Bernard Madoff is in jail after stealing $55-billion from investors...I said BILLION...I said 55-billion times more money than the human imagination can even contemplate, far more than all the great bank robberies and train robberies and stage coach robberies combined. Let's be clear here. Madoff isn't just a thief. He is a Financial Cannibal.
He cannibalized people's savings. His primary targets were his own friends, his own acquaintances, charities and the primary beneficiaries of those charities, children. If that doesn't add up to evil, then what does? And here's what gets me almost unhinged, and maybe I can get you to become a little bit bothered by this. Why is it that when a financial cannibal does evil and gets caught eventually for doing evil and then gets called evil, nobody in the legal community or the academic community or the medical community, the psychobabble community, nobody comes forward to say, please, please don't rush to judge this man. He had issues, deep psychological issues. For someone to be this cold and calculating and bloodthirsty, means that his judgments are impaired by psychological conflicts that need to be examined, pondered and probed. Bernard Madoff needs help and to call him evil is absurd. To stigmatize him is ignorant and unseemly and barbaric and haven't we learned enough about the human mind to know that nobody in his right mind could possibly do something like this. To call him evil is over the line. To have people applaud the judge's decision to revoke his bail before he is even sentenced and send him straight to jail, directly to jail, do not pass go. This is an outrage, this is lynch mob justice, this is Salem. Do you hear anybody saying that? Anybody saying that would be thought of as INSANE.
Why? Because Madoff only stole money and not lives. No, No, No. It's because he stole a lot of people's money. It's because Madoff is now associated with the trillions of dollars and I said trillions that have been stolen from billions of people living all around the world who are now dealing with a CREDIT crunch, which has become a JOB crunch and in the process free enterprise isn't just being crunched, it's being dog piled. What Michael Vick did to dogs, is what Bernard Madoff did to children. What some sharks on Wall Street did to Main Street is all bundled up in one iconic figure, Madoff. When the second richest man in America - Warren Buffett - calls what's been happening in the economy an economic Pearl Harbor, it is Bernie Madoff who is associated with those people who ordered the bombing. Madoff affected all of us and so none of us would at any time take any excuses that some expert would offer for what he did. The Financial Cannibal has NO defenders. And he won't have his sentence reviewed every year to determine whether or not he can get out and live among us, among free people. No, he won't get that kind of treatment. Maybe, just maybe, when he’s 85-years-old some parole board will say, you can go home to die. But the chances are Madoff will die a prisoner, which is what everyone wants, and no one is being called blood thirsty for wanting this. No one is being called vengeful. That v word, vengeance doesn't even come up. Why? Because there is no sympathy for the Devil. No safe harbor now for this evil. Why? Because he stole Money from a lot of people and even those he didn't steal directly from are affected by it because he contributed more than any single figure to the melt down of confidence in the world economy.
Now last week at this time we were talking about Vince Li, the man who last summer purchased a knife and not just any knife, a really big one, the kind that you could use to slice off the head of what you had just been hunting for, whether it was elk, or bear or human. In this case it was a human hunt and the hunting ground he picked was a Greyhound Bus in Manitoba. After he stabbed his human victim over and over again, he then proceeded to start eating his kill. Today, Vince Li is in a hospital and every year he will be assessed as to whether or not it's a good idea to release him into the public arena. The dice may be rolled some day on whether or not this person is able to be among us again. While many agree with me that he ought to be confined to a mental hospital or a prison for life, there are many, many, many in the legal establishment who call my thinking one that is motivated by vengeance and that in calling for this kind of punishment, I am stigmatizing other people with mental illness.
So let me get this straight...The man who stole $55-billion and sliced through confidence in our financial system like a hot knife through butter, is going to jail for a very, very long time, likely for the rest of his life. But the man, who hunted for a human and killed one and beheaded him and proceeded to dine on him, is up for release every year. What's the difference here? You can talk until the cows come home about how one evil agent knew precisely what he was doing and was in his right mind and the other one wasn't. And some will say, oh ok. But let's be honest here. If any court decided that Bernard Madoff could be up for review and could possibly be released every year and he would never threaten the public finances again because he would simply be put in a situation through monitoring where he simply wouldn't be able to ever do what he did again, do you think anyone in the world would feel that's ok? Madoff would be as close to zero risk of re-offending as it can get. His name and face are everywhere and with monitoring, who honestly thinks he could ever slice into anyone's portfolio again?
The reason Bernard Madoff has almost no chance of leaving prison except in a box, is because his crimes affected the world, and Vince Li's crime affected one little person, one little family. And outrage over a crime, be it about killing a human or helping to kill an economy, are judged differently. Bernard Madoff is being treated like a mass murderer, and while there is no capital punishment for his crime, many think there ought to be. Is that because people are filled with feelings of vengeance? Is there something wrong with 50 of his victims clapping in the court room, clapping when the judge told Madoff he was going straight to jail? No Bail Madoff. You're going to jail right now. Was the applause coming from feelings of vengeance? Do those victims need a psychiatrist to put them on a medication to correct their behavior?
The truth is Bernard Madoff belongs in a bucket for life, and so does Vince Li. I personally would be happy to see them both in the same bucket. But the established psychiatrists and the established lawyers disagree with me and if you agree with me, they disagree with you too.
Real justice, free of psychobabble interference, is reserved for those who steal from the many, as opposed to those who murder the few.
That unfortunate and tragic truth cuts like a knife.
I'm Charles Adler on the Corus Radio Network.
