Hard Times
 

Sure, we all have a thing or two to say about Bernard Madoff. But Diana Henriques of the New York Times, who knew Madoff for 20 years, reminds us that he was also a "visionary" who understood the financial industry well as anyone in the field.


She believed him as much as his clients. And why not? Madoff recognized how computerization and globalization would affect the trading of stocks in the nascent days of the World Wide Web. He was on the vanguard, and that he could carry out a fraud of this dimension, Henriques says, "stunned" her.


 

madoff1.jpgBernie Madoff had the book thrown at him -- 150 years for the ponzi scheme that bankrupted families and non-profits. I suspect that I should be rejoicing and in fact I did when I heard. He did something so despicable that he does deserve to die in prison.


Yet I have little sympathy for his victims and their quest for the government to get them some of their money back:


[S]houldn't the Madoff victims have to bear at least some responsibility for their own gullibility? Mr. Madoff's supposed results -- those steady, positive returns quarter after blessed quarter -- is a classic example of the old saw, "when something looks too good to be true, it probably is." What's more, most of the people investing with Mr. Madoff thought they had gotten in on something really special; there was a certain smugness that came with thinking they had a special, secret deal not available to everyone else. Of course, it turned they were right -- they did have a special deal. It just wasn't what they expected.


As PunditMom says, greed will trump any sort of regulation the government does craft. Greed from the Madoffs of the world as well as greed from those doing the investing.


I'm not an economist nor do I feel like I have a firm hand on my own retirement funds, but even I would balk at a deal that is just too good to be true. I don't even go hirer than the quarter slots in Vegas. I just don't gamble with money nor do I think that get rich schemes win out in the end.


[Image: Kathy Willens/AP via The Guardian]

 

madoff.jpgI was relieved when I read this afternoon that Bernard Madoff received the full sentence requested by lawyers prosecuting his case: 150 years. In contrast, Madoff's lawyer's request for 12 was both a joke and an insult to the people whose lives Madoff all but destroyed.


The presiding judge, Denny Chin, said he wanted to make an example of Madoff and believed that levying the full 150 years would be a deterrent to future white-collar criminals. The Madoff sentence is the third-longest for any white collar crime, according to a compilation by Forbes.


The $65 billion Ponzi scheme that Madoff had constructed since the 1980s was a vast, far-reaching deception. It convinced thousands of people that Madoff was a man with eminent financial savvy, an ability to turn modest wealth into a fortune through wise investments. But all he was really doing was taking the money from new, unsuspecting customers and giving it to older clients to create the illusion of successful returns. It was a gigantic jig-saw puzzle with numerous missing pieces, and eventually the 71-year-old Madoff could no longer keep up the charade.


When he ran out of money last December, and told his kids about the Ponzi scheme, it's doubtful that Madoff thought that in just six months he'd be facing life behind bars. But even if he did suspect this fate, his apology to his victims rings as hollow as the investments he pretended to be making.


During his trial, Madoff turned to his victims and apologized, claiming that he lives in a tormented state for what he's done, and while he knows it won't make any difference, he feels he must say how sorry he is.


Bull. He's not tormented for defrauding his clients; he's tormented because he's been living in a holding cell in Lower Manhattan for nearly four months. If he really feels bad about what he did, he wouldn't have spent 20+ years doing it.


Madoff will most likely be sentenced to a medium-security prison in Upstate New York or New Jersey, to ensure that he is close to his family. Authorities do not intend to sentence him to a maximum-security facility because he is not a violent criminal, but his sentence is also too long for him to be a candidate for a minimum-security prison or a "prison camp" -- a facility in which prisoners are granted maximum freedom and the illusion of being outside through open-air yards with fences instead of walls.


Madoff is likely to find his next job in the kitchen or laundry of his new home, earning no more than 40 cents an hour.


[Image: The AM New York blog]

 

Nico Lizarraga_image.jpg

My longtime friend Jason and I were walking through the very affluent Nob Hill neighborhood here in San Francisco. Jason is the extreme opposite of affluent. I love Jason to pieces and have always been struck by his absolute and complete satisfaction with living as simply as he can. Jason is incredibly intelligent, good looking and charming and could have almost anything he wanted in life but scoffs at most everything people want. We photographed each other throughout Nob Hill but the picture that says the most is his proud declaration of what he is happiest with, his minority status.

 

320px-Carl_Spitzweg_021.jpgThe Friday before last, I stopped into the Virgin Megastore at Union Square for its final day of business. The shelves were mostly bare, but there were still scads of people combing their contents for great deals on music and movies. I was too depressed to stick around, having already witnessed the closures of my two favorite music stores this year: Kim's Video, on St. Mark's, and Etherea, on Avenue A.


