[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Welcome back initiates. We are here with the Scarlet Thread Society once more. As always, as you enter the lodge, some words of warning, lock your door, close your windows, cover your mirrors and light a little tobacco with us toward the evil spirits. Joining me again today after a lengthy absence, perhaps only in my own mind, is the high meggos of smoke-filled rooms and the auger of dirty dealings. Mr. Mike Roach, welcome back again. Good to have you back, or good to be back rather, you're the one who's having me back. This time, yes. So, Dex, I want to talk to you about a little known aspect of the broader series of events known as the Greater Financial Crisis. We all watched unfold, and we probably didn't kind of understand what's going on. You and I kind of, there's always been a theme amongst our episodes, right? That like, you're observing these kind of trends, right? But someone is forcing this stuff happening, right? And that's where the really interesting angle is. So, Dex, do you want to give the audience introduction on the topic today, or do you want me to handle that? Well, a little bit of a tease, right? We will work back to our actual subject matter, but as you and I were discussing this, I sprawled it out pretty quickly as I will tend to do. So, I will give the broad topic for consideration, and then we can get into the more specific example, or some point, perhaps, is a better word, that we were going to discuss about it. Everyone in the audience has a boomer con in their life, somewhere, that believes that Barack Hussein Obama is the head of the Illuminati. Every single one of you hearing this has someone in your life that thinks he is the king of the lizard people. He is not. He is the public face of a certain team of them that got to parade around and get rich in power on their behalf for approximately eight years. Now, the reason that everyone thinks he is the big chief of the evil in the shadows is because his regime heralded a change of power among certain teams, a shifting in alliances, an ebbing and a flowing of influence, and Mr. Mike Roach brought to my attention an event that I hadn't even considered. It was removed from my regional politics, but upon further examination appears to be an interesting case study in this fight that was happening in and around that individual whom I just named. Does that feel like a good introduction that we're doing here? So, let's talk about... Let's pull the curtain back, and let's talk about client number nine. That ringing a bell to anybody? I'm sure it is. Client number nine is a former governor of New York by the name of Elliot Spitzer. Elliot Spitzer was brought down in 2008 in a prostitution scandal, the girl by the name of Ashley Dupree. You probably know those names you've definitely seen her face before. You definitely remember the Mayflower Hotel. You definitely have probably heard the name of the Emperor's Club. Now, all of that is the fact that the sitting governor of New York, a man who had been the attorney general, the sheriff of Wall Street, Elliot Spitzer, was patronizing a high-end prostitution ring. He had gone after people for using prostitution rings like this. So obviously powerful guys, they get wrapped up in stuff like this. You know, they have weird tastes, they're routinely on a regular basis. This is not Alina. Mike and Paz have sold out and they're taking the cheap angle. The governor of New York uses prostitutes. You're telling me for the first time. Yeah, this is so shocking. That's not the angle on this. So why would it be Spitzer? Why would Spitzer get brought down in this way? And let's just take it right from the get-go. Client number nine. Did we ever find out who clients won through Adar? Were there only nine guys? Was there only one client? If there was only one client, you know what I mean? Well, so if you want to play that game, if there is just one client, perhaps it is client number nine. I've heard a lot of chatter about the subliminal messaging in that Beatles song. Number nine, number nine. However, fucking win way back on Sergeant Pappers. But that's an even more schizophrenic. Let me, let me, let me, because I was hoping you avoid that. But let's just, let's just dive in head on because, because the evidence, the public evidence, this is from Elliot Spitzer himself, who apparently stumbled upon the link for the Emperor's Club VIP on the internet. He was just looking around on the internet for hookers. Apparently, this is, this is the official. Well, that is something you could do. That is something that you entirely could do. Well, he apparently found it in 2006. That doesn't, you know, again, all of, I'm saying this could happen. This is not out of the realm of the possible. But let's say, for example, you've been running in these same circles as Elliot Spitzer. Maybe you've been to some of the same weird parties, right? And maybe Elliot Spitzer has been a thorn in your side, right? Maybe Elliot Spitzer had taken down some of your allies, made some moves that you were trying to run a little bit more difficult. It's probably not the most difficult guy to entrap. If you know that he's got that proclivity, right? So who would have the motivation to do this? Who would be like looking out for something like this? There have been a lot of rumors about, oh, well, it was Wall Street, right? It was, it was, hold on, let me grab the guy's name right here. So Alex Gibney, who you might know from the Enron movie, did a, did a movie on this called "Client Number Nine." And Gibney's allegation is that it's intra-Wall Street, right? Because, you know, Elliot Spitzer, the steamroller, yada, yada, yada, the sheriff of Wall Street, Spitzer came from money, right? Spitzer, while he was certainly a crusader, he was a political guy first and foremost, right? Well, I mean, they always are. That's how that always works. Spitzer came from like a Donald Trump-type family before Donald, right? In that there were long-time developers in that kind of non-household name rich of New York, right? Subways in black cars rich, right? As we would say out here. So his two big enemies, right? AIG, former chief executive Hank Greenberg and Ken Langen, ex-director of the MYSC. These are the exact type of guys where if they were wrapped up in something like the Emperor's Club, they would have probably ran into this guy, right? So that's the popular speculation. But there's a lot