Democracy for Vancouver

I thought at the time there was something hinky going on, but I didn’t know the specifics about this until Mike Malloy mentioned it last night:

The exposure of New York State Governor Eliot Spitzer’s tryst with a luxury call girl had little to do with the Bush administration’s high moral standards for public servants… Timing suggests that Spitzer was likely a target of a White House and Wall Street operation to silence one of its most dangerous and vocal critics of their handling of the current financial market crisis.
…
On February 14, the Washington Post published an editorial by Spitzer titled, “Predatory Lenders’ Partner in Crime: How the Bush Administration Stopped the States From Stepping In to Help Consumers,” which charged, “Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.”
…
The editorial appeared the day after Spitzer’s ill-fated rendezvous with the prostitute at the Mayflower Hotel. With that article, some Washington insiders believe, Spitzer signed his own political death warrant.

On March 4, 2008, Spitzer furthermore proposed legislation that would have imposed penalties for mortgage fraud and predatory lending.

From Spitzer’s editorial:

Several years ago, state attorneys general and others involved in consumer protection began to notice a marked increase in a range of predatory lending practices by mortgage lenders.
…
Even though predatory lending was becoming a national problem, the Bush administration looked the other way and did nothing to protect American homeowners. In fact, the government chose instead to align itself with the banks that were victimizing consumers.
…
[W]hen the dust settles, [the Bush Administration] will be judged as a willing accomplice to the lenders who went to any lengths in their quest for profits. So willing, in fact, that it used the power of the federal government in an unprecedented assault on state legislatures, as well as on state attorneys general and anyone else on the side of consumers.

I had little sympathy for Spitzer then, and I still think he was an idiot, despite the fact that he was obviously targeted by BushCo for political assassination.

Spitzer, like John Edwards, has more than his family to answer to for his horrific bad judgment. He was elected precisely because the people of New York wanted this sort of protection from their governor - the same kind of fraud prosecution that protected New Yorkers when Spitzer was the state’s 2-term Attorney General. We all deserve better than public servants who incinerate our opportunities for a better country with their own selfish need for illicit sex.

But read Spitzer’s entire editorial and try to believe for one second that Bush, Paulson and Bernanke have the country’s best interests in mind when they make their ridiculous demands.