Leave Bruno Alone

Dear Federal Prosecutors:

I read more and more about the possibility of a federal government shutdown and all that would mean to the people, whether the people like to acknowledge it or not. I also read about our large federal budget deficit, the looming necessity to increase the federal debt ceiling, and, perhaps worst of all, the possibility that some Republicans will decide to oppose raising that ceiling, never-mind the catastrophe that would cause.

And in the midst of all this I also read that you, federal prosecutors, are looking to retry now-former New York State Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno. You have convicted him once on some charges, but lost other charges to an acquittal. His convictions were in effect overturned by the United States Supreme Court's understandable concerns about the law he was convicted under.

The federal government's damaged finances may appear unrelated to the ongoing efforts to put Joe Bruno in jail. But consider this undeniable fact: Prosecutions cost money. And for now we're only talking about the costs to the government and thus, indirectly, to the taxpayers. We are leaving aside the costs to middle class people who will be dragged into court, again, to testify.

Focusing only on the government's costs, as a taxpayer in the United States, I plead with you: Leave Joe Bruno alone. It's just not worth the money anymore.

I do not make this plea because I like Bruno, or because I consider the efforts you made against Bruno to have been entirely wasted.

While I began looking at this matter as a Bruno supporter, that eroded. Thanks in part to your efforts, to your previous semi-successful prosecution, I was able to see that Bruno surely was corrupt in some sense, despite my early support of him. You were clearly not prosecuting Joe Bruno for being Joe Bruno, as Roger Stone had suggested and as I'd initially feared. Even if Bruno's corruption didn't quite cross the line into illegality, he came close enough for me. Your prosecution thus highlighted Bruno's corruption and the way in which State law is lax enough that Bruno probably managed to not break any State laws while he was being corrupt. In other words, a federal prosecution highlighted the need for a better, more reasonable State law. While this isn't the primary purpose of a federal prosecution, at least I hope it is not, it is a valuable purpose, and I honor it.

By mostly failing, your previous prosecution also unintentionally highlighted that it was indeed possible to be a business consultant and a State Legislator at the same time. Bruno was, generally speaking, acquitted on charges related to consulting work he'd done that was in fact legitimate consulting work or at least appeared to be so. Where his problem came was treading in the gray area between legitimate consulting and influence peddling. A consultant-legislator who actually has consulted would appear to not be in much danger.

At least after Bruno was mostly acquitted, anyway.

Your prosecution, however, has already served the only good purposes it can. Please leave Bruno alone now. It is simply not worth your time and taxpayer money, my money, to keep going after him. Not in the age of a huge federal budget deficit, a looming government shutdown, and worst of all the distant but real possibility that some of Joe Bruno's fellow Republicans may decide to make the most irresponsible possible decision and block the increase of the debt ceiling. Joe Bruno hasn't been in power for years. He will never be in power again. It is just a waste of taxpayer money, a commodity in ever-shorter supply, to keep going after him.

It's time to let go. Spend my money going after other crimes. Make sure you convict Senator Carl Kruger. Go after lawyer-legislators, like John Sampson and Sheldon Silver, whose legal work may not be any more real than you accused Bruno's consulting work of being. Use the precious, dwindling resources the people give to you to investigate people currently in power. Not to keep up after people you've already gone after oncem haven't been in power for years, and likely won't ever be in power again..

There is simply no longer any money to spare for fishing expeditions, or for vendettas. And, honestly, a vendetta is what this is starting to look like.

Please stop and let it go. There just isn't any money for this anymore.

Sincerely,
The Albany Exile
(a taxpayer)

Honest Lawyers

Where, I wonder, are all the corrupt lawyers.

Of the various New York State politicians who have been credibly accused or convicted of various corruption charges of late, only one that I can think of, former State Senator Vincent Leibell, was a lawyer, and what he did was an old-fashioned mafia-style shakedown more than it was anything actually political.

Neither Carl Kruger nor William Boyland are lawyers. Nor Joe Bruno, nor Shirley Huntely, nor Vito Lopez, nor Shirley Huntley, nor Tony Seminerio. None of these people are described as lawyers in their official biographies, and they are not listed in the Office of Court Administration's attorney directory.

