Wikipedia writes: "A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to investors from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors rather than from profit. The term, "Ponzi scheme," is used primarily in the United States, while other English-speaking countries do not distinguish colloquially between this scheme and other pyramid schemes.[1" On the other hand, in today's world, the technique has been mastered by Madoff who seems to have gotten away with 49 billion since, even though there was a whistle blower for several years, the SEC ignored all facts.
While Ponzi didn't invent the pyramid scheme, he certainly learned to make it function well for himself as did many others until recently Bernie Madoff
became world's champ and cruelly defrauded many of their life savings and retirement money. While he is certainly responsible for his own actions, it is as though we were saying, "Well, it is not the fault of the police that they didn't catch the bank robbers, they were on their coffee and donut break." Most important was that the SEC was allowed to ignore the whistleblower. From the Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald: "HARRY MARKOPOLOS, the private investigator who uncovered the Bernie Madoff scandal, came straight from central casting: geeky, too-big glasses and a prominent comb-over. When he spoke, it was in the vocabulary of a man who had watched a lot of detective movies."
While violence may have been less an issue during the Bush administration, terrorism in the form of the negligence we saw towards out citizens through poor health care, inferior education, lack of regulation, mismanagement of monies that will follow us for more than a couple of generations, all need to be viewed for the destruction we endured as a people in a country that should have been internally safer in more areas than bin Laden bombings. I have been little heard for years as I have repeated bin Laden's threat that he would ruin the American economy (which he succeeded in doing very well because we had a greedy government run by an arrogant, poorly prepared puppet who played at being President.
