have you seen this?

http://shop.ebay.com/?_from=R40&_trksid=p0.m38.l1313&_nkw=bernie+madoff+bank&_sacat=See-All-Categories


Caricature likeness of Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff's head sculpted into a non-dispensing piggy bank. hand-finished and polished in bronze patina, measuring: 7 1/4" H x 5" W x 5 1/4" D.  Back features stacks of money bags in bas relief; inoperable plug at bottom, signed Madoff in the USA.  Your money goes in but does NOT come out.  "It's the gift that keeps on taking."  Sculpture is shipped with Madoff's image on $50 billion dollar bill.  Limited Signed Edition, first of ten already produced in a limited edition produced by Sculpture House Casting, sculpted, signed and numbered by artist Palmer Murphy. Edition will number 100 pieces.


The questions & answers are funny


Questions from other members
Question & Answer Answered On
Q: Are the retards buying these things the same people who threw their money away with Madoff in real life? What's your next sculpting "creation"...more Mar-09-09
A: No, it is not a joke. Please note that I will be directing this message to Ebay.
Q: Hi. You say these are a certain number of 100. Where is the number showing # of 100? I can't find it in the pictures. Thanks. Mar-09-09
A: The artist, Palmer Murphy, has not numbered these yet. He will be numbering and signing the pieces prior to shipping.
Q: If you put money in this bank, is there any way to get it out? Mar-09-09
A: No. That is the joke - just like Bernie the money goes in but does not come out. It is more a work of art than a standard piggy bank. Thank you or asking...more

The bids are doing well.

The bids are doing well.


yes they seem to be...

yes they seem to be...
...and the busts are serious too?

...and the busts are serious too?


supposedly- 

They need send Madoff to prison (I mean hard time) for the rest of his life.  I don't care if he's an old man.  What he did was evil.  I'm sick of seeing a poor kid who holds up a grocery store get punished more than some fat cat who steals billions of dollars in a Ponzi scheme. 
::)

They need send Madoff to prison (I mean hard time) for the rest of his life.  I don't care if he's an old man.  What he did was evil.  I'm sick of seeing a poor kid who holds up a grocery store get punished more than some fat cat who steals billions of dollars in a Ponzi scheme. 
::)


I concur

They need send Madoff to prison (I mean hard time) for the rest of his life.  I don't care if he's an old man.  What he did was evil.  I'm sick of seeing a poor kid who holds up a grocery store get punished more than some fat cat who steals billions of dollars in a Ponzi scheme. 
::)


To paraphrase Leona Helmsley (allegedly!)...'only little people do hard time'... ::)

They need send Madoff to prison (I mean hard time) for the rest of his life.  I don't care if he's an old man.  What he did was evil.  I'm sick of seeing a poor kid who holds up a grocery store get punished more than some fat cat who steals billions of dollars in a Ponzi scheme. 
::)


They should throw the book at Madoff.  Make him swim across a tank of live sharks as punishment for his Fonzi scheme.

They should throw the book at Madoff.  Make him swim across a tank of live sharks as punishment for his Fonzi scheme.


Sharks wouldn't touch him.  Professional courtesy and all that.

Sharks wouldn't touch him.  Professional courtesy and all that.

The difference between Madoff and sharks is sharks earn an honest living.
::)

They need send Madoff to prison (I mean hard time) for the rest of his life.  I don't care if he's an old man.  What he did was evil.  I'm sick of seeing a poor kid who holds up a grocery store get punished more than some fat cat who steals billions of dollars in a Ponzi scheme. 
::)


I think a public execution would send the right message.

I think a public execution would send the right message.


Yeah, that "public execution" is the right way to send a message.
::)

Capital punishment.

Yeah, that "public execution" is the right way to send a message.
::)

Capital punishment.


I'm not normally in support of capital punishment, but there are exceptions I make for powerful people who really... really...  deserve it.

Interestingly enough, the rumor mill has it that he's going to plead guilty later this week.

