If ethics stories make people's eyes glaze over, maybe someone should relate them to the bottom line. For example, regarding the state pension fund/comptroller's office scandal that Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has been investigating: Is the graft part of the reason for the fund's recent 26.3 percent decline, which local taxpayers will have to pay for?
At the legislative level, it's a little trickier. The feds allege the $3.2 million Joe Bruno raked in as Senate leader from private business consulting was in effect a collection of bribes, but that may be hard to prove. The systemic scandal is that Joe could hide that income and those clients, as other legislators and leaders continue to do. Whether or not he or they are guilty of anything, or just playing by Albany rules, their clients and contributors have done well sucking on the public teat -- while unconnected private-sector companies, especially upstate, have found it impossible to keep paying the state's high cost of doing business.
Meanwhile, though, a lot of the ethics discussion is about tangential issues and politics (that's surely what Eliot Spitzer thinks), and that mindset filters down to the local level. In the Saratoga town of Malta, which was embroiled in a ludicrous case last year where critics of the supervisor raised bogus ethics charges, the latest hullabaloo has critics of a speedway saying the town board has a conflict of interest because free town events have been held there. The town attorney solemnly reviewed the matter (according to this week's Ballston Journal), and concluded that there was a conflict of interest, but not an illegal one. This kind of nonsense gives ethics investigation a bad name, and plays into the hands of those political leaders and special interests who want to keep paying each other off at the highest levels of state government.
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