Bye Bye, Bernie

Good news that $65 billion Ponzi schemer Bernie "I Made Off With Your Savings" Madoff was sentenced to the maximum of 150 years in prison for swindling the life savings from thousands of people. The sentence assures that he'll spend the rest of his life behind bars with no chance of parole. Hopefully, he'll meet a love interest in prison in the form of a large tatooed Aryan nation skinhead.

Madoff Like a Bandit

Judge Ronald Ellis today refused to jail ponzi aficionado and capitalist buccaneer Bernie "With Your Money I" Madoff today, after prosecutors argued that he should be jailed for violating the terms of his bail. It seems Bernie tried to send jewelry and write checks to family members in an attempt to "hide" assets from his many outraged, and suddenly poor, clients/creditors. To which we can only say: "Jail the Judge!"

(Photo: Buccaneer Bernie)

Quote of the Week - II

From the WaPo, Jim Hoagland, "The Madoff Generation," 12/21:

"[The] problem is the awakening of the world's youth to the raw deal their parents and grandparents -- my generation, in toto -- are handing them, and the growing anger the young feel about the fetid stables of debt, scandal and corruption they are being left to clean...

"We have taken the greatest financial, technological and political opportunities the world has ever offered and abused them for our own pleasures, greed and egos...

"Bernie [Madoff] was one of all of us who refused to vote for politicians who would raise our taxes and make the nation live within its means, even as we went to war. Bernie was one of all of us who did not demand more diligent supervision of financial markets as long as the outsize returns kept flowing. And in his own special way, Bernie was one of all of us who wasted energy in myriad forms, kept on consuming imported goods even when it meant going into debt to foreign lands that do not wish us well, and cut budgets for regulatory and law enforcement agencies even in the fat years."