Right and Wrong

As summer approaches, my thoughts usually turn pastoral – to warm walks in the morning gloaming, lingering suppers on our patio under whispering pines, trips to green places where water leaps and falls with musical abandon. But not this year. Increasingly, my idyllic longings are being interrupted by a rising indignation, often triggered by an insistent, anguished question: why has no one gone to jail?

Alright, one person – Wall Street maven Bernie Madoff – has gone to jail, but that's only because he turned himself in, more or less. Eventually, he pleaded guilty to directing the largest Ponzi scheme in history and will receive, for his sins, a life sentence in prison – which won't be adequate retribution for the thousands of individuals, institutions, and charities he defrauded or decimated. One can only hope that he 'volunteered' for jail from a pang of conscious, though he showed few public signs of regret. In fact, Madoff's motivations for his mammoth fraud are as much a source of speculation these days as the location of his vanished assets. But one incentive, at least, is clear: Madoff desired to get as filthy-stinking rich as possible.

Which leads back to my question: where are the other jailbirds? Nowhere, apparently. Hell, at this point it looks like there won't even be any relevant indictments. I find this shocking and infuriating – and a sign of the times, unfortunately.

Let's recap: the greatest financial meltdown since 1929 happened because a bunch of greedy, arrogant bastards throughout the American financial system  took  outrageous  risks