Friends, I continue to be fascinated by the unfolding story of Stanford and Madoff. It is not a matter of the tall-poppy syndrome but more one of being completely mystified by the behaviour of these two obviously intelligent people.
Both of them were billionaires. As billionaires they had the funds to purchase all the ‘best’ things that the material world has to offer (keep in mind that what looks ‘ best’ may prove to be psychologically destructive). They had a certain notoriety, castles in Spain, luxury motor yachts, who would know?
Yet these two men, using a Ponzi scheme, carried out massive frauds, Stanford’s involving 9 billion and Madoff’s involving 50 billion. The scheme was simple: offer impossibly high interest rates then use the money of later investors to pay high interest to the initial investors. The idea is that each new wave of investors provide the money to cover the interest of those behind while the fraudsters use the capital for, well who knows what: more shares, more real estate, more gold bicycles?
But what happened was that we had a world financial crisis and the new investors dried up and the value of the shares and real estate fell dramatically and Madoff and Stanford, egg on face, we stuck with paying interest bills with no new money.
Both men, at this point in time, are not in jail which, in itself, is a curious thing. Meanwhile those who invested because of the high interest rates on offer lick their wounds and wonder whether they’ll get any of their money back.
But the more interesting thing to me is: why did these men engage in a fraud that could only end in discovery, bankruptcy, and jail terms when they already had so much money that they didn’t know what to spend it on?
My only conclusion is that greed is a sickness and that, in some people, it reaches a pathological stage where they simply can’t help themselves. The more money they have the more they want and they will use any means to achieve it, even illegal ones. Worryingly, a broader interpretation can be derived from this conclusion, one that extends beyond these two men. It is a sickness that infects people world-wide.
We live in a world where greed, disguised as capitalism, is the major driving force. Everyone in Western societies is indoctrinated to believe that materialism is a good thing, that with-it people should make as much money as they can by whatever means so they can wear the latest Rolex watch or drive a luxury car or own a harbor-side mansion.
Greed is far-reaching, invasive. It is often fused with militarism and armies that are supposed to be purely for self-defense are used by politicians to snatch scarce resources from other countries (Iraq and its oil is one example) and to build Empires that are entirely self-serving.
Environmentally destructive Corporations encourage politicians to carry out wars for resources and provide large donations to such politicians. The Media goes along with the scenario and push materialism via mindless, profitable adds that appeal to mindless people.
Greed is a sickness, one that’s impact can range from minor aberrations to what can only be described as insanity.
Greed is destroying both our planet and our human potential.
Greed is despicable, dehumanizing and dangerous.
Denounce greed!
What’s sick is corporate law that makes a corporation an entity without accountability! No one in Congress gives a rat’s pituty because their mostly rat’s themselves.
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David G Reply:
February 21st, 2009 at 11:42 am
That’s a fact that has often concerned me, VR2. Make the management and the directors of all corporations personally liable for all debts and many problems would disappear overnight!
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Greed seems to be an addiction. It links to competiveness, insecurity and lack of ethical boundaries.
The pundits are screaming about Obama’s mortgage help proposal.
What has gotten lost in the ranting is the fact that these mortgages were written to become unpayable by cunning lenders.
We used to call this planned obsolescence, by the time you got an auto or other product paid for it no longer worked, was out of style or uncompatable with newer devices.
That’s a great illustration, the coat of starving masses, etc. who’ s the artist?
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Hey, Kate, thanks for your comment. An addiction? Perhaps. It’s certainly one that humans embrace.
Regarding the loans, I think they were purely made to package and on-sell to gullible and greedy investors and funds managers who, realizing their worthlessness, in turn repackaged them again and on-sold them. Eventually the bubble burst.
The illustration is shown several times on Google Images under GREED. You will be able to track down the artist fairly easily. Cheers.
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These are just two of the thousands of shysters around the world, and yes David you’ll probably find a few Jews among their type.Of course this is where the trouble on the planet starts and stops.
BUT WAIT! It is not them?
