Fascinating stuff. This of course in no way excuses Spitzer's sexual indiscretions and in many ways makes his behavior additionally infuriating for supporters of ethics and oversight of the financial markets.

EJ:

Some of Palast's screed is fairly accurate, others verge into wild-eyed conspiratorial thinking.

Look at it this way. As I blogged this morning, the current meltdown is indeed traceable to Bush administration policies, including the OCC preemption fiasco that both Greg and I make note of. And the subprime industry certainly has a disproportionate impact on minorities, although I'd argue that it's a little more subtle than Greg makes it out to be. (There are three factors at work here. One is that minorities tend to have lower credit scores, for complex and tangled reasons. That's the industry's standard defence, but can only account for part of the discrepancy. Another factor is steering, when disreputable brokers push minorities into subprime loans. But the biggest problem seems to take place on the level of corporate decision making. Relatively few major banks open lending operations in the poor, inner-city neighborhoods where minorities predominate. Instead, they have their subprime subsidiaries open offices in those areas; independent subprime lenders also filled the void. That meant that the local lenders, to whom area residents first turned for loans, tended to be pushing subprime deals.)

But what has any of that to do with Spitzer?

True, he was a tireless crusader against the worst excesses of the moneyed and privileged on Wall Street. But I could as easily point out that the man had prosecuted prostitution rings and championed landmark anti-trafficking legislation, and darkly insinuate that the prostitution rackets entrapped him and then turned him in, thus ridding themselves of an implacable foe. In neither case would I have a shred of evidence to support the allegation.

The tragedy of Spitzer is that he was so right on so many issues, only to be undone by his own appetites and hubris. Were the prosecutors on the case, and perhaps their supervisors up the chain, gleeful at the chance to take down such a high-profile figure? I don't know, but there's some reason to believe they went out of their way to humiliate him. Even if they hadn't secured a second wiretap order just to get him on tape, though, they had him dead-to-rights. And the blame for that falls on Spitzer, and not on anyone else.

EJ,

My friends say I'm crazy but I believe there's something more to the Spitzer prosecution and it's not just schadenfreude at the expense of a guy who was a bit "holier than thou" while he was ruining lives on Wall Street (and remember the big names got off, Spitzer only managed to actually prosecute smaller players and some of them wound up winning in court).

I don't think this is revenge from the financial community, though. I think it's a signal from the Bsuh administration -- that they have enough access into people's lives that they can take down a big fish.

Of course it is just speculation but it is so obvious that it almost doesn't need to be said. Of course if the law firms defending the banks got wind of his shenanigans they would work to set this up. One would have to be a fool to not realize this. That makes Spitzer the biggest fool of all. The governor a repeat customer at a brothel. And he thought the employees were not going to gossip about it? Incredibly stupid. He definitely deserved to go down for this alone.

Of course there's no excuse for Spitzer's foolish and reprehensible conduct. Nonetheless, it has been the Republican M.O. for decades to take out promising Democrats from national contention.