Blue Collar...White Collar...Green Collar

Bernard Madoff was smart and cunning. He was able to convince thousands of people to invest with him in the sum of 50 Billion dollars, but instead of investing in legitimate assets, they were involved in a Ponzi Scheme. The idea of a Ponzi scheme (which was named after its original fraud Charles Ponzi in the early 1900s) is for a confidence artist to get people to invest to high return investment and then pays their return from their own investment capital. This scheme worked with Ponzi and Madoff because most of the original investors, reinvest their return back into the scheme or investors lack of knowledge when it came to financial jargon.

Those are the facts. The issue here is that Madoff is white, upper class ( I have an apartment in the Upper East Side) kind of guy which affords him interesting advantages. The guy is not in jail pending trial, he is on house arrest. He is treated with more respect and given more rights than the average citizen. One cannot help but wonder, if Madoff was not who he is, would his treatment be the same?

I declare that Madoff would be literally hanging from a tree if he was anything but a White upper class citizen. Imagine the lynch mobs that will be calling for his head and being outraged at his "house arrest."

That is the society we live in, you steal a dollar and you are considered a thief that should go to prison, you steal $50 Billion and you get to wait out trial in an upper east side apartment that you probably paid for using the money you stole. You fail to pay your primary home mortgage, you become homeless, but if you fail to pay thousands of mortgages, then you get a $700 Billion bailout.