The All-American Pyramid Scheme

On Tuesday the SEC announced a formal investigation into a $300 trillion pyramid scheme that dwarfs the $50 billion scam allegedly orchestrated by notorious investment guru Bernard Madoff. While a specific target in the inquiry has not been named, it appears the crime involves the entire American economy from 1980 to 2008.

“When all the evidence is in on this one, Madoff is going to look like a kid who swiped a pack of gum from a Quik-e-Mart,” said one anonymous government official.

The SEC refuses to release the details of the probe, but they have admitted that the apex of the pyramid consists of the nation’s top 5 percent in wealth and that the victims of the scam include “just about everyone else.”

What remains unanswered is the question of who masterminded the entire plot. Four former presidents—Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush II—and 14 different variations of the U.S. Congress are expected to be charged as accomplices in this scheme to send to the nation’s wealth to the top of the pyramid while falsely promising that it would “trickle” back down to the bottom, but the case’s primary suspect is a mystery even to the watchdogs who are supposed to protect the people from such dangers.

“We know that the top 5 percent benefited from their position atop the pyramid,” said lead investigator Sally Ingram. “But we aren’t sure if they are the crooks or merely the fortunate, perhaps at times unwitting, figurative and literal ‘bankers’ who made their fortune laundering the crooks’ money.”

Speculation as to the identity of this masked culprit has dominated the often-reliable “Internet discussion board” source of information and includes possibilities such as Alan Greenspan, Ayn Rand, Osama Bin Laden, neo-conservative movement founding father Leo Strauss, and the Lord of Darkness—Satan.

“While all those choices present solid possibilities, each one also brings up a unique problem for a federal prosecutor,” said Harvard legal scholar Grey Eria. “Rand and Strauss are dead; Bin Laden has been hiding out with Santa and the Easter Bunny at the North Pole; Satan always gets charged but never gets convicted; and Greenspan has already retained Johnnie Cochran as his potential defense attorney.”

Former Justice Department prosecutor Kellen Hommen disagrees, saying that this time they may have a shot at convicting Satan because “the anti-Christ made the key mistake of taking on a human form when he moved into the body of former Vice President Dick Cheney in the mid-1970s.”

“Yeah, but as soon as the guilty verdict is read, Satan will leave Cheney’s body and either return to Hell or move into someone new,” Eria countered.

With or without a singular scapegoat, the SEC plans to continue their investigation into what Ingram has called the “granddaddy of all non-consensual butt poundings forced upon the hard-working, middle-class citizen and the future generations of middle and lower class Americans.”

Despite the obvious criminal intent of the plot’s nebulous mastermind, not everyone is sympathetic with the plight of the millions of victims who had invested their time, effort, money, and faith into the non-sustainable business model known as the American-economy pyramid scheme.

“The world is divided into the winners and the whiners,” said shipping fortune heir Jacob Taylor Howell III. “It’s time for the losers to shut up, pull themselves up by their [Made-In-China] Nike shoelaces and make something of their lives.”