Unbridled greed chips away at last remnants of the American Dream
nydailynews.com
By Mike Lupica
Columnist
The New York Daily News
Monday, December 15th 2008
In a city suddenly lousy with grifters like Bernie Madoff and Marc Dreier, who think they can steal as much as they want in this economy, the old man came from Bay Ridge to the midtown streetcorner that is his office six days a week. He set up his vendor's cart to sell scarves and hats on a cold Sunday in New York.
"I'm a little different than those guys in the papers," the old man, named Don, was saying. "I only try to sell you what you can see."
He's an Army veteran from the 1950s and worked with his MBA in various businesses after the service. But when he tried to retire he couldn't. He missed people and having a job to go to, and then his wife passed away 11 years ago and now he is set up by 8:30 most mornings and stays on his corner until 5.
He was born two years before the 1929 stock market crash and has lived long enough to see the closest thing since. Sunday he stood on one of the most famous shopping avenues in the world - Fifth Ave. - and said what is happening in America has been happening for a long time.
"You can't be surprised by greed in a country of greed," he said, not far from the dazzling Christmas lights. "All people have wanted in this country, for a long time, is more. So they kept saying 'yes' to everything as long as the money kept coming in."
Now almost every day, we pay the check in the city and the country for systemic greed that flourished under the outgoing President and his men - so-called leaders who missed all the warning signs on an economy about to crash the way they missed warnings about planes about to crash into our buildings.
This is the country that George Bush hands over to Barack Obama in a few weeks, one that has lost its way. It is a country where greed has gone unregulated through one presidential administration after another, all the way back to the boom years of the sainted Ronald Reagan.
So here we are, with a fraud like Marc Dreier, a pathetic New York celebrity groupie, accused of defrauding hedge funds out of as much as $400 million. And with Bernie Madoff, once a respected Wall Street name and a founder of Nasdaq, accused of being one of the worst thieves in American history.
"There is no innocent explanation," Madoff is alleged to have said to investigators.
Of course there is! This crazy old man just wanted more, another captain of industry who ought to spend the rest of his life in an orange jumpsuit.
It is a wretched thing to read about Madoff's victims. But when the bottom fell out of the mortgage business and all these banks, we were told again and again that this was all the fault of poor people who overextended themselves to buy houses they could not afford; that somehow the poor sunk the economy and all these huge companies by themselves.
But these things never happen in a vacuum, not with bums like Madoff, allowed to run wild in a world of money without nearly enough transparency or regulation, until it is too late.
Maybe it can begin to change for the better under a new President. It was never going to change under George W. Bush, whose mission has always been to redistribute the wealth in a way that made rich Americans much, much richer.
"A country run by amateurs," the street vendor Don said Sunday.
There is an old line from Fay Vincent, the baseball commissioner who suspended George Steinbrenner for conspiring with a known gambler, Howie Spira. Steinbrenner paid Spira to get some dirt on Dave Winfield, for whom Steinbrenner had no use, and Vincent caught him doing that and kicked him out of the game.
Vincent said at the time that Steinbrenner had heard no moral alarm because "none sounded."
There was no moral alarm for Bernie Madoff as he systematically ruined fortunes and pension funds, and ultimately lives, and didn't get stopped until now. He is the biggest thief we know about, but only for now, because he is caught. You wonder how many more like him end up in orange jumpsuits before this is over.
Madoff was a huge figure on the grand, mythical place known as "The Street." But on another street yesterday, on his own corner of Fifth Ave., the old vendor from Bay Ridge shook his head.
"Fifty billion dollars," he said. "Everybody kept saying 'yes' to this guy Madoff until the law told him 'no.'" |