Looks like the fix is that he falls on his own sword, and in so doing, gets to protect the rest of his family.  You're a *redacted*, Madoff, but I gotta admit, that was well-played.

Apparently, he will be pleading guily and possibly spending 150 years, in jail.

http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2009/03/news-roundup-ma.html

This next song, goes out to you.... Bernie.

;D

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2Qh5gc6-J4&feature=related

Yeah, but I don't want to see him go into one of those Pablo Escobar prison deals where he's got his own disco,his own cinema, his own library, his whorehouse, his own five-star restaurant, his own pharmacy (both medical and recreational), his own tailor shops (male and female), his own health club, his own guitar-shaped swimming pool, his own golf course, his own NASCAR track, his own ski resort, his own film festival, his own amusement park, his own botanical gardens, his own zoo, his own fashion magazine, his own stock trading firm, his own candy store, his own police, his own skeet-shooting range, his own.....

:D

He should go to federal pound you in the butt, prision, instead!

;D

There must be others involved, I cannot see BM doing all this on his own?

look. he's going to get off. he's gonna go to some cushy prison, probably get out in a year or two, and he will never be really punished. that's how it works. if you're rich, even if you got rich by stealing, the rules don't apply to you. haven't you guys figured that out yet?

we can talk all we want about how we'd like for him to be punished, but at the end of the day he wont be and we all know it. why pretend otherwise?

Latest:

Madoff denied bail and ordered to jail.

See ya later, Bernie!

http://www.terrymcfall.com/images/monopoly-go-to-jail-card.jpg

Something I did not till today is that he is 70 years old, so there will not be much in prison to be spent?

i think he'll be out in two years, tops.


He'll get cancer, heart disease, or a hangnail or something and the courts will commute his sentence.
::)

He'll get cancer, heart disease, or a hangnail or something and the courts will commute his sentence.
::)
dude, he's rich. ayn randian supermen dont get punished. if they got 50 billion dollars they must be amazing people, even if they stole it.

dude, he's rich. ayn randian supermen dont get punished. if they got 50 billion dollars they must be amazing people, even if they stole it.


I heard a caller to the Ed Schultz show defending Madoff today. 
"Most of those investors made their money back; if they invested a million dollars, they made three million in interest over the past ten years; OK, maybe their million dollar principle is gone..."

I dunno, somehow I don't think that idiot would be defending a kid who held up a 7-11.
"Look, dude, the store pays insurance, so like, they probably made money off that hold-up!"

:D

dude, he's rich. ayn randian supermen dont get punished. if they got 50 billion dollars they must be amazing people, even if they stole it.


You sure you read the same Rand I did?  Because the one I read said something like this:

"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth--the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?"
- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, from the full rant colloquially known as Francisco's Money Speech.

Get mad when you read it.  You're supposed to.  Just because a scammer wears a nice suit, doesn't make him worthy of the title "businessman".

Madoff took the fall in court to protect his family, whose gains are every bit as fraudlent as his own.  He produced nothing; he was a fraud, a looter, and his investors - many of whom knew full well there was something fishy about him, but who "invested" nonetheless because of his social connections - were moochers.  The only reason Madoff still breathes is because he's a member of "The Aristocracy of Pull", and was precisely the kind of villain Rand railed against, and the system in which he operated was precisely the system from which the "good guys" of Atlas Shrugged) finally walked away. 

If Madoff (and Angelo "Tangelo" Mozillo, Dick "Dick!" Fuld, and Ken "Solid Gold Toilet" Lewis, and all their ilk) are the best that American business can produce, it's a hint that Atlas shrugged years ago, and that the sooner whatever remains of our current system finally collapses, the better.

So tell me again what it was that two admirers of Rand, Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan, did in service of her dogma?

Was not George W. Bush Rand's "worthless" heir?  I he then man she would have rise to the presidency? 

This worthless moocher asks, "Where is our John Galt now?"
???

Was it Rand's vision that the titans of the banks and the corporations run Ponzi schemes and then extort the payoff from the taxpayers?  If these "men of the mind" went on strike twenty years ago, would society be worse off without them?

