Putting real faces on the Madoff scandal

A lot of the Wall Street meltdown seems miles away, especially if you have a 401k account that you don't intend to touch for 40 or so years. Or if you don't have a 401k at all.

But it is interesting to put some meaningful faces on the losses suffered by some of the Madoff investors. Per Smart Money, here are some of the standouts:

Entity: Support Organization for the Madison Cultural Arts District
Exposure: $18 million invested with Fairfield Greenwich until September
Date of disclosure: Dec. 19
Notes: A spokesman for the Overture Center in Madison, Wis., built with SOMCAD funds, said, "Speculation that SOMCAD could be on the hook is not outlandish."


Entity: JEHT Foundation
Exposure: n/a
Date of disclosure: Dec. 16
Notes: The foundation stopped all grant-making and plans to shut down at the end of January. Its major donors had essentially all their money invested with the Madoff firm. Grant recipients had included Human Rights First and the Michigan Department of Corrections, Make Voting Work and theInnocence Project.

Entity: Wunderkinder Foundation
Exposure: Steven Spielberg confirmed the foundation sustained losses.
Date of disclosure: Dec. 15
(more on this here)

And from People.com, it looks as though celebrity couple Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgewick have also lost substantial amounts of money. I wonder how much a couple of Golden Globe noms are worth.

John Cusack on The Big Lie

I'm crushing on him harder than the time he held up a boom box in the rain.

Check out John Cusack's capitalist critique on the Huffington Post. Here's a choice bit:

So define the big lie: free marketers want free markets. Not so, the facts say. They are the biggest welfare freaks on the planet.

These men and keepers of the faith would lecture us with a straight face on the evil socialists/ communists/terrorists /vampires/space aliens who would dare "redistribute wealth" by amending the tax code. Two wars and the only shared sacrifice they want is more tax cuts for the rich and for the U.S. citizenry to continue shopping. As Sidney Falco said, you gotta give it to them, their gall is gorgeous.