One useful website... and another one...and an important piece of news....take heed.

• http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/

• http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/confirmed-were-literally-on-the-brink-of-catastrophic-collapse_01062011

"For those 17% of people who think the economy is in recovery and the other 33% who believe it will happen soon, we point you to the latest statement from current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who ... in a January 6, 2011 letter to Congress writes:

I am writing in response to your request for an estimate by the Treasury Department of when the statutory debt limit will be reached, and for a description of the consequences of default by the United States.

Never in our history has Congress failed to increase the debt limit when necessary. Failure to raise the limit would precipitate a default by the United States. Default would effectively impose a significant and long-lasting tax on all Americans and all American businesses and could lead to the loss of millions of American jobs. Even a very short-term or limited default would have catastrophic economic consequences that would last for decades. Failure to increase the limit would be deeply irresponsible. For these reasons, I am requesting that Congress act to increase the limit early this year, well before the threat of default becomes imminent.

…

Treasury would prefer not to have to engage again in any of these extraordinary measures [suspension of the issuance of certain types of government debt and government investment vehicles]. If we are forced to do so again, these measures could delay the date by which the limit is reached by several weeks. Once these steps have been taken, no remaining legal and prudent measures would be available to create additional headroom under the debt limit, and the United States would begin to default on its obligations.

The Treasury Secretary of The United States of America just said that if we don’t get another $1 trillion or so dollars by March of this year then this country will begin to default on its debt obligations. These remarks are extremely serious and should be understood for what they are.

We are, literally and without [mixing] words, on the brink of economic catastrophe....."


 - And here is another version of the above:

Raise debt limit to avoid national catastrophe, Geithner warns Congress
By Lori Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 6, 2011; 1:28 PM


Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner warned lawmakers Thursday that the national debt could hit the legal limit on federal borrowing as soon as March 31, and he urged them to act quickly to avoid a government default that would spark "catastrophic economic consequences that would last for decades."
In a letter sent to every member of Congress, Geithner said the national debt now stands at $13.95 trillion - $335 billion short of the current limit on borrowing that Congress set last year. Unless Congress acts to raise the limit, the letter says, the United States will default on its debt, a calamity that would be unprecedented and that could destroy "millions of American jobs," spike interest rates, hurt the dollar and halt federal payments to millions of retirees, veterans and active U.S. troops.
"For these reasons," Geithner wrote, "any default on the legal debt obligations of the United States is unthinkable and must be avoided."
The letter sets the stage for a showdown with congressional Republicans, who are threatening to block a debt limit increase unless it is paired with deep spending cuts and budget reforms that limit future spending. Even some Democrats have said they would be reluctant to raise the limit above $14.3 trillion without a plan for reducing the budget deficits that force the nation to borrow.
"The American people will not stand for such an increase unless it is accompanied by meaningful action by the president and Congress to cut spending and end the job-killing spending binge in Washington," House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a statement. "While America cannot default on its debt, we also cannot continue to borrow recklessly, dig ourselves deeper into this hole and mortgage the future of our children and grandchildren. Spending cuts - and reforming a broken budget process - are top priorities for the American people and for the new majority in the House this year, and it is essential that the president and Democrats in Congress work with us in that effort."

• Judge delays fraud trial for financier Stanford

Comment:  Of course: NON-JEWISH financier, guilty of same as Madoff, ("only" 7 billion stolen and not 50 ), instead of receiving 110 years in jail, is off the hook - "for now". Did you really, honestly, expect a fair outcome? 

 Not to mention arch-fraudsters JP Morgan, master silver and gold manipulators, who, instead of being stopped in their tracks and indicted for massive fraud, were just invited into the White House, in the form of Chief of Staff. Talking about collusion..... if anybody ever again blames THE JEWS for the massive criminality pervading the United States elite and banking system, I don't know what I'll say, but I assure you it won't be pretty.