You see, there was buzz this week among the right-wing punditocracy of our "achievers" "going Galt."  That is, they will deprive the rest of us of their services. 

Who are these self-appointed Galts?  Are they the executives of the auto companies begging for government handouts?  Are they the bankers doing exactly the same thing?  Are they research scientists working for pharmaceutical companies?  Who are these John Galts? 

I say let them go on strike.  They can go create their own utopia.  Of course, they will be giving back all that bail out money.  Can't go start an Ayn Randian Society of Great Men with saddlebags full of dirty socialist banknotes, can we?
8)

What about the old place the John Galts leave behind?  I guess they'll just have to let the bureaucrats and the leeches run the place...and discover how hard the task is to set up a society with no bureaucrats to do the dirty work and no leeches to buy Mr. Gates' computers and Mr. Lay's potato chips!

well, i'd be the first to admit that my first-hand knowledge of ms. rand is spotty at best. (i read atlas shrugged once ten years ago to impress a woman in a bikini. true story.) what i gather from the quotes foo bar provided us is something to the effect of, over time the amount of money someone has tends to fall into balance with that person's character, or lack thereof? the randian superhero will eventually find his fortune wherever he goes because it's simply in his character to do valuable work and amass wealth as a natural byproduct, whereas the unworthy heir will attract moochers, be profligate in his wealth and eventually putter it away?

it's an interesting idea and i actually enjoyed reading the passages -- i remember thinking rand was a talented writer when i read AS way back when -- but i think it falls victim to a flaw that seems to me to be inherent to conservatism as a philosophy: it tends to be overoptimistic about the relationship between Man and his money ... i actually think using patriarchal language is probably kinda instructive here, also, and i notice rand uses it; not an indictment since everyone did back then but it seems like this idea is a little like the idea of the Invisible Hand of the Markets: for rand money somehow knows your character and will either come to you or away from you in the long run based on it (note where she anthropomorphizes money, quite cleverly, in saying the worthless heir corrupts his money rather than the other way around, and that money won't serve the mind that can’t match it – raising the interesting but somewhat bizarre implication that money has a mind of some kind, on its own, separate from the humans who created it? Meanwhile, for Milton friedman and the other “Invisible Hand� free marketeers, the Adam Smith guys, money somehow knows how to run societies on its own (well, that’s a bit unfair of me, course smith et al. say the market knows how to run societies, not money per se, but I’m grooving on this idea of anthropomorphizing money, I really think subconsciously that’s what’s at work a lot of times here, the idea that money is on some level a kind of living thing and that the relationship between it and human beings finds a natural balance, symbiosis, if only government wouldn’t interfere…)

It’s pretty to think that money on its own has this sort of ordering effect on society but not surprisingly, since I’d rather throw in my lot with Keynes, krugman and Naomi klein than the friedmans and the greenspans of the world , I just don’t think it’s accurate. I’ve had another metaphor for money floating around in the back of my mind and I’ve been trying to find a way to articulate it: what if money is actually more like a virus?

What does a virus do? When it infects an organic cell, it uses the cell as a nutrient and multiplies, eventually overwhelming and poisoning the cell. when the cell bursts millions upon millions of little viruses go flying all over the place, looking for other cells to infect. As a metaphor for the current market. the financial system -- the organic cell, if you will, the genuine assets created by genuine people doing genuine labor – was exploited by all these notional transactions, all these traders who really had nothing useful to contribute but had found a way to manipulate the system in order to get rich by shuffling papers around – for a while it looked healthy but it turns out the cell was only expanding because the viruses were growing inside it. then boom, the cell bursts and what have we got? 50, 60, 70 whatever it is trillion dollars in notional debt from these credit default swaps and what have you. Now admittedly just about anything I know about the financial system I know from watching the Daily Show so this comparison is pretty intuitive for me, but the point I’m trying to make is there is no natural balance, no symbiosis between humans and their money, and in fact the belief that there is is what’s dangerous. I mean greenspan was totally a randian superstar for a long time, everyone thought he was the ultimate financial guru, and now we discovered he probably did more than any other single person to create this mess.

