Eliot Spitzer and AIG

[Magda Hassan]

Was Eliot Spitzer Taken Out Because He Was Going to Bust AIG?
Posted by Melina Ripcoco, Brilliant at Breakfast at 3:39 PM on March 19, 2009.


America is known for its great second acts, and we may be witnessing the curtain rising on Spitzer's.

Eliot Spitzer is back and he's talking. The thought of this, no doubt, brings a small shiver to the boardrooms of some of the perps walking around trying to figure out how to hide the money this week. Today Edward Liddy testified that there have been death threats made to or about executives who received bonuses, so no names will be put on the record, but these anonymous players must know that the jig is up in the land of easy-money. Isn't what to do a no-brainer for these great Americans?



Spitzer may be as "disgraced" as any anonymous sex loving Republican loser, but America is known for its great second acts, and we may be witnessing the curtain rising on Spitzer's.
Today in Slate Eliot Spitzer has a short op-ed that speaks volumes about what is going on, and indirectly, if you follow the money, what happened to him. Plainly stated, Spitzer brings the AIG Ponzi Scheme one step closer to the revered establishment when he explains how the bailout money was funneled straight into the top players, with Goldman Sachs being the name that comes up again and again. These top players already got bailout money, and Goldman is looking at zero losses at this point, while regular Americans are being asked to make concessions or just plain losing everything. here are the biggest financial entities in the world, making billions on what appears to have been nothing but air traded back and forth, and having gutted the American people they are walking away with 100% return to their stockholders. In return AIG seems to think that its appropriate to pay themselves bonuses with the leftover funds. This leaves AIG still a wobbly shell with no plan of how to go forward, and the threat of the collapse of all of the world's financial markets still up in the air. So, what was all that bailout money for? Apparently to make sure that no one at Goldman or the other few top firms in the hand-out-line lost anything!



The relationship between AIG and Goldman goes back long enough that one would think that Goldman would know, having bought so much of this "insurance" or whatever it was, whether the "products" were ...er...real or feasible at all. Indeed, Goldman and AIG almost merged a few years ago, but Spitzer notes that the unknown black hole of AIG's business practices were probably what prevented it. Still, that didn't stop the incestuous dealings; it almost makes one think that this whole thing was a setup.


This is country that Spitzer is familiar with; he has been a terrible liability to entities that, under the Bush administration, were allowed to literally gut the country and its citizens. All of this seems to have been part of the Bush Administration's own Ponzi Scheme, which figured that the illusion of an ownership society, terrified of the "terraism" and steeped in the me, me, me, culture would look the other way while they finished clearing out the vault. Beyond that, it's clear that the media hyped housing bubble encouraged the house flip mentality and the idea that anyone could be rich. The idea of the lottery dropping on our own heads made us more protective of the rich, because we might one day be one....or look, we could be one with no money down, if we could just balance that on this, and flip that house!!



Every week came a new offer from our bank or credit card to just put the enclosed check into the bank for a $50,000 loan, unsecured and with a low APR!! Who would know that those same banks would go out of their way to cause a day or week default by changing the cycle or stopping refusing cards that went over-limit, in order to charge fees and raise the rates. Who could know that the fine print on all those little fliers talking about privacy rights and how they are selling all of our information, also said that by-the-way the interest rate is now 25% and the minimum payment has tripled! Default on that and likely AIG has sold insurance to your lending institution that should repay them for making the bad loan in the first place....no money down mortgages? No problem....its the same story. This is the ownership society and we all need to own alot of stuff. It is... what did he say?...uniquely American!



Spitzer was questioning this back in February 2008 when he wrote his Valentine to predatory lenders in the Washington Post. He detailed that Attorneys General across the country had entered into litigation in an attempt to protect the people of their states from predatory lending. The response from the federal government was astounding!

What did the Bush administration do in response? Did it reverse course and decide to take action to halt this burgeoning scourge? As Americans are now painfully aware, with hundreds of thousands of homeowners facing foreclosure and our markets reeling, the answer is a resounding no.


Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.



snip



In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government's actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules.



