Scrooge Meets Ponzi

It’s only fitting here in this season of giving, the media is filled with a story of taking on a colossal scale. No, I’m not talking about the $1.6 billion doled out to bank executives who earned a federal bailout for their bad decisions — although that certainly seems to capture the spirit of taking. I’m talking about Bernard Madoff, the New York investment guru who turned out to be running a huge Ponzi scheme — as in $50 billion (or more) huge. In fact, it’s so big, they might want to consider renaming the Ponzi scheme after Madoff — after all, Charles Ponzi’s take back in 1920 was less than $80 million in current dollars.

It’s hard to know what motivated Madoff, but money is an obvious culprit. He enjoys his huge fishing boat, Bull (you know, it was always a bull market for Madoff), and his four homes. But his kind of scam can only last so long, and earlier this month the music stopped and he had no chair to sit in. Like Ponzi, he had to know his moment of judgment would come, so why keep the fraud snowballing bigger and bigger, year after year?

Greed makes people do crazy things, always has and probably always will. And right from the start back in that manger, Christmas has served as a potent reminder of the evils of greed. After all, it’s the birthday of the man who said, “Truly, I say to you, it will be hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

And if it didn’t sink in on first read, Jesus thought the message so important he went ahead and repeated it in the Gospel of Matthew, adding, “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

Despite the underlining of the message, we continue to forget his words. And as a result, greed has continued to plague us, including our current economic debacle, created by an entire industry that, like Ponzi and Madoff, didn’t think gravity applied — an industry that came to believe high investment returns could be manufactured, almost magically.

At least we have continued to try to remember that message each Christmas, as most of us give to family, friends and even complete strangers. Usually it’s up to our artists to remind us of our better selves. Of course legendary director Frank Capra understood the predicament of greed very well, and he articulated it perfectly in the character of Mr. Potter, the greedy, soulless banker in It’s a Wonderful Life.

But most eternally, it was Charles Dickens who made a statement for the ages when he wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843. The name of Scrooge has come to stand for a peculiar form of greed, and Dickens put a razor’s edge to his already sharp pen for the poor old man’s introduction: “Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire…”

Today we know the tale by rote, but in the endless reproductions, from musicals to film versions starring Muppets, the edge has come off what was really a powerful piece of social crusading. Dickens lived in a time of greed gone wild, and he made poverty his cause. His writing made a difference, opening people’s eyes enough to raise an outcry and, ultimately, correcting bad behavior.

And that’s where we are today — in need of some serious correcting of greed-fueled behavior, aka lying, cheating and stealing as personified by Madoff. It’s nothing new, really — such correctives have been a part of human life since well before Dante took aim at sinners in his Divine Comedy. Riffing on Pope Gregory the Great’s Seven Deadly Sins from the 6th century, he skewered the greedy by giving them their own circle of hell. Those not yet too far gone found themselves in the Fifth Terrace of Purgatory, where their corrective was to lie flat on the ground, face in the dirt to get the not-so-subtle message: Too much devotion to earthly goods is a sin.

Still, despite all the cautionary tales, words of warning and even open threats of eternal damnation, we continue to have the likes of Bernard Madoff to deal with. What can we do?

Well, we can continue to do what everyone from Capra to Dickens and from Dante to Jesus has done — we can rail against it. Then we can teach our kids to be honest (along with students in America’s business schools). Finally, and perhaps most important, we can punish it.

Why is Bernard Madoff at home under house arrest? Here is a man who defrauded so many good people and charitable institutions — a man who mocked our system of honest financial dealings — and he sits in his $7 million New York condo? Most Americans would sit in jail awaiting justice if they stole a few hundred dollars; Madoff was in for $50 billion.

Perhaps if Dickens wrote Madoff’s story there would be redemption at the end. Maybe he could have escaped Dante’s Inferno and made it to Paradise after all. But for now, he’s the symbol of all that’s been wrong with America as we’ve endured yet another era of greed. And now, especially in this season of giving, he needs to pay his penance.