of things that happened in 2008 between the fall of 2007 and January of 2009 of Obama's inauguration. There was the most change to the political economy of the United States of America that there has ever been since FDR and that whole thing. FDR's FDR probably is exactly where I would have gone with that. Take your pick of whatever pivotal left-word communist shift happened in the late '20s, early '30s. That was the biggest sense. So who is the guy that's kind of running all of that for Obama, right? He's Geithner. He's Tim Geithner. Whose job do you think that he got? Let's say for example, Hillary Clinton ends up winning the 2008 primary. She very well might do. You know, having the governor of New York ready to go on her team, the sheriff of Wall Street, right? This is when people really believe that. And Spitzer did put guys away. Spitzer did go after people. Obviously, you know, when you're compromised, it kind of gives you, in many ways, to do some of these things, right? Because if you know who's pulling your strings, they're going to give you the targets, right? That had always been an allegation around Spitzer. Nobody could ever prove it, right? There's a very easy case to be made that perhaps maybe a target was made out of him. The problem is that at least Spitzer is not just a guy. At least Spitzer is the governor of New York. At least Spitzer is arguably what? One of the top 10 most powerful officials in the entire country. You know, say what you want about the state of New York. Finance is concentrated here. You get your pick of the litter, you get the president, you get the VP, you get three or four guys in Congress, a couple cabinet members. It's easy then to slot the top governors into that next bracket of like seven through ten. Exactly. And that's the pool from which the kind of next guys to run are drawn. That's where the next vice presidents, the next attorney generals are found, right? Yeah, that's the farm league for the true exactly. And so Spitzer is certainly one of those guys and there was a lot of sort of scuttlebutt and speculation at the time that, you know, well, maybe it was even thought that Spitzer might have been an '08 guy. Spitzer was also a longtime Clinton loyalist, so he was never going to run against Hillary. But there was every chance that Eliot Spitzer comes in as Hillary Clinton's attorney general. And the entire roll up of the financial crisis goes entirely differently because by the spring of 2008, the cracks are starting to show, right? So the fact that something is coming in the economy and it's got a lot to do with Wall Street and there've been misbehavior was certainly a known fact, right? So then we have to look at when does this thing start to happen. So the earliest rumblings of this are found. And again, this is all the official story. We don't know kind of anything beyond this, but let's deal with known facts here. This is all in the Washington Post, which, as you want to just take a brief digression and tell the audience about the Washington Post and what it means and what it doesn't. Well, I guess the whole thing people should keep in mind about the Washington Post is that, well, it is pretty explicitly decried in popular culture as a sort of partisan rag sleaze mag. More often than not being one of the few magazines that's at least red team sympathetic. I should say newspaper, not magazine, left in the country. A lot of times they're sort of the first place. You get to see actual left wing dirt appear before it then immediately gets buried by the mainstream narrative. So with the idea in mind, I guess I don't even know. The Washington Post is like the, if you will, the house paper of kind of... The red faction of the insider purple team. Yeah. Yeah. It's the place where you can safely err dirty laundry or try to get a counter narrative out in a, not necessarily prestigious, but accepted actual institutional media environment. You know, we live in a world now where the media unity is so strong that anything the Post tries to do is going to get strangled. But if you've got a bone to pick against the blue team and you need legacy media on your side, the Post is where you can try to make it happen. So Wednesday, this is from Wednesday, March 12, 2008. The FBI apparently placed a surveillance team on Spitzer at the Mayflower Hotel for the first time on January 26th for concluding from a wiretap conversation that he might try to meet with a prostitute when he traveled to Washington to attend. And you know what, if I can jump in just right there. Governor or not, what is the FBI doing, putting taps and a surveillance team on someone for a fucking hooker sting? So, here is, here is where it comes, it becomes interesting as to... Yeah, there's your tea I'll try. The wise as to the wise and the house, because apparently the investigation of Spitzer was initiated after North 4th Bank reported suspicious transactions to the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Act, Enforcement Network, as required by the Bank Secrecy Act, which was enhanced by... You already know where I'm going with this, the Patriot Act. So this is the official version, right? That the process by which banks have been turned into cops, right? Which I obviously have time for the argument that, you know, what's the difference? They always have been, right? I'm not unsympathetic to that argument, but I don't... But it's an explicitizing now, and it's only been ever headed in that direction, right? So, why did they do that? Why him? Again, this is apparently just clients one through eight, nobody thought to look for them. So, they find Elliot Spitzer, they observe this meeting, and this meeting apparently happened. This is the second meeting on February 13th, and this is when they actually wiretapped the rooms on February 13th, 2008. They observed him handing Kristen, who was later identified as Ashley Dupree, who became the public face of the scandal. Very quickly, a speculation, who is she? You know, she came through the New York nightclub circuit, briefly tried to have a music career, speculation. So they observed him on a wiretap. Apparently, 4,300 in cash was exchanged along with a deposit for future services. So, like, they really got him, right? They got him on all of the elements, right? Dead two rights. Once this all happens in Room 871 at the Mayflower Hotel, which was booked under the name of George Fox, pseudonym that was allegedly the name of a close friend, the