But the unanimous opposition of the 50 states did not deter, or even slow, the Bush administration in its goal of protecting the banks. In fact, when my office opened an investigation of possible discrimination in mortgage lending by a number of banks, the OCC filed a federal lawsuit to stop the investigation.

Now, they will say that they fought the consumer protection laws to actually protect the consumers and assure that they could get credit in the future. But actually, Americans could get credit; just credit that they were able to handle and could, by reasonable standards, pay back. This was just more of the same in hindsight. Looking back that all that the Bush administration has done, the beginnings of this disaster looks almost quaint, and not like an institutionalized foray into the dirty underside of criminal activity. There were quotas passed by the government as to who got the loans and the focus was on certain populations who would be helped into homeownership even if they couldn't maintain the credit. It was treated as some sort of fulfillment of the American Dream for people to own something, but really had more to do with the insurance on the loans than the people involved. The American dream is dead, as we well know, but what it was, way back then, was that people could
afford
to own a house and put their kids in college!

AIG sold insurance to the biggest entities in the financial world to cover the proliferation of bad loans. This insurance became so common that it was impossible that the lions of finance didn't somehow have an inkling that something was wrong. Didn't Goldman and the rest of these huge firms know something about the stability of an impossible business plan? Hadn't Goldman gone over everything in their bid to merge? And what of the government and their mandating of certain loans that were bound to go bad. There were people involved in these things, and its not like regular people understand the ins and outs of the financial industry. They rely on brokers to explain it to them. But these brokers were being forced to see a certain product to an unqualified population. How could they? Why would they? Those are questions for another time.




Spitzer has been fighting these guys and asking questions all along
. Coincidentally, right after the WSJ editorial appeared on Valentine's Day 2008, Spitzer was caught up in what was an extremely unusual sting. So unusual is an investigation like this that it seems almost like it was a set-up; and considering where it all came from and how it all came down, it might well have been.

It seems that Spitzer's bank was investigating expenses under the auspices of the newer Homeland Security laws of the Bush administration.
Greg Palast
wrote about this compellingly, and in light of how the whole thing is shaking out now, and what Spitzer said back then about this financial mess and what he tried to
DO
about it, Palast had a pretty good early grasp on what had gone down. So now, with Spitzer poking his head up from the underground of "healing his family," at this most compelling of moments, its probably worthwhile for Americans to screw their heads on straight and forget the details of the hooker, and look at what Spitzer was working on when he was taken down. We might all find ourselves wanting to thank the egotistical crime fighter who cant keep it in his pants.

I am no apologist for breaking the law, and usually its the highest and mightiest that fall the hardest. But when the mainstream is showing us the shiny object, we must resist the temptation to succumb to our base natures and try to see the bigger picture. There was never a real case against Eliot Spitzer, and no charges were filed. The release of embarrassing personal information was at the discretion of the Bush Administration's Justice Department.

Why was this information released? It wasn't that he was a crusader against such crimes, because many who have been caught were exactly the same and their information has been kept quiet. It wasn't that the press is all so great in their investigative journalism, either...because we know they're loathe to get off their asses if they can just read a talking point; as is evidenced by the reportage on this case.




Palast
:

Not all crimes lead to federal bust or even public exposure. It’s up to something called “prosecutorial discretion.”


Funny thing, this ‘discretion.’ For example, Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, paid Washington DC prostitutes to put him in diapers (ewww!), yet the Senator was not exposed by the US prosecutors busting the pimp-ring that pampered him.

Naming and shaming and ruining Spitzer – rarely done in these cases - was made at the ‘discretion’ of Bush’s Justice Department.



Or maybe we should say, 'indiscretion.'

Bush's Justice Department.
Its clear to me that all things being equal, this was at the very least, not a transsexual streetwalker a la Hugh Grant, and it was all very ho-hum and quiet. So, whatever the problem that leads to this sort of behavior, I don't want to know about it...its personal, so just walk on by...nothing to see here.





Welcome back Eliot Spitzer. I hope we hear more from you very soon...your voice is needed in this matter.





c/p RIP Coco

[Jan Klimkowski]

Lil' Dick Cheney was allegedly using the same hooker service as Spitzer. So, it was clearly a spook-sanctioned callgirl service.

