The Washington Post reminds us of Rod Blagojevich's biggest extortion of late and it isn't selling Barack Obama's Senate seat:
The day before he was arrested on charges of massive corruption, Blagojevich visited a group of striking workers at a North Chicago firm called Republic Windows & Doors. After being laid off the week before, the employees had begun a sit-in, demanding benefits they were still owed by their employer, which said it could not meet their demands because the Bank of America had cut off its financing. At this point, Blagojevich informed bank officials that unless they restored the shuttered window-and-door company's line of credit, the state of Illinois would suspend all further business with Bank of America. A few days later, the bank caved in and ponied up a $1.35 million loan.
The idea that the governor of a state as prosperous and important and sophisticated and upscale as Illinois would make this kind of threat is terrifying. Even more terrifying is that Bank of America saw no alternative but to give in. Yet even more terrifying is that nobody outside Chicago seems to have gotten terribly worked up about the situation, riveted as they are on the governor's more theatrical transgressions. But peddling a Senate seat or using scare tactics to shake down a newspaper are nowhere near so serious a menace to society as letting the government arbitrarily intervene in financial transactions between banks and creditors. A crooked governor we can all handle. But a governor who capriciously decides which commercial enterprises a bank must finance and which it can ignore is a scary proposition indeed.
Just what are the implications of this?
The bailout hysteria gripping the United States has spawned the dangerous idea that politicians, as the taxpayers' elected representatives, should be allowed to pick winners and losers when jobs are being cut or windows being shuttered -- because taxpayers now have skin in the game. The pols don't even have to look at the books to see whether the enterprises are still commercially viable: The banks do business with the public, the public hates unemployment, the banks have a moral responsibility to shore up fatally wounded businesses, and that's the end of it.
In other Blagojevich news of the day,Blago met with his criminal defense attorney
Ed Genson also known as a prominent
Chicago Mob lawyer.For a more detailed look at
Ed Genson and his Chicago Mob clients.
