Bail for Mega-Thief - Jail for the Rest of Us

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

"Madoff's larceny is
larger than the gross domestic products of all but 63
nations in the world."

The United States is a nation that would sear the conscience
of a million Ebenezer
Scrooges. When Charles Dickens wrote his books on poverty in England -
including his famous, "A
Christmas Carol," his purpose was to critique, in the popular forums of the
day, the British system of class rule, which afforded no safety net to the poor
no matter how hard they worked, or were willing to work. (Dickens also needed
the money, not being himself part of the aristocracy.) Dickens found the
Christmas holiday season to be an effective motif for laying bare the gross
immorality of a social order in which a pampered few bought security for
themselves in exchange for institutionalized misery for the masses of their
fellow human beings.

A century and a half later, the Ebenezer Scrooges of
America have fashioned for themselves a system so predatory, it would overwhelm
Dickens' power to encapsulate in a small story. Bernard Madoff, the fifty
billion-dollar Ponzi schemer, is Scrooge unbounded, the personification of a
world-devouring capitalism that, having driven a significant portion of the
planet's inhabitants to eke out a living from less than a dollar a day, has
turned on its own in an orgy of financial
cannibalism.

"Madoff is allowed to
travel around New York, Connecticut and Long Island, like a free man."

Bernard Madoff's confidence game was, in reality, not so
different than business-as-usual in this last stage of capitalism, in which the
ruling financial classes produce nothing worthwhile yet reward each other
through pyramid schemes based on notional and derivative values that are
ultimately unsustainable - as the world is learning, to its horror. Madoff's
larceny is larger than the gross domestic products of all but 63
nations in the world. It is as if he stole the entire yearly economy of
Croatia, Sudan, or Ecuador, or the combined economies of Kenya and Lebanon, or
three times the gross domestic product of Tanzania. Think of it. Bernard
Madoff's 50 billion dollar theft is the equivalent of three times the value of
every good and service provided by every man, woman and child in the East
African nation of Tanzania. In the United States, Madoff's looted treasure
would run the city of New York for about 10 months of the year.

Perhaps a better measure of Madoff's stolen wealth is to
compare it to the New York State prisons budget. At $2.4 billion per year,
Madoff's loot could run the prison system for 21 years - hopefully, with him in
it. But Mr. Madoff still lives in his penthouse apartment, on Park Avenue. Even
his two sons would not co-sign for his bail, but the judge settled for his
wife's and brother's signatures on Madoff's $10 million dollar bond. Madoff is
allowed to travel around New York, Connecticut and Long Island, like a free
man, until his nightly curfew at 7:PM. Meanwhile, just a couple of miles away,
130,000 inmates per year languish at the ten New York City jails on Rikers Island. Ninety-two
percent of them are Black or Hispanic, and fully one-quarter are locked up
because they can't afford $500 or less in bail money. Not a single one has
stolen the equivalent of the gross domestic product of a medium-sized country.
But this is the land of Scrooge, where justice is a fiction. For Black Agenda
Radio, I'm Glen Ford.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected].

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