November 24, 2010: Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer
Eliot Spitzer was once the new sheriff in town, who came to New York state as attorney general and later as Governor, vowing to clean up the corruption and filth in the state. And that he did for a number of years, making waves with groundbreaking investigations to bring Wall Street excesses under control, leading to prosecutions and new legislation designed to stand up for ordinary people. Then, Spitzer got caught with his hand in the cookie jar, so to speak, and resigned in disgrace. It was the only thing he could do, politically, but the whole story is not quite so cut and dried as that.
Spitzer was outed as a client of a high-priced prostitution ring. Now, that sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t end the career of a politician, depending on how it is handled. But Spitzer had cultivated a “Mr. Clean” image for years, bordering on the holier-than-thou, attacking corruption and systematic casual lawbreaking, indeed prosecuting the very escort businesses whose services he would later utilize. It’s obviously a dumbass thing to have done, and I think it’s fair for that to have cost him his political career, but does it need to dominate and prejudice all discussion of Spitzer from this day forward, and negate the effectiveness of the work he did for all those years?
Through a series of surprisingly candid interviews with a number of people including Spitzer himself, this documentary explores some of the back story behind Spitzer’s time in power, the enemies he made, and the escort businesses at the heart of this scandal, those establishments being relevant by virtue of them being so closely tied to the expense-account spending of greedy and irresponsible Wall Street bankers. From the start, Spitzer was fighting corruption in the system, but it’s clear that he may have been zealously overstepping his bounds in some cases, both politically as he pushed for much more radical change than the system was accustomed to (which was his prerogative as a strategy, and had its successes), as well as legally, as he fought tooth and nail as governor for certain changes and didn’t like to accept the authority of the state Senate as having a say in the matter. This all suggests a certain megalomaniacal streak – necessary for such radical change, but it can undermine one’s credibility. When Spitzer was exposed as a client of a certain escort service, he had no choice but to take the fall, or else he would be as corrupt and hypocritical as those he tried to prosecute for all those years.
But Client 9 delves further into the business back story, and that’s eye-opening. A number of Spitzer’s “victims” are interviewed, big business tycoons who had some of their plans foiled and part of their oversized chunk of the pie reduced, and alpha-male characters like these tend to seethe with venom for anyone who gets in the way of them owning EVERYTHING. A notable example of this is Hank Greenberg, who was the CEO of the bailed-out AIG insurance company. He can clearly be shown to have pushed for the structuring of investments which led to the eventual downfall of the company, though he was pushed out by investigations spearheaded by Spitzer before the collapse. Still, Greenberg and others were doing everything in their power to bring down Spitzer, including private investigations which led to the leaking of information which created the scandal. To give a sense of the mentality behind a guy like Greenberg, the interviewer asks him how much his AIG stock was worth after the collapse. He says “virtually worthless…about $100 million”. Clearly I don’t play hard enough to play with guys like this.
So Eliot Spitzer is basically a well-intentioned, but seriously flawed and not necessarily likeable person, who through his own hypocrisy left himself open to being brought down by rich and powerful men. He’s done some good work, but he’s also pushed further than he should have at times. He’ll have to live with the fallout from this scandal and what it means for his credibility. On a more distressing note, this film and my earlier film this evening (Fair Game) both felt almost like sequels to Inside Job, which I saw last week. All three of these films tell ominous and eerily similar tales of rich and powerful people in business and government making sure that the little people don’t get too much of the pie, and that those who try to expose reality will be crushed. It’s pretty clear that it’s the reality of the world, and people are starting to talk openly about it, but I wonder when any meaningful change will come.
They’ll manage to destroy your reputation.
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