28 minutes ago
A judge has delayed the trial of former Texas billionaire and financier R. Allen Stanford, who is accused of bilking investors out of $7 billion in a Ponzi scheme. U.S. District Judge David Hittner determined that Stanford is not mentally competent to go forward with his case. The financier's trial had been set to begin Jan. 24. The judge agreed on Thursday to delay the start of the trial until Stanford can be treated for medical problems affecting his competency. The judge did not say how long the delay could last. Hittner ruled after a daylong hearing during which three psychiatrists testified that Stanford is not competent because of medical issues including a brain injury he suffered during a jail fight in September 2009. 

Read about these interesting developments re:$134 billions in bonds in Chiasso... and now REMEMBER THAT THE JEW MADOFF WAS CONDEMNED TO 150 years in prison for a fraud just about 1/10th of this value!

B"H

To all,

Shavuah Tov.


First, please read what author Eric Phelps has to say about the Madoff saga:

...

 

Madoff "the Jew" was used by the Order to create anti-Jewish fury here in the American Empire.  To know this is true, check out the Fairfield Greenich Group in Conn.  It is totally controlled by Jesuit-controlled agents of Rome.  That group brought investors to Madoff to be set up for the slaughter.  That slaughter would never have happened had not White Gentile NYC Fed president Tim Geithner refused to provide a $65 billion bond to save Lehman Brothers, "the Jew" Dick Fuld taking the fall.  I regard both Madoff and Fuld to be papal court Jews having willing set up all American Jews to be blamed for the financial collapse of the Empire.  The Nazi fascists coming to power will have much to say about the Jews ruining the country.

 

When Lehman went down (along with billions in Jewish money), I tried to get Fuld to come on my program explaining that Lehman was deliberately broken.  He refused.  When I discovered he was CFR and on the Board of the NYC Fed, I then concluded he was a papal court Jew serving the Order in New York.


Now think of the strange TIMING OF THE MADOFF VERDICT AND ORCHESTRATED ANTI-JEWISH FURY( June 29th), AND THE SIMULTANEOUS EXPOSURE, NOT EVEN A DAY LATER ( June 30th), OF THIS INFORMATION:

Update:

Japanese Prime Minister to Visit Vatican

VATICAN CITY, JUNE 28, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI will receive in audience the prime minister of Japan next month, which will be the second high-level meeting between the Vatican and the Asian country this year.

The Union of Catholic Asian News revealed Friday that Japan's Catholic prime minister, Taro Aso, will visit the Vatican on July 7, the day before the opening of the Group of Eight Summit in L'Aquila, Italy.

Last March, Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, the Vatican's foreign secretary, became the first Vatican top diplomat to make an official visit to Japan in the 67-year-history of bilateral relations, which were established in 1942.

Japan's ambassador to the Holy See, Kagefumi Ueno, told ZENIT last week that Archbishop Mamberti's 6-day visit "assisted in shortening a sense of distance existing between the two countries."

The last Japanese prime minister to visit the Vatican was former Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, who visited Pope John Paul II in 1999.

There are 1 million Catholics living in Japan, out of a total population of 127 million.


LATEST UPDATE:

INTERESTING, INTERESTING!

2 days after the announcement that the prime minister of Japan will visit the Vatican, Japan takes the heat for the story of the $134 billion in US bonds, which suddenly ARE REAL - until now, there was a doubt -now no more, and Japan is the guilty party.

Of course, the PM's visit to the pope has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS "SUDDEN DISCOVERY".

So to clarify the story, it seems that the US government is not too pleased by these revelations of Nazi Hal Turner about the coming AMERO, and is threatening all bloggers with imprisonment for revealing the plans of the NWO.

In addition, VATICAN NEWS are hard at work, putting up smokescreens, and making sure that JAPAN is mentioned as the guilty party. Not the INNOCENT MAFIA, God forbid; and specially , NO CONNECTION TO THE VATICAN FINANCES EITHER. The Catholic Japanese PM's visit announced two days earlier has NOTHING, I repeat, NOTHING to do with the story, of course. And neither does the JESUIT GENERAL WHO HAILS FROM JAPAN, of course, of course.......



