Spitzer is not a Terrorist. Bush and Cheney are.
Well, those sneaky changes to the laws that got through in the Post 9/11 era are what got Spitzer’s “structuring” of withdrawals and deposits into various accounts put under a microscope. But can anyone tell me if, when it was found out that these financial flags were not pointing at a TERRORIST, why the activity still went on? Were legal and correct WARRANTS obtained in order to look into the matter further? And, more inportantly, does that put us all under scrutiny for being “terrorists” if we move some money around from one account to another?
It seems to me that Palast has it right on his blog.
This week, Bernanke’s Fed, for the first time in its history, loaned a selected coterie of banks one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks’ mortgage-backed junk bonds. The deluge of public loot was an eye-popping windfall to the very banking predators who have brought two million families to the brink of foreclosure.
Up until Wednesday, there was one single, lonely politician who stood in the way of this creepy little assignation at the bankers’ bordello: Eliot Spitzer.
Who are they kidding? Spitzer’s lynching and the bankers’ enriching are intimately tied.
How? Follow the money.
Palast goes on to tie it all into a neat little package, which makes too damn much sense to ignore. “Now, what kind of American is ‘sub-prime.’ Guess. No peeking. Here’s a hint: 73% of HIGH INCOME Black and Hispanic borrowers were given sub-prime loans versus 17% of similar-income Whites. Dark-skinned borrowers aren’t stupid – they had no choice. They were ‘steered’ as it’s called in the mortgage sharking business . . . ‘Steering,’ sub-prime loans with usurious kickers, fake inducements to over-borrow, called ‘fraudulent conveyance’ or ‘predatory lending’ under US law, were almost completely forbidden in the olden days (Clinton Administration and earlier) by federal regulators and state laws as nothing more than fancy loan-sharking . . . But when the Bush regime took over, Countrywide and its banking brethren were told to party hearty – it was OK now to steer’m, fake’m, charge’m and take’m . . . But there was this annoying party-pooper. The Attorney General of New York, Eliot Spitzer, who sued these guys to a fare-thee-well. Or tried to.”
Indeed, the reaction of the financial markets to Spitzer’s downfall surely seems to back up what Palast has stated.
I’m not particularly enamored of Spitzer, and I think that the Mainstream Media’s characterization of Prostitution as a victimless crime is even more reprehensible. But I also know that of all the men on that list that is being investigated, some of whom are surely Republicans, only ONE name was leaked to that very compliant mainstream media, who then gleefully ran with the story, without doing the further digging that maybe would have resulted in that rotten fish smell that comes from anything that Bush and Cheney touch.