Oh no, it is the Johny six packs that will vote for the party’s that will look after these toe rags interests.You know David the following is not anecedotal, hearsay,or a fairy story, it is recorded for history for all to see.It is one of those things you take to your grave with you.
Now dig this, when the conservative scum bags had control, the union movement took one of its claims up to the industrial commission many many moons ago, one of the judges in his deliberation said “It costs more for a loaf of bread to the CEO of a company, than the dude who sweeps the floor.Class alive and well in good ol Oz.Volumes, volumes, volumes.
Oh yes ol Johny six pack, keep the price of piss about right so he can pickle his feeble brain on the weekend, keep the fish and chip shops open, and all the hamburgers and chicken they can eat and plasmas on tap, ” They belong to the man” such tried and true methods have worked since the industrial revolution.
That the Madoffs of the world, even if he got the loot legally can control this amount of money is a scandal in and of itself.That one man can squander the price of a hospital wing or a possible cure for cancer, on a private jet and other toys turns my stomach.And look at their wives,all barbi dolls,”Prix d Amour” another story for ya David. Of course me mate down the road who can’t find 2 cents to scratch his own arse hole will defend these bastards and vote accordingly.
Strange animals indeed.
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David G Reply:
February 21st, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Yeah, there sure are a lot of injustices in our world, Phill, and unfair inequalities. And none of them are necessary.
P.S. Phill, if you could tone down the colourful language, it would be greatly appreciated. There are ladies present!
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I call it capitalism rum amuck.
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We are probably all, at least, a little bit guilty of greed. Not on a billion dollar scale, but on a much smaller one. All the junk that China was making and sending overseas were not necessities. I know, I have bought my share in the past. I am trying to live a very different lifestyle now and not just because of financial problems. Have found out that stuff doesn’t make me happy and in many cases is just a burden. I am living a much simpler life. I have a feeling it will continue to keep on getting simpler.
The moment I really “got it” was a few years ago at Xmas when some great neices and nephews where busy tearing open present after present soon they where sitting on the floor bored with nothing to do. There was just too much, nothing had any value if it wasn’t instantly brand new.
I have seen it with my grandson too. If you give him a gift he will open it and want to play with it. He will be happy with one gift. He has to have that gift taken away and told he has another whole pile of presents yet to be torn opened and then ignored. In a way he is being taught to be greedy.
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Advertising is to greed what steroids are to growth.
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i have often said that greed will bring about the destruction of the planet…………
and it looks like it’s happening……………
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I to am guilty. I like to travel. When I take a trip, for example to Sofia, it creates more pollution than an African creates in 5 years. I could just sit home and watch a travel program about Sofia. Yet if I see the travel program I may want to go to Sofia even more than if I had not seen the program. I could suppress my desire to go to Sofia but I will probably end up consoling myself with a trip or two to Nancey or maybe even Charolette. Then what have I really achieved? Now I could suppress my desire to travel altogether but travel can also be a good thing. It broadens our horizons as long as we are awake when we travel. There is no telling who we might meet or run in to when we travel.
Yet if I do not take a vacation I have a lot of extra money in my pocket that I could use to pay David or Wayne or Stan or Tom to maintain their web sites. But if I do not take that trip either near or far then Pierre or Victor or Darius is suddenly going to have less money
to maintain their small family hotels. Now if only I cancel my trip they can no doubt over
come such a cancellation but if many people cancel their trips and donate their savings to the poor in Bangladesh it will not be long before Pierre, Victor, or Darius are as poor as the people in Bangladesh.
Something that I learned from a Muslim some years ago, is something that I could have learned from an Atheist or a Buddhist. I just happened to learn it from a Muslim. Muslims can be smart to. But I am drifting. What I learned was WHY you spend the money that you spend is also important. If you build an indoor swimming pool just so that you can show off to your friends and relatives you are greedy. But if you build an indoor swimming pool so that the children of you neighbor have somewhere to go to learn how to swim and to be involved in some drug free, alcohol free activity, that you only close off for very special occasions such as a child’s 18th birthday or wedding then you are not greedy.