I suppose I might have missed another scandal involving a lawyer-legislator. There have been so many scandals, losing track is easy. Assuming I haven't, though, one could think that lawyer-legislators are probably the most honest and least corrupt. While that may be true, I don't think it's the reason comparatively few of them are either convicted of or credibly charged with crimes.

Many, but not all, of the allegedly corrupt legislators have been accused of variants on the same crime, which is using fake “consulting” firms to in essence funnel bribes collected for performing legislative work. In these arrangements, little or not actual consulting work is done. If I recall Joe Bruno's convictions correctly, he was acquitted when the jury thought he was doing real consulting work and convicted when they thought he wasn't. So it's not like there's no way to be a business consultant and a legislator at the same time. One just has to, you know, actually consult.

An old saying in Albany goes something like, “you don't bribe a legislator anymore, you hire his law firm.” It's only been pretty recently that we could add, “or you hire him as a business consultant.”

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver is “of counsel” at a prominent law firm, as is Senate Minority Leader John Sampson. Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos also has a law firm, exactly what his title and role are I don't know. How many people with business before New York State, we wonder, have hired one, or all, of those firms. And is any real legal work done.

Has anyone looked? Maybe they have. But my distinct impression is that lawyers are potentially given a free pass for no-show work because they are lawyers.

I'm not saying legislators' law firms are hired for no-show work. I'm saying that, the way the rules are written and interpreted, they could easily be.

The rules are written, mostly, by lawyers, and are enforced by other lawyers who are called prosecutors and judges. Lawyers like to hide behind the concept of lawyer-client confidentiality. Other professionals, such as business consultants, security consultants, or private detectives, clearly do not deserve the same considerations that lawyers have, or at least so say the lawyers who write the rules. Lawyers, you see, can think in boxes. Therefore, surely a lawyer-legislator won't be influenced by, say, the Trial Lawyers' Association or one of the Koch Brothers' businesses hiring his firm for big legal fees.

But those businessmen. You have to watch out for them. Surely, they will be influenced by those big consulting fees.

I understand of course that lawyer-client confidentiality is important; but is it really any more important than consultant-client confidentiality, when it starts to rub against public trust? Does a legislator's bank account know the difference between a legal fee and a consulting fee?

There is simply no good reason to hold legal fees as more sacrosanct than consulting fees. Both can be used as a form of influence, and both probably are. There is no good reason to think that, in terms of influence peddling, a no-show legal job is any less dangerous or corrupt than a no-show business consulting job. We shouldn't allow a New York State Legislator to be more efficiently corrupt because he happened to go to law school as opposed to business school or accounting school.

There are, of course, several other signs that New York State doesn't take ethics seriously as a policy issue, but in a way this one is the most telling, and almost certainly the least-sung. In effect one profession is singled out. The legal profession is in essence excused from the kind of corruption that seems to be the most common these days. Not excused from committing it, I mean, but excused from being legally held accountable for it. In the strictest legal sense, lawyers can only be corrupt by going far out of their way to be so, like Vincent Leibell did.

Or so it seems.

Joe Bruno once stated that he'd pitched to Eliot Spitzer that ethics reform should include full disclosure of all outside income for legislators, including lawyer-legislators, but that Spitzer balked at the inclusion of lawyers.

New York must take ethics seriously if it is to bother proceeding at all. It needs to start with putting all outside income for legislators on an equal footing, if outside income is to be allowed at all. (And if it's not you need to at least double the legislators' legislative pay and tie it to the inflation rate.)

When I hear about a potential Moreland Act Commission to deal with the issue of ethics reform I get very nervous. A Moreland Act Commission is a blunt instrument by definition, and is beholden only to the Governor. But you know what? If such a Commission will take ethics seriously as an issue and have all options on the table, including ending the disparate treatment of lawyers and other professions?

Then I, for one, will take it.

Adult Supervision

“Wall Street,” a financial expert once said on National Public Radio, “needs adult supervision.” I have heard of something very similar said by some Wall Street guy or other, in the pages of the book The Big Short, one of several books about the financial crisis that I have yet to read but really should.

