On the other hand, the Bill Clintons and Eliot Spitzers of the world owe it to their high public profile to keep some elemental and basic control over their actions. They know they are targets. Spitzer apparently operated over a long period of time with extraordinary arrogance.

This is an incredibly unforgiving country when it comes to perceived moral failures. In Europe they just shake their heads in disbelief that we can hang an adulterer out to dry and allow the criminality of the current administration.

But that's the way we are and Spitzer and Clinton should have known that.

"Ready or not, here we come!" 

by Jim Freeman (108 articles, 53 quicklinks, 227 diaries, 386 comments) on Monday, Mar 17, 2008 at 12:30:40 PM

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. . that's beside the point I'm trying to make, which is that we apparently have a cabal of high-ranking officials at banks and various government agencies, including the Department of "Justice,"  who are now able to work together to remove high-ranking government officials from office, for political reasons. 

 Remember what happened to Alabama Governor Don Siegelman?  Remember the federal prosecutors who were canned either because they refused to go after Democratic officials who were not really guilty of anything, or because they went after Repugs who were probably guilty?

 When every high-ranking Democratic official knows that their phone conversations and emails are being recorded by the NSA, and all their financial transactions can be monitored by Republican enemies, we are well on our way  to fascism my friend.

by Richard Clark (30 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 101 comments [2 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Monday, Mar 17, 2008 at 3:33:16 PM

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We're back to Caesar's wife and it's not where we should be, given our past blindness to Eisenhower, FDR, LBJ and Kennedy's dalliances. We are an international joke for these Victorian double-standards.

Having said that, it sure doesn't help Spitzer's devastated wife. 

by Jim Freeman (108 articles, 53 quicklinks, 227 diaries, 386 comments) on Monday, Mar 17, 2008 at 5:37:22 PM

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Alexander Cockburn asks: Did Wall Street nail Gov Spitzer?

The Wall Street titan Ken Langone was a former target of Eliot Spitzer and he had promised to launch ‘a holy war’ against Spitzer.  It looks like this was it, says Alexander Cockburn.

“Was there a right-wing conspiracy to nail Governor Eliot Spitzer, above and beyond his own diligent efforts in the same cause?  It certainly looks like it, the right-wingers in question very possibly hailing from Wall Street, whose ruling powers loathed Spitzer for his crusades against them when he was New York's attorney general.  If threatened, Wall Street plays very dirty.  So let's nose along the trail.

First of all, it’s clear that the federal investigators' probe _started_ with Spitzer, not the prostitution ring.  Spitzer's bank wire transfers led them to the Emperors Club.

Spitzer divided his $10,000 transfer down into smaller units, _allegedly_ triggering a federal probe.   But it strains credulity to believe that North Fork Bank's 'Suspicious Activity Report' on a well-known client immediately aroused the interest of the government clerk scrutinizing the hundreds of thousands of SARs churning through his computer in the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) watch-post in Long Island.  The official version of the story has the IRS man noting Spitzer's name, then passing the information up the food chain to the Justice Department, and the US Attorney’s office in Manhattan. 

Instead of the banks being curious on their own, what if the feds told the banks to report all of Spitzer's wire transfers to them?  It does seem likely, and if that’s what happened, what we have here is a sting operation, which raises another pressing question: Who was it who first steered the feds in Spitzer's direction?  And need we ask why?

================

Relevant here are Ken Langone’s remarks on CNBC last night, following Spitzer's resignation.  The billionaire venture capitalist was a New York Stock Exchange board member whom Spitzer had gone after when he was attorney general.  Langone later proclaimed he was launching "a holy war" against Spitzer. 

CNBC: "Would you say that you were surprised by this news?"

Langone: "Not at all...  I know for sure he went himself to a post office and bought $2,800 worth of mail orders to send to the hooker...  I know somebody who was standing in back of him in line..."

As a 20-year veteran of Wall Street emailed me a propos of Langone's remarks: "Spitzer's enemies on Wall Street probably hired private eyes to follow him.   I know this to be standard operating procedure against Wall Street enemies."

Spitzer's role as the sole target in this recruitment of investigative and prosecutorial manpower since July 2007 is evidenced by the malicious insertion in the prosecutor's indictment of a hint from the phone taps about his sexual preferences (reminiscent of Kenneth Starr's detailed disclosures about the minutiae of physical transactions  between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky). 

================

Major Wall Street operators created the housing bubble, fixed the system of bogus AAA ratings, kept the debt off their balance sheets and prevented pricing transparency.  As with the dot-com NASDAQ bubble of nearly a decade ago, there are perpetrators who should be facing criminal sanctions.  Wall Street has nothing to fear for its sub-prime frauds from the Security Exchange Commission (SEC); the SEC has no criminal prosecutorial powers. 

