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.
Many thanks for EyeoftheStorm’s long post about sociopaths on Wall Street, and especially this quote:
“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.”
Listen to any right-wing radio talkshow, and you will hear this scheme defended as an ideology. For the past 25 years we have seen “supply-side economics” become a religion. It posits that, as the little guys, we have to get screwed to get more. A kind of economic sado-masochism. Heaven forbid “those people” (code for African-American widows, by the way) should get something for nothing — as if doing the shit jobs in society is living on the dole.
We have come to believe that capitalism runs on extreme inequality, and that people such as this grifter are “capitalists.”
Capitalists are supposed to be people who invest in the means of production. Not gamblers, grifters, or ponzi scheme operators. But these are exactly the people glorified as heroes of our economy since the early ’80s. As if driving a fast car makes a person a mogul.
And if one objects, he is said to be a proponent of “class warfare.” Marxist. Anti-capitalist.
I would like to say I’m optimistic about this changing while the world is falling down around us. But I’m not. I think falling for the sociopath is ingrained. Believing in Big Daddies who will take care of us will be part of who we are until we attack that problem itself.
As long as people need sociopaths, sociopaths will rule. It isn’t they who need to change; it’s us.
I hope everyone is paying attention to the Bernard Madoff scam. For he did what our EXs did … on a grand scale.
I for one, hope this slime ball gets life behind bars … forced to work on a rock pile slamming boulders with a pick ax … then we can all watch to see how the scum finally does manual labor for the rest of his life.
Send the man to life in prison and lets call it a day with the likes of ALL of them … our EXs included!
Peace. It’s not us, it’s THEM!
i too escaped a sociopath/conartist relationship, but i will pay forever for the 5 years it took to escape– that exposed my children to his poison…my daughter now has fibromyalgia & latest research for that is indicative of such relationships in the past..part of the path away from him involved digging grandma’s rifle out of dad’s closet…alerting the local sheriff’s dept to my intent and ability to protect my own –
at any rate, that was 14 years in the past.
but as i walked past the telly & paused to watch our fearless financial leader make his televised play for this baillout, something caught my attention…i stood there, letting it soak in, trying to identify what exactly caught my attention…
something about his body language, about the phrasing, all of the picture was just nagging the back of my mind..
two hours later it came with a snap..
the body language, the language he had used, the phrasing…all of the above…were so similar to the same things in my ex…
i had to sit down to examine this possiblity…but the more i did, the more certain i was of the same dynamic at work..
so i don’t know about y’all, but i am definitely stashing back food, tp, and fuel…& trying to figure out how the hell to survive if the whole system is filled with sociopaths & con artists at the top, and wannabes moving into place under them…
shall we PRAY…
LOL
carriesguns
CarriesGuns: Yes, we know all too well who took over our country. Good news. Those that are decent that are in power are aware of this too. Rest assure, we will see big changes come down in this country. Sit back and watch. We will overcome these selfish, unscrupulous sorts. Their time has come … and I for one, am glad to see they finally get what’s coming to them … big, long jail sentences.
Peace. Have you blogged with Oxy yet? You two have something in common.
Indi: You need to find the smaller number of blogs. Those big numbered 400 and something slow my puter up.
P.S. I don’t drink beer … only once in a blue moon when someone tells me this beer taste great, you have to try it … so I will.
Did you get a puppy yet?
Dear Carries,
I also “carry” and so do my sons, we have concealed carry permits and are proficient in their use.
I too worry about the nation and the psychopaths at the top, like this Madloff guy, and the hundreds (thousands?) of others in political office, like the gov of Illinois and his cronies, trying to sell a senate seat. The gov of NY on his “anti prostitution” campaign and while he was doign that he was paying prostitutes hundreds, thousands of dollars an hour for his pervesions.
I don’t really think our politicians are any more corrupt than they have ALWAYS been, I think we are just more aware of it. There have always been more psychopaths in “power” no matter whether it was a country, or a tribe, or a family, because they are dominance directed and control directed.
Look at that African “leader” who denies that his country is in a crisis with cholera! He is so “powerful” he thinks he can lie in the face of evidence and have people belivee it. Look at Hitler, Saadam, and all the other Ps we can name (long list) what makes us think that our “civilized” “leaders” are any better?
Wini seems to think that things will be different now that the dems are back in office, but look at Ted Kennedy,, look at Bill Clinton. Come on, who would believe that anything is going to be different? It is just a matter of which group gets to cut up the spoils between them. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Power brings out the worst in most normal people, and we can only imagine what it does for the Ps who are “power mad” anyway.
I too have “prepared for hard times” the way my grandparents did during the depression. First by staying out of debt for anything ever except necessities. “Make it last, make it do, do without” has always been my motto, inherited from the tales of want during the depression.
“Stay out of debt” and I have managed to do so through hard work and thrift, living BELOW my means, not above them. Fortunately though I am not rich, everything I own is paid for so if push came to shove, I could live pretty cheaply and only need cash for a few things, taxes on land etc being the only thing I would have to come up with. During the depression many people couldn’t even come up with that and lost their homes.
I don’t think we are in a RE-session, but a DE-pression and have been because of the greed of the “players on Wall street” and the corporate price gouging, and people living well ABOVE their means to keep this snow ball rolling uphill.
Poor people in our country live way above what many middle class people in other countries do. OUr buy, use, throw away and buy more mentality has become a national way of life. The entitlement mentality to be “best of everything” including large homes that are impossible to heat or cool, or pay for, large vehicles running up and down the road for every trivial errand etc. is using resources faster than they can be replaced.
The ‘loan industry” making loans to people who have no possibility to repay them for this “high end lifestyle”—it all goes together with corrupt gov’t and people who want more than they can reasonably afford. I think the house of cards is coming tumbling down. I feel intensely sorry for those people who have no savings, who have lived beyond their means to have a “better” life style and now are losing it, but it was a “no brainer” to me as I had the luxuary of my grandparents’ wisdom on how to survive. Not everyone does.
It will be some tough times, I think there were 500,000+ jobs lost last month, the most in decades. States are running out of money to pay unemployment and the federal government is printing more valueless money to loan or give them.
This is to me like cutting off the tail of a starving dog to feed it to him. It isn’t going to “help” for long. In the meantime, I think it behooves all of us to look at our life styles and make adjustments where we can in energy and financial conservation.
In other words, use good sense. As times get harder I think the psychopaths will “play harder ball” than they have in the past. They sure are not going to “down size” their life styles, but make even greater efforts to con others out of their assets.
Corporations are “psychopathic” in their very nature and I think in many ways governments are as well.
I am very good at barely gettin by – I have my chicken’s, my garden’s and $18.27 cent’s in the bank~~~!!! And my .22 and 4.10, lot’s of deere, squirril’s and turkeys!!! Guess I better learn to grow tobacco..!!
Hahahahahha
Henry I love Chickens! I had Chickens at the trailer and the neighbors complained. No one gave a shit about the lose dogs or the drug dealers just the chickens! I am so happy to be outa da hood! LOVE JJ
Indi: You always make me laugh. Beam me outta here Scotty!
Henry, remember that old Charlie Daniels song “Country boys can survive?”
“I can skin a buck, I can run a trot-line”?
It’s a lot of work, but whatever needs to be done I know how, and have my sons for the muscle, so we will survive whatever happens.