Muslims have a good concept on charity. World wide communication has made it a bit outdated but it is still good. That is charity, or jihad, works its way outwards in ever larger circles. Once your family has escaped poverty you help the people in your village escape poverty. You seek to overcome your own unjust behavior and you work to solve injustices in your community where you can have first hand expiriences with what is going on. Once you live in a community in which poverty and injustice in your mind have been eliminated you move on to your region then your country then your planet.
Now of course disagreements will occur as to whether or not something is an injustice. Non Muslims will accuse Muslims of imprisoning women in clothing that is inappropriate. Muslims will accuse non Muslims of exploiting women for inappropriate sexual purposes.
Also with world wide communication we often learn that although the countries or communities where we live might not be perfect in some far off place famines or injustices are happening that make the problems of your area seem like child’s play. Yet unless you have a minimum of knowledge of that far away area you are likely to forget that there are at least 3 sides to every story or conflict. So does it not make sense that a person would perhaps be better off trying to fix a lesser problem close to home in which the person is knowledgeable than a more serious problem far away. Not that such a person is unconcerned about the more serious problem but that they would hope that people closer to the problem can rise to the challenge of solving it.
There may also be some problems that appear local but may have their source a half a world away in Rotterdam or Washington DC. The wars over the diamond trade are an example that I have in mind.
Greed is not something that can be judged in the same way killing some one can. When you kill some one there is a motive than can be clearly judged. Others may some times be fooled. But to the extent that we are not fooled we can judge this behavior much easier than judging how people spend their money.
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Steel Reply:
October 23rd, 2009 at 7:33 am
Well spoken and interesting. But you miss the point. Greed is not the same thing as un- ecological behaviour. Greed is the cancer behind it. It is said that money is the rot of all evil …That is wrong! … Spending money is not evil. To earn money is not evil. To earn more money than you deserve is close to greed…but there you have a choice of way …You can spend that money in a non greedy way. Greed is the real evil. That is what your Muslim friend tried to explain to you. So you can judge greed and it’s easy to recognise. It’s when you earn more money than you deserve and never get enough…When you travel 1000 times to Sofia …and just want to continue doing it. To be greedy is also to be contagious …You spread the decease to those who don’t have the insight that this is a sick behaviour.
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Jeannie, given the amount of indoctrination and pressure each human is put under each day, it’s no wonder we are all a bit guilty. Perhaps this economic crisis will have a positive outcome, help us to readjust our values?
Coco, unless we move in a new direction, greed will destroy out world. There’s no real change to the use of fossil fuels anywhere!
Buddha, if a person or group or community’s lifestyle is causing other people elsewhere in the world to starve and face an early death then is that greed not a crime?
Cheers.
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David, that is a very good question. I did not look at it from a collective perspective but an individual perspective. But off the top of my head I am not sure that crime is quite the right word. The reason why is that when someone makes the decision to buy something the only thing that they are REQUIRED to think about is the price and if they can pay that price. The price of an object conveys no information about who made the object or how it was made. It conveys no information about how the money that you pay will be divided up between retailer, wholesaler, or the company that moved it from its point of manufacture to the point of sale. It tells nothing about how the money that the manufacturer receives is divided among the owners, the managers, and the workers. From the part that the owners receive we know nothing about how much that they use for modernizing their factory and how much goes for the purchase of a new yacht.
Now a person can imagine answers to all of these things but they are all generalizations.
When we want to say that some has committed a crime we usually need to show intent or that there was negligence. For example when I accuse the people in the military of being criminals I am saying that they have either knowingly committed a crime or if they really want to say that what they have done was not criminal then I would say that their not knowing was so negligent that it was criminal. Now some of them may try a 3rd defense and that is, I know that what I did was criminal but I at the time I thought that it was the lesser of the evils. I can agree with that but only up to a point, and only if they admit that those that put them in the position to have to make that choice did so with criminal intent, and should be held accountable for their crimes.
Now when it comes to this problem of greed I see it partly as a problem of the system rather than only corrupt human nature. Of course the capitalist system makes the problem worse.
