Yes, the face of that great mountain has been a long time coming into view, considering that Korten penned those words way back in 1995. So when Michael Mandel, Chief Economist for BusinessWeek magazine, in a recent column connected the dots that inexorably linked rogue Wall Street money manager Bernard Madoff to the larger global financial network, he sounded more like a fifth-columnist within the world of money. "Painfully, the allegations of fraud surrounding the Madoff affair are also exposing the fundamental fallacy of the global economy." Just that one sentence said it all.

One-time Chairman of the NASDAQ Stock Market, Madoff’s scam was no complicated global securitization based on black-box rocket science, Mandel noted. "Instead, it appears to be a good old-fashioned Ponzi scheme, enabled by a lack of government supervision." [That’s been the eight-year curse of the Bush Administration in every sphere of human activity.]

The point Mandel was making, and making so succinctly, was that like Madoff’s trusting investors, the rest of the world was willing to assume that the US economy as a whole was a low-risk, good-return investment. "This belief drove the entire structure of global trade and finance for the past 10 years. And when the subprime crisis showed this assumption of low risk to be false, the financial crisis resulted."

Wall Street’s big operators - like Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, CitiGroup, AIG and comparatively small fry like Madoff - assured foreign investors the US was not only the world’s safest economy but also one that could still provide decent returns. But it wasn’t simply Madoff, says Mandel. The Wall Street boom of recent years was built, as far as he could figure out, on selling the low-risk story to foreign investors. Indeed, most of the financial innovations of recent years, such as the enormous growth of foreign exchange derivatives, enabled those abroad to protect their US investments from exchange-rate fluctuations.

Mandel’s conclusion is one that investors worldwide ignore at their own grave peril: "Globalization will be seen as what it is - a game with risks that can’t be wished away."

Having read Mandel’s views, Andrew Leonard of the internet political newsletter Salon.com noted that when considered together with the Wall Street Journal’s report on how the Securities and Exchange Commission missed numerous red flags warning something might be awry with Madoff, "you end up with a nice little morality tale. As went Madoff, so went Wall Street. The free market has never looked better, has it?"

Alexander Cockburn, in CounterPunch magazine, focused more on a little publicized but extremely significant aspect of Madoff’s criminality. "In terms of financial and psychological impact, Bernard Madoff’s $50 billion heist certainly ranks as a major ethnic cleansing here in America, a hugely traumatic event for American Jewry. Of course Madoff had clients of every creed and nation, but he made a specialty of trolling for Jewish money." In that context, Cockburn quoted a young person’s terse comment on the world’s affluent one-percent: "Now the rich people will know what it’s like."

Mark Charendoff, President of the Jewish Funders Network, told The Forward newspaper: "It’s an atomic bomb in the world of Jewish philanthropy. There’s going to be fallout from this for years to come." Madoff’s collapse, Cockburn notes, has opened a black hole at the centre of the tight knit circles of wealthy Jews who socialize and do business together, and who, year after year, support Jewish causes. In fact, the Jewish Journal had even come up with a title for them: Swindler’s List!

Part of Madoff’s genius as a swindler was that he turned many away. He would turn down applicants unless they could put up millions, Cockburn writes, and that of course vastly increased the zeal of the suckers to be on to a good thing, to join the exclusive club. He recalls what his father told him on numerous occasions: many people have a bit of larceny in their bloodstream, and that’s what conmen trade on.

Of course, Madoff’s story that for decades he ran his gigantic fraud by himself is unbelievable. One man alone could not have done the work of inventing and cranking out thousands of statements every month, not to mention keeping track of the comings and goings of billions of dollars. Unquestionably, a family enterprise.

Pam Martens, another CounterPunch contributor and a 21-year veteran of Wall Street herself, was on to Madoff back in 1991, according to Susan Antilla in her column on Bloomberg. Martens, having taken over management of a customer’s municipal-bond portfolio, was alarmed when she found the man had invested the bulk of his money with Madoff on a guarantee of a 13 percent a year return.

Martens told him, "First of all, that’s impossible, and second, that’s illegal." She got copies of the customer’s brokerage statements and phoned Madoff. "I’m looking at Mr. X’s statements, and it’s clear you’re not doing anything here that generated 13 percent a year." Madoff’s belligerent response, "No one has ever dared question what I’m doing."

Since 1991, there were others who did question, says Cockburn. Some of them pressed their suspicions upon the SEC, stating emphatically their view that Madoff was running a Ponzi game. Madoff sailed through the charges for a variety of reasons. First, he posed as a regulator and due diligence watchdog himself. The SEC thought he was one of their own. Madoff had heavy-duty social, financial and political protection. "Here’s where there should be a lot more investigation," says Cockburn.

Madoff poured money into the Democratic Senatorial Campaign war chest ($100,000 between 2005 and 2008) and made large contributions to important Democrats on the Finance Committees, like Rep Henry Waxman and Senator Charles Schumer. "Waxman and Schumer have hastily announced they’re donating this money to charity. (Who knows? Maybe the donations have gone to the next Ponzi racket down the food chain so it’ll come back to them again as protection money.)"

In Cockburn’s considered view, Uncle Sam is the biggest Ponzi operator of all, "with the added magical power denied Madoff (unless forgery was among his talents) of being able to print money at will." So the CounterPunch co-Editor offered readers the tip of the week: Wheelbarrow stocks. "Buy ’em while the price is right. Soon Americans will be needing wheelbarrows to put the money in to go shopping. A vast new wheelbarrow industry could be part of Obama’s recovery plan: collapsible wheelbarrows for the soccer moms to get in the back of the Volvo, electric-powered wheelbarrows, hybrid wheelbarrows from GM and gold-plated wheelbarrows from the Defense sector." [In our own little Paradise, even hand-pushed wheelbarrows would be an unconscionable luxury for most Sri Lankans.]

In conclusion, Cockburn stopped kidding and came right to the point: "On the larger canvas, what exactly separates Madoff’s operation from those of the banks rewarded for their shady follies by a $700 billion bailout? Just like Madoff, the banks finally had to admit that all their public financial statements were false, that the supposed assets were worthless."

Both Madoff and the banks had close links with movers and shakers, yet one man will likely get 20 years in the cooler, while the corporate crooks are rewarded while pretending they were the innocent losers in a game of chance.

Free Market indeed. For some.