WT: Madoff trustee gets $7B settlement

Courtesy of the Washington Times

NEW YORK (AP) — The trustee recovering money for Bernard Madoff's burned investors has reached a $7.2 billion settlement with the estate of a Florida philanthropist and businessman who had been the single-largest beneficiary of the fraud.

The settlement with the estate of Jeffry Picower was detailed Friday in Manhattan court papers.

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara called it "a truly historic settlement" and a "game changer for Madoff's victims."

Barbara Picower, representing her late husband's estate, entered into the agreement with the U.S. attorney's office.

She said in a statement that her husband was "in no way complicit" with Madoff's fraud. She said the estate would "return every penny received" through Madoff investments.

Picower drowned after suffering a heart attack in the swimming pool of his Palm Beach, Fla., mansion on Oct. 25, 2009.

A recovery of that size would mean that a sizeable number of Madoff's victims could get at least half of their money back — a remarkable turnaround for people and institutions that thought two years ago that they had lost everything.

Picower, who was 67 when he died, invested many years ago with Madoff. Court-appointed trustee Irving
Picard's investigators said that, over time, he withdrew about $7 billion in bogus profits from his accounts. That amounts to more than a third of the dollars that disappeared in the scandal.

That money was supposedly made on stock trades, but authorities said that in reality it was simply stolen from other investors.

Picower's lawyers claimed he knew nothing about the scheme, but the trustee argued in court papers that he must have known that his returns were "implausibly high" and based on fraud.

I must say, it's about time that the victims of this monstrous crime received some just compensation.  The sheer amount of unadulterated greed that went into this is staggering and makes me physically ill.  I harbor no ill will toward Mr. Madoff and I will pray for his coversion and repentance, but I thoroughly condemn the enormous fraud he perpetuated on innocent people.  Life savings were wiped out in his scheme, and I welcome this effort to try to make things right.

Let us continue to pray for these poor souls.  With God, all things are possible.

Pax Christi.

Is there a double standard at Notre Dame?

No doubt many of you already know about the scandal that engulfed Notre Dame last year when they invited pro-abortion President Barack Obama to speak at their commencement.  Some of you probably also know how 88 pro-life protestors who were opposing the presence of the most pro-abortion president in the history of this country were arrested for trespassing.

The University has so far not responded to calls for them to try and get the pro-lifers released.  And now there's a new story emerging from the campus.

Recently, the pro-homosexuality group Soulforce (a nominally Christian group which promotes homosexuality as a valid alternative lifestyle) and anti-ROTC protestors from the Catholic Worker group (Dorothy Day may be a saintly woman, but her strict pacifist stance is unrealistic) protested and were also arrested for trespass.  What happened to them?  Well, read on, courtesty of Life Site News.

 It turns out that members of the pro-gay group Soulforce, and Catholic Worker anti-ROTC demonstrators, who were arrested for trespassing on campus in March 2007, were let off scot free. Dempsey says that he interviewed participants in each case, who "all state that, after they were taken into custody and processed on the campus, they were released and heard nothing more." It is unclear whether the decision not to pursue the cases further was made by the university or the district prosecutors, although the Trust suggests that it originated with the university.

According to the report, the anti-military and pro-gay protestors had their charges dropped almost as soon as they were booked.  Yet the pro-life protestors who were demanding the Our Lady's University uphold Catholic teaching on abortion by disinviting a man who's view on abortion contradict everything we as Catholics believe remain behind bars?

There's something wrong with this picture.

Is there a double standard at Notre Dame?  I would say yes.  The University, by allowing charges to be dropped against this group of protestors (one of which, Soulforce, holds to a fundamentally anti-Catholic viewpoint) but refusing to do they same with pro-lifers demonstrates a fundamental hypocrisy.  The University is, in effect, saying that one group of trespassers will be treated with kid gloves, while another is treated like common criminals, because of their viewpoint.

I encourage everyone who reads this post to contact Notre Dame's president, Father Jenkins, and register, charitably of course, their disapproval of this travesty.

University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana
46556, USA
phone: 574.631.5000
email form: president@nd.edu
Pax Christi.