I was of the many victims of the gang at Enron, and I am very sympathetic to Jon Corzine's victims at MF Global. Since he's not denying that his company broke the law by mixing customer funds with its own and investing them in risky schemes, the former Governor/Senator is either a crook or negligent to a remarkable degree. He told Congress that he has no intention of using his own fortune to make good the losses of those he has impoverished, so his claim that he's sorry about what he's done to his victims is obviously a lie.
At the same time, you sorta gotta sympathize with Corzine. As a Governor and U.S. Senator, in cahoots with New Jersey legislators and members of Congress, this guy has been robbing Americans for years on a mammoth scale. So now he could be asking himself why theft was okay when he was a public official. . . and even got him endorsements from the likes of the N.Y. Times. . . but allowing money to disappearon a much smaller scale (only $1.2 billion) gets him into trouble now that he's not on the public payroll.
Perhaps he's recalling some of the economic crimes committed by Congress and other "public servants" for which no one was ever punished:
· Years ago President Johnson and a Democratically controlled Congress drained the Social Security trust fund, and used up the money for operating expenses. In private life the trustee who loots the assets of a fund for which he is a fiduciary is subject to criminal and civil penalties. But neither Johnson nor any of those Congressional crooks was ever punished or even denied his pension. Visit Congressional office buildings and hearing rooms and you can see the portraits in oil of many of these guys on the walls; none of them are in prison stripes.
· Recently we've been treated to disclosures of insider trading by members of Congress. We always knew there was something fishy about the way people like Harry Reid or John McCain could arrive in Congress poor or with modest means and get so rich, we just weren't sure how they did it. Now we know. Being an elected official with access to all sorts of inside info and being legally free to exploit that for personal gain is a nifty perk. But if you're a cab driver who happens to overhear a conversation in the back seat about a big deal in the works and you act on that information, you could wind up in prison.
· The Fannie Mae disaster. In 2005 the director of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight said that during Franklin Raines's tenure as CEO, Fannie's books had been cooked and employee signatures forged in order to increase reported earnings. This allowed Raines and his fellow executives to collect $27.1 million in bonuses in 1998 alone, of which Raines got $1.1 million. Also as head of Fannie, Raines helped bring about the current economic collapse through his role in sub-prime mortgages, and he got sweetheart loan rates from fellow crook Angelo Mozillo of Countrywide Financial. His punishment? Well the NY Times noted that he did have to pay back, $24.7 million dollars from the "hundreds of millions" in bonuses that he'd paid himself.
Read the rest here.
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