» 06/30/2009 13:13
ASIA-ITALY(AsiaNews: that is VATICAN news!)
Everything suggests that the American bonds seized at Chiasso are real
Official U.S. sources continue to say they are fakes, but there is no news that American experts have inspected them in person. Arrested for another matter, the director of a U.S. radio who says the bonds are real and Japan was trying to sell in Switzerland, not trusting the ability of the United States to honour its debt.

Milan (AsiaNews) – Four weeks have passed since American bonds were confiscated from two Japanese men who were travelling on a direct train to Chiasso, Switzerland, and while there has been clarification of some - very few -points, Italian authorities have remained silent on the rest of the episode.

In addition, a strange coincidence in the timing of the arrest of a director of an internet radio who had made revelations regarding the incident ,increases the already strong oddities surrounding the case. This added to the revaluation of the fact that among the evidence seized there were "Kennedy Bonds", all points toward the authenticity of the items seized by the Guardia di Finanza (GdF) in early June.

The major English-speaking newspapers ignored the story for a couple of weeks. They only started to report on it after the Bloomberg agency carried a story on 18 / 6, in which a spokesman for the Treasury, Meyerhardt, declared that the bonds, based on photos available on the Internet, were "clearly false." The same day, the Financial Times (FT) published an article whose title laid the blame for the (alleged) infringement at the feet of the Italian Mafia, despite the fact that the article failed to make even one possible connection with the episode in Chiasso. Nevertheless, the version of events as reported in FT was taken up by others as being "appropriate" (given that it is a very common cliché about Italy and it is a sequester that took place in Italy) and in the end "colourful." It's a pity that it goes against all logic: that the Mafia tried to pass unnoticed in its attempt to dump fake bonds amounting to 134.5 billion dollars and moreover were to "stung" a mere step from their gaol, is not very credible.

Most recently last week, 25 / 6, the New York Times reported on the story in particular, the allegations of CIA spokesman, Darrin Blackford: the U.S. Secret Service carried out inspections, as required by the Italian judiciary, and found that they were fictitious financial instruments, never issued by the "U.S. government". It is not clear, however, how the checks mentioned by Blackford were carried out and whether they were also are carried out via internet. In fact according to official Italian sources the Commission of American experts, expected in Italy, have yet to arrive. Furthermore, the bonds were accompanied by a recent and original bank record. It is therefore unclear how the U.S. authorities can declare fake documentation that does not originate from the Fed or the U.S. Department of Treasury.

On the contrary, claims in support of the bond's authenticity were made 20 / 6 on the Turner Radio Network (TRN), an independent radio station broadcast via Internet. On that date in a massive exposure, TRN stated that the two Japanese men arrested by the Guardia di Finanza (GdF) and then released in Ponte Chiasso were employees of the Japanese Ministry for Treasury. AsiaNews had also received similar reports: one of the two Japanese arrested in Chiasso and then released is Tuneo Yamauchi, is the brother of Toshiro Muto, until recently vice governor of the Bank of Japan. On its website, the creator and presenter of the Radio, Hal Turner, had also claimed that his sources had revealed that the Italian authorities believe the evidence to be authentic and that the two Japanese officials are from the Japanese Ministry for Finance. They were supposed to bring the bonds to Switzerland because the Japanese government had apparently lost confidence in U.S. ability to repay its debt. Japanese financial authorities therefore were trying to sell a part of the securities in their possession through parallel channels ahead of an imminent financial disaster, thanks to the anonymity which, Turner said, is guaranteed by the laws of Switzerland.

