Madoff says he’s very very sorry

The New Neo Posted on by

In breaking news, Bernard Madoff admits his crimes, and apologizes.

No, not this apology (starting at 00:40):

This one.

I’m watching on cable news, and the description of Madoff in court is that his affect was flat and bland as he read his words of contrition and frequently sipped water. This lack of emotion (except for the dry mouth, which could be a reflection of fear for himself rather than any real sense of shame) is entirely consistent with the sort of sociopathy I (and others) have speculated is part of Madoff’s character—although, paradoxically, sociopaths can appear remorseful in order to placate victims and the law, even when they are not.

Madoff doesn’t seem to be doing even that. What’s more, if he is so very contrite, and knew this day would come, and began the scheme in the 90s thinking it would be temporary (all of this was part of his confession), then why didn’t he stop and confess earlier, before more and more people and charities were drawn in?

Victims and others are quoted as saying they are certain Madoff had confederates in crime. And, although that is highly probable, I continue to maintain that to automatically assume it is impossible that Madoff acted alone is to underestimate the ability of a really smart con artist to pull off a con, especially when people trust him. If Madoff was able to con the SEC, I think it remains at least within the realm of possibility that he covered his tracks enough with the family members who worked in his office to fool even them. His blemish-free past certainly gave them reason to trust and respect not only his character but his business acumen (I have written elsewhere on how he might have accomplished cooking the books without their help—see the “Note” at the end of this post).

Whatever the Madoff family involvement, prosecutors and investigators will be on their own; Madoff’s plea was no bargain. There was no quid pro quo in exchange for lenience. Madoff appears to be remaining mum on what others may have done to help him.

What do we know about how the Madoff operation worked? There’s this:

…The money manager [of Madoff’s operation] told his employees to create false account documents and trade confirmations reflecting phony returns so as to transfer funds while giving the appearance of legitimate trades, and to generate false financial statements for regulators, prosecutors said. Those actions gave the appearance of a “legitimate investment advisory business,”…

The issue will be whether the government can establish that they knew what in the paper was in fact phony,” Christopher Steskal, a former federal prosecutor, said in a telephone interview. “If the facts show it, they will likely pursue those people. It seems improbable that he would do it alone.” …

His back-office staff had little or no experience and at Madoff’s direction misled clients about investments, prosecutors alleged in court papers.

“Certainly lower level employees are unlikely to be involved, but people with auditing function or authority to access accounts or make trades are more likely to have knowledge of the alleged fraud,” Steskal said.

Here’s more:

[Prosecuters] said [Madoff] hired people with little or no relevant experience in the investment business, directing them to create bogus documents such as client account statements and fake trade slips. No one else has been charged in the case.

Prosecutors said that to further the fraud, Madoff concocted phony balance sheets, income statements, cash flow documents and internal control reports. They said he then sent those documents to would-be clients and regulators at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

One person I would wager is innocent is a former Madoff auditor with this sad story:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation recently interviewed a longtime auditor of the Madoff firm…Jerome Horowitz, [who] said that he saw no indication of fraud at the Madoff firm during his time as the auditor, from the early 1960s until his retirement in 1995, said a person familiar with the matter…

Mr. Horowitz, who is 80 years old and has terminal cancer, lost his life savings in the fraud, according to his lawyer. “Mr. Horowitz thinks this is a tragedy and feels horrible not only for his own family members, which are victims, but for all victims,” said his lawyer, Latour Lafferty. “He has cooperated fully with the FBI and wanted to explain his role in working for Mr. Madoff before he dies.”

As for the all-important “where is the money?” question, I was thinking about that (I doubt I’m not the only one). Although Madoff had probably stashed a lot of it somewhere, a great deal of it is probably gone, given to clients over the years.

No, this was not done through the goodness of Madoff’s heart. But since he was regularly paying clients earnings of about 10%, and this practice went on for many years, and there were no actual investments to grow the money much (Madoff alleged today that he put it in a back account at Chase), you figure it out.

For example, a person investing a million dollars with Madoff would get back $100,000 earnings a year on the investment. At least, he/she would think it was earnings; in actuality it wasn’t. In ten years at that sort of payment level, the principal would be gone. I’m not suggesting Madoff paid clients back from their own money, of course; it was from the pool of monies, but the point is still the same.