Basically, this Wall Street guy said that the financial industry kept doing what it did in-part because it kept expecting the adults to come in and stop it. "Surely the adults won't let us play this dangerously forever," the thinking went. But then the financial industry realized that there aren't any adults anymore. Along very similar lines, note this New York Times' interview with grandmaster Wall Street con artist Bernie Madoff. Madoff claims it likely that the banks had to have caught onto what he was doing, and chose to look the other way.

The need for adult supervision isn't confined to Wall Street. Albany is a city which seems to be almost entirely devoid of adult supervision. Come to that, the oil industry doesn't seem to have many adults either. Nor does the auto industry. To pick but one glaring example, it shouldn't have taken Congress, or the ever-reliable mainstream media, to point out that showing up to ask for money in your own private jet sends entirely the wrong message. That's a child's mistake, not an adult's.

The debt collection industry is another example. A series of articles and documentary films have convinced me that this industry is largely made up of overgrown children, pretending to be pirates. I didn't make that comparison up. It came straight from the mouth of a debt collector quoted in the documentary film Maxed Out. Similarly, the Fall 2010 newsletter of the New York State Collectors' Association termed “ridiculous” a bill introduced in the New York State Legislature that would prevent the collection of debts from the dead. Only someone who doesn't know the debt industry would be surprised by the thought of a collector attempting to collect from the family of a corpse. The Association similarly opposed vociferously a bill that would require debt collectors to be (gasps in horror!) licensed. How dare adults try to spoil our fun!

Adult supervision.

When the British Petroleum oil spill happened in the Gulf of Mexico, I, like Roger Ebert, was struck by the incredible degree to which attempts to get BP to clean up after its own mess were taken by Fox News and the like as an attack on the capitalist system itself. Did this remind anyone else of a chastised child claiming “it's not fair” and then running to a neighbor or a favored uncle? What, I wonder, would the hue and cry have been if regulators had stepped in to try and stop Bernie Madoff?

Are there no more adults? Consider this. It's not like financial regulators did not exist even before recent changes to the system. Madoff had to do filings with them; in the New York Times interview cited above, Madoff expresses surprise that no one caught onto the discrepancies in his filings. It's not like Albany politicians don't have to do filings. Indeed, filings were a menace to Senator Pedro Espada even before the potential extent of his corruption was authoritatively established. And it's not like debt collectors don't already have rules to follow.

Adult supervision exists on Wall Street, and in Albany, and in the debt collection industry. It probably exists in the auto industry and oil industry as well. I wonder if it isn't that there are no adults, but rather that the children have merely figured out ways to hide from them. I read of changes to the financial industry regulatory system, changes which are surely needed. I read of ethics reform proposals in Albany. I read of private lawsuits against debt collectors, and of an New York State Attorney General crackdown on the industry. And then I read that, at the same time that the Attorney General is investigating debt collectors, he's also hiring them.

If I am right, and it isn't that there are no more adults so much as the children are quite adept at evading the adults, then all the additional supervision in the world is simply may not matter.

Not on Wall Street, not when the debt collector is pounding on your door, and surely not in Albany.

Zero Effect: The Arizona Shootings

It wouldn't surprise me whatsoever if the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords by Jared Loughner was politically motivated. And that's the picture that's starting to emerge. (Mr. Loughner shot others besides Representative Giffords, of course, but Giffords was his primary target, so I refer to the incident as her shooting.)

Indeed, it would surprise me if the incident were NOT politically motivated. If it turned out it was merely the product of voices in the gunman's had, or if there were some old family grudge he thought he was settling, basically ANY non-political motivation, that's what would surprise me.

With all the violence inherent in today's politics, I refer to violent rhetoric and violent implied inclinations, it's surprising that such an incident hasn't happened sooner. And let me say something that isn't politically correct, but is true: This violence is mostly, almost exclusively, found on the right. The days of the Black Panthers and the Symbionese Liberation Army, violence on the left, are for the moment long past. Perhaps the most-violent rhetoric from the left I've seen in awhile came from Eliot Spitzer, and we saw what happened to him.