AsiaNews does not know to what extent Turner's revelations can be held as credible, given that in this case too, it is difficult to believe that $ 134.5 billion would pass unnoticed anywhere in the world. It seems far more logical to assume that the bonds, if authentic, were directed to the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, BIS, the central bank of central banks ahead of the issuance of securities in a new supranational currency. Turner had in any event added that as evidence to support his revelations he would have provided the serial numbers of the seized bonds. Before he could do so, however, was imprisoned. Hal Turner is the journalist who long ago first broke the news of a secret plan to replace the dollar, after a severe financial crisis, with a common North American currency, the Amero. In a dramatic phone call from inside the prison in which he is detained pending trial, relayed via internet, Hal Turner claims that his arrest is political and it is in relation to the securities seized in Chiasso, because the authorities are terrified by his revelations of the bonds' authenticity. Of course, the allegations made against him have to nothing to do with the story and thus an already intricate story becomes ever more complex. Turner maintains that he did not personally formulate the disclosure for which he has been imprisoned. Although it was clearly his responsibility to remain vigilant, it is also true that blogs from around the world and the U.S. themselves are full of threats and provocations. The coincidental timing, the unusual diligence and the details of his arrest arouse suspicions about the true motives of the American federal police. Indeed, this very arrest suggests that the evidence seized from GdF are truly authentic.

One more element in favour of the bond's authenticity is found in the securities, which in the June 4 statement, the GdF termed "Kennedy Bonds" with photos provided. These photos reveal that the securities under discussion are not bonds but Treasury Notes, because they are securities that can be immediately exchanged for their worth in goods or services and because they are devoid of interest coupons. One side carries a reproduction of the image of the American president, the reverse side that of a spaceship. From confidential, usually well-informed sources, AsiaNews has learned that this type of paper money was issued less than ten years ago (in 1998), although it is difficult to know whether those seized in Chiasso are authentic. But the fact that the release of this particular State Treasury was not completely in the public domain tends to exclude the possibility of counterfeiting. It highly unreasonable to suppose that a forger would reproduce a State Treasury not commonly in circulation and of which there is no public knowledge. For this reason, it can be concluded that the 124.5 billion dollars divided in 249 bonds of 500 million each are authentic. These titles, although referred to as "Federal Reserve Notes" are actually bonds, because they accrue interest and are redeemable at maturity. But one question remains unsolved regarding them. It is somewhat hard to understand why the securities, which were from the outset indistinguishable from the original to the GdF, all have their coupons. Any ordinary investor, even a state, would have cashed in the interest coupon every year, so as not to lose purchasing power.




See also this latest piece of news:

UPDATE Japan raps Citi for lax money laundering controls
Fri Jun 26, 2009 5:34am EDT

* Japan bans Citi from retail banking promotions for month

* Cites problems with governance, internal controls

* Regulatory action follows similar violation in 2004

* Citi apologises, promises plan to improve compliance (Adds Citigroup comments in paragaph 3, 12, 13)

By Taro Fuse and David Dolan

TOKYO, June 26 (Reuters) - Japan ordered Citigroup (C.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) to suspend sale promotions for a month at its retail bank for lax oversight against money laundering, in the struggling U.S. bank's second brush with Japanese regulators in five years.

The Financial Services Agency said Citigroup had not developed adequate systems to detect suspicious transactions such as money laundering, citing the same violation that led the regulators to close its private banking business in 2004.

Citigroup, which has 35 branches and generates about $2 billion in revenue a year from its retail and corporate banking division, Citibank Japan, apologised for the breach, saying it stemmed from the way it reported suspicious transactions.

"If Citibank cannot get its house in order, its operations in Japan may come under threat," said Neil Katkov, head of Asia research for financial services consultancy Celent.

"We have seen banks in the U.S. shut down for alleged loose money laundering compliance, and this is a sign that Japanese regulators are getting tougher."

The suspension comes as Citigroup tries to sell assets in Japan, an integral part of its efforts to raise cash after suffering more than $85 billion in losses on toxic assets and receiving a U.S. government bailout.

The bank agreed last month to sell its Japanese brokerage and investment banking assets to Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group (8316.T: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), Japan's third-largest bank, for about $5.9 billion.

It is also looking to sell its Japanese asset management arm, Nikko Asset Management, and telemarketer Bellsystem24 Inc, sources have told Reuters. The deals are expected to raise more than $1 billion each. [ID:nBNG457249]

The FSA said Citigroup had not made improvements since the last regulatory crackdown in 2004, which prompted then-chief executive Charles Prince to make a public bow of apology in Japan, a custom for Japanese executives showing remorse.