guy at a hedge fund. Why does the Sheriff of Wall Street have close friends at hedge funds? Well, because he grew up wealthy with a real estate investment family, but we don't talk about that, right? Because, well, and even if it weren't that, we all know the natural consequence of regulating something is actually just to make friends in the history. You know, these guys are never actually their enemies. And I know the audience is wise to that, but it bears repeating. So, again, apparently the official story of what kicked all this off is really the funny part is that Spitzer had broken up the transactions. He wanted to send more than $10,000 to the same company in a short amount period of time that it raised the flag that he was engaging in transactions. What's the technical term? In transactional structure, which is a big no-no. And that's apparently what caused all this. So, we're expected to believe that this high-level financial crime's attorney, which is really how Spitzer made his bonds. I cannot understate his reputation, having grown up in his area, seen this guy on the news. I mean, he went to Princeton. He kind of drew even Harvard Law, right? And this was when that meant a lot more than it does now. This is a 1590 SAT score guy. And yet he somehow still got hammered for something that even the dumbest gangbangers are able to do well? But the dumbest gangbanger will tell you, now, dog, you got to do that for $9,500. The government don't know about that. The government can't track that. He's not right, but he's at least thinking about that. Like, that is in the front of his mind. And it was apparently in the front of the governor's mind. And then he refused to sign for the wire rather than just signing for one large wire and hit it in the open. Like, it probably would have gotten lost. It possibly would have gotten lost in the wash, right? Yeah, I mean, especially for a guy like that, it's almost safer to just do it anyways and say that it was something that's not. It was at, you know, like in his situation, he's the sort of guy that moves enough money at sufficient volume that it would be way easier for him to just pass that off as a different transaction and let it get flagged, but flag it as something. That is exactly right. So what starts to happen? So things escalate relatively quickly, you know, because once something like this breaks, it has to go big and it has to go public and it has to go hard. So on March 10th, there were already arrests. By March 10th, this was already in the Times. March 13th, the Post had blown it all absolutely out of proportion. One second, having trouble with my HDMI cable. I thought it was the globalist. It's actually just a cable. I did, in fact, test the underlying equipment. I thought we were being attacked during the last service. Well, you know, this is the sort of conversation that can get us into trouble. One reason why I think people didn't really look at it. Well, that and the fact that I truly believe that, you know, this is the exact type of story that can truly get lost in the shuffle, right? And I don't, and I genuinely mean that there are things that just end up lost in the tide of kind of bigger, more substantial parts of the news. But also the exact type of thing that kind of anybody with enough of an axe to grind would either be susceptible to an offer or be already in on it on one side, on one of the teams, if you will. So, to go back to the sequencing of events now that I've gotten my computer monitor working again, apologies for my unprofessionalism there. On March 10, Eliot Spitzer resigns, I have acted in a way that violates my obligation to my family and violates my or any sense of right and wrong. I apologize first and foremost to my family. I apologize to the public to whom I promise better. I disappointed and failed to live up to the standards I expected of myself and I must now dedicate some time to regain the trust of my family. By March 17, he was gone, and less than in about a week and a half, again, a top 20 guy with with ambitions on, you know, job one through five, completely gone. You know, it's, this is kind of where you're going with this, but for anyone who's listening and not quite catching it, think about just how fast the turnaround on that is. Think about how long scandals stretch out these days, how long they have in the past, how long they have just consistently throughout US history. A politician with a rabid enough fan base can survive any scandal, or at least fight it for weeks on end. And this was what? A week, two weeks after the first arrest started. Week and a half, week and a half approximately. Yeah. Yeah. So this dude was cooked basically immediately and know everybody. Everybody turned on every single person. Now, there's one part of New York City that was celebrating, according to Neil Minow, a corporate governance expert Wall Street reaction to the scandal was largely positive. And that there had been broad dislike of Elliot Spitzer amongst investment professionals. Governor Spitzer made his rise to victory in New York City politics promising ethics and integrity. And he had been noted for prosecuting several high end prostitution, which to me is just absolutely, absolutely hilarious. And that, and you add in the fact that apparently Mr. Lang and his pop and bottle champagne when this all happens, right? And then you get to, and this is years, years, years, years, years, years, years later. Roger Stone in 2013 pops back up as if to kind of God, how I love that penguin ass looking motherfucker. It's so funny, isn't it? Now just pop up out of nowhere, right? Just when everything was starting to go away, Ashley Dupree at the time, the girl at the center, you know, who had her name dragged through the mud. She, of course, was made to kind of suffer a lot of the, a lot of the. Sure. It's how it always goes with this exact kind of scandal, right? You get to take down the guy you actually wanted, and all it costs you is the reputation of whatever hooker you used to frame him. She did land on her feet. She ended up marrying some shady developer. Again, par for the course is that sort of person retires out of that sort of profession. And, you know, again, I don't think that there were a lot of people who tried to make her the kind of centerpiece of this and really lay a lot of agency for this on her in a way that really kind of misunderstands the dynamics of anything that was actually going on here. And, you