Unless there were a lot of people who got into the game recently and hadn’t had much time yet to receive their supposed earnings from Madoff, or unless there were a lot of people who rolled their earnings back into their principal invested with Madoff investments, the hefty payments to clients had to continue to keep the charade going. This would have substantially depleted the Madoff monies over the years.

To what extent? We haven’t a clue. But Madoff does.

And now for a change of pace: Giselle through the ages

The New Neo Posted on by

I find I need a bit of refreshment and rest from the nonstop gloom of the news. My idea of relaxation is to look at a few old ballet clips.

“Giselle” is one of those old-fashioned warhorses that people like to mock, the conventions of the ballet being both ancient (choreographed in 1841, it’s one of the oldest in existence) and sentimental. But to ballet lovers “Giselle” is the “Hamlet” of traditional ballet, rich with psychological depth, sorrow, betrayal, and redemption.

My first viewing of “Giselle” was as a tiny child, and I was bored nearly to tears. It was memorable, though, because it was one of the final performances of the British ballerina Alicia Markova, who had been a student of my British dance teacher in New York. And thus it was that my mother and I were allowed to go backstage to meet her and get an autograph. Markova, who was probably in her mid-40s at the time, looked tired and old and rather scary to me, since she was painfully thin and still in her garish stage makeup.

I’ve searched for a video of Markova dancing the role of Giselle in her prime. But alas, all I could find was the following, which shows her about as I saw her. She is performing Giselle’s famous variation from Act I, in which she happily dances for her new love, blissfully unaware of the tragedy that lies ahead. Note the very British restraint in Markova’s dancing; it is most definitely not my cup of tea:

Next is a rare clip of a fragment of the same variation danced by an even earlier ballerina, the Russian Olga Spessivtzeva, who performed from 1913 to 1939. She was one of the earliest exemplars of the modern type of line—long, lean, and elegant (the dancing doesn’t start till 00:27):

And here is my very favorite, Carla Fracci. I saw her dance this ballet in person many times during the 1960s and 1970s, as well as in the movie from which this clip comes. She never had the strongest technique. But it was fully adequate to her needs, which were to express all the charm and radiance of which a human being is capable:

Camille Paglia learns…

The New Neo Posted on by

…the price of criticizing Obama even a little bit (see the comments section at the link for a sample of what I’m talking about).

The venom she’s receiving from the Left for having the audacity to mention that things have not gone all that swimmingly in the Obama administration so far—plus her jaw-dropping defense of Rush Limbaugh—is nothing new. You’re either with them or against them—and, as a commenter writes, it’s another example of the Left eating their own.

Renegade Paglia has become quite a tasty morsel, it seems, especially since she mounted a defense of (gasp!) Sarah Palin way back when. The attacks on Paglia are especially ironic, since she still labors under the illusion (delusion?) that none of the errors, missteps, and awkwardness of the new administration are actually Obama’s fault. Defending him, Paglia writes:

…free the president from his flacks, fixers and goons—his posse of smirky smart alecks and provincial rubes…

President Obama—in whom I still have great hope and confidence—has been ill-served by his advisors and staff.

But did that staff spring into life, full-grown, from Zeus’ head? Hardly. In case Paglia hasn’t noticed, Obama is not only the person who chose the staff, but its key players are old and trusted advisers from his days in Chicago politics.

Camille, girlfriend, please take a look and remember what the Presidency is all about:

buckstops.jpg

[ADDENDUM: More Obama buck-passing.]

Gee, I can’t imagine why any sane person would object to Charles Freeman’s appointment

The New Neo Posted on by

I also can’t imagine why he would be accused of being anti-Jewish or anti-Israel. His parting words on withdrawing his name from consideration to chair the National Intelligence Council certainly give no indication of any bias on his part [emphasis mine]:

I do not believe the National Intelligence Council could function effectively while its chair was under constant attack by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country….

The libels on me and their easily traceable email trails show conclusively that there is a powerful lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired, still less to factor in American understanding of trends and events in the Middle East. The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth. The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution of political correctness for analysis, and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors.

