No bra needed for New York graft

If Dianne Wilkerson had been a senator from New York instead of Massachusetts, she wouldn't have been reduced to (allegedly) stuffing bribes up her brassiere.
Consider the poor FBI and U.S. attorney's office, still trying to figure out if former Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno's private consulting business may been involved in illegality. It seems pretty darn likely that the firm's union and other clients were trying to curry favor with one of the two kings of the New York Legislature. But that's just the way things are done around here, without any stated quid pro quo. Bruno's royal partner, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, has never disclosed how much money he makes from which clients in a Manhattan law firm. Maybe all those clients write checks because they value the business and legal advice of successful people who just happen, in a completely unrelated endeavor, to have become powerful politicians. Why, then, do they all  insist on keeping their arrangements secret?
The goo-goos, who like everyone else in Albany have an interest in getting along with the powers that be, sometimes talk about campaign contributions as a system of legalized bribery. They have a point, and have run a recent campaign against pols using contributions for noncampaign expenses. But when it comes to the personal incomes of powerful people, the goo-goos tend to get all prissy about privacy rights. They pay vague lip service toward seeking more disclosure, but fail to recognize how deep and wide is the potential for corruption.
The ethics "reform" passed last year, which succeeded in getting rid of Albany's one actual reformer (Lobbying Commission Executive Director David Grandeau), giving more power to the governor and leaving the Legislature untouched, was announced at a press conference attended by Spitzer, Bruno and Silver. I asked the governor about the nondisclosure of legislators' incomes, and he inaccurately stated and repeated that legislative leaders are now required to publicly disclose the approximate amounts of their outside income. He wasn't lying. It's just that this hotshot lawyer, elected on a platform of cleaning up Albany, hadn't bothered to discover the content of the law that he was supposedly reforming.

Comments

[Brian]

"campaign contributions as a system of legalized bribery. "

I'm glad someone else recognizes these 'contributions' for what they really are.

[Bob Conner]

Yeah, but what about direct payments to pols or family members? Why don't the goo-goos get exercised about those?