Of course, Kim's didn't close completely -- it reopened a few blocks away -- but in a fraction of the space it had on St. Mark's, and with a fraction of the selection. I suspect it won't be long before it shutters its new doors, too.


With the digitization of music, movies and now books, I fear the worst: a Fahrenheit 451-type scenario, in which future generations may not live without those things, per se, but will never develop a sense of context.


In Ray Bradbury's novel, all books have been destroyed, so a group of elders have each memorized a specific book, and they pass that book on to the next generation in the oral tradition. Thus each person is a repository of one text, but nothing more.


The author himself, now 87 years old, is speaking out to save the public library in Ventura, California, which is in a massive deficit and is likely to follow its for-profit counterparts if something isn't done to save it. But what is the likelihood of that happening? The problems faced by the Ventura library are not unique to that city. Will libraries become the sole province of private universities? And if so, how long will that sustain itself, if the entire book publishing industry falls apart?


There can't be anything to shelve if no one's printing the books.


I began thinking about this months ago, when it became obvious that music and movie collections were fast becoming obsolete. With innovations like the Amazon Kindle, will collections of books -- personal, academic, public -- be next?


[Image: The Bookworm, by Carl Spitzweg]

 


This month marks the fifth anniversary of Save Darfur's founding. The organization's goal has been to pressure the U.S. Government to work to end the conflict in Darfur. And while the present administration is much better on policy regarding Africa's longest running civil war, things could always be better. As rain reason approaches and malarial mosquitoes breed in stagnant water, more than a million refugees are in a dire predicament.


Want to do something? Hunger strikes aren't the only way to get involved. You can sign this petition to keep the pressure on President Obama to stay on top of the situation in Darfur.


You can also send an e-postcard to the President here.

 

Do you know Capucine? She's an adorable 4-year-old French girl who tells adorable stories about animals and more. Her videos have been watched by hundreds of thousands -- which gave her and her mother, Anne, an idea.



They have made t-shirts, buttons and magnets featuring drawings by Capucine based on her stories, the proceeds of which are being donated to EduRelief to create "Capucine's Library," a project to help raise literacy rates in Mongolia. The effort has raised nearly $1,500 so far -- chip in yourself and help one adorable little girl help a whole lot of other adorable little children.

 

Bevacqua_image.jpg

I was shooting photos for Megaphone, a local street magazine that provides opportunities and a voice for socially excluded people while bringing light to issues that affect our communities, in particular, Vancouver's downtown eastside. Every Saturday, Food not Bombs, feeds the people of the Eastside, often referred to as "Canada's poorest postal code." Megaphone was featuring Food not Bombs in their latest issue and they asked me to shoot photos to accompany the story. I was happy to be able to work with them as they are a great paper and a much needed resource in our city. 

 

David Carr is a media columnist for the New York Times, but he's also a recovering drug addict whose journey to the vaunted offices of the country's largest paper nearly killed him. His memoir, Night of the Gun, recounts the author's long, murky descent into crack and alcohol abuse back in the 1980s, his recovery in the 90s, and his miraculously successful efforts to rebuild a life for himself in the 2000s.


Here Carr talks with Rachel Sklar of the Daily Beast about some of the topics nearest and dearest to him:


 

prospectpark-1.jpgAt about 10 am on Wednesday morning, I was running in Prospect Park, in Brooklyn, when I saw a lot of commotion a few hundred meters up the road. As I got closer, I saw several police cars, an ambulance, and suited authorities inspecting the scene. A man lay motionless on a stretcher, one arm hanging lifelessly off the edge, as medical personnel lifted him into the ambulance, their efforts to resuscitate him a mere formality.


The middle-aged black man was dressed in dirty clothes and old work boots, his shirt open, revealing a barrel-shaped chest. About 20 minutes later, as I passed the scene on my second loop, the cars had cleared out, but the investigation carried on. The police had cordoned off the entire area -- a sheltered plot with several picnic tables underneath -- with tape. It may have been a murder, an overdose, a suicide or death by natural causes.


But I was not there to report on the death; I was just a passerby like the many other people in the park that morning, all of whom passed much as I did: without stopping or even looking beyond a quick glance. Perhaps, being city-dwellers, we're just accustomed to minding our own business. Or maybe we don't care.


And this is what I spent the rest of my run thinking about: When we see a dead man in a public place, shouldn't we stop and think of all the injustices that may have led to that death? I thought of poverty, addiction and violence, as well as the lack of sufficient social services to help those who suffer from all of the above. I thought of the man's life, which couldn't have been spent entirely on the street, because he was a reasonably healthy looking man over 40. What happened that led him to this lonesome end?


Of course, the problems are deep and systemic, too numerous to solve with a few idealistic initiatives. But I, for one, am thinking about those problems more today than I was yesterday. And it's a shame that it took seeing a dead man in the park to do it.


[Image: Prospect Park]