The FSA said the lack of compliance showed Citigroup executives "... lack an understanding of the rules applied in Japan, such as laws and regulations, and an awareness of improvement".

Citibank Japan, which handles retail and corporate banking operations, had 299 billion yen in net assets and 1,548 employees as of the end of March, according to its website.

Citibank Japan promised to submit a plan to the Japanese regulator by the end of July to remedy the problems.

While Citibank Japan cannot promote its retail products for the next month, customers can still initiate transactions with the bank, the FSA and Citigroup said in statements. (Additional reporting by Mayumi Negishi, Nathan Layne and Noriyuki Hirata; Editing by Michael Watson)


I hope that after this, whenever you hear a message coming out of Rome against "THE GREED OF WALL STREET", you'll remember the episode of the $134 billion in bonds, Japan, and the Vatican - and see it for what it is:

A CHEAP, BUT UNFORTUNATELY VERY SUCCESSFUL, ATTEMPT TO SHIFT THE BLAME TO THE JEWS, WHILE YOU KNOW WHO IS GETTING AWAY SCOT-FREE, AND AS USUAL, LOOKING WHITE AND CLEAN AS A NEWBORN LAMB.

AND DO NOT FORGET TO READ the previous, related posts:

1. THIS MIGHT SHED SOME LIGHT ....
2. WHAT IS GOING ON HERE, ANY CLUE..
3. OK, SO THE JEW MADOFF GOT 150 YEARS....

OK, so the Jew Madoff got 150 years. Now let's see how much Stanford with the nice little Hitler moustache gets! BTW, whatever happened to the $50 billion: now it is ONLY 13 billion? To be fair, STANFORD should get 92 years, that is 8/13 of 150.

Monday, June 29, 2009, 12:54pm EDT

Madoff sentenced to 150 years

Atlanta Business Chronicle

Bernard Madoff, the confessed mastermind behind the largest Ponzi scheme in history, will spend the rest of his life behind bars.

A U.S. District Court judge in New York sentenced Madoff to 150 years in prison, which was the maximum allowable sentence under the law.

Judge Denny Chin made his decision Monday morning after reviewing letters from many of Madoff's victims and hearing testimony from them in court.

According to reports filed by journalists in the courtroom, Madoff made a statement prior to the announcement of the sentence in which he said in part to his victims: "I cannot offer you an excuse for my behavior. I know this will not help. I'm sorry."

Madoff's attorney had asked Chin for a far more lenient sentence of 12 years.

Madoff plead guilty to 11 criminal counts, including securities fraud and money laundering, on March 12. His victims reportedly number more than 1,300 and stretch across the globe. Their losses are estimated at more than $13 billion.

Sir Allen Stanford arrested in US

June 19, 2009 Texan billionaire Sir Allen Stanford has surrendered to the US authorities after a warrant was issued for his arrest on criminal charges.

The 58-year-old already faces civil charges brought by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over an alleged fraud worth $8bn (£6bn).

Sir Allen turned himself in to the FBI in Virginia and is expected to appear in a Richmond federal court on Friday.

It was not immediately clear what criminal charges Sir Allen faces.

Dick DeGuerin, Sir Allen's lawyer, told The Associated Press he had surrendered "to some FBI agents who were hiding out in black SUVs outside the residence where he was staying in Virginia".

"He walked out and asked if they had a warrant," Mr DeGuerin said.

He said Stanford told the agents to arrest him if they had a warrant, but if they did not have a warrant, he would go back to Houston to turn himself in.

In February, the SEC, the US financial watchdog, described the alleged fraud at Stanford Financial group as a "fraud of shocking magnitude".

The cricket impresario is accused by the SEC of luring investors with promises of improbable and unsubstantiated high returns on certificates of deposit and other investments - what is known as a Ponzi scheme.