There is a special irony in having been accused of improper regard for the opinions of foreign governments and societies by a group so clearly intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government ”“ in this case, the government of Israel. I believe that the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics has allowed that faction to adopt and sustain policies that ultimately threaten the existence of the state of Israel. It is not permitted for anyone in the United States to say so. This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East; it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United States.

In other words, as Slublog (at Ace’s) says: “Shorter Chas: ‘It was the Joooooooos!'”

So, as Bret Stephens points out, what of those Chinese dissidents who objected so strenuously to Freeman’s appointment? Are they members of the far-reaching Israel lobby as well (“funny, you don’t look Jewish…)? And what about Freeman’s history of being a paid representative for the Saudis?

Not to mention 9/11—which is also the fault of the Jewish lobby, according to Freeman:

“We have paid heavily and often in treasure in the past for our unflinching support and unstinting subsidies of Israel’s approach to managing its relations with the Arabs,” [Freeman] said in 2006. “Five years ago we began to pay with the blood of our citizens here at home.”

I can’t say I see that Freeman is currently being silenced much by those nefarious Jews—he seems rather talkative to me. But I suppose that Jews—unlike every other group in America—have no right to voice an opinion about the appointment to a position of power in this administration of a person they see as biased against them.

Note, also, Mark Steyn’s piece on how the entire Freeman controversy has fallen under the radar screen of the MSM until now. Could it possibly be because it reflects badly on this current administration?

No, of course not. Even if it turns out that Freeman was never even vetted (or maybe especially if it turns out that Freeman was never even vetted).

Lifting the stem-cell research “ban”

The New Neo Posted on by

Google “did bush ban stem cell research?” and you get this gaggle of articles. Some of the titles announce that Obama has ended Bush’s stem cell research ban, while others refer to Bush’s policy as a funding ban.

What a difference a word makes! The second set of articles more closely approximates the truth. But to be even more correct you would have to add “federal government” to “funding ban,” and change the word “ban” to “restriction,” as well as adding “embryonic” to modify “stem cell.” Bush never banned stem cell research nor even government funding for all of it; he did limit government funding to lines that had been developed prior to August 9, 2001, and he never had any problem funding adult stem cell research.

Many people have applauded Obama’s actions. But to agree with Obama’s new policy is it really necessary to distort history? Although it is indeed likely that the Obama directive reversing the Bush position will open up more opportunities for research with stem cells, it’s not as though under Bush things were not progressing, through the use of adult stem cells and other creative solutions (see this and this for two examples). But to acknowledge that would be to acknowledge that Bush wasn’t really against science, just a particular form of science that he considered unethical.

Obama has released a so-called “fact sheet” in tandem with his new executive order on stem cell research funding. In it he writes:

The previous Administration allowed the National Institutes of Health to fund human embryonic stem cell research on cell lines created before an arbitrary date, August 9, 2001, but prohibited research on cell lines created after that date. The Executive Order signed by President Obama today lifts this restriction, which has no basis in science and was not required by any law.

There it is again [emphasis mine]: “prohibited research on cell lines created after that date.” No, it did not; it just withdrew federal funding. And of course the Bush restriction had “no basis in science;” that’s a straw man argument. Bush never alleged it to have such a basis.

It was a decision about the ethics of science, and the way in which ethics and science interface. You may or may not agree with Bush’s decision; Obama clearly does not. But to pretend otherwise is to be disingenuous.

The uncharismatic Bayh isn’t buying

The New Neo Posted on by

I was watching Fox News last night and saw Greta Van Susteren interview Evan Bayh.

Long considered one of the Senate’s more moderate Democrats, Bayh announced back in December of 2008, shortly after Obama’s election, that he planned to form a coalition of other Democrat moderates in the Senate that would somewhat resemble the House’s Blue Dog coalition. In the Susteren interview last night, Bayh said he will vote against the current budget bill because this is neither the time nor the place to pass it with so many earmarks (bipartisan ones, by the way; some of them are pet Republican projects).

No one is quite clear on whether any of this will matter, because the bill may have plenty of votes without Bayh and his group. But he and Senator Feingold have urged Obama to veto the bill it if it passes.

This will not happen; of that much I’m certain. Obama has already said he intends to sign it, and launched his administration’s gobbledygook explanation that it all doesn’t signify much—pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, there are no broken promises about earmarks—because, after all, it’s “last year’s business.” Whaaa?

