Note to media: Please stop referring to Eliot Spitzer as the Sheriff of Wall Street. The title certainly doesn't fit now, and arguably didn't fit a decade ago when he took Wall Street to task for putting out conflicted research on stocks. Lest we forget, Spitzer never prosecuted -- let alone jailed -- a single person he implicated in "Analystgate." Preferring to try his cases in the court of public opinion, Spitzer resembled less a sheriff in the wake of the dot-com bust than a demagogue, who in the end did little to reform the market.
But that hasn't stopped Spitzer from glomming onto the Occupy Wall Street movement and hoping it provides a media comeback of sorts, brandishing his alleged bona fides as protector of the proverbial Little Guy from the evils of finance. In the past few weeks, Spitzer could be found throwing his support behind protestors on Keith Olbermann's show on Current TV, which he followed up by sharing a stage with ProPublica reporters Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger at the Tenement Museum on New York's Lower East Side for the first in a series of monthly "Tenement Talks" that ProPublica plans to hold.
It was during that gig that Spitzer, always one to give a good sound bite, called for a petition demanding the ouster of Timothy Geithner in favor of Paul Volcker, Joe Stiglitz, Paul Krugman or Robert Reich -- "people who understand what can be done and are willing to flex their muscles in a meaningful way."
That, of course, led to a slew of celebratory headlines in other outlets, such as The Atlantic Wire's "Sheriff of Wall Street Backs Occupy Wall Street." Spitzer has also dedicated at least two of his recent Slate columns to the protests, including one where he correctly calls out Bill Kristol for running TV ads that paint the movement as anti-Semitic. In addition, Spitzer could be found opining on Occupy Wall Street with The New Yorker's David Remnick at the magazine's "The Big Story" event. And New York magazine tapped Spitzer to discuss capitalism with a protestor and ran their conversation as an "annotation" to an essay by Frank Rich on class warfare.
In talking to that protestor (Manissa Maharawal, a CUNY graduate student in anthropology who seems to be having her own media moment), Spitzer pats himself on the back for being one of the good guys. "Over the last ten or fifteen years, the global economy has lifted millions of people out of poverty," he tells Maharawal. "It's also had very significant and often negative effects here; I was one of the first people to say that we should deal with those problems."
Really? To be sure, Spitzer went after unscrupulous subprime lenders in New York as early as 2001 and brought down AIG's Hank Greenberg a few years later (a move Michael Lewis has suggested only hastened the insurer's disastrous demise, but that's another story).
But it was Spitzer's camera-ready pursuit of conflicted analysts such as Henry Blodget that earned him his metaphorical sheriff's badge and is now routinely rolled out as proof of his tough stand against Wall Street. "I know you worked to reform banking," Maharawal responds to Spitzer's self-adulation. "I know you took on all these cases as attorney general."
Reform banking? Since when does reforming an aspect of Wall Street research qualify as taking on the banking system? At a time when banking remains plagued by critical but unresolved issues that range from too-big-to-fail to executive compensation to capital requirements, crediting Spitzer as a bank reformer is crazy.
Furthermore, as much as Spitzer and his media admirers like to spin "Analystgate" as a crusade to protect the Little Guy, many of that scandal's victims were hardly members of the 99%, whom Spitzer now claims to feel such empathy for (neither is Spitzer, a Harvard grad and son of a wealthy real estate magnate). They were well-heeled individual investors -- well, speculators -- who were playing the stock market, like the Queens pediatrician who filed the arbitration suit against Blodget after spending nearly $1 million on dot-com stocks. And that's what rankles about the media's infatuation with New York's former attorney general and onetime governor: Most, like Maharawal, simply accept his own description of his accomplishments.
Before booking Spitzer for another appearance, commissioning him to write another column or conducting another interview, editors should ask themselves this: If so many people wanted to hear from Spitzer, wouldn't more of them have watched his now-canceled cable TV show? Maybe the public has spoken.
Yvette Kantrow is executive editor of The Deal magazine.
Follow Yvette Kantrow on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MediaManeuvers
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Eliot Spitzer did better than most in going after Wall Street, but you are right to point out the lack of criminal convictions he obtained in going after Wall Street crooks.
Sptizer did do the right thing in forcing Greenberg out at AIG. Devin Leonard & Peter Elkind wrote a great article in Fortune (posted online July 25, 2005) titled "Hank's Big Fall" that outlines some of the criminality at AIG while Greenberg was in charge. And I,Tim Lytal, am personally on file with the U.S. Justice Dept. accusing AIG & Greenberg of being involved in money laundering for organized crime. Their actions against me for speaking out against them and in furtherance of their criminal organization in this regard finally became an FBI matter (Indianapolis office) in 2008.
If Michael Lewis who, at least at the outset of the financial crisis, seemed to put an undue emphasis on the role Wall Street's recklessness played in the financial crisis, as opposed to Wall Street's criminality, thinks it was a bad thing that Spitzer forced Greenberg out, than he is way off base.
Mr. Lewis needs to spend more time researching and meditating on the criminality at AIG under Greenberg. Anybody who protests Greenberg's ouster from AIG is making themselves look bad.
I hope you will do another story on the issue of Spitzer forcing Greenberg out at AIG and enlighten us as to what Mr. Lewis' "angle" is on taking the position he has taken on this matter.
He is not a god, but he is better than a lot of what we have.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/27/eliot-spitzer-wall-street-fallen-angel
My beef with people like Spitzer and Anthony Weiner is that they allowed themselves to get caught with their pants down, depriving Progressives of their clear and articulate voices for fairness and liberal values. It's too bad Spitzer will be relegated to punditry for the rest of his career, when he could clearly being doing so much more good as a politician.
Regardless of anything and everything, the 99% will prevail............!