely because money buys a few of us much better justice than the rest.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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