Why the Old Sheriff of Wall Street’s Prostitution Scandal Shouldn’t Have Mattered
When Eliot Spitzer effectively cracked down on Wall Street corruption, America’s twisted sense of morality blocked the good sheriff’s crusade against a far worse immorality than his tie-up with whores. Les Leopold swiftly sums it up:
When Eliot Spitzer was New York Attorney General (and earned the handle Sheriff of Wall Street), he uncovered how hedge funds were maneuvering around trading rules like a Ferrari speeding around the hapless shmoes stuck in midtown traffic. Hedge funds were allowed to jump in and out of mutual funds many more times than normal investors, enabling them to score high returns at the expense of regular mutual fund customers. They even got away with booking trades hours after the market closed for the day — a real perk, since market-moving announcements often are made right after closing. You don’t need to go to Wharton to make big bucks on this one: All you do is wait a few hours to judge the impact of the after-closing news, then book your trades at the 4 pm price. Spitzer forced the guilty parties to pay several billion dollars in fines.
Caring more about punishing Spitzer for his hooker-involvement than his work on clamping down on rampant Wall Street criminality is just like how this country cared more about Clinton getting his weiner massaged than the Rwandan genocide, than Clinton’s bombing of Iraq (where hundreds of thousands of people were killed), and his bombing of Bosnia.
But that’s Puritanism for you. Put the fine lenses on distinct and famous genitalia while ignoring genocide, invasion, famine, and gratuitous, profitable war. I say, let Spitzer play with prostitutes, as long as he continued to whip the degenerate beast with two backs that fucks the American people with toxic debt, and then bets against their coming fiscal demise.