Perhaps the most interesting part of the Bayh interview was his comment that he believes one of the main reasons he has the perspective he does is that he was a governor before becoming a senator, and had to balance a budget. That’s certainly not the only explanation—I would imagine, for example, he’s hearing from his constituents that they don’t like the bill. Also he may really be enjoying the spotlight. But still, I think he’s onto something.

One of the major criticisms of Obama is that he has virtually no executive experience. Obama’s resume is especially thin in this regard. But a great many senators (John McCain was one) are lacking in that area.

I started to look up the resumes of every single Senator, but I got very weary and stopped at number twenty (alphabetical order). Among those twenty, however, there were only three who had been governors. Among the rest there was a smattering of businesspeople and a couple of Attorneys General. But the road to the Senate seems to pass overwhelmingly through the House.

Legislators tend to be career legislators, with previous political experience mostly in the legislature at a lower level (state and/or House) before they become senators. This was certainly true of Obama, who had also barely kept his Senate seat warm before he vacated it to run for President.

You think it doesn’t matter? Generally, it does. But charisma trumps experience nearly every time. Poor Evan Bayh could hardly scare up any support when he ran for president in 2008. In December of 2006 he dropped out of the race, just a little while after he entered it:

[I]t became crystal-clear to Sen. Bayh in New Hampshire last weekend that his candidacy lacks the requisite buzz. While Obama attracted thousands of purring supporters and dominated national headlines, Bayh couldn’t fill a room, and elicited little mention in the press.

A former Governor of Indiana, the soft-spoken Bayh is serving his second term in the U.S.Senate, where he’s earned a low-key profile as a fiscal conservative and a social moderate.

I suspect that Bayh would have made a better president than Obama. Heck, he even supported the Iraq War—a fact that worked against him as a candidate for the Democratic nomination, campaigning as he did at the end of 2006. But Bayh just didn’t—and doesn’t—have that certain something, that spark, that pizazz, the thing that made Chris Matthews’ leg tingle when Obama entered the room. And you know how much we all need pizazz and tingle in our leaders.

I’m being sarcastic here. But in a way I’m not. Because it’s an undeniable and bipartisan truth that that undefinable thing called charisma seems to be important for winning a presidential election.

It’s not that candidates can’t ever win without it—Richard Nixon, for example, was an anomaly since he was remarkably lacking in that quality, as well as several others (although he did have experience; if it weren’t for his paranoia and ethical flaws—big “ifs,” to be sure—he might even have made a fairly good president).

But pizazz usually counts for a great deal in the minds of the electorate. In the case of Obama, it counted for even more.

[ADDENDUM: Why, now it seems as though those moderate Democrats are giving Obama some trouble on card check, one of the worst proposals of the entire Obama administration so far.

Good.]

Deeply undemocratic

The New Neo Posted on by

Evan Bayh has another ally in opposing the budget bill: Senator Robert Menendez from New Jersey, who is protesting a little item that was slyly slipped into the bill while no one was looking. Menendez, the son of Cuban immigrants, was stunned to find a provision there that would relax rules on travel and imports to Cuba.

Senator Menendez seems to be pretty liberal, and he would have otherwise supported this bill. But he’s not just annoyed, he’s enraged—enough to offer this bit of stinging rhetoric to the supposedly “transparent” administration, as well as Congressional leaders Reid and Pelosi:

The process by which these changes have been forced upon this body is so deeply offensive to me, and so deeply undemocratic, that it puts the omnibus appropriations package in jeopardy, in spite of all the other tremendously important funding that this bill would provide.

“Deeply undemocratic”—I’m sure Menendez meant “undemocratic” with a small “d.”

I find it pretty offensive as well, but not because it’s undemocratic (small or large “d”). Slipping in provisions without debate on them is certainly not unheard of in Washington. But the especially offensive (“deeply offensive”) part is the hypocrisy of the promises on which Obama ran versus the reality of his actual presidency.

Transparent? Yes. But not in the way Obama meant.

Notes from Chairman Lenin—and Dostoevsky

The New Neo Posted on by

A few days ago a commenter here offered a link to this page of Lenin quotes. Some of them seem pretty apropos in light of recent developments, and so I offer them to you for your contemplation [I’ve emphasized some of the most “interesting” by highlighting them in bold]:

A lie told often enough becomes the truth.

