Just Because It’s Legal…

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Above is this week’s cartoon from my strip in The Independent. I got an interesting letter about it from a reader. He said:

karen,
bernie didn’t lose 65 billion dollars. he stole it. the other guys may have lost more but they didn’t steal it. they may have been stupid and greedy but they are not thieves; thats why bernie’s in jail and they are not. whether we should have bailed them out is another question. i think we should have let them go bust.
ed

While I see his point, I think there’s a lot of grey area here. My response below:

Ed,
I certainly see the distinction you are making.

But I believe there’s a broader definition of the word “stole.” In a perverse way, Bernie’s the biggest mensch of all of them. He acted alone instead of being part of a looting mob. And unlike these other men, (Pandit, Lewis & Greenberg are simply a few public faces involved in this disaster) Bernie went to jail like a mensch. He’s not hiding behind the manipulation of a system so huge and Byzantine, that those who were supposed to protect us and create value, were able to rob us blind for monumental personal gain, and then head home to their mansions in a chauffeured limousine.
I think we should stop focusing on Bernie. He’s an easy decoy keeping us from focusing on who the real culprits were, the men who robbed our economy, our jobs, the value in our homes and retirement accounts.
I think these men were thieves. Just because it was legal doesn’t mean it wasn’t theft. They should be sharing a jail cell with Bernie. And I agree with you 1000%. I would have let them all go bust too.

And there it was. Just because it was legal, doesn’t mean it wasn’t theft. We wuz robbed! Not just those unlucky souls who invested with Bernie Madoff. Every last one of us who trusted our system.