Cenk Uygur: Back in the days, Governor Eliot Spitzer was, of course, the Attorney General of New York, he used to be known as the Sheriff of Wall Street. Why? Because he actually went after people who committed financial fraud.
Apparently CNBC hates this. He was recently on with Maria Bartiromo and they got into a debate about how he went after the former CEO of AIG Hank Greenberg.
I want to show you the clip, and more than this, I want to talk about her general attitude towards her job. So watch the clip first.
Eliot Spitzer: Hank Greenberg’s accounting was fraudulent.
Maria Bartiromo: C’mon, you can’t say fraudulent because there is no indictment: you can’t just throw around the word fraud.
Eliot Spitzer: Here’s the federal judge’s opinion that says he was a conspirator. Here are the headlines: his company throwing him out.
Maria Bartiromo: So then why no charges: why six out of eight charges dropped then?
Eliot Spitzer: You want to know why? The answer is we charged the company, cleaned it up, got new leadership, the Southern District said to me, we are going to bring the charges. We let the Southern District. This has all been documented. We said, you want to do that, that’s fine.
Cenk Uygur: So here is what I find amazing. AIG paid one point six billion dollars because of fraud. Now why would Bartiromo think, oh, you think they are just going to pay $1.6 billion if they didn’t commit the fraud? They have an army of lawyers!
Hank Greenberg himself paid a fifteen million dollar fine for fraud. But Bartiromo’s default position is: protect the financial industry; protect the people who are in power; protected the establishment. And this guy who actually try to do something about fraud you must attack him, you must destroy him in order protect the establishment.
This is exactly what’s wrong with the establishment media and CNBC in particular. All they do is protect the guys who are doing fraud. You are supposed to represent us, your audience, not those guys. Unfortunately they totally misunderstand that.
Unofficial transcript by:
The Barefoot Accountant
Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC
Certified Public Accountant
Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor
Accountants CPA Hartford, LLC