Spitzer, ahem, didn't play the game so his indiscretions were used to discredit him.

Lil' Dick, of course, is The Game, so his depravities are essentially ignored.

There are pictures, screengrabs, and much more interesting information at the link below:

http://www.truthalliance.net/Archive/tab...fault.aspx

Giulianni, Cheney and Abramoff All Used the Same Hooker Service as Spitzer, All Connected to 9/11 Organized Criminal Network

Dick Cheney was a client of the all exclusive "Emporer's Club" which provided high end escorts to politicians, corporate executives, and anyone willing on paying the price, an average of $11,000 for just a couple hours.

Vice President Cheney, while CEO of Halliburton, was a client of the escort service of DC Madam, Deborah Jeane Palfrey. In addition, one of Cheney’s closest military advisers and friends was also a client of the DC Madam’s Pamela Martin & Associates escort service. Cheney used the escort service while he was a part time resident of the posh Ballantrae section of McLean, Virginia.

ABC News’ Brian Ross revealed that the list of customers of an alleged Washington-based prostitution service includes White House and Pentagon officials as well as prominent attorneys.

“There are thousands of names, tens of thousands of phone numbers,” Ross said. “And there are people there at the Pentagon, lobbyists, others at the White House, prominent lawyers — a long, long list.” Ross added that the women who worked for the service, potentially as prostitutes, “include university professors, legal secretaries, scientists, military officers.”

On Friday, Ross broke the news that U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Randall Tobias had frequented the escort service. Ross added new details to that story tonight, recounting how he asked Tobias in a telephone interview “if he knew any of the young women, their names. He said he didn’t remember them at all. He said it was like ordering pizza.” Under President Bush, Tobias oversaw a program helping men in poor countries “develop healthy relationships with women.”

Deputy Secretary of State Randall L. Tobias submitted his resignation Friday, one day after confirming to ABC News that he had been a customer of a Washington, D.C. escort service whose owner has been charged by federal prosecutors with running a prostitution operation.

Tobias, 65, director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), had previously served as the ambassador for the President's Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief.

A State Department press release late Friday afternoon said only he was leaving for "personal reasons."

After intense pressure from the White House and Disney executives, ABC News killed the DC Madam client story after having been given exclusive access to Palfrey’s ten years’ of phone call records.

Here are screen shots from the Emperor's Club VIP's website. The Emperor's Club, of course, is the "prostitution ring" that New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer allegedly penetrated with his sex bits. Let's see if it was worth $5,500 dollars an hour (and his governorship/career/family etc).

Gov. Eliot Spitzer has been caught on a federal wiretap arranging to meet with a high-priced prostitute at a Washington hotel last month, according to a person briefed on the federal investigation.

The wiretap recording, made during an investigation of a prostitution ring called Emperors Club VIP, captured a man identified as Client 9 on a telephone call confirming plans to have a woman travel from New York to Washington, where he had reserved a room. The person briefed on the case identified Mr. Spitzer as Client 9.

Senator Vitter has admitted and apologized for his part in the scandal, but is still in office, likely to be subpoenaed in the Spring 2008 trial of Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey.

Perhaps more sinister then the prostitution allegations are the questions of complicity in a media wash-out by ABC, whose in-house staff was originally given call records directly by Madam Palfrey.

Also according to Madsen, the probe of the DC Madam reveals much more troubling questions, including the unsolved murder of a US attorney and another fired in Bush's DOJ purge, both of whom were investigating the DC Madam case.

This network cover-up mirrors similar allegations made in Dan Rather's lawsuit against CBS News/Viacom. Hopeful his $70 million suit will go forward, Rather claims his controversial Texas Air Guard story was killed not because of the infamous disputed memo, but because of a call made from the White House.

Rather too, will likely name who in the Bush Administration made the call, and who at Viacom took it, also claiming CBS News quashed the Abu Ghraib detainee abuse scandal to curry White House favor, until it was reported by Australian news.

Reported on OpEd News last May, Cheney used this service and be sure to follow the trial this April, because network news may not!

