We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. And we know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me and I welcome their hatred.
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1936
The e-mail came from Patrick Madigan, a top lawyer in the Iowa Attorney General’s Office, on August 23. “Effective immediately,” it announced, “the New York Attorney General’s Office has been removed from the Executive Committee of the Robosigning multistate.” And just like that, Eric Schneiderman, the top law enforcement official in New York– the state where Wall Street is situated–was kicked off the nationwide committee of state law enforcement officials investigating Wall Street fraud.
In a sane society, Attorneys General would show themselves unfit for such a committee by exhibiting too close a relationship to the subjects of the inquiry. In this one, the opposite was true: Schneiderman has too upstanding a record as a corruption-gadfly for the establishment’s comfort. In the New York State Senate, Schneiderman took on the culture of corruption in Albany, passing tough ethics reform measures while campaigning for even tougher ones. This led him to do some kicking out of his own, when he chaired the committee to eject a crooked senator for the first time in modern history, and won unanimous support, at a time when political divides between Democrats and Republicans had essentially thrust Albany into gridlock, for a measure adding tax fraud to New York’s whistle-blower law, hailed as America’s strongest law to root out fraud against taxpayers (and Schneiderman, now Attorney General, at last finds himself in a position to use that law).