know, again, we, as I like to say, someone is trending the forces, right? She's a 22 year old, you know, cocktail waitress, nightclub host, want to be lounge singer, right? This is not a political operative, or at least there is no evidence to suggest that she has in any way, any agency in, I mean, obviously beyond her, you know, her agency in the participation of all that we're not here to get into that issue. But the no, I mean, that part of it's not even relevant. Straight up. She's straight up. The point is, is that the only person here who is not a political actor is Alexandria, Ashley Alexander is your party to use her stage name as she became famous for. So to go back to why it might have happened, or to go back to an interesting fact of how it all unfolded now quickly it happened. Four people were charged for this. At least Spitzer was not one of them. And you're never going to guess when they decided to announce that Spitzer would not be charged. I would love it if you'd tell us. Of course. Well, it was after the 2008 election. And Barack Obama and Tim Geithner were already, already at Treasury helping to coordinate the response, helping to coordinate the response to the, you know, whole financial crisis, which was blowing up at the time. Hold your horses just a moment here, Mike. So you mean to tell me that in an election where the Republicans were weak, basically throwing it, having to wrestle away with Bush fatigue, that what happened was instead we have a Dem fight where Hillary's top guy, her money crusader, gets popped right before the election. Now mind you, this is after something else that got buried was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, Michael J. Garcia, who does pop up in interesting places later on in his career, and says famously that there will be no deal with Mr. Spitzer, that his resignation is entirely separate. So for anyone not connecting the dots through that extremely thick layer of sarcasm, what happened was, '08 was all about what Democrat was going to get the reins, because McCain never had any viable chance whatsoever, a Republican was never going to win that election. And all of a sudden, you have someone who was clearly on the docket to be one of Hillary's top operatives within the administration, get just absolutely shellacked on something that not just him, but all of his buddies and all of his enemies were also due. Funny how that works out. And the guy with the most of the game, I would argue personally, the guy, and who I think was the hatchet man, who do I think really had the most of the game, and who do I think was the pivot around all of this happened, and look at the linkages, look at what happened with AIG. Look at who was the number two guy celebrating, celebrating what happened. Tim Geithner, for me, if you're looking for the linkage that puts all of this together is Tim Geithner. Tim Geithner ends up as the leader of the kind of Obama faction on Wall Street, that really makes Wall Street, that brings Wall Street into the Obama administration. That's Tim Geithner. Tim Geithner. And that's exactly what it is. So, to explicate that statement then for anyone who might still be chewing on it here, what this basically was, we already discussed earlier in the episode that the purpose of a regulator is not actually to regulate someone in terms of punishing them, so much as to ensure loyalty and keep them in line by publicly harassing them, and then privately making sure they're on your side, making sure they're in line. And this was an operation to remove Clinton's Wall Street guy and slide in Obama's own. This is the team fight going on within the blue team camp, their little mini civil war at that point. A lot of people read it as a changing of the guard publicly in terms of national politics. Look at this bright young star and the team he's bringing with them. But what it really was was stripping the flagging Clinton machine of an asset and bringing it into a new fold. That's all wearing the same jersey to us, the peons, but in reality is obviously many different factions. There's another little favor that Geithner does. Geithner is the head of the New York Federal Reserve and again, another. This is not the guy that ends up, maybe a treasury. This is not a guy who will ever end up being president or vice president, but this is a guy who will end up running treasury. This is a guy who will end up going back to go run an investment bank, run the public bank. So there's another interesting favor that he does to the good people. Let's just call it the more, let's call it the riskier side, the more esoteric sides of American merchant finance. March of 2008, Geithner engineers, the fire sale of Bear Stearns, the JP Morgan Chase for $2 per share. And $2 per share is less than the stated real estate value at the time. This is about the peak of office, office valuation. The building that Bear Stearns owned at the time was worth $5.6 a share. Now, that was enough to cause, that caused an outcry to the point where JP Morgan got Bear for effectively the price of their Manhattan real estate, which is around $10 per share. They also had to support a bunch of other stuff. So it ended up being actually a fairly, as far as these things go, a fairly. Well executed state intervention into a private market. As far as the way the numbers worked out, not in any of the structural impacts, not in any of the ways that you should read this as an average participant in the economy, as a financial speculator. But by the numbers, it worked on this one and ended up being a good trade. Well, in terms of making a hit and then profiting from, that's what we're saying. But actually for the American taxpayer in this case, and as well as shareholders of JP Morgan Chase, didn't work very well for anybody who was holding certain assets at Bear Stearns or anybody who worked at Bear Stearns. That's a matter for another day. It never does. Well yeah, and Bear Stearns, just the fact that they're involved even tangentially is a whole nother can of worms, because that name is more than just being biggest bank to ever go under or the great cause of the financial crisis. There's so much more going on. Well, it was them, and then it was Lehman, right? And then Lehman, Lehman ended up being a real one, right? That started to go over the cliff, over the cliff. But here's another big institution, and I've said this name before, that Geithner is working with in 2008, which is