If there are any criminals in the system it is those that have conspired to save this system from defeat by a socialist system. But even they have a reasonable defense. Socialism may have seemed like a better system to you since 1960 or earlier but I did not BEGIN to question the supiriority of capitalism until the mid 1990s. We are all products of our environment. We are all influenced not only by what we have read but by what we have not read. Millions of people have been and continue to be fooled but they are more victims than criminals.
Furthermore even though I now no longer believe that capitalism can deliver happiness and justice to mankind I also have doubts about socialism. Socialism that is not properly implemented will also be a failure. Successful socialism will require proper management.
What are the chances that the proper managers will be in the right place at the right time?
One final point that you may not realize not living in the US. That is the vast majority of wealthy Americans do not believe that their life style has anything at all to do with 3rd world problems. It is likely to make you really angry that Americans think like that but to avoid high blood pressure you have to keep in mind all the obsticals that prevent Americans from figuring that out.
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well david, there is some change to the use of fossil fuels but it might be a bit ‘too little, too late’ as it were. where i live we have many wind turbines generating power and there is a programme to generate power from the sea. (waves) but that is only a small corner of the world. this won’t help the starving thousands/millions in less fortunate circumstances. if the ‘powers that be’ had got their effing heads together many moons ago and distrubuted the ‘world’ wealth equally and provided for everyone, there is no reason why in this day and age there are peoples who are suffering from famine, lack of water, lack of housing, lack of health care (i use the term ‘health care’ loosely, given the GREED of pharamceutical companies), lack of basic needs to survive and lack of education.
i don’t really know what i’m getting at here. but it just seems so unfair. but then life at a microscopic level might be equally unfair. who knows what is going on in the life of those entities?
be that as it may; the planet earth is only capable of providing for a designated amount of living creatures. let’s face facts. what happens when there are too many creatures on a given amount of sustainable fodder?
combine that with the GREED, WARS, GLOBAL WARMING, CLIMATE CHANGE ………………
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I love this site….
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coco Reply:
February 22nd, 2009 at 10:58 am
keep on loving………………..
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What sickens me the most are the lower/middle class people who condone or encourage the behaviour of the GREEDY CAPITALISTS and the devastating results that ensue: i.e. the current world wide economic tragedy we’re experiencing. What i’m basically asking is: who’s side are these MORONIC APOLOGISTS on anyway? I could understand their sympathy to the greedy/ wealthy if they themselves were rich, but that obviously isn’t the case. I just don’t get it. Wake up, people.
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David G Reply:
March 10th, 2009 at 6:49 am
It’s because we’ve all been sold the idea that greed is good, Dan. Everyone has bought it hook, line and sinker!
It’s time for a reality check!
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Wow. Living in a smallish town in the U.S. I was beginning to think I was the only one in the world that saw what greed was doing to the world. I’m surrounded as Dan put it by “Moronic Apologists”. Everyone I work with at my factory job is biased towards republicans, not that democrats are always much better. These people are good people but seem completely ignorant on the subjects of politics, economics, ecology, and a host of other things but they still VOTE. A uninformed voter is worse than a nonvoter. They probably watch fox “news” and get all the news of the world filtered through a conservative sieve instead of from multiple sources.
It’s unbelievable when you get politicians and clergy and pundits still talking about how gays and lesbians, feminists and liberals are destroying the world when we see what has happened on Wall St. I don’t care what they think about the Seven deadly sins but right now the one that’s doing the most damage is Greed and they seem to ignore it.
Well sorry if I’ve rambled and not made any sense but I really needed let that out and there’s alot more still pent up when it comes to these issues.
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Steel Reply:
October 23rd, 2009 at 7:43 am
You are not alone and you are a man with insight Brad. Lets hope there will be more of us before its to late.
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You have said it very succintly….In Kaballah they call greed being small-brained..wanting for yourself alone..a child’s development…learning to share is an indication of being a balanced part of the whole…however evolution is not a linear process and that should give us all hope. It ain’t always what it seems…Kate
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