Last night was the final night of a course in social gerontology I taught at the University of Bridgeport. I left the class feeling optimistic about humans. While walking to my car I reflected on an interview of Dr. Charlotte Perry, Medical Anthropologist at UCSF. When asked about the needs of aging African Americans she said,
“I did a study in the Southeastern part of the United States of a large group of widows living in subsidized housing. The widows who were “weller” (for lack of a better term) were in fact taking care of those in the housing complex that weren’t as well. The housing complex management took no responsibility for making assessments on health status beyond the initial application that showed that applicants were able to manage their daily lives. People didn’t come forth and say, “Well, now I’m unable to do this,” because if they did, they would no longer be able to live there. What we found was that younger widows were taking care of those who were frail.”
The “weller widows” don’t get much press but I believe they actually reflect the values and beliefs of most humans.
On the ride home, I was jolted out of my euphoria by News Radio 88 which had quite a different story to tell. It is alleged that one of Wall Street’s most trusted investment advisors, Bernie Madoff has actually been a fraud. He stands accused of the largest Ponzi scheme in history. The losses may approach 50 billion dollars.
When I got home, I emailed my cyber-friend who is securities fraud investigator, asking, “Is Bernie Madoff a con artist?” This morning on awakening I eagerly opened her reply hoping to read a long story of some terrible mistake. The email said only, “Of course.”
The Wall Street Journal has the most detailed account I could find of the unraveling of Madoff’s life. FBI agent Theodore Cacioppi said Madoff’s investment advisory business had “deceived investors by operating a securities business in which he traded and lost investor money, and then paid certain investors purported returns on investment with the principal received from other, different investors, which resulted in losses of approximately billions of dollars.”
The WSJ also tells the story of Madoff the entrepreneur who started his company with “$5,000 he saved from a lifeguarding at Rockaway Beach in Queens and a job installing underground sprinkler systems, according to a 2000 report in a trade magazine, Wall Street + Technology.” Lifeguard to Wall Street vanguard? does sound a little far-fetched for anyone but a sociopath/psychopath.
Is it possible Madoff is a sociopath? or maybe one of Paul Babiak’s psychopathic Snakes in Suits?
In Chapter 12, of Unmasking the Psychopath, Dr. Ethyl Spector Person compares entrepreneurs to psychopaths. She states, “In their personality styles, both psychopaths and entrepreneurs are action oriented and innovative rather than reactive and inhibited. In particular, they utilize manipulation of the interpersonal field”¦In the entrepreneur, domination and the will to power are incorporated into the ego ideal and therefore stand at considerable psychic distance from primitive sadistic wishes”¦Sadism must be vented (in the psychopath), in order to preserve the sense of self; sadism saturates the interpersonal enactment of intra-psychic dramas and ultimately leads to downward drift in the lives of psychopaths.”
Can we infer from the above quote that sadism and downward drift differentiate the psychopath from the entrepreneur?
I’ll leave you with the story of one of Madoff’s alleged victims. “Susan Leavitt of Tampa Bay, Fla., said she had several million dollars of inherited money invested in the firm and added $500,000 earlier this year. A stay-at-home mother with two children, the 46-year-old Ms. Leavitt says she is considering going back to work. “That was my nest egg for the children, and my future. I’ll never see much back, I’m sure,” she said.”
I move we put disadvantaged African American widows in charge of Wall Street, the Banks, the Auto Industry and the country. Anyone else for that?
For more information on the scam, read this report on Bernard Madoff arrested over alleged $50 billion fraud on Yahoo News.
To read an interview of Madoff from 2000, visit CNN.
GREENWISE
SolentGreen ( sp ) Remember this Grindthemup and feed them to the poor ! :)~ bonapiete where’s my Beer!
Indi: You saw Solent Green? Hey, did you happen to catch King of Hearts?
Dr. Leedom:
Thank you for posting the link to the Fortune article. I am looking forward to your upcoming posts about psychopathy in the financial sector! It’s time for professionals to call national attention to this aspect of our economic meltdown and to the unrestrained psychopathy of capitalism which can result when certain personality types are able to seize control!
These individuals feed and support one another other, insuring domination and a tight web of control until the fundamentals can no longer support the scam. A weak link inevitably brings down everything and everybody. To be clear, I think capitalism is the best system around. The good things we have in this country are the result. However, sociopaths will find their way to the top, and while getting there they chew away and destroy the fundamental structure just like termites .
I watched C-Span today as three Governor’s appeared before a House committee and told the members why they needed hundreds of billions in appropriations and grants to prop up their state’s failures. Finally, one of the Representatives reminded the Governors that these fiscal problems were largely self-inflicted…..excessive spending, boondoggle programs, catering to special interests, assuming too much debt, and approving too many ENTITLEMENTS, to name a few fundamental flaws.
According to the Governors, litter will pile up, crime will escalate, problems in the schools will grow……..not because people won’t behave, but because government spending will have to be curtailed! After all, everyone knows we need generously funded government programs to keep people from throwing their fast food trash out the window on local scenic drives!
I have been watching some of the hearings from the first days of the financial crisis. Paulson, Bernacke, Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan, and Wall St.’s investment bankers all sat before members of Congress looking rather grim and pale as they explained the financial dark night they have brought upon the country. Executives from the parent company of AIG, the banking industry (commercial and investment), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and now the auto industry…….all paraded before our legislators, explaining why they are deserving of billions of dollars in bailouts and artificial lifelines to keep themselves afloat. Where will the money come from? The Federal Reserve, a private bank, will print it out of thin air of course, give it away, and taxpayers will repay it with interest to the U.S. Treasury which then endorses the checks over to the Fed! Nice scheme!