AIG, which is starting to become a real big problem. These are the people who are selling the credit default swaps, right? Hank Greenberg, remember him? Who's the guy who had a famously had a picture of Elliot Spitzer on a dark board in his office? Where did he work? Oh, no kidding. Now that part of it, I didn't even actually know. That's crazy. And what is Timmy Geithner doing? But Timmy Geithner is engineering a bailout. All of this. All of it. Do people actually do that? The pictures? I don't know if there's ever actually happened. That's exactly the type of thing that he would be like, well, I would never actually do that. You know, we don't actually have dark boards in the office. Compliance would have a field day with us. You know exactly what they would say on CNBC, right? Yeah. But as if I'm not actually hanging up a real picture of them on a dark board. Well, you know, I have a dark board that's just ripe for one in my bedroom, right? Just hanging on the wall there. What's to stop me from doing that? Do people actually do that? Total tangent, but I'm curious. That could actually be a piece of subscriber-only content. Mike and Pat, Mike and Pat play globalist, darkboard, mood, or doll. Sorry for the digression. Anyway, so let's get back to all this. We looked at a lot of like little pieces, right? We've made a lot of illusions. So let's actually stay up. What I am saying happened, I am not going to firmly go on record on any individual piece of the mechanics other than to say that somebody knew that's what Spitzer was doing because all of these things, they only take a little piece of insider information to break them all open. And so let me give you an example. I was working on a property deal with a couple friends of mine. We were trying to find just a piece of information to kind of unlock this portfolio of holdings that we all had a good idea of what they were, but we couldn't actually piece anything together until we were able to actually figure out the boat that the guy owned, right? Because there's a registration there. And so this has a corporate entity, right? And so what do we do? Okay, we found one corporate entity, right? Because we'd seen pictures of him on the boat. So we find out this corporate entity owns a boat. Okay. So there's one piece of known information that we can link this guy to something in real life. This corporate entity owns other houses. We happen to know that he has told people, you know, guys that I was working with on this particular project of houses he's owned in that area. So there we have another piece of information. Then we, you know, through tracking his social media, we're able to place him on a plane, at an airport, you know, near enough to this house, track the flight records from a place where he know, we know, you know, we know he lives there. We know that that's where his kind of main company is to a place where he know, we know that he was to this house. Then the whole thing just unravels from there, right? Because once you have two pieces, everything else in the middle can be linked up, right? So this is what I'm saying is that somebody had to have known that this was going on and somebody had to have raised a flag. And as much as they like to pat themselves on the back and say, whoa, look, look, the law did its job, right? The Patriot Act had all these structures and yet was designed to catch terrorists, but actually it was the governor of New York. Bring it up. Bring it up. Bring it in. Hookers from New York City to Washington and track a seller. Violating any number of known federal anti slavery sex trafficking banking fucking money laundering tax evasion enough to. Yeah, take your pick of any white collar vice crime and he just did it and he was foolish enough to do it and he's the only one that's ever done it. We're going to hang them high, right? Come on. You're going to sit here and you're going to tell me and you're going to tell me some jackass at the bank raised the flag through compliance and it wasn't. Sir, we got a problem. Somebody in the compliance departments flag the governor's account. What do you want me to do about that? Do you want me to promote him or do you want me to fire him? You know, what do you want? Man, we don't talk. What do you even do it? What do you do is that guy who's been that guy's fault, maybe not that exact guy, but a guy who's had an underling like that who's exactly smart enough to raise a flag like that. But raise it the wrong way to raise it on paper in a way that means that I have to do something about it, right? You mean to tell me that that's what happened? Right. And look, it might have like the stranger things have happened. Well, that to be clear, that is the story. That is the official version of what happened. Is someone said this guy's engaging in suspicious behavior? Now, it could very well be possible that someone just saw it's the governor of New York acting like a real shady asshole. Like, let me raise a flag. And then maybe that guy's boss got a call from his boss's boss. Yeah, you guy. He did the right thing. And it threw. You sure, sir? Positive. You know what? I wish I could believe that people were that virtuous and took law in order that seriously, but it stretches plausibility, especially on a show. It is more likely that the regular guy found it and thought that he was being set up by internal compliance. And that's why the flag was raised, because he's like, this is too clear. Yeah, this is clearly me being tested by somebody. I'm going to give the obvious correct answer. And I just passed my performance. Exactly. Exactly. Like, this is the personal shot. This is the, you know, the private shopper, right? The paid shopper, right? Corporate is doing a test on our bridge security practices. And they're not. And like, the economy doesn't look great. My ass isn't getting fired. Look, it could genuinely be that stupid, right? Now, having said all that, having walked through all of the kind of dumb explanations, do we believe any of them? Absolutely. We do not. Not even one of them. None of those passed the credibility test. I think the obvious answer here is that somebody knew this and somebody had a reason to kind of call that particular strike in, because as we said, this is when nobody really knew who Barack Obama was. The internet was everywhere, but it was still a place, right? It was a place that you could take with you. It wasn't just like a work stream of your real life, right? Yeah, it