From Wikipedia:
Quote:
[Blagojevich threatened to halt the state’s dealings with Bank of America Corp. over a shut-down factory in Chicago. On December 8, 2008 (the day before his arrest), all state agencies were ordered to stop conducting business with Bank of America to pressure the company to make the loans. Blagojevich said the biggest U.S. retail bank would not get any more state business unless it restored credit to Republic Windows and Doors, whose workers were staging a sit-in. John Douglas, a former general counsel for the FDIC and attorney for Bank of America, called Blagojevich's worker support dangerous.
I have always found the timing of the Blagojevich arrest interesting given the above passage. To me, the Blagojevich case finds an equally intriguing parallel in the Eliot Spitzer sex scandal. If you recall, the Spitzer case broke a few weeks after he penned a Washington Post editorial calling for an investigation into possible wide scale criminal activitiy committed by Wall Street financiers in the mortgage mess. As governor of New York, he had the power to oversee such an investigation and had in fact risen to power in the state by cultivating a reputation as a merciless opponent of white collar criminals. Alan Greenspan, by the way, was one of his main nemeses. At the time of Spitzer's arrest, many legal analysts commented that the FBI was taking almost unprecedented action in bringing federal charges against Spitzer for buying sex. Since his arrest, no formal charges have actually been filed against Spitzer. We'll see what happens with Blago.
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Antonio Gramsci wrote:
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
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