The Misdeeds of the Rich and Greedy

Whether it's ENRON cooking the books, Lou Pearlman stealing *NSYNC's royalties, Worldcom becoming the symbol of everything wrong with Wall Street in the '90s, bank CEOs lining their pockets with bailout money from the US government or Bernie Madoff making off with the nest eggs of thousands of innocent investors, one thing is becoming increasingly clear:

"Rich People Suck."

At least that's what Paul Burton and his 2,000 weekly readers can attest to. Burton was once just a mild-mannered creative director at his Atlanta-based web design firm 16 Toads, but then, after watching Madoff receive 150 years in prison and the glut of white collar crime stories that followed disappear from the front pages in favor of Balloon Boy and the Tiger Woods Sex Scandal, he decided to take the ball the media dropped once Madoff was behind bars. "It effectively prevented people from learning about what was happening and the people behind it," Burton told Agence-France Presse.

He started The Vile Plutocrat, a website that aggregates real white collar crime news, combines it with bios of the superstitious-cowardly-lot behind it all, throws in some scathing editorial commentary and adds a dash of payback for all the people wronged. "We take the stories and tie them to the individual behind everything then let people judge for themselves. It is definitely a news site; nothing is made up, nothing is extemporized, it is all real."

Of course, with features like "Greedy Bastard of the Month", (this month spotlighting embattled Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick), it's also more than a little biased. But when you're chronicling real word douche-baggery from a real plutocracy, where 1% of the population controls 95% of the wealth, how could you not get a little angry? Angry in the funniest way, but angry just the same. Some Canadians may visit this site thankful they don't live in a country full of financial scandal. Unfortunately, we're far from vicarious spectators. "We pull in news from around the world and it involves people from every country," confirms Burton.

There's plenty of rotten apples to choose from in this country: Alberta-born Worldcom founder Bernie Ebbers is fair game, as is everyone's favourite ex-media baron Conrad Black. And let's not forget that the fall of the Bre-X gold mining company remains the biggest stock scandal in Canadian history. If you still can't get enough of these vultures, after picking the bones of The Vile Plutocrat for all the back door deals it can expose, then why not flip over to CNBC? Let Stacy Keach (Prison Break, Titus) guide you through business's underbelly on American Greed. Every Wednesday night at 9 p.m., this documentary series profiles the fat cats uncovered by the website, and more that aren't even up yet, with interviews featuring the people they conned and the prosecutors who put them away.

Both the website and the series tell such unbelievable stories that in some circles they could prove Gordon Gekko's old adage: "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good!"