And ironically, if you want to talk about real people creating real things, something ayn rand obviously, and rightly, holds in high regard, I think the people who are going to be doing that going forward are going to be the people who streamline our system – shifting to alternative energies, building a web of mass transit across the country to replace our outdated and horribly inefficient highway system, re-engineering urban space for multi-zone use, etc. And guess what’s going to be providing the resources for that? The stimulus package. So right now I have to say that the people who are claiming to be randians and are about to “go galt� – michelle malkin and rush Limbaugh and the rest of those useless twats – are totally the moochers and worthless heirs rand complains about, though I’m sure if she were alive she’d disagree. And the people she’d call freeloaders are probably, if they’re truly as industrious as I hope they are, the only chance we have to get out of this mess.

Anyway, that’s my take. And when I was snarking on the randian supermen above, I was really talking more about michelle malkin’s bastardization of rand than the woman herself. Much as I take issue with rand even I wouldn’t accuse her of saying what michelle malkin seems to think she is.

so in other words the keynesian perception of money and its reality in practice diverge in the marketplace in general, where the keynesians think the more you deregulate markets, the more genuine wealth will be created, but in practice we saw that the more you deregulate markets the more the system lapses into severe imbalance.

i'm also often amused at the admiration that the super-rich often garner from the rest of us commoners; someone like donald trump is reviled, yes, mostly out of jealously and somewhat because he's understandably arrogant -- after all, with his resources, who is going to ever hold him accountable for anything? the only time anyone is ever going to look someone like donald trump in the eye and say "no, you're wrong" is if he explicitly hires someone to do so. (sorta like bruce wayne and alfred?) but trump -- like bill gates, steve jobs, etc., although in gates' and jobs' case you certainly can make an argument that they do provide a useful service; i'll be damned if i even know what trump does except piddle around in real estate...

but really when i see someone who's amassed a personal fortune in the multiple billions of dollars i see someone who feels about money the way an addict feels about crack cocaine. or maybe a better comparison would be to think of it as a form of compulsive hoarding... point is, something's wrong with these people. they're addicted to making and hoarding money. the only reason they aren't vilified the way a spinster with 300 cats in her house would be is that pesky "unknown known" preconception we have that money reflects a sense of personal worth and character, so that if one person makes 50,000 dollars a year, and someone else makes 5 billion, the second person must be 500,000 times better than the first. but again, that also imagines money as some abstract thing separate from the goods and services it provides. there's absolutely no reason for anyone to need 5 billion dollars -- not unless you've got several hundred wives and several thousand children to feed.

Ayn Rand does for angry conservatives what Morrissey does for depressed teenagers; it doesn't provide any useful solutions to problems, but is sure makes you feel a whole lot better about yourself!
::)

What a name--Bernie Made-off!LOL

Sorry to take so long to get back to the thread, but... well, here goes.


So tell me again what it was that two admirers of Rand, Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan, did in service of her dogma?

Was not George W. Bush Rand's "worthless" heir?  I he then man she would have rise to the presidency? 


Naw, he was George H. W. Bush's worthless heir - the Paris Hilton of the political class.  Dubya was anti-rational from the get-go.  Remember "compassionate" conservatism?  Rand's economic policies were anything but compassionate.  And Bush's "compassion" was always driven by his religious beliefs, and Rand was as devout an atheist as there ever was.  There's a reason why Bioshock has a banner reading "No Gods, No Kings, Only Man" in a city built by a guy named "ANDRew rYAN". 

Reagan?  Not much, frankly, but he's not really much of a story to the Randroids. 

But Greenspan?  Now there's a story!

One school of thought says he changed his mind before joining mainstream economics and getting onto a career path that ended up with him running the Federal Reserve, and that he was genuinely "shocked" when the wheels fell off last October.