wasn't a vector on which everyone is interacting every day, unless they were a very certain kind of person. Like, this was the time when you were using the internet every day, but you were walking away from it for long periods of the day. You looked at cat memes for two hours, checked your aim chance, and then you just left it alone. But the news cycle was still 24 hours. We're very much in a weird point in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Things are stabilizing. The economy's starting to look bad. Bush is obviously in the lamest of lame duck modes. But Barack Obama is not quite the guy. A lot of people had seen that maybe this unknown from Illinois has got some sauce around him. Obviously, that was all media. And he wasn't even really the guy until after he finished this fight with Clinton anyways. And even then, it wasn't actually settled between the two of them. Obama wasn't Obama until his second ... That's a separate discussion entirely. But even just to get him there, the amount of maneuvering that it took, the amount ... They were talking about super delegate challenges and Hillary having the advantage of parliamentary procedure on Obama. The kind of knock was, "Well, do we really need 20 years straight of bushes in Clinton's only?" And that was a real fatigue for her, but McCain was suffering worse from Bush fatigue than Hillary was from Clinton fatigue. Hillary Clinton was the very well liked moderate Democrat Senator from New York at the time, and for all of her ... Which is also insane to think about that she ever got away with. Well, I think not maybe not to defend ... This is not a defensive Hillary Clinton so much as an offering of an explainer. On behalf of the electorate is that we didn't really necessarily see the fruits of her personal extremism until she was given the job at state. And I have a lot of time for that argument. I could be convinced into that. I think it's my own biases and opinions about that particular power node that make it so obvious to me, especially in hindsight, but I could be persuaded to hear that out, sure. So here we are in this March of 2008. We've got the governor of New York has been deposed. This is one of Clinton's guys. Wall Street is clearly running a muck. And what did we just say? Not only is Wall Street running a muck, the sheriff was banging hookers the whole time. Hillary, that was happening in your backyard. Hillary Clinton had no political power while he built up his reputation as the sheriff. Hillary Clinton's job, political power, had really very little to do with Elliot Spitzer's in the direct wielding of the enumerated duties and responsibilities of their offices. I'm speaking in a very narrow context here. Yeah, because outside of that narrow context, it's also clear that the soft power was built and it was maintaining already at that point. You know, the Clintons hadn't gone anywhere, even if neither of them were really in power. Exactly. But Spitzer, again, it cannot be overstated, the linkage. And there was even a time when Spitzer was thought to be a front-runner instead of Hillary Clinton. Spitzer probably could have probably taken it in '08 with the kind of right campaign and the right messaging. Again, I don't believe that he was ever going for it. I think he knew where his bread was buttered. I think he knew that if he went against the Clintons at this point, the Clintons are the exact type of people to know about this thing. And you'll be their best friend. You have a relatively kind of normal scandal with a kind of clear open flank and clear exposure that, you know, isn't. But if you're the billionaire son, not the billionaire, you know, you're a decimillionaire son of a real estate empire, right? It's not going to kill you in that industry. No, it's not at all. You're still going to be Elliot Spitzer, right? You're still going to be an important guy. They're not going to kick out a cocktail parties for being a member of the Emperor's Club for VIP, right? This is the exact type of compromised guy that they all like, right? Not too far gone. Not too far gone in terms of the eyes of the public, right? Sure. He gets caught doing this level of dirt. Exactly. You can still be his friend. Yeah, you can't sign any deals within this financial year. But with the right structuring vehicle and, like, you know, you put his family money. One kind of layer of know your customer passed my fiduciary responsibility in legal obligations, right? If you figure you have two layers of legal obligations, three layers of fiduciary responsibility. I don't have any further obligation to look for number four, right? Yeah, I'm wildly oversimplifying, but we all know what I mean here. The audience is obviously a very intelligent one. So you can put Spitzer there. You know, again, your kids, you're not going to necessarily send the kids over there, like, while the whole scandal is breaking, but, like, you can still trust. You can have a sleepover by the time they graduate high school. Well, maybe, I guess, once your daughter turns 16, you give her a can of pepper spray if she's going to his house, but, you know, it's, he's, he's a kind of, it's, it's, it's a one and a half standard deviation degenerate behavior, right? It is the perfect level of compromising in that, like, you know that Elliot Spitzer didn't truly think he was a bad person for doing any of the scene. You know, most of his colleagues didn't think he was either. And you know a lot of the people that were going to be hanging him for didn't actually have a moral laundry with this. I mean, they deal with worse prostitutes than Ashton Duprey in their professional careers dealing with lobbyists. You know, these are not, these are not people to whom this behavior is at all shocking or aberrant, but it is certainly enough compromising in the public, especially when Spitzer had literally used this, this exact tool of, well, I may not be able to get you for the insider trading that we all know that we're doing, but, but it looks like there's a shell company that one of your dirty real estate transactions was associated with with the, with the emerald lounge Excelsior pass spa. You know what I mean? Oh my. Oh, look at that. Look, look who's been engaging, who's been engaging the services of a high end prostitution ring and perhaps how would Elliot Spitzer, Attorney General of New York have known that. It's almost like that seen from Casablanca in it. Gambling? It's just, it