Some folks wish this shooting to be what public policy scholar Thomas Birkland calls a “focusing event,” a moment that crystallizes the need for a change. Seen as a focusing event, presumably the shootings would focus our attention on the need to increase civility in our public discourse, to recognize that there's a difference between winning an election and “knocking you down,” as now-former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer so eloquently threatened to do to now-former New York State Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno. Birkland was talking about a policy change following a focusing event, not a change in political tone or a process change, but the principle is the same in both cases.

And it sure would be nice if this shooting could serve some good. I'm tired of seeing the right portray President Obama as the Joker from Batman, or with a Nazi flag behind him. I'm tired of people bringing guns to meetings with their Representatives to protest the government giving them health care. I'm tired of people at rallies threatening to lynch the Attorney General of the United States. I'm tired of hearing the likes of G. Gordon Liddy advise people to shoot federal agents in the head. I'm tired of Newt Gingrich thinking he knows what a “normal American” is and who the enemy of those “normal Americans” are.

And, mostly, I'm tired of hearing Sarah Palin and Carl Paladino and those of their ilk use sex-laced, incendiary rhetoric and then hide behind the First Amendment when something bad happens. The First Amendment, after all, doesn't give one the right to yell fire in a crowded theater.

It would be nice if this shooting helped to end all that, helped to restore to America a conservative movement that not only understood that compromise was necessary but that praised the idea of compromise (as Ronald Reagan once did) and that understood your opponents could be friends after 6pm (as Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neil claimed to be). But let's face it. Even if the shooting was politically motivated (which it may-yet turn out to not be), and even if that fact if true were undeniable (and, sadly, everything is deniable these days), it still wouldn't change anything. The shooting will not be a focusing event for anything.

The shootings by army psychologist Nidal Hasan were successfully directed into scrutiny on American Muslims, and logic suggests the Arizona incident will direct a similar scrutiny toward the right. But contemporary American politics, as the shooting itself ironically suggests, is not about logic.

The violent rhetoric of the right isn't new, and we've seen similar potential focusing events before. The Oklahoma City bombing; the Branch Davidians' madness at Waco Texas; the Olympic Centennial Park bombing; the anti-government Right Wing rhetoric and violence of the Unabomber; various abortion-related killings; the flying of an airplane into IRS offices in Texas; the shooting at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; etc. All of these, and others, many others, were potential focusing events to change the increasingly ugly nature of our political discourse. But all were successfully redirected. Instead of focusing on militias, we focused on the alleged root cause of the militias: Bad government. Ironically, this is the same thought process, focusing on society and not the criminal as the root cause of crime, that the right has long decried when it's convenient for them, such as now, wherein we are told that Loughner is totally responsible for his own actions. The right wing insisted that we reach out to gun-toting politically-motivated lunatics (as long as their actions can be somehow traced to spontaneous anger at the government itself, and not the result of things said by the political right) with sympathy and understanding, even as they explicitly denied similar considerations to gun-toting, economically-motivated urban street thugs. Or to gun-toting politically-motivated lunatics whose actions can in part be traced to violent political rhetoric.

And that's what'll happen this time. Nothing. Or, worse than nothing, the incident will somehow be used to cast scrutiny in the wrong direction.

The corrosive influence of Post-Modern philosophy on America's public life, once feared by the right, has become their greatest friend, because it enables them to sell us political goods we can't afford and have no good reason to buy. When all facts become opinions, it's the opinions of those with the biggest mouths and the most money that get to become facts again. And when all values are openly questioned, anger becomes the most-important value. Anger focuses, cuts through, motivates, intensifies. And, best of all, anger cheap to buy or manufacture.

The right, by far, has the most money (the Koch Brothers, unlike George Soros, aren't going to back down for fear of being misunderstood), the biggest mouths (conservative talk radio has reigned since the 1980s), and certainly the most anger. And if the anger already present isn't sufficient, the money can be used to buy more.

If Sarah Palin's pathetic, self-serving video, and her bizarre public E-Mail exchange with Glenn Beck, showed us anything, it's that the redirection process has already begun. And if the polls showing that Americans mostly think that the shootings in Arizona had nothing to do with politics are accurate, it may mean that the redirection process has already succeeded.