Another school of thought says he didn't change his mind about a damn thing, and that his entire time at the Fed was spent playing the role of Francisco D'Anconia, the gazillionaire copper magnate in the novel who, when the Peoples' States nationalized his mines, had the last laugh.  Go ahead and nationalize everything - there's nothing left for you to loot!  Take his 2008 comments about being "shocked", in this scenario, as a tongue-in-cheek "I am shocked, shocked that there is gambling here" from Casablanca.

Truth of the matter is, we really don't know, and absent a deathbed confession, we never will.


Was it Rand's vision that the titans of the banks and the corporations run Ponzi schemes and then extort the payoff from the taxpayers?  If these "men of the mind" went on strike twenty years ago, would society be worse off without them?


Maybe they did go on strike 20 years ago, and we didn't notice.  We built an entire economy on FIRE: Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate.  And in the words of Douglas Adams, How can you have money if none of you actually produces anything?


You see, there was buzz this week among the right-wing punditocracy of our "achievers" "going Galt."  That is, they will deprive the rest of us of their services. 

Who are these self-appointed Galts?  Are they the executives of the auto companies begging for government handouts?  Are they the bankers doing exactly the same thing?  Are they research scientists working for pharmaceutical companies?  Who are these John Galts? 


Absolutely not.  The book (to the point of nausea, because Rand desperately needed an editor) rails against CEOs whose only value-add to the company is their ability to work within The Aristoracy of Pull and land fat government contracts... or in today's language, bailouts.  These people are the moochers and looters against whom she rails so stridently. 

Rand's sorta like Nietzsche.  A lot of people read Nietzsche, but very few people actually understand him.  One idiot who got him 180-degrees-bass-ackwards killed 50 million people.  Unfortunately, a bunch of other people who never bothered to read him tend to think the idiot had Nietzsche right. 

The villains in Atlas Shrugged aren't Joe Sixpack, they're suit-wearing fraudsters, shysters, and lobbyists.  Joe Sixpack's just the innocent victim.  A lot of Rand's so-called supporters rail against the working poor; they're idiots.  A lot of Rand's opponents think that Rand's so-called supporters actually understood the book.  They're just as wrong.

My serious answer as to "Who is John Galt" was in that thread about homeless tent camps.  Who is John Galt?  He's some Chuck pounding stakes into the ground, teaching people how to purify water from the nearby river, turn old DirecTV dishes and aluminum foil into solar cookers, and in the language of The Road (which has nothing to do with economics), keeping the fire alive. 


I say let them go on strike.  They can go create their own utopia.  Of course, they will be giving back all that bail out money.  Can't go start an Ayn Randian Society of Great Men with saddlebags full of dirty socialist banknotes, can we? 8)


The full text is available on line or via .torrent.  Pirate this book.  (And take vicarious pleasure in the fact that Randroids believe in intellectual property, which is yet another reason that I'm not one :)

The scene in which Hank Rearded ("Good guy") is "invited" to sell the secrets to Rearden Metal ("Really cool stuff") by a government weenbag named Potter ("Bad guy") is exactly what happened, in real life, last year.  A bunch of bank CEOs - legitimate and fraudulent alike - were herded into a locked room and told that they would play ball.

Rearden?  Rearden would have had none of this TARP funding.  He'd have burned his factories to the ground.  (Galt?  Galt just packed up and left.)


Ayn Rand does for angry conservatives what Morrissey does for depressed teenagers; it doesn't provide any useful solutions to problems, but is sure makes you feel a whole lot better about yourself! ::)


Pretty much.  It, and Ender's Game, helped make me into the douchebag I am today.  My only redeeming vice is that I was saved by the Illuminatus! Trilogy, which taught me never to take myself so seriously, and the Book of the SubGenius which was pervaded with reminders that even if I don't get eternal salvation for my $20 membership card that denotes me as a superior mutant, at least I get triple my money back!