is just all like, and the last thing that I really want to talk about is that is the good, we'll start with the good reasons for why we don't remember any of this. We don't remember any of this because everything was happening so fast and so furiously, like the country was just shell shocked of what was going to happen. Are we going to have another depression? Are my parents, you know, are your parents going to lose their job? Are we going to lose the house? Like, what's the foreclosure rate? Yeah, it was bad. It was not a good time in the economy. To use the Zoomerism, the vibes were truly off. Things were happening fast and furious. AIG, Bear Sterns, you know, the banks were being rolled up. Glass-Steagall was being undone. The entire basis of the American financial system in which merchant banks and investment banks were separated was truly being undone and dynamited. It had already been unwound, but it had not been truly linked up to the degree, you know, creating the kind of too big to fail mega banks. Yeah, this was the garbage bar stage we were in. The dumpster is burning uncontrollably and there's cooking. But at least, and again, I'm not here to defend these guys because, you know, I was studying economics while all of this was happening. Like, I remember a professor walking into the class and feeling everything I've taught you guys is bullshit. You woke up without knowing it, and this is right around the time Bear Sterns is happening, without knowing it. You woke up in a new world today as far as financial regulation, money, and banking goes. The entire world changed overnight and nobody's ever going to be able to pinpoint it. You're never going to realize it, but it did, and he was 100% right, and I remember that day because it was right. I don't remember the exact date, but it was right when all this was breaking, and it turned out to be even more right than we could possibly know because does any of this happen? If there is the sheriff of Wall Street, if there is, you know, Hillary Clinton, the first female president with the mandate to come in and put bankers in jail, you know, like the... Well, to be clear, not that she would have. Well, she may have in the kind of way that only Nixon could go to China, right? Right, sure, yes. Hillary and her faction at the time for all this looked like they had enough juice to actually at least show the mob a couple powerful heads. Yeah, and I think that's the right way to frame it. Like, she might have been able to take a couple scalps for appearances sake, and that's more than anyone else would have managed. But there is a real case to be made that you end up with a different character of Wall Street. You should none of this go down, where you do have kind of a return to the older ways of doing things where it is more of a closed shop. And there are less of these new entrants with these exotic vehicles, right? Where the kind of junk bonds and the hedge funds do have their feet nailed to the floor. In the interests of keeping the old school investment banks, the commercial paper, the, you know, New Corp. Yeah, and so that right there I think is the biggest, that's the biggest thing right there. You know, nothing would have changed except the old players would have stayed in place instead of getting replaced by all these new ones we've seen since then. You know, the game itself wouldn't have changed, but the backups wouldn't have come in. The starters wouldn't have gotten bad. Maybe these credit default swaps and all these exotic products with AIG, maybe those probably go away. But what you end up with, you end up with the film on the scale for, you know, the more traditional types of activity that people associate with, with merchant finance, right? Trying to say that there, I'm not trying to say that Hillary Clinton is a great defender of the common man as economic interest far from it. I'm trying to say that Hillary Clinton had a team, and it wasn't the same team as Tim Geithner and AIG and Jamie Diamond and all these guys. It was a different faction. Yes, absolutely. And that's something we absolutely harp on here. You're 100% on the money and I am so glad someone else is saying it too. To me, and again, I may have gotten this wrong. I don't think I'm in the ballpark with this. It looks to me like this is the kind of linchpin strike that makes the entire Obama presidency and the economic transformation of the United States through the financial industry possible. The groundwork was already laid in a lot of ways and in a lot of areas and Spitzer made the mistake of being a visible hypocrite who made enemies through his personal style and left his flank open through his, through his his proclivities and his personal behavior. So Spitzer creates the opening for the decapitation strike. Now, where I'm not qualified to comment because this is a layer beyond my understanding is did Hillary get the tap on the shoulder and say this was coming or was Spitzer, or was it the tap on Hillary's shoulder? That I think if I'm going to engage in speculation. I'd be more inclined to go with the later there than the former, but that's just not something I'm ever getting answered. But when you play games like this and when you have this level of figure involved in stuff, I think as often as not taking the head off one of the minions like that is the message, but who knows. But again, I just want to sum it all up and say that we can't prove any of this, none of this will ever be proven in a court of law, but all of this to go back to the episode that we set on the Knights Templar. Someone is forcing the trends, right? Who is the great winners of all this? It's Wall Street. It is the Obama is the faction that most people would associate as the Obama faction. Yes, and thank you for picking your words so careful. You'd make sure, right? Now let me be clear. Barack Obama is a figurehead. He's not the guy and Barack Obama to digress a little bit, learned the lesson. Just how much not the guy he is. And do you know who taught him that lesson? I'm just how much not the guy he is. Joe fucking Biden. And his probably last act of political relevance was to teach Barack Obama. You're not the guy. Yeah. Yeah, and that's that's something we could even get into. That an autopsy on all of that would be really interesting once we're. Oh, another six months out from now and everything's wrapped up with the way people again turn into rabid morons here in the next couple of months. The shadow psychohistory of the kind of Obama regime from 2006 through its its last kind of defeat. Right. And in the summer of this year is a really interesting topic that you know really really needs to be explored. That's something I've been harping on in the main show, right? You saw this insurgency that really started with whoever Obama's boss is. And whoever those people are, whoever they represent, they're not necessarily also backing Kamala. Kamala has been presented as one of their players, whether she actually is or not. And the fact that the old Dems came back, tied her to a stone altar and handed Trump the knife, shows that whatever experiment was going on there is over. They have hung her out to dry so hard. And Joe's people, the old school Democrat factions are literally complicit in it. Probably how that worked. