“I am more concerned with the return of my money than the return on my money.”– Mark Twain

Our current brand of capitalism is kaput. I am not saying that the concept as a whole is flawed, but rather the particular flavor we are using today.

On what do I base this assertion?

Nevermind that Enron was an omen of things to come that we casually dismissed as "a few bad apples" and allowed to replicate on a massive scale in the name of free markets.

Nevermind that we're effectively giving trillions of dollars to banks who have already lost trillions, with no real oversight or accountability over how it's being spent...  did you know the application form that banks have to fill out to get access to TARP funding is only 2 pages, far shorter and less demanding then the paperwork required to fill out for student financing?

Nevermind that the feds only solution to drowning in debt is.... to create more debt! No one has seriously stopped and examined the long term rammifications of expanding the money supply so drastically, opening the door down the road for possible inflation similar to Weimar Germany.

Nevermind that while 2 million Americans have lost their jobs this year and that nearly 40% of homes with mortgages may be under water by the end of the year, the only real bailout has been a ridiculously massive sum of money paid by the public into a tiny number of private hands.

No, on top of all that recently we had the piece de resistance... and his name is Bernard Madoff.

Bernard Madoff quite possibly has struck a greater blow against modern capitalism than any armed resistance movement or radical group could ever dream of. And he did it from the inside with a smile.

In short, he created a 50 billion dollar fraud. A ponzi scheme, also known as a pyramid scheme, in which the initial investors get their returns paid by the money that comes in from subsequent investors rather than any kind of profit. The irony is that Bernard ran his fraud succesfully for years, so much so that the creme de la creme of the investor class were begging him to manage their money in his so-called hedge fund. Rather than accept all comers as is typical for these schemes he turned many people away. An investor with a mere few million dollars wasn't worth his time. He was after the multi-millionaire and billionaire class and even then he made it very clear to them that his fund was closed, but he'd make an exception because they were related to a friend or ran in the same circles.

His victims include celebrities like Steven Spielberg and the Bank of Scottland and the Dutch Bank Fortes. Several Israeli and Jewish advocacy groups lost billions that they had invested in his scheme, as he was an avid philanthropist for their cause. The financial loss incurred on these groups has prompted some wild speculation that Madoff (a Jew) was actually a sleeper agent for groups like Hamas all these years as the financial dammage he's wrought dwarfs anything a terrorist group has succeeded in pulling off in a single strike.

But that is thankfully utter hogwash. The damage he has inflicted on his own people has more to do with greed, and the lesson that in our current system capital trumps all... it knows no affiliation to any particular culture, race, nationality or cause. There are only the shysters and the suckers, the predator and the prey. Everything else has become window dressing.

So, ol' Bernie managed to cheat some very rich and powerful people out of 50 billion dollars. Big whoop. Why is this such a big deal?

1) For years Madoff's operation was touted by all of the financial experts as one of the soundest, most desirable investments a person could make. All of the major players in global finance swooned over his supposed success and genius.

2) The SEC (security and exchange commission) investigated his hedge fund twice, and both times gave it a clean bill of health.

3) In 2005, over 3 years ago an analyst blew the whistle on Madoff's operation. He very clearly and correctly stated in plain language what Madoff was doing and that he was committing one of the biggest financial frauds in recent history. What was the reaction to this stunning revelation?

"Who did you say was doing this? No, it couldn't be good ol' Bernie! He's on the level you know! Besides, who are we going to believe? Some no-name analyst who doesn't even have a million to his name or Bernie Madoff, former president of NASDAQ and reputable manager for billions of dollars of the wealthiest investors on the planet?"

See where I'm going with this?

If Madoff could get away with such a bald-faced lie and the system failed to catch him until now, what other tom foolery could be hapenning that hasn't been detected?

Remember the SEC are the cops that are supposed to keep law and order and they looked into his fund TWICE and couldn't find anything wrong.

How many other "funds" out there have gotten away with financial murder that have only had a cursory examination from the SEC and been given a clean bill of health?

Remember, the same experts who advise governments and come from the most prestigious economics schools in the world were none the wiser to ol' Bernie's scheme. These people were cheerleaders for his fund, because as the old saying goes;

"never ask where the money is coming from so long as you're getting paid"

And that's the whole problem with our system. There's literally no oversight as to what's going on behind the scenes. So long as everyone's getting their slice of the pie, namely the "expert" accountants and economists, everything just goes chugging along in blissful ignorance. Until one day, as with all frauds, when the game is up and the scheme is exposed for the house of cards that it really is and it comes tumbling down.

We've taken finance and investment, originally a usefull tool intended to support the real economy and warped it into a stand-alone industry more akin to a casino in which money trades hands and magically creates more money without any real goods produced or services rendered.

And all the while that casino capitalism has reigned free to take all of the sucker's money (the suckers being most of humanity) it's been lauded by the very experts we trust to keep the economy solvent as the brave new world of economics, the soon to be ultimate and best way of doing things.

Well, that way of doing things has failed us folks. It's time to throw it out and move to a more reasonable, rational, and transparent way of doing things.

The answer isn't the simple moniker "we need more regulation!"

The answer, my friends, is systemic change. We need to get rid of the shadow banking system and put finance back in it's rightful place, that being a support structure for the economy, NOT the economy itself. The federal reserve and the treasury need an overhaul big time. Quite possibly, it could be time to replace or get rid of the federal reserve.

We need to stop listening to the smartest guys in the room. They've already bungled things royally, and now they're more concerned with keeping the status quo running a little bit longer, at least until they can get out of dodge with enough fat of the land to live happily ever after in their guarded compound in sunny tropical paradise (insert name here)

Meanwhile, things are gonna keep just a chugging along for a little while longer. Wealth is going to get concentrated in fewer and fewer hands while the predators out there keep preying on all of us dumb suckers, and every time things start to look like the show is getting close to the end they'll happily raid the public purse to keep it running just a little longer.

Don't worry, things aren't all bad. If the system gets mucked up enough, and enough people lose their jobs and have trouble affording luxuries like bread and electricity, the door will be opened big and wide for a strong man to step in and abolish that pesky thing called democracy. You know, just on a temporary basis so he can guide us back to a better society, ya know?