The media black-out on the scandal involving DC Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey is surprising in light of the lack of lawsuits being leveled at the Wayne Madsen Report website. Instead of Dick Cheney and the recently resigned Randall Tobias filing libel and slander lawsuits against the site, we see only their silence. Moreover, the Wayne Madsen site has been continually expanding on this story - making this either the scoop of the century, or the biggest fairy tale in DC history.

Consider this: WMR is now reporting specifically who at ABC News' 20/20 became fully aware of not only Cheney's use of the escort service, but dozens more "high profile" names - culled from the phone records only since 2002 (the escort services full records go back to 1994). ABC's crack team was reportedly gagged by their bosses after concerned calls from the White House. This would be amazing if true, yet no White House denial has been forthcoming as of this writing...

WMR also reports that the DC Madam first came under DOJ scrutiny after US Attorney Thomas DiBiagio got a crooked cop Ed Norris (a pal of NYC Police Commish Bernard Kerik) to squeal on the escort service in May 2004, admitting the service had received illicit payouts from official police funds. Less then a year after Norris was hired as State Superintendent by Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich, another US Attorney, Johnathan Luna, who had also investigated Norris and Kerik back in NY turned up murdered in December of 2003. Luna at the time was working under DiBagio on the DC Madam case, finding Ehrlich and lobbyist Jack Abramoff were DC Madam clients. Then, DiBiagio became the first U.S. Attorney fired by the Justice Department after Bush's re-election in 2004. Vastly underreported, DiBagio's probe had linked Republican governor Ehrlich to Bob Ney, Tom DeLay, Duke Cunningham and others but the investigation died when he was fired.

It wasn't until Palfrey attempted to leave the country and sell her house that interest in the DC Madam was revived. A warrant eventually seized her assets. WMR reports that one DC law firm representing Saudi clients turned up on the phone list and that another patron on the list was a client of the law firm of Bracewell & Giuliani. Though Madsen can be a little quick to speculate, he stands by his claim, purportedly confirmed by three different sources, that Cheney's beltway phone number appeared in the records numerous time when he was CEO of Halliburton.

No major media has picked up the story, though David Letterman mentioned it in a recent monologue, quipping that Cheney paid the hooker service as much as $2 billion dollars to date. Washington Post did cover an aspect of the story but omitted any mention of Cheney.



Back at the excort service, customers must obtain exclusive access before they can begin to look for their "lady" for the night. Here, Truth Alliance has obtained exclusive screen shots of the selection from the site, where only members get access to a range of high end prostitutes.

This lady is Candace, a "smoldering Caribbean beauty." We have nothing more to add to that:

In fact, when the news broke, Bush's "AIDS Czar" Randall Tobias, a former Eli Lilly top exec, resigned in shame. He should have stalled a bit like Louisiana Senator David Vitter did - the story was going to be killed, according toWayne Madsen who named the ABC employee that pulled the plug after White House pressure.

Madsen expanded on the story after ABC dropped it, to allege that convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff was a client, as well as a lawyer in Rudy Giuliani's firm.

Jack Abramoff, aside from being in this prostitution ring, was part of an "ownership" group that bought the SunCruz line in Florida, where alleged 9/11 Hijacker Mohommed Atta was a Heroin dealer and regular client on the cruise's ships. Abramoff bought the company, even though it wasn't for sale, from a Gus Boulis, the famous Greek tycoon and owner of the Miami "Subs" Restaurant Chain. Gus Boulis accused Jack Abramoff of "faking a wire transfer" in the amount of $23 million, the equity they had agreed in the purchase of the Sun Cruz Line. The Cruise Line consists of a dozen unlicensed gambling boats, a fashion in any other state is considered criminal.

Gus Boulis was gunned down in his BMW while driving home from his Fort Lauderdale office on February 6, 2001. Just before the assassination, Adam Kidan, Abramoff's partner in the fraudulent purchase, got into a fist fight with Boulis at a meeting over this scandal where Gadahn is said to have threatened Boulis. Boulis had accused Abramoff of being "intimately involved with the Florida State and the United State Federal intelligence community and also accused Abramoff's partner, Adam Kidan, of having been connected to drug running operations and organized crime. This purchase of the Sun Cruz Line was very interesting.

