A Bernie Made-off bailout?!?
Sunday, January 4, 2009
So I'm on the treadmill this morning, and I happen to hear a reporter on Faux news discussing a pending request from victims of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme who are asking for some sort of Government bailout. The reporter himself was sympathetic as he stated that certainly those who had lost 'everything' should expect that they might receive some sort of restitution; then he questioned, "but where will it end".
This was funny to me because it reminded me of another act of butt-ass ignorance that I had the privilege of witnessing... Some years ago, I was a soldier in the US Army. While I was yet in training, we'd spend all of the day in class and most of the evening in the day-room shooting pool, watching TV, and talking shit. One day, someone cracked the plexiglass on a vending machine with their pool cue. The insatiable greed of ordinary motherfuckas led folks to start fishing for chips and snacks out of the machine with coat hangers. This led to a larger break in the plexiglass. Which led to folks reaching into the machine with their hands. Which led to a larger break in the plexiglass. And so on and so forth until, by morning, all of the plexiglass was gone and the machine was completely empty. When the Drill Sergeants found the machine, there was hell to pay for the entire unit, not to mention the fact that we lost all of our vending machines thereafter.
It never occurred to any of those geniuses that there would be a price to pay for their actions. It never occurred to any of those geniuses that you can never really have something for nothing. Once people became consumed with the idea that they could personally benefit, they stopped thinking and started reaching...
That's the image in my mind when I hear about the latest installment of bail-out-a-rama. Bunch of simple motherfuckas to self-focused to look ahead to tomorrow morning. Its tragic, but hell, so is life. Madoff was no Lex Luther, he was just a hustler; drop by ANY big city and you can meet a hundred more. And those who lost their money are not universal victims deserving of governmental intervention; you're just a bunch of people who got took...
But hey, now that I think about it... I got took for $30.00 in a three card monte game once. Not to mention all those times I was bamboozled by the man selling fake gold chains back in my teens. Is there an on-line application on Hank Paulson's website?
