Written by Richard Raznikov   

I underestimated the penalty he’d have to pay for failing to understand who runs America. Blagojevich got 14 years. I’d figured on 10. The former governor’s sentence is only 13 years and 362 days longer than the jail time a judge recently gave a Rohnert Park, California 19-year-old for running over and killing a 2-year-old in a cross walk because she was distracted by her cell phone.

It is also roughly 8 years more than Jack Abramoff got for influence peddling inside the White House on behalf of corporate clients.

We’ve got our values in this country, don’t think we don’t.

The bankers who’ve stolen your children’s financial well-being and looted the public treasury haven’t done a minute in prison and aren’t likely to. The one public official who might have stopped them, Eliot Spitzer, was forced out of office in a bizarre sex scandal.

Neither Blagojevich’s arrest and conviction nor Spitzer’s fall from grace was an accident. Each was intimately linked to the fact that each politician threatened some of the most powerful people in America.

I’ve written about both men before and there’s no need to restate the details. But it’s useful to consider, as the Occupy Wall Street movement finds itself marginalized by the mainstream media, how power really works in this country.

Blagojevich was a dangerous public figure precisely because he was the anti-Spitzer. Rough, unpolished, an on-the-ground populist who offended the power structure in Illinois, the Governor was in trouble not because he wouldn’t play dirty but because he didn’t know how to.

A lot of state legislatures are corrupt, that’s not news. Illinois is famous for it. But in the wheeling-and-dealing of his state, Blagojevich committed the cardinal sin of antagonizing the leadership of both parties. In doing so, and in running through some rather groundbreaking reforms by using public pressure, he drew the attention of some people whose attention is not something one wants to invite.

Prior to his indictment on 24 criminal counts, Blagojevich had for more than a year been the subject of a federal investigation led by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.

On December 8, 2008, Blagojevich announced that because it had refused to extend a loan to Republic Windows and Doors, which would have enabled the company to pay its workers and keep its doors open, he was going to direct the state of Illinois to cease doing business with Bank of America.

On December 9, 2008, Fitzgerald announced the arrest of the Governor.

You probably think the timing was a coincidence.

Blagojevich was the second U.S. governor to go down that year. In March, after pursuing investigations into criminal activities of AIG and Bank of America, Eliot Spitzer found himself on the front page of the New York newspapers exposed as a client of a high-end ‘escort service’.

The hooker story emerged as a result of a federal wiretap operation in which certain people were tapped because, government prosecutors noted with a straight face, there had been unusual bank transactions brought to their attention. What was not mentioned in the media was that the feds are notified of around 3,400 'unusual bank transactions' daily.

If that’s all you got from the news, other than various salacious (and generally, as it turns out, false) details of his appointments with the high-priced spread, you might think of Spitzer’s fall as being just one of those unlucky breaks, the kind of thing that happens when one’s hubris exceeds one’s judgment. If so, you would be wrong.

Spitzer’s ruin, like Blagojevich’s, was calculated. In each case, powerful people decided that they could not risk their continued occupation of a governorship. Spitzer, moreover, was so dangerous and so popular that the Wall Street crooks believed he might send them to prison on his way to the White House.

But you didn’t get the truth about these two scandals on your television and radio. Nobody told it. Not on MSNBC, not on PBS, not NPR. Because in order to get at it, they’d have had to dig beneath the gloss, and nobody wants to do that. Besides, weren’t these guys guilty?

Well... that kind of depends.

Blagojevich, it turns out, was probably no more guilty of the political acts he was accused of than your own governor. Not one item was especially unusual. In fact, there was considerable doubt about most of the charges. Remember this: in his first trial, the jury was unable to agree on a verdict on 23 of 24 charges. The one they got him on was lying to federal agents.

Fitzgerald was not going to let it go, not the people’s crusader. He brought him back before a second jury and nailed him. In his statement to the press a couple of weeks ago, this phony, self-righteous fixer said the sentencing “should send a message.” It sure does. It send the message it was meant to: don’t screw around with the powerful.

The one major league charge against Blagojevich was that he tried to ‘sell’ the vacant Obama Senate seat for some kind of payoff. “It’s golden,” the surveillance records him saying. Indeed, it was. It’s also golden whenever a governor gets to fill a vacancy in the Senate. Pretty obvious. Bet it wouldn’t surprise any of us to learn that the last time an American governor filled a Senate vacancy without any thought to what he could get out of it, personally or professionally, was probably during the administration of Andrew Jackson, or maybe never.