Florida's "cruises to no where" represent the largest unregulated gambling industry in the United States, according to Bill Thompson, Professor of Gmabling at the University of Nevada. Once the boat reaches international waters, the gambling begins; as well as prostitution and drug dealing.

Unlicensed gambling boats have long been a favor of organized crime, money laundering operations and drug smuggling. Shortly after Abramoff bought the SunCruz Line, he leased a corporate jet from "Discover Air" to ferry Republican Congressional Staffers down to Tampa for the 2001 Superbowl and to gamble aboard a SunCruz ship.

Ironically, one of Discover Air's planes was caught with 43 lbs of Heroin on it, and the owner of the State Wide Airline, Wally Hilliard, received no punishment. Wally Hilliard was also owner of Huffman Aviation, where Mohommed Atta was "training" to be a pilot, aside from also being a Heroin dealer on the SunCruz Line.

To read about the CIA connections to drug running operations, click here for an article from Truth Alliance.

On September 26, 2001, The Associated Press reported that several employees from the SunCruz Line recognized Atta and 2 of the other hijackers as frequent guests.

Associated Press:

"SunCruz Casinos has turned over photographs and other documents to FBI Investigators after employees said they recognized some of the men suspected in the terrorist attacks as frequent customers....Names on a passenger list from September 5th on the cruise line matched those of the hijackers."
Abramoff's partner is commonly confused with Adam Gadahn, an Al-Qaeda operative. Adam gadahn and Adam Kidan are two different people all together. It is easy to confuse the two.

Adam Gadahn is the grandson of the founder of Mossad, the Israeli Intelligence Agency.

Newsweek magazine reports Adam Gadahn was named by none other than al Qaeda operations chief Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The magazine says Mohammed told interrogators he wanted Gadahn to join a plot to blow up fuel stations outside Baltimore. The report says Gadahn was willing to help, but would not join in any suicide operations because his wife was pregnant. Government sources say Mohammed had previously told interrogators of al Qaeda plans to attack gas stations in the Washington, D.C. and New York City areas.

Known as one of the masterminds of the 9/11 attacks, Mohammed had already fingered about a dozen Al Qaeda operatives. Officials say two of them, Adan al-Shikri Juma and Afias Sedeiki were among the seven listed last week with Gadahn.

Born Adam Pearlman in 1978, Adam Gadahn was an American-born English-speaking senior operative, cultural interpreter, spokesman and media adviser for the Islamist terrorist group Al Qaeda.

From 2004 to 2006 he appeared in a number of Al Qaeda videos produced by the organization as "Azzam the American" sometimes transcripted as Ezzam Al-Americee. He is felt to have inspired Bin Laden's September 2007 video.

In 2004, he was added to the FBI Seeking Information - War on Terrorism list. On May 26, 2004, United States Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller announced that reports indicated that Gadahn was one of seven Al-Qaeda members who were planning terrorist actions for the summer or fall of 2004. Gadahn's name was the only new name released by Mueller in this warning.

On October 11, 2006 he was removed from that list, and placed on the Bureau of Diplomatic Security Rewards for Justice list of wanted criminals. On the same day, Gadahn was indicted in the Southern Division of the United States District Court for the Central District of California by a federal grand jury for the capital crime of treason for aiding an enemy of the United States (i.e. Al Qaeda). Gadahn was the first American charged with treason since 1952.

In late 2005 it was widely reported that the Washington DC Republican Lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, pleaded guilty to tax evasion, fraud and conspiracy to bribe public officials. No one was ever arrested or convicted in the murder of Gus Boulis.

In February, 2008, Pakistani news sources reported rumors that Gadahn was killed by a missile fired by a MQ-1 Predator drone, in the strike that killed al-Qaeda leader Abu Laith al-Libi, but on March 2, an Al Qaeda spokesperson claimed that Gadahn was alive.

[Peter Lemkin]

"You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month."
--CIA operative, discussing the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories. Katherine the Great, by Deborah Davis