The Creators of the Financial Crisis Are Trying To Rewrite History

By Eliot Spitzer   |   Posted Monday, Aug. 20, 2012, at 12:32 PM ET

National Review, a magazine founded by the late William F. Buckley, is the intellectual leader of the conservative movement. It speaks for the agenda of deregulation and pure free-market theory that overtook and then destroyed our economy.

Back in 2004, National Review put a caricature of me on its cover and called me the most destructive politician in America. Why? Because, as the magazine pointed out in the accompanying article, I was the attorney general of New York at that time, and I and my office were pursuing wrongdoing in a multitude of areas. We were suing coal-burning power plants that were violating the Clean Air Act, we were suing the tobacco companies because of their illegal marketing and deceptive practices, and we were suing virtually all the major Wall Street investment banks for committing fraud and violating their duty of honesty to the public. The feds were doing nothing about these problems before we did. We sued the largest mutual fund companies—which were gaming the market—leading to billions of dollars in refunds to customers and lower fees totaling billions of dollars. Again, this was something the feds were unwilling to do. And, as the article pointed out, we were suing predatory lending companies, long before 2004, and I was warning that subprime debt could be both harmful to the borrower and toxic to the economy. The federal government tried to shut down our effort.