Bernie Madoff

[RGacky3]

I think its hillareous how the media demonizes Bernie Madoff, as if he is Satan himself, they get REALLY REALY creul with the death of his son and so on.

Heres why I think its hillareous, and somewhat sad. What Bernie Madoff did was no worse than what Goldman Sachs did, tons of executives and traders there, what Citigroup did, what tons of financial institutions did, when it comes to causing human suffering.

But what did Bernie do that was so evil? He screwed over rich people .... whooopsie.

I think picking out individual capitalists to demonize rather than the system is a bad idea, its the bad apple fallacy, and its really just to defend the system, point in case, the most creul attacks come from Market fundementalists.

[Dean]

Correction. Madoff had absolutely nothing to do with the pump-n-dump, securitization and derivatives-based destabilization of our global economy. He is a footnote in a major global collapse and a massive restructuring of global wealth which has enshrined a new class of super-rich, who have twice as many assets shared among half as many millionaires as there were before the crisis.

That means that the relative wealth of US millionaires has increased fourfold - half of that from what is taken from the poor (especially as the rich are bailed out while the poor are left to rot in an austere economy), the other half from thinning their own ranks in a cutthroat game of capitalist expansionism.

Madoff is a scapegoat, villified by the media because he didn't just steal from the poor (a kind of greed that would be forgivable) but he stole from the rich - his greed threatens accumulated wealth, and so accumulated wealth fights back.