Madoff and me
Saturday, January 7, 2023
So tell me, what is the bottom line for a society in which a fraud of the magnitude of Madoff’s can go unpunished, uninvestigated, unprosecuted, for decades as it continues to build? It seems too enormous to have been the result of lack of oversight. It is “too big to fail” in another arena.
Tell me, guys, what is the real story? Am I right, for instance, to assume that people at the top of the regulatory agencies must have been being paid off, or bought off, or implicated somehow? Could they really have acted so idiotically as to have not investigated things that would have been so easy to investigate? The fact for instance that there was no record of counterpart trades? What would it have taken, a phone call? A written request? They knew the independent agency that exists for just the purpose of recording such trades. One phone call requesting verification. Never made. It could have bene done pro forma, perfunctorily, even while totally disbelieving the allegations, and it would instantly have blown up the whole Potemkin Village. Can there be any innocent explanation why such a call was never made?
This excites you emotionally, why?
Because it reeks of conspiracy that cuts off a scapegoat to prevent investigation higher up. Madoff is assumed to be the head of the scheme. He is assumed to be acting alone as he claimed, with only relatively minor assistance from the 17th floor. Frank DiPasquale, yes, the two computer programmers who each got two and a half years, yes, a couple of secretaries, more or less. But nobody among the regulators, nobody among the banks. Is there any reason to assume that they were innocent? Case in point, every bank transaction over $10,000 is supposedly looked at. Madoff shuttled not millions but billions overseas in both directions, continually. Never looked at. Why not?
We repeat, why do you care?
Okay, I see your point. Why this particular smoking gun when society is rife with them? Maybe just because I put my attention to it via the Netflix documentary, and am educated enough in history to put it into context. Richard Whitney, for instance. [Whitney was president of the New York Stock Exchange, 1930 to 1935, later convicted of embezzlement and imprisoned.]
No, why does it disturb you?
Perhaps I’m not understanding your question.
You began your life naïve about people and trusting in institutions, but you learned better, long ago. What is essentially different between Madoff and, say, the people behind the oil depletion allowance?
You’re saying, I think, our society is rotten top to bottom institutionally, so why is this any different. Maybe merely because I got my nose shoved into it.
Here insert a tired sigh. Look, you are spending your days going back through four years’ worth of material between us, centering on the question of how to have “life more abundantly.” What does that have to do with whatever rottenness can be found in your contemporary society?
Good and evil? I’m seeing things through the filter provided from eating the fruit of the Tree of Perceiving Things as Good and Evil? Is that it?
You tell us. You’re the one who is upset.
I don’t think that answers it.
Nor do we. So, dig.
Partly, I suppose, I always want to know, and I can see we’re never going to get the truth. Maybe in 50 years, if then. Certainly not in time to discommode the guilty.
And?
There is indignation. I hate seeing crookedness succeed, and at such a scale, and at such an unpunishable altitude in society.
And?
And why should it be so obvious to me and not to the people at the top? Either I’m wrong or they are stupid or – far more likely – complicity is so extensive, so overarching, that even a crook of Madoff’s magnitude is relatively a minor player. I can’t remember the proper name of the bank, nor what they did, but there was this major institution some years ago that was so complicit in so many crimes that they said its initials stood for the Bank of Crooks and Criminals. [Luxembourg-based Bank of Credit and Commerce International.] That’s what I’m smelling here.
We aren’t disputing any of this. What does it have to do with one’s pursuing life more abundantly? Did Jesus advise setting up an investigative agency within the Roman Empire? Did Gautama say that individual enlightenment would be facilitated by a just society? Did anyone ever find himself unable to follow the Noble Eightfold Path because he was surrounded by corruption?
I concede all that. I didn’t intend to abandon my work merely because I watched a Netflix series, any more than if I were to subscribe to a newspaper. But I don’t see that I need to ignore –. Ah, here’s an example. I am rereading Alice Turlock’s biography of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. I have always immersed myself in history, and I have no sense that any of it was wasted effort. How is this different?
You are perhaps misinterpreting our question. We ask, how does this affect you, and you take it as a rhetorical question. But it is a straightforward query. How? Why? Do a little digging, find a buried treasure.
Hmm, I see your point. It is easy to get involved in valid questions that are nevertheless tangential to your proper work.
Isn’t that one of the points you intend to make in your final novel, if you ever write it?
Is it? I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I suppose so. Not the main point.
Consider your friends who immerse themselves in politics, or international affairs, or “the new” in general. What is your habitual response?
Mostly I silently wonder why they bother. Or, no, not that, because after all I have been there at different times in my so-called career. More like, “Don’t get caught up in one viewpoint.” And I guess you’re saying that’s why I’m doing here.
We didn’t say it. Do you say it?
Well, I don’t know. I don’t see what’s different conceptually between studying (again!) Civil War history now more than 150 years old, and looking at a situation still historical, even if only over the past few decades. I don’t see why either study should be necessarily a distraction from the main event. I’ve never lost sight of the fact that, though our 3D life is not quite what it appears to be, still it is what we are living, it is what we are immersed in.
It is not the subject of study that is at issue; it is, do you lose yourself in it, and if so, positively or negatively?
I think you mean, positively as in “the thing that causes you to lose t rack of time,” Joseph Campbell’s measure of following your bliss, negatively as in “forgetting to hold your center,” letting a different “I” captain the ship, unnoticed.
Yes. And the answer is?
I’d say absorption in the Madoff affair could lead in either direction. One could theoretically go down the rabbit hole, chasing clues to a conspiracy so huge that no individual could ever unearth it. Or, one could use it to remind oneself that it is as Hornblower said to his wife: “Very few things re right, my dear.”
Your choice, always. And, after all, it is a valid choice. Nobody says there is no place in the world for Don Quixote’s quests. Somebody has to tilt against windmills, or the idea wouldn’t be in the mind of mankind. But that doesn’t mean it is your job. Only you can decide that.
I’m a little at sea as to the meaning of this little conversation.
Doesn’t it bridge your own experience and that of your news-obsessed friends?
Ah, I see your point. We all do it, only on different topics, at different times.
If there’s one thing at the heart of all our conversations with you, it is be aware of what you do and why you do it. That amounts to learning who and what you are.
Well, you have our thanks, as always. What shall we call this?
“Life more abundantly v. the news,” perhaps.
Very funny. Maybe, “Remembering our center”?
That might do. You’ll think of something as you transcribe.
Till next time, then.