The billionaire financer has refused to talk to US regulators investigating his alleged fraud, and court documents show that Sir Allen pleaded the Fifth Amendment - the right to withhold potentially self-incriminating evidence.

In an interview with ABC earlier this year he insisted no money was lost by customers dealing with his financial services companies.

"If it was a Ponzi scheme, why are they finding billions and billions of dollars all over the place?" he said at the time.

Comments:

1. bill said:

Let's keep in mind that Madoff was in business for 40 years, giving people higher-than-normal returns.

Most of these people made more money than they invested with him.

He was so highly respected, that he was made chairman of THE NASDAQ STOCK EXCHANGE.

His empire collapsed only when the U.S. Government destroyed the real estate market by forcing banks to make bad loans to people who could never afford to pay.

That same government runs the biggest Ponzi scheme in the world, the "Social Security" System.

Yes, the Jew will be thrust in front of the public, to be tarred and feathered, while the real crooks--the Clinton people who manipulated the real estate market, and the Congressmen who twisted the arms of the bankers, sneak away, laughing all the way to the (Swiss) bank.

By Bill Bonner, the Daily Reckoning newsletter:

The Extraordinary Evil of Bernie Madoff
by Bill Bonner
London, England


Let the punishment fit the crime!

Poor Bernie. The man has been ordered to spend 150 years in the hoosegow. What for? Who did he kill? A century and a half seems a little excessive for a financial crime. You could hold up three liquor stores and rape a whole convent and still not get 150 years. With a little bit of good lawyer-ing, a history of child abuse in the family, and good behavior in the big house, you'd be back on the street in 18 months.

But all the papers seem delighted. "Locked up for Life!" says one of today's headlines. The judge "threw the book at him," says another. His victims wanted him to get no mercy. The judge gave him none, imposing the maximum sentence. He is "extraordinarily evil," said the man on the bench.

Justice has been done. Right?

Here in the building with the gold balls on the roof, we're not so sure. We stand up for lost causes...die hards...and scalawags. Besides, we're not convinced that Bernie is extraordinarily evil at all. He seems much more like an ordinary evil to us.

They say he defrauded investors out of $65 billion. The amount is unusual, but the crime is as common as income tax evasion. Who gets 150 years for evading income taxes? Heck, in civilized countries it's not a crime at all - but a civil misdemeanor, subject to fine and retribution, not punishment.

But didn't he lie to investors? Well, yes...he exaggerated the returns investors were likely to get from his fund. But if you put every fellow on Wall Street who does that in jail, you wouldn't have any room for stick-up men and wife beaters.

Isn't he the biggest financial scammer of all time? Well...he's the title-holder now. But he has a lot of competition close on his heels. Bernie's crime was taking money from people under false pretenses...and then being unable to give it back to them. How is that different from the financing activities of the US government?

This year alone, the feds will borrow 50 times as much money as Bernie managed to take in during his whole 20-year career. They can only pay it back by borrowing even more money from more lenders. This is not very different from the typical "Ponzi" scheme, except that it's the government doing it. Eventually, the suckers are going to lose a lot of money.

And when you balance Bernie's sins against his virtues, we're not sure the man doesn't come out at least as well as many of his accusers. While Bernie was pretending to make his investors rich, the SEC was pretending to protect them from Bernie. In fact, neither were really doing what they claimed. Which is to say, both are guilty of ordinary evil.

As we pointed out yesterday, nothing is as dangerous as good luck. Madoff was not extraordinarily evil; he was just extraordinarily lucky. He was plying his trade when the feds were pumping up the biggest financial bubble in history. No wonder so much hot gas came his way. His luck ran out when the bubble popped. And now a court has found him guilty of fraud and a judge has ordered him locked up for a period equal to roughly the time between the end of the US War Between the States and the resignation of Richard Nixon.

While Bernie is behind bars, the SEC and FED officials are still at large. Both are clearly guilty of dereliction and negligence.

