Madoff pays, Banksters still free

So Bernie Madoff gets the max. 150 years. Won't have him to kick around any more. And I don't disagree with the judge.

“Objectively speaking, the fraud here was staggering,” Judge Chin said. “It spanned more than 20 years.”

But I do have a quibble with the prosecution's characterization of it as "one of the biggest investment frauds in Wall Street history."

It may have been the longest running by a single operator, but there are host of banksters out there who defrauded the entire system of trillions and they're not only getting away with it, they're getting government handouts even as they perpetrate their latest scamming of the oil futures market.

Madoff surely deserves his sentence, along with the forfeiture of his personal assets. I hear they only left his wife with a paltry 2.something million and they have to sell all the fancy digs. But meanwhile there's a corrupt hedge funder, or two, flying around on private jets without a worry in the world about indictments. That's just not right.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News]