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Like I said, you and I should talk about maybe doing an autopsy and all that in a few months from now once things cool off. But man, yeah, there's a lot going on there. And then there will be for a long, long time. And you know, there's going to be parts of this that are going to remain unknown. And Elliot Spitzer himself is certainly never going to kind of give us the inside detail. He truly has has owned it. He's had some, you know, briefly unsuccessful run on CNN. But you know, he's done well in the kind of family business of being a sleazy real estate guy. And, you know, what's just funny is he started out as a sleazy real estate guy or his family's like somewhat sleazy real estate guys. She, the girl in question ended up with a sleazy real estate guy. He ended up being a sleazy real estate guy. The Mayflower Hotel where all of this ended up happening was engaged in a series of sleazy real estate transactions. Timmy Geitner's, you know, Timmy Geitner's second big favor to the kind of other, other side of the Wall Street faction was a sleazy real estate deal. For the Bear Stearns building. So if I think the audience can learn anything from all this, is that anytime that there's something else going on, you're never more than two degrees of separation away from sleazy real estate. Yeah, you know, and as much as we're chuckling about that, and it is a good bit. It's a hundred percent true. You know, the only asset more valuable than gold is land. You can make up as many zeros. You can edit the Excel spreadsheet at the Federal Reserve as much as you want. But it always comes back to tangible assets, and nothing is more tangible than owning the only thing they aren't making more of. And maybe it's that simple. It was all about the land grabs, you know, land and power, right? The two kind of sex, land and power, the oldest parentheses in the world. This scandal's got all three, which is why the American public was so enraptured by it. And it's also why it was kind of so easy to tie it all in a neat little bow, right? Like, all right, powerful guy, you know, you know, he's got his wife. Yeah, this clearly checks out kids. He's rich. You know, he's out. He's out on the town. He's 46. I've seen him jogging with his shirt off in the post. He looks, he looks good wife's, you know, wife's probably, you know, wife probably hasn't touched him since his birthday. You know, again, all of this. Notice how everybody ends up getting forgiven at the expense of their kind of future clean careers. But not necessarily their kind of long term economic value, not their long term kind of social relevance. Kind of what would have been expected in the data sets for the involved players, right? Or what could have been expected in the data sets of the involved players. So it all kind of, it's big and it's dirty, but it's quick and it resolves itself neatly and it gives everybody something, right? And I think that's why nobody ever really kind of decided to look into it, right? And that's probably part of the reason why even you and I are never going to really be able to find the true depths and nitty gritty of it all because it all just kind of, this, this one adds up. There's, there's plenty of ways that you can have this one up and in every vertical, you add it up at all, at all tracks entirely, right? So at any point, yeah, Spencer got God, but he was allowed to keep a probable future. And at any point, you want to stop looking, you can find yourself at a satisfying resolution of like, yeah, you know, like, that one, that one pretty much worked out for everybody. Even the people that didn't really work out that well for, other than the guys who were actually, you know, doing this X trafficking, but, you know, fuck them anyway. Those guys are the real pieces. Right. Yeah. They're real pieces of shit anyway. So like, you know, in terms of like a decapitation strike that precipitated a whole lot of change that accomplished its goals. If our theory on it is right, like, this has got to be one of the best, most elegantly executed conspiracy theories or conspiracy conspiratorial actions we've ever seen. And I think the kind of the proof of that. And like, I hate using a negative to prove positive, but, but the fact that like, pretty much anybody comes to a kind of satisfying end and stops looking as the ultimate proof that there was a hell of a lot more going on here, right? And, and the kind of complex yet simple elegance of all of it, like, is what I love about this story and is what I kind of hope that everybody took away that you got to keep looking and you got to kind of come in and come out on this stuff and pick and choose what you like. And to always remember that someone is trending the forces right and someone is forcing the trend. That's my, my kind of summary. Yeah. Amen. Amen. Shoot. There's a lot more I want to say. We're already past our traditional stop mark. So I will just not say anything other than to ask if there's anything you would like to show, promote, plug, anything you would like to tell the audience. As a closing note, so Dexter would never say this, but Dexter had a little bit of issue with his vehicle. So, you can go ahead and hit him up on the crypto link, buy a shirt, sign up to the Patreon, help our guy out so he can keep giving you some of his great content and he and I are going to be kicking the ball around on some possible exclusive ideas later on down the road. So that's all I want to leave you with. Bless you. Thank you, Mike. And thank you more importantly for returning to the show. show. It's always a pleasure.
