Tuesday, April 25, 2006

This started as a post expressing my disappointment that David Weinberger is doing a turn on stage at the Milken Institute. Michael Milken has served some time, not nearly as much time as he was sentenced, and far less time than the judge recommended, but he has served his time for some of his felonies. And then, when he violated his probation, he made it up to us by turning over tens of millions of dollars of fees plus a little interest in order to stay out of jail. And he did have prostate cancer, so it’s easy to understand that while he had technically violated his probation to the tune of hauling in the $42 million of illegal fees the SEC identified, and probably another $50 million according to the current iteration of Wikipedia, it’s easy to see why they wouldn’t treat him like some common criminal, say a guy on the street caught with a joint in violation of his probation. He was ill and he deserved a break.

And while he has been identified as the proximate cause of the crash of 1987 and he was accused of tearing apart viable companies in his corporate junkyard and putting the employees on the street in order to gin up more “high risk securities” to meet the market demand he created with his scandalous greed-is-good philosophy, Michael Milken did get out of jail with a billion dollars in his pocket. His long struggle back to social acceptability includes the Milken Institute.

I guess my bottom line on this has to be that Milken won. His billion dollars bought him the respectability he wanted, and like Andrew Carnegie he will be remembered more for the good he did than for his rapacious criminal greed. We don’t boycott Carnegie Mellon just because it was endowed by a criminal master class of monopolists and manipulators. If people choose to gather annually in the house that junk-bond-greed built, it simply demonstrates how flexible we are as a culture. Besides, “Michael Milken” is ever so much more mellifluous than — say — Ivan Boesky.

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