Greed and corruption

Some days it seems like there's not an honest man or woman left in a position of power anywhere on the planet. The news this week has been shocking. Not that anyone was surprised by the Blagojevich indictment. It's been a long time coming. But the breadth and depth of it, the sheer sliminess of the allegations, go way beyond what most people were prepared for. It might get worse.

Then there's Bernie Madoff. This one's a stinker, for so many reasons. A lot of people are going to get hurt. People who never had anything to do with his Ponzi scheme are going to get hurt. He probably didn't mean to hurt anyone. These guys almost never do. They never think it's going to catch up with them and once it starts to go bad the efforts to patch it, hide it, fix it until things get better (but they never do) just snowballs out of control. I've seen this before. Everyone loses.

Relevant cliché of the day: if it looks too good to be true, it is. Take a deep breath and walk away.

Then again, sometimes even a really bad deal is actually worse than it looks.

Shabbat Shalom.