But New York State does have the Martin Act, one of the most powerful criminal enforcement weapons in the country and used to great effect by attorney general Spitzer.  In January of this year there were news stories about the current attorney general Andrew Cuomo using the Martin Act to go after the sub-prime corporate miscreants.  Such an onslaught, with the backing of Gov Spitzer, was undoubtedly making Wall Street nervous.  Hence the decision to take out Spitzer.

by Richard Clark (30 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 101 comments [2 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Monday, Mar 17, 2008 at 3:38:23 PM

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When Bush Jr.came into office we immediately went into Fascism101.How he spreads his disease into every vein and artery of the government is like a Black Plague spreading over the United States and is virtually unstoppable.It's disgusting how a democratic House and Congress can't rein in his reign of terror on the American Justice System,American People and his outright lies.Bush and Cheney should have never taken office just from their illegal stock trades,sweetheart deals-Halliburton-Both should not have reported to the White House-They should have reported to do a 20 year sentence for all their crimes.Volumes of Books have been written about these TRAITORS and LIARS and they are still there like a cancer on the American people just festering away and making everything they touch turn black and die.And can you believe i never got into politics until this scum came into office?

by lupercio (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 5 comments) on Monday, Mar 17, 2008 at 7:11:32 PM

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What I find interesting is that the media NEVER brings up the affair that G.W. Bush and Victor Ashe had, and their adulterous-bisexual relationship with Leola McConnell making the arrangements for the women who participated in the three-some.  These affairs took place in Tennessee during the 1984 senate debates.  Leola McConnell was paid $15,000 to arrange sexual liaisons involving bisexual men for G.W.  She wrote an eBook about her BDSM experiences with Bush and Ashe, titled "Lustful Utterances".  After the book came out, McConnell hasn't been seen or heard from by friends and family.  If you want to read more, go to http://bushssecretlifein84.tripod.com/

by lucydavis (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 88 comments) on Tuesday, Mar 18, 2008 at 8:20:56 AM

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 With thanks to Jim Fetzer whose observations and comments I used here as a kind of basis for what I came up with:

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If you buy the official story, “Revelations about Governor (Spitzer) Began in Routine Tax Inquiry” (The New York Times, March 11, 2008), then of course the situation looks like Spitzer was just extremely unlucky to have been caught (because of the suspicious nature of financial transactions intended to conceal his expenditures for high-priced prostitutes). 

But if you think about it, that is a most _unlikely_ explanation of how the man happened to get caught.  Why?  Because the sums involved here – two or three thousand each, spent by a well known multimillionaire – are not sufficiently substantial to have drawn attention – except to someone who was looking for possible dirt on Spitzer.  And the great degree to which emphasis has been placed on this explanation suggests that someone’s plan was to discover dirt about Spitzer.  The only question is: who?  Who gave the order to keep an eye on Spitzer’s financial transactions?

Second likely motive:  For Spitzer to have been the object of a Bush vendetta, there would of course have had to have been some very good reason to give that order that would lead to the man’s removal from office -- just as in the case of Joseph Wilson or Admiral Fallon.  And indeed, all three men (Spitzer, Wilson and Fallon) directly challenged basic tenets of the Bush administration, and did so in a way that Bush and Cheney found threatening.  So it is quite significant that just one month before his outing, Spitzer published a column in The Washington Post called “Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime,” February 14, 2008, in which he explained that the administration’s own policies of (a) deliberate regulatory neglect and (b) favoring cronies, were major factors that contributed to the home mortgage crisis, perhaps the greatest economic catastrophe of our time.

It is no leap of logic to infer that Bush must have been infuriated and, as in the case of Wilson and Fallon, he probably wanted to strike out in retaliation.  That Spitzer’s fall should happen so soon thereafter, suggests that the decision to ‘get’ him was made partly out of a desire to punish another person for pointing to his administration’s dereliction of duty.  And why is he going to such lengths to protect the telecommunications industry?  He wants to be able to remain free to gather “intelligence” about those who might criticize or impeach him, his policies, and his administration.

by Richard Clark (30 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 101 comments [2 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Tuesday, Mar 18, 2008 at 10:12:06 PM

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Please read Jim Fetzer's original version of what I said in my last post.

Here's the link to it: 

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_jim_fetz_080313_bush_vendetta_3f.htm

by Richard Clark (30 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 101 comments [2 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Wednesday, Mar 19, 2008 at 12:18:36 AM

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It's one of the most amazing displays of journalistic incompetence and malpractice in recent memory.

The US news media failed to draw the obvious connection between the bizarre federal law enforcement investigation and leak campaign about the private life of New York Governor Spitzer and Spitzer's all out attack on the Bush administration for its collusion with predatory lenders.

While the international credit system grinds to a halt because of a superabundance of bad mortgage loans made in the US, the news media failed to cover the details of Spitzer's public charges against the White House.

Yet when salacious details were leaked about alleged details of Spitzer's private life, they took that information and made it the front page news for days.

To the 9/11 fiasco, the Iraq War, the travesty of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, and the shredding of the US Constitution, we can now add a deliberate and reckless undermining of the credit and banking system of the US to its list of "accomplishments." 

Watch the great video about this, here:

 http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/291.html

by Richard Clark (30 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 101 comments [2 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Saturday, Mar 22, 2008 at 11:19:57 AM

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WMR has learned from sources involved with the Fresh Kills recovery
operations -- yes the black boxes for both Twin Towers flights were found -- that the take down of the World Trade Center North and
South Towers, as well as Building 7, were the result of an operation
that wired the buildings with explosives, ensuring their total
destruction. The Ground Zero crime scene was massively interfered
with by a cabal of individuals, including New York Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani, Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, and Trade Center owner
Larry Silverstein. Silverstein ordered the "pull down" of Building
7.

Spitzer, while not a co-conspirator in the World Trade Center
operation, apparently knows enough about it to have been thought of
as dangerous to the parties involved in the take down. For that
reason, Spitzer's activities with Emperors Club VIP prostitutes was
made public after he began making noise about investigating the
financial activities surrounding 9/11. The conspirators decided that
it was time to end Spitzer's political career and his continuation
as Governor of New York.

http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/articles/20080327

by Richard Clark (30 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 101 comments [2 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Friday, Mar 28, 2008 at 7:40:59 PM

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