But, what is the point of keeping Madoff in prison? He represents no threat. Rather than pay $30,000 per year to keep him locked up, we suggest that he be forced to do community service work. He should be pressed into service as the next head of the Federal Reserve after Ben Bernanke's term expires in December. With Madoff in the big office, there would be no longer any illusions about what sort of bank the Fed is running.

A contrarian view:

Free Bernie Madoff



Bernie Madoff stole billions from the customers of his phony investment funds, running a racket rather than a financial service. People who aren't even his victims are furious, and nearly everyone enjoyed a 10-minute sense of vengeance when the judge threw him behind bars for 150 years.

Let me weigh in with a contrary view. Free Bernie Madoff, I say.

His life is already ruined. He is a pauper. He will never again do business.

From the innovative genius whose information technology in the 1960s became the basis of NASDAQ, he rose to the heights and fell to the depths where he will stay this way until death. He won't be able to be seen in public for the rest of his life without encountering scorn and derision from everyone around him.

Maybe the idea of jail is punishment. I don't see how it can be a worse punishment than he would face on the outside.

Maybe the idea is to impose on him a feeling of remorse. But does he not already feel regret, even deep sorrow? This man who was widely considered to be a historic phenom is now disgraced, forever. We all have one life to live, and his is now a complete wreck, going down in history as the worst financial criminal of all time.

What, then, precisely, is the point of jailing him? He is no direct threat to anyone. Society would not be safer because he is in the slammer. He is not going to rob people or beat people up.

He might write a book and donate the funds to charity or make some restitution to his victims. I, for one, would like to read that book.

Instead, taxpayers will be forced to pick up the tab for his living expenses. Victims get nothing. That's not justice. That's inhumane for both sides of the transaction: Bernie and us.

Will jail "rehabilitate" him? It's ridiculous. His rehabilitation, if there can be one, is probably already complete. Consider the dilemma in which he found himself. It began small, a simple scheme that anyone can play. His problem was that it worked better than most.

Once his scam began, he probably hoped the markets would turn around and he would become honest again. It didn't turn out that way. Then he couldn't dig his way out of it, no matter how much he hated his life. That it lasted decades instead of days is a testament to his marketing savvy, but that's not to say that he loved his life. Spending the rest of his life in the pokey won't rehabilitate him any more intensely than life on the outside.

The problem with prisoners is not that you are treated like an animal. Would that they had it so good! At the zoo, the animals are fed and groomed and cared for. They have value because they elicit affection from paying customers. Even slaves are in a better position, for at least they are valued to some small degree by their masters.

Prisoners, on the other hand, face a kind of metaphysical transformation. They go from being valued members of society to being treated like blobs of flesh taking up space. Their wardens see them as objects. They are abused by fellow inmates and live in a state of incredible degradation everyday.

All prisoners are therefore living amidst a kind of torture. It isn't modern. It isn't even medieval. It is contrary to all principles of civilization. Perhaps we should allow it for the most violent members of society, pending some other solution. But that doesn't apply to Madoff, and it doesn't apply to some ¾ of all the prison population.

But still, we are all supposed to feel some kind of joy at his captivity. For decades we've been told by sociologists that the real criminals in society are not muggers and murderers and rapists but rather "white-collars criminals" who are capitalists sneakily stealing money using fancy finance. They are the ones who should be in jail.

And so now, those educated by the sociologists, forever soft on real crime but oddly tough on financial crime, have their way, as the bourgeoisie cries out for vengeance against a guy whose sole victims were the rich people who were his own customers.

Can there be anyone doubt that Madoff has been set up as a scapegoat, a person on which to blame the downturn so that we will be distracted from the greatest scams of all that enjoy the cover of law?

So let us ask the unaskable: Just how unusually evil were Madoff's actions? Not that unusual. In fact, the whole notion of paying off past investors with the funds of present investors is at the very core of the Social Security system.

At least Madoff sought the consent of his investors who let him care for their money based on their own volition. And at least he didn't attempt to defend himself with the claim that he was conducting wise public policy.

Jeffrey Tucker is the editor of Mises.org.

http://mises.org/story/3546