Ponzi nation

As Bernie Madoff was led off to his dungeon beneath the murderous gaze of the investors he ripped off for $50 billion, the Fed reported that $11 trillion had been wiped out of household net worth nationwide.

So Bernie only was responsible for about 5 percent of that if we believe his calculations.

Jon Stewart did a good job of reminding the sniveling Jim Cramer from CNBC that guys like him could shoulder the blame for at least an equivalent portion. Stewart has done a public service that should make his name live through the ages: he has definitively pilloried and finally unmasked these screaming on-air con artists. And he does it looking indignant rather than nasty.

Too bad we don’t have any Democrats capable of doing the same in the name of the Party of Working People.

Despite the anticipated spinelessness of congressional Democrats, I hold out some hope that the full political weight of the cataclysm wrought upon us by the fast-money boys like Cramer, Bush, Madoff, Thain, Rubin, Lewis, Cheney and all the rest has not yet settled upon the land. Thousands of Madoff victims now join the millions of mortgage-holding marks in waking up day after depressing day to their newfound destitution.

That’s gotta rankle.

We hear a lot of historical parallels drawn between the present and the post-1929 crash that led into the Depression, and few are so foolhardy as to predict where things are headed. But it is worth recalling that Roosevelt faced furious opposition to most of his measures and was blocked repeatedly by the Supreme Court, yesteryear’s equivalent of the Republican saboteurs of 2009.

Things were even worse in 1936, but that didn’t stop FDR from rolling over the Republican candidate in the worst electoral drubbing in a century, only matched by Saint Ronald’s 1984 triumph.

All of which proves absolutely nothing except that anything can happen, and a lot of experts listening to the sweet tunes of their self-generated flatus are going to be spectacularly wrong—kinda like Jim Cramer.