What a Happy Downfall for Eliot Spitzer

March 12, 2008 · Filed Under Blog, Politics · 1 Comment

Somewhere along the line with Enron and Worldcom, the world stopped trusting big companies. It became a situation where a few bad apples really did spoil the bunch, to quote a trite phrase. What we are finding out is that not all companies are truly nefarious juggernauts, intent on bilking investors out of money and creating high stock prices on little more than vapor. The problem is, with Enron, Worldcom and others so fresh in the public’s mind, it opened the door for someone like Eliot Spitzer to smash and bash his way to political fortune on a popular sentiment, even if it was based on the same vapor that built stock prices for Worldcom.

Eliot Spitzer was wrong more often than he was right. For every bad person he took down with his reign of terror as Attorney General for the state of New York, there were more good people who paid dear prices and had no reasonable way to stay out of his path. I don’t want to get into all of the details of all the people that Spitzer smashed unfairly. Those stories are all over the place this week. But know this. Spitzer’s tactics were very similar to those of the RIAA who have been going around the country suing college students and file sharers with the intent of never giving them a day in court. It is a terrorizing campaign seeking to coerce people into settlements and statements admitting wrong-doing.

And while Spitzer’s political career won’t end because of those types of tactics, these tactics probably helped create enough enemies in the world where Spitzer couldn’t get away with something like ordering prostitutes in his personal life. It is really an unrelated situation to why people really hate Eliot Spitzer, but as the other old saying goes; “It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

Also, I have been reading up on a lot of this business about Spitzer, and the one article that I found most fascinating was about the media and how they became complicit in Spitzer’s reign because he leaked info to them all the time. The key quotes from Kimberley A. Strassel’s article in the WSJ are the paragraphs below.

Mr. Spitzer’s main offense as a prosecutor is that he violated the basic rules of fairness and due process: Innocent until proven guilty; the right to your day in court. The Spitzer method was to target public companies and officials, leak allegations and out-of-context emails to a compliant press, watch the stock price fall, threaten a corporate indictment (a death sentence), and then move in for a quick settlement kill. There was rarely a trial, fair or unfair, involved.

On the substance, his court record speaks for itself. Most of Mr. Spitzer’s high-profile charges have gone up in smoke. A New York state judge threw out his case against tax firm H&R Block. He lost his prosecution against Bank of America broker Ted Sihpol (whom Mr. Spitzer threatened to arrest in front of his child and pregnant wife). Mr. Spitzer was stopped by a federal judge from prying confidential information out of mortgage companies. Another New York judge blocked the heart of his suit against Mr. Grasso. Mr. Greenberg continues to fight his civil charges. The press was foursquare behind Mr. Spitzer in all these cases, and in a better world they’d share some of his humiliation.

Update, Spitzer has now resigned. The rumors were that he was waiting to resign so that he could use it as a bargaining chip to keep from being prosecuted. Listen to the disingenuous jackass as he stands next to his wife. This is abuse to be sure.

Tags: Eliot Spitzer, emperor's club, media, prostitution, wall street journal, WSJ