And ironically, if you want to talk about real people creating real things, something ayn rand obviously, and rightly, holds in high regard, I think the people who are going to be doing that going forward are going to be the people who streamline our system – shifting to alternative energies, building a web of mass transit across the country to replace our outdated and horribly inefficient highway system, re-engineering urban space for multi-zone use, etc. And guess what’s going to be providing the resources for that? The stimulus package. So right now I have to say that the people who are claiming to be randians and are about to “go galt� – michelle malkin and rush Limbaugh and the rest of those useless twats – are totally the moochers and worthless heirs rand complains about, though I’m sure if she were alive she’d disagree. And the people she’d call freeloaders are probably, if they’re truly as industrious as I hope they are, the only chance we have to get out of this mess.


No irony there -- yes, you get it.  Unlike most of her followers.

Not to make it blindingly obvious to those who haven't read the book, but consider the book was written in a time in which there existed a technological development that, in the hands of industry, promised to revolutionize the means by which "motive power" was to be delivered to the world... and that had already been used by a governments in various non-profit endeavours...


Anyway, that’s my take. And when I was snarking on the randian supermen above, I was really talking more about michelle malkin’s bastardization of rand than the woman herself. Much as I take issue with rand even I wouldn’t accuse her of saying what michelle malkin seems to think she is.


Flame on.  Rand's worst detractors are the ones who claim to be her supporters.  See the Nietzche bits in that last post of mine.


so in other words the keynesian perception of money and its reality in practice diverge in the marketplace in general, where the keynesians think the more you deregulate markets, the more genuine wealth will be created, but in practice we saw that the more you deregulate markets the more the system lapses into severe imbalance.


Dig.  It's getting late, and I'm sobering up :) 

The interesting thing is that neither the Keynesians nor the Chicago school nor the Austrian school have answers for this.  Many academic economists are doing serious soul-searching (PDF) at this point.


but really when i see someone who's amassed a personal fortune in the multiple billions of dollars i see someone who feels about money the way an addict feels about crack cocaine. or maybe a better comparison would be to think of it as a form of compulsive hoarding... point is, something's wrong with these people. they're addicted to making and hoarding money.


There's something to be said for that; much like communism implodes when you try to scale it past 100 people, it's probably the case that there's an upper bound to laissez-faire capitalism, although it's probably around the 100M-person mark.  When you've got enough money to buy all the stuff you want, the only thing left to puruse is power.  Not just power over oneself -- which can be had by simply buying more toys -- but power over others. 

Anyone who voluntarily runs for public office should immediately be disqualified as unqualified for the job.  And yes, that's why I lean to the libertarian side of the political grid.  I don't want to force anyone to hand over their money (or labor) to my pet projects; I want to convince them, but I'm OK with the people who aren't convinced -- they're cool by me too, as long as they afford me the same respect, by not forcing me to fund their pet projects.  Live, and let live. 

Which has its own scaling problems.  The first jerkwad with a power fetish and a convincing smile (whether it's a Maine blueblood with a down-home Texan affectation or an intellectual orator with Chicago-borne street smarts) convinces enough people to go along for the ride, and it's game over.  The Maine blueblood was a puppet of his wing of the Party's entrenched interests, and the new guy is a puppet of his wing of the Party's intrenched interests.  So it goes.

My bind has become my suspicion of ALL power.  You've heard me rant many times about the corporate bigshots; however, I live in a community full of progressive do-gooders and I have seen what happens when THEY get in charge of anything: Rules, rules, rules, rules, and more rules, and if you say something that MIGHT offend an oppressed minority, you are out---O-U-T--out!

Those who talk of freedom are not so much interested in freedom as they are in writing the new rules....

But the scary thing is...somebody's got to be in charge!
::)

Those who talk of freedom are not so much interested in freedom as they are in writing the new rules....

But the scary thing is...somebody's got to be in charge! ::)


Catch-22, it's the best catch there is...

Getting back to the Monkeysphere idea from that thread a few weeks ago, last Friday, the Financial Times had a fantastic article entitled A Fred Goodwin or Dick Fuld in all of us.