As you all know by now, Bernie Madoff is in jail and serving a sentence of 150 years. It’s an absurd number of years for anyone to be sentenced, and considering that Madoff is now in his 70s, barring some sort of divine intervention, he will in reality probably only serve 15 or 20 years of said sentence before he dies in prison.
By my calculations this will leave a good 130 years or more of an unfinished sentence, and unless these jail credits are similar to a tax credit for the reincarnated, the years of unused sentence will disappear as quickly as the ill-acquired money in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.
Only 150 Years?
A 150-year sentence may seem like a long time, but Madoff’s sentence pales in comparison to another multimillion-dollar scammer, a 71-year-old man by the name of Norman Schmidt, who is serving 330 years in a Denver prison and, unless he gets unlucky, should leave a jail credit of about 310 years.
Not to be outdone, New York businessman Shalom Weiss, since 2000, has been serving a term of 845 years in jail for his role in bilking an insurance company out of $400 million and costing 25,000 customers their life savings. Weiss is now 64 years old, and even if he manages to live for another 21 years, he will still leave a jail credit of 830 years of time not served.
Considering that 1,000-year life spans have not been the norm since the time of Methuselah, these are insane numbers by any stretch of the imagination. My guess, though, is that vengeance and greed are somehow linked together by outrageous math, and, while there is no number large enough for the greedy, there is also no punishment large enough for them either.
Unfortunately, in this case, the greedy are still not giving back all the stolen money and, as an added slap in the face, the vengeful are being short-changed by hundreds of years of deserved punishment. Very possibly, this is a spot where water boarding could actually come in handy, since the vengeful would most likely find the punishment more rewarding than jail time, and the greedy would almost certainly “cough up” the locations of their offshore accounts where all the ill-gotten gains are being stored.
Reincarceration
Anyway, as impressive as it sounds to impose hundreds of years of punishment upon these felons, hundreds of years of jail time is not a practical punishment, and the multi-lifetime incarcerations would only make sense if the courts dealt with these criminals in the same way that the Tibetan monks relate to the death of each Dalai Lama.
The way it works is that after each Dalai Lama dies, a committee of monks traverse the land seeking the reincarnation of his departed soul, and when the reincarnated soul is found — usually in the body of a young boy — they then bring the child back to the monastery for retraining as the new Dalai Lama. Imagine how many generations of vengeful people would find satisfaction in locating Madoff’s reincarnated soul and imprisoning him again and again until his sentence is completed.
I would think that a life sentence with no chance of parole would be a better option than handing out inordinately long jail terms, but in our day and age of inflated numbers, it make sense that we accept unrealistic jail terms as well as improbable returns on our investments. Paper money is and has been issued as a redeemable note against something very real, such as gold or silver, but when the amount of paper exceeds the amount of whatever is backing it up, then that paper money loses real value and becomes fantasy money. Much like a 150-year jail term for a 71-year-old man.
{mospagebreak}
Milking the System
We live in a world where traders make millions of dollars with just a phone call and a few keystrokes of their computer. Companies trump up the value of their holdings by issuing millions of dollars in stock options against nothing tangible, and then go broke, leaving the workers and small investors empty handed while a few executives walk off with millions.
Investment houses gamble on bad mortgages and then hedge their bets by insuring them, thus making money on the sale of the bundled mortgages as well as the insurance claims for the failed mortgages. Finally, when everyone declares a loss, they all receive billions in the form of a government bailout from a $700 billion dollar pot.
Somewhere along the way all this large finance, with numbers that can only be regarded as pure reverie, trickles down to the rest of us working stiffs, and we are left with higher credit card interest, more debt and less equity in our homes and business.
Unlike those “Masters of the Universe,” we, the little people, live in a very real world of working for our money, and whether we make $10 an hour or $100 as an hourly wage, we lose money if our salary stays the same when the cost of living rises. If there are no regulations in place regarding pricing, then anyone can charge what they like and business becomes a free-for-all until the buyers lose faith in the system.
How It Works
In our business, we have two major selling points. The first is our time and effort; the second one is the equipment we use. In regard to the pricing of equipment, we assign a per-day price to said piece of gear that reflects a percentage of the purchase price. For example, a speaker that is purchased for $500 might rent for $50 dollars per day and $125 per week. Easy, right?
If another sound contractor wants to sub-rent it from us, then we give them a 20 percent discount so that they can rent the gear to their customer and make a little money while the customer still gets the gear at its going rate. If the contractor marks up the equipment more than the 20 percent margin, then they are screwing with a very delicate balance of fair market rate.
Now, let’s say this piece of gear gets rented on paper and without a required delivery, 10 different times by 10 different contractors. By the time the piece of gear is delivered to the final contractor, the cost to the client may have rocketed up by as much as 200 percent.
Obviously, this kind of speculation works better in the oil industry, but so be it. We, in the audio business, are unfortunately regulated to renting our gear for a fairly fixed rate, and while it may go up every few years, that increase only keeps pace with inflation and doesn’t stay ahead of it.
{mospagebreak}
A Fair Day’s Wage
That leaves us having to work for a fair days wage, but therein lies the question, what is a fair days wage? Since our hours are so erratic we often get paid an agreed-upon day rate. If the gig turns out to be a little shorter than expected, then great, we come out ahead, but if the event lasts longer than we anticipated then we lose. Therefore we have to have some criterion for accepting or demanding a certain fee for a days labor.
That raises the question of what exactly we are getting paid to do? The show itself may only last an hour or so, but it might take a 14-hour day to make the show happen. Only six hours of the day are spent setting up and breaking down the gear, therefore the 14-hour day is only a seven-hour workday. If, for example, we are billing the client $30 per hour for the day then the 14-hour day works out to $420 dollars for the day, but if we only charge $30 per hour for the seven hours worked and $15 per hour for the down time, then the day’s pay equals only $315. Fortunately for us, the latter scenario is usually not an option since we don’t treat down time in the same way we treat travel days. Payment also depends upon whether the gig is a one-off or if there are multiple shows. Regardless of what one’s daily rate may be, a daily rate on a weekly basis will usually will go down a bit due to the amount of work that one is guaranteed.
Making a Bundle
At any rate, no matter how one calculates it, by the time the end of the year comes around, it always seems that the hours worked are more than expected and the money made is less than desired. Hey, life is tough for the working stiff who gets paid by the hour or day! C’est la vie. Maybe what we should do is bundle our hours together and start selling them to speculators who bet on the hours we might work in any given day against the down time in that same given day. We can even have them speculate on the weekly hours for tours. We can call the down hours “Sub-prime” hours and have a large insurance broker insure the bundled hours. The bundled hours will be sold and resold until finally when a tour or show actually purchases the hours our rates will be 200 percent higher than when they were initially quoted. The great thing about this plan is that if the tour or show should lose money because there are more “Sub-prime” hours than good working hours, then the insurance company has to cover the loss. See; with a little good old American know-how and unregulated free market trade we too can be Masters of the Universe.