In other words, are you kidding me?

But Blagojevich had mixed it up with people who don’t like to be mixed with, and the declaration that he would order Illinois to stop doing business with Bank of America was clearly the last straw. I have no trouble believing that shortly after that statement, Fitzgerald’s phone rang and he was advised to get it done.

What the media never mentions is that Fitzgerald had earlier proven his trustworthiness to those in charge. Leading the prosecution in the case of Valerie Plame, when a CIA agent was exposed –– and important middle eastern networks jeopardized –– because Dick Cheney wanted to get even with Plame’s diplomat husband over Iraq, Fitzgerald nailed ‘Scooter’ Libby and let Cheney off the hook. That’s how it works.

In New York, Spitzer had to go because otherwise some of the world’s biggest crooks might go to prison. He’d discovered, among other things, that Bank of America had actively facilitated a gigantic mutual fund fraud in which its computers were used to backdate trading activity and clean the records of bets that went bad. This had enabled an outfit known as Canary Capital to score amazing profits while other funds were tanking.

Spitzer was also going after AIG for fraud. The insurance giant had agreed to cover the bad bets of the investment bankers while arranging a secret loan of $500 million to make its own books look good. Its CEO, Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, was looking at life behind bars. As Spitzer has since pointed out, AIG got an initial $12 billion in bailout funds, exactly the amount of its reported profit the following year.

On the Bloomberg web site, alongside the article on Fitzgerald’s moralizing, is a link to an article entitled, “Goldman Sachs Is Said to Start Offering FDIC-backed CDs Linked to Equities.”

Eliot Spitzer was probably the most dangerous political figure in America in 2008 because he was the only one of his stature untouched by the corruption of Wall Street. Keep in mind that while Barack Obama sold himself as the beacon of hope and change, his largest single contributor was Goldman Sachs. Obama could clearly be trusted, but not Spitzer. It would be risky to let him keep after the bankers. Not only might he get them, he would be a constant example of what the new President was promising but never intended to deliver.

It’s easy enough to get distracted by surface stories. Blagojevich broke the law, didn’t he? Spitzer, after prosecuting call girl services, was using one himself. So, who cares, right?

I suppose Spitzer should be grateful. He didn’t get prosecuted and nobody had to shoot him. Blagojevich, not so grateful, probably because he didn’t bow out gracefully but fought back, is headed to the slammer. Nobody is on his side anymore. But I am. He got railroaded.

It’s been quite a long time since the owners of America found it necessary to kill a political leader, although I suppose it hasn’t been that long if you count Paul Wellstone, which hasn’t been proven. They’d rather ruin people if they can.

And, yes, Spitzer and Blagojevich should have realized that with the enemies they were making they had to keep themselves clean. They knew who they were dealing with, or should have. Their infractions don’t seem to sink others. Senator David Vitter, for example, was phoning hookers from the House floor during roll call votes, yet survived to win a Senate seat. Of course, Vitter is a Republican. But it’s also a peculiar situation. In order to stand up against Bank of America and other powerful corporate crooks, it takes considerable arrogance. And it’s the arrogance which can sink you.

Anybody remember a guy named Gary Hart?

Hart was a Senator from Colorado, formerly the campaign manager for George McGovern. He was young, articulate, charismatic, and dangerous. He had been a graduate from Yale University’s Divinity School. While seeking the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, Hart was asked about rumors of extramarital dalliances; he denied it. Not only that, he invited reporters to follow him around. They did.

Hart’s campaign was wrecked when, in late 1987, he was discovered frolicking with one Donna Rice aboard a boat aptly named ‘Monkey Business.’

Many years later, an older and wiser Hart has what some people would no doubt consider a ‘conspiratorial’ view of his denouement. He believes he was ‘set up’. He thinks Rice was placed in his path as a ‘honey trap’, a very common maneuver of national spy agencies. Was it true? I don’t know, but it sure made sense. In 1988, coming out of the Reagan era, the nation was at a turning point. Instead of Hart, the Democrats offered up Michael Dukakis. The next President turned out to be a former chief of the CIA, George Bush.

How it works.