Democracy is indispensable to socialism.

Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.

It is true that liberty is precious; so precious that it must be carefully rationed.

One man with a gun can control 100 without one.

The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.

The goal of socialism is communism.

The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.

There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience.

No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses.

The final quote is of special interest because of the way it dovetails with the insights of the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky. Although Lenin was a mere nipper of ten when Dostoevsky wrote “The Grand Inquisitor,” (a chapter from Dostoevsky’s masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov, written in 1880), Lenin seemed to steal a page (or several) out of his book.

Dostoevsky was no stranger to the revolutionary socialist zeal and terrorist nihilism that was already beginning to shake Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century, which terminated in the Russian Revolution and the ascent of Communism there. Although he died in 1881 and did not live to see the final flowering of the movement that had taken root decades earlier, he had been a revolutionary himself in his youth, and had actually faced a firing squad after being arrested for subversive activities.

It was a traumatic experience for Dostoevsky, already a highly emotional and even unstable youth. He and his companions were subject to a mock execution, their sentences commuted at the last moment to years of harsh labor in prison camp. That experience and others made Dostoevsky a “changer;” he later renounced both socialism and a host of other Western ideas, embraced Russian Orthodoxy and a mystical spirituality, and became one of the world’s greatest writers.

I came across Dostoevsky’s works in high school and then again in college, during the period of upheaval and unrest that started in the late 1960s. In high school we were assigned to read Crime and Punishment, as well as the “Grand Inquisitor” excerpt from Karamazov, and in college I read his chilling work The Demons (then titled The Possessed), about the spiritual and moral bankruptcy of the revolutionaries.

Did I understand these works then? Not as well as I think I understand them now. But of all the lessons I learned during my school days, and of all the books I was assigned to read, these made perhaps the deepest and most powerful impression on me.

Much of school felt like the memorization of dry and irrelevant facts. Many novels seemed obscure and and hardly applicable to my life, and one would have thought that would have been even more true of these startling and intense Russian works from a time that seemed so distant then (although it seems much closer now; odd how that happens).

But something in them rang a bell, especially as the political upheaval of the 60s progressed. That bell had a sound not only of strange and inexplicable familiarity, it was also an ominous toll of warning. The books seemed to speak to the troubled times in which I was living, and made me realize that there is hardly any new thought under the sun. Those headstrong revolutionaries of the far-off Russian past were not stilted figures in an old and faded photo; they too closely and uncomfortably resembled the rebels of my own generation, who thought they had invented protest and cast off the shackles of the past.

I’ve quoted the following excerpt before on this blog. I’m quoting it again now. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I have reason to quote it in the future.

In this excerpt Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor is addressing Christ, who has returned to earth but is arrested and imprisoned again:

Oh, never, never can [people] feed themselves without us [the Inquisitors and controllers]! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man?

[ADDENDUM: And then there’s Machiavelli.]

[ADDENDUM II: For an interesting discussion as to whether the Lenin quotes are authenticated or not, please see the comments section.]

Jim Cramer gets it—and then he doesn’t

The New Neo Posted on by

Jim Cramer is puzzled, and just a little bit angry.

When Cramer said that the Obama administration is destroying wealth in this country, he thought his liberal bona fides would protect him. He also thought that the fact that he was, you know, speaking the truth might have some effect as well.

Cramer may have thought that liberals would defend speaking truth to power; after all, it’s one of their favorite phrases. But it depends what “truth” and it depends what “power.” If the powerful people being criticized just happen to be liberals or the Left, then it can’t really be “truth,” you see, whatever its obvious merits might be. And the person so bold as to utter that truth not only had better shut up, but he/she immediately becomes fair game for attack, ridicule, and/or distortions of what was said.

Now, as Cramer looks around from his perch under that crowded bus, he is surprised. He shouldn’t be. Welcome, Cramer, to the first step on the long road to change.

Not that Cramer will necessarily take any of the next steps. But it can be profoundly disturbing to discover (as Cramer now has) that those whom you thought were interested in actually solving a problem and listening to honest criticism are far more interested in silencing and marginalizing the opposition.