The Politics of Corruption

Two stories that stuck together in my mind (and I'm not the only one who sees the connections). The first, via via Nicole Bell at C&L, is about Eliot Spitzer. From Greg Palast:

While New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was paying an ‘escort’ $4,300 in a hotel room in Washington, just down the road, George Bush’s new Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben Bernanke, was secretly handing over $200 billion in a tryst with mortgage bank industry speculators.

Both acts were wanton, wicked and lewd. But there’s a BIG difference. The Governor was using his own checkbook. Bush’s man Bernanke was using ours.

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.

No bail-outs for the homeowners. No nothing for the homeowners. $200 billion for the loan sharks.

Read the article -- it's quite detailed and more than a little damning. And then think about who conrols America. It ain't you and me.

The second story is Don Siegelman. Again via Nicole Bell, here's an article from Onepissesdoffliberal at Daily Kos. Bell includes this comment on an article by Sam Stein:

A new review of evidence suggests that an aligned group of Republican interests were pressing for — and seeking to profit financially from — the trial of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman on charges of bribery, according to Sam Stein of HuffPo.

It's fairly conclusive that the key witness against Siegelman was lying, but the Justice Department refuses to reopen the investigation. Who's involved? Remember that the 60 Minutes segment on Siegelman's persecution was blacked out in northern Alabama by TV stations owned by a prominent Republican.

This is the Bush Justice Department at work.

Write your representatives and senators and demand investigations. It's about all you can do.