History will tell us Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law. Look a little deeper and you will see who hatched the idea…….prominent wealthy businessmen and bankers! Sociopaths intent on screwing society to maintain personal wealth? I don’t know. It’s an interesting question to consider. Google, John D. Rockefeller sociopath.
{“A group of wealthy businessmen ”“ led by J P Morgan, Paul Warburg and John D Rockefeller ”“ intervened to pave the way for the establishment of a private central bank. With their connections, they soon put a banker-controlled plan to President Woodrow Wilson.
In a decision that would later come to haunt him, President Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law. In doing so, he effectively placed control of the US economy squarely in the hands of the private bankers, who would go on to create massive amounts of credit ”“ backed by absolutely nothing.”}
After reading the Fortune article and thinking back on Enron, and the very clear predictions I have been reading for many years about what the future might hold because of reckless policies pursued by the Federal Reserve, I am wondering about the relationship of psychopathy to all of this generally. This mess is the result of massive financial slight-of-hand , con artists, and sophisticated gimmickry on so many levels. Average citizens were encouraged to invest retirement accounts in Wall St.! Brokers were schooled in the art of dispensing comforting reassurance in the face of declining portfolios. The plan…..our ever increasing work force would continue making monthly contributions to the investment houses on the street of dreams because tax incentives created by politicians cinched it! Growth would be perpetual! We would all live happily ever after!
They have been doing all this right under our vulnerable and naïve noses!
I found the following on a blog entitled “The Economist’s View”. I could not find to whom I should attribute this excellent quote……….
“So what have we learned? In a capitalistic society too many of us don’t understand the question about screwing society. The social bias is there and a rewards system is there to nurture or encourage the sociopath. Sociopaths at the top seldom see themselves as sociopaths but as victims. We don’t know how many sociopath running capital markets it takes to bring the system crashing down along with society since just one sociopath running a large enough company can start a domino effect. ”
My deflating 2 cents!
Tempist
Welcome to Game ! Cash your Gold Visa/Mast/AE/Discover Whats? your PIN #?
Dr. Leedom………….
Re: Dreier………
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aOjthIymyvHo&refer=home
WOW! These guys may not wear signs, but the signs are there, aren’t they!
I saw the following in this morning’s New York Times: “Mr. Dreier was the only equity partner in the firm, and deals wee structured so that only he knew all the specifics and had access to all accounts…Mr Dreier convinced lawyers that such an arrangement was best by emphasizing that it would allow them to concentrate on their first love, the law, while he worried about running the firm. There would be no executive committee. No partners meetings. Mr Dreier would handle all adminitrative chores. For lawyers there now, the delegation of responsibility means that they are just now figuring out that Mr Dreier had let theri malpractice insurance lapse, exposing them to enormous resk if they are suced my Mr Dreier’s growing list of potential victims…”
The control, the secrecy, the reckless disregard of the consequences to the innocent lawyers and clients of the firm — sounds like a textbook sociopath to me.
My father, who was an entrepreneur and eventually made the Forbes 400 list in the late 70s, had for years conned people into “investing” in his earlier projects, but since he “kept the books” he never “made any profits” to share with them so their investments were always a loss.
Later, after he did start his rocket-like rise to riches with his product, the IRS sued him for failure to file income taxes, and believe it or not, he won in court! LOL
When I worked for hiim, he was receiving checks for some products he had sold and he had an arrangement with the bank, that the president kept the checks in a locked drawer and whem my father would present a check on his account to be cashed the bank president would put enoug of the checks out of the drawers to cover them. Primarily, my father operated with CASH. Back in the 60s and 70s it was unusual but not illegal to buy things with cash, even large items.
When we left the country for a trip over seas for work, I had a large purse, with about $70,000 in cash in it, of course this was illegal to take that much cash out of the country, but I didn’t know it, but it was in MY purse so if we had been nabbed I would have been the one in trouble not dear old dad!
On the way back from Africa, he had bought some items, gold mostly, and it too was in my purse and would have been confiscated if any of the many customs checks had looked in my bag.
He also used to smuggle pre-colombian art out of South America as well as other items.
He threatened people, he hurt people, and when he did have a significant amount of money he used it like a “club” to try to beat people into submission. Even in his will when he left me and 2 of my half sibs out, (which I expected and I am sure they did too) he did it in a way that he showed he wanted to hurt us by doing that….what he didn’t count on, is that I no longer was desirous of his money or anything he had, so it’s “loss” was NO LOSS. It was blood money, I didn’t want that kind of money, it wouldn’t have bought anything of any satisfaction for me. I can’t speak for my half sibs, but for me, I had no desire for anything of his.
Please let us not forget the Honorable Barney Frank, Chrisopher Dodd, Charlie Rangel and Nancy Pelosi. Our federal government is a safe haven for sociapaths and imagine they get paid for their service. They are in charge of our fates.
Wisernow,
Yea, isn’t that a comforting thought!
Oxy & Wisernow: Yeah Blagojevich will probably move to Sin City in the state I live … all the crook from around our country end up in Sin City, USA!
Funny, there’s a huge cross on the top of the mountain range … looking down on this city. They had to tear it down a few years ago for renovation purposes… but rest assure, they erected a new one that lights up on it’s own (LOL). I guess those in the know in our State figure that a little help from God couldn’t hurt those that reside and continue living in their big egos there (LOL).
Peace … oh, and a little prayer for me having to deal with knowing all these criminals live in my state wouldn’t hurt (LOL). Thanking you in advanced.