Spitzer’s fall from grace saddens me
I’ll admit, I’m one of those people who are thrilled to see the back of Eliot Spitzer, New York’s law unto himself. I’m just disappointed that his fall was prompted by a petty sex scandal.
Spitzer made a career out of screwing people he shouldn’t have screwed. But since he went around destroying the careers of high-profile people, often with no basis in fact, and with little more moral justification than the puerile principle that every Goliath must be wrong and every David right, I really would have preferred him being taken down by one of his victims, such as Hank Greenberg or Dick Grasso. I wish the victims of Spitzer the judge, Spitzer the jury and Spitzer the executioner, had been able to defend themselves against their inquisitor.
Problem is, he didn’t often bring those victims before a court, where his self-aggrandizing crusades might have faced rational, independent scrutiny. He preferred extortion and public humiliation as his weapons of choice. He preferred to denounce the heretics from his bully pulpit, and club them with the extraordinary legal powers he wielded.
Take Dick Grasso, for example, who got publicly humiliated with disclosures and insinuations that were none of Spitzer’s business. By all accounts, Grasso did a great job keeping the New York Stock Exchange competitive against both upstart competition and foreign stock exchanges. The NYSE’s board thought fit to pay him handsomely for those services. Yet for some reason, Spitzer thought he had a right to second-guess the NYSE’s own shareholders. He thought he had the moral justification to publicly challenge Grasso over his remuneration, using absurd arguments about the stock exchange’s culpability for the behaviour of listed companies, or worse, that the performance of a stock exchange should be judged on whether share prices rise or fall. If that’s what Spitzer really wanted, he should have nationalised stock markets and got it over with, rather than singling out apparently innocent executives to strong-arm.
Speaking of innocent, the case of Maurice “Hank” Greenberg is even more blatant. Spitzer forced this long-serving head of an insurance company into a hasty resignation not by charging him in court, but by calling his actions illegal on television and threatening the company that employed him with indictment. If Greenberg had indeed broken the law, Spitzer’s duty was to charge and convict him in an independent court. It would have behooved him to do so without creating a media circus around it. But though he had been entrusted with the power to prosecute, Spitzer declined, preferring public insinuation as his billy-club. Last time I checked, falsely accusing someone of a crime on television constitutes defamation, not justice. As for the threat of indicting Greenberg’s employer, AIG, we know what such action can do to a company: Arthur Andersen was indicted, but was exonerated on appeal. By then, however, there was no company left to save. Justice delayed is justice denied, in such a case: indictment can be a death sentence for a company. It is an extraordinarily powerful, extraordinarily blunt instrument. Use it judiciously, or not at all. Spitzer abused it to ruin the careers of people he had no intention of giving their day in court. If he wasn’t entirely false, but had made good on that threat, he would have robbed shareholders, destroyed jobs, reduced competition and punished policy-holders, just to feed his monumental ego and burnish his political stature as a supposed corruption buster. In his crusade against what he saw as corporate corruption, Spitzer came to epitomise the corruption of state power.
If he wants to screw around and hurt his family, that’s between him and his family. It’s reprehensible, but a man’s private moral failings are his own business. Granted, he was breaking New York law, and no person given a position of public trust should get away with doing so. Granted also that he exposed an office of public trust to the risk of blackmail and extortion, which is a grave offence. But still, it is an unsatisfying end to his career. He should have crashed and burned in one of the dogfights he picked with innocent high-fliers. That would have been justice served.
