Tuesday 13 July 2010

You can't fool all of the people all of the time

Shyam
With a few notable exceptions, for a long time, Bernie Madoff was not only generally portrayed by the traditional media as an admired and respected financial guru, but also as one of America's most generous philanthropists (guided by his religious faith). The entire world now knows that, in reality, nothing could have been further from the truth. Ironically, the same media which (for decades) completely failed to expose Madoff as a dangerous sociopath running one of the most outrageous scams in history, was suddenly more than ready to savage the financially-illiterate clowns at the US Securities Exchange Commission who (in their official capacity) also refused to launch a rigorous investigation of Madoff and, thus, effectively assisted him in peddling his fictitious '£50 billions Hedge Fund' as fact.
It seems that the morally, and intellectually, feeble attitude of high-level SEC officials towards Bernie Madoff, influenced mainstream journalists and vice versa.
At one time, I would have found it difficult to believe that so many well-educated adults could have continued to swallow, and regurgitate, such a pile of puerile nonsense without bothering to check the facts. However, after looking at 50+ years of the absurd, but nonetheless pernicious, 'MultileveI Marketing' lie, I now realize the enduring wisdom of the phrase (variousy attributed to Abraham Lincoln, P.T. Barnum, or Mark Twain):
'You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.'
David Brear (copyright 2010)

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