Zero effect. This, America, is the politics we're stuck with, the politics we've made. Focusing events may have no actual meaning.

On Legislative Staff

In a recent piece on Senator Leibell's ethical issues, I briefly mentioned Senator Leibell's staff. I wondered aloud if maybe one of Senator Leibell's problems was that he lacked staff with either the guts or the authority, or both, to tell him that what he was doing was both wrong, and stupid, and would harm all of them. (This of course assumes his staff had any idea what he was doing, and simply “knew better” than to call him on it. It might be the case, of course, that they had no idea at all.)

I was criticized for these remarks; I was accused of blaming Senator Leibell's problems on his staff. But I was doing no such thing.

Well, then was I saying that it was staff's responsibility to police the actions of the boss? Again, no, I wasn't. The responsibility for all legislators' actions, and all of a legislature's or legislative conference's actions as a collective body, falls on the legislators themselves.

What I was doing, however, was highlighting the important and oft-overlooked role of legislative staff. As a legislator, a good staff can, if you let them, save you from yourself, at least temporarily. (In the long run, of course, no one can save anyone from themselves. But staff can help in the short term.) Staff should be good enough, trusted enough, and have enough integrity to tell you that what you're doing is wrong, whether it's an unjustifiable policy choice, or an unethical or even an illegal action. Political trust between legislator and staff is important, yes. (Note, though, that political trust is not the same as political agreement.) But, at the end of the day, competence, intelligence, and guts are all more important than is political trust.

I should imagine that for a legislator one of the most tempting things in the world is to hire staff that will just stroke your ego, reenforce your ideology and your preconception, and find smart-sounding ways to simply confirm what you say. This is an understandable temptation that should be avoided.

It's incumbent upon legislators, individually for their offices and collectively for the house or conference, to build a good staff. To seek out people who know what they are doing, have integrity, and are unafraid. As the legislator, ultimately the decisions are yours, and staff should respect that. But the staff also shouldn't be afraid to tell you to your face, behind closed doors of course, that what you're doing is wrong. Whether it's a bad policy, or an unethical (or illegal) action. If you discourage staff from performing that critical function, or even worse if you initially hire staff who isn't inclined to perform it, you have done yourself, your constituency, your conference, your chamber, and your state a disservice.

Sadly, I have no impression that the New York State Legislature (I speak especially of the State Senate, which seems to make the news a lot more often) agrees with me. If they have the tough, smart, capable staff I envision, they keep it well-hidden, and seem to rarely or never listen to it. Bad policy and lack of ethics don't always, or even mostly, go hand-in-hand, but there are important linkages. Staff is one of those linkages.

I don't know for sure, of course, that Senator Leibell's staff didn't try to talk to him. Ditto for Senator Espada, Senator Bruno, Assembly Member Seminerio, or any of the others who have faced problems. It might be that in all these cases, staff tried to warn legislator, and legislator didn't listen. Or staff might have not known at all. (With Bruno at least, thanks to his trial, there's a record at least of what people say or claim went on, so someday perhaps I will obtain that record and see for myself. With the others, though, we may never know for sure.)

But with all the problems New York's state legislators have had of late, one wonders if part of it is that they are hiring folks who kiss up and kick down, John Bolton style, rather than the people they should be hiring. And indeed, there's actually some specific reasons to think that hiring bad staff might be part of the New York State Legislature's problem, at least as far as the Senate is concerned.

Our first example comes to us from the Senate Democrats. Under Democratic rule, the State Senate hired former disc jockey Christopher Sealey as “Director of Creative Services” (huh?), at a 2009 pay rate of about $92,000 a year. Published reports indicate that even he was surprised by his hire. Luckily, he's ended his State service entirely, and he can go back to being a disc jockey. I have no idea what he did for the Senate and I don't think he did either.

For our second example, we go to the Senate Republicans. Who could forget the bizarre E-Mail from Senator Dean Skelos' aide, Thomas Dunham, to then Senate employee Edward Lurie, which was sent in late 2008 and hit the news in early 2009, wherein Dunham blatantly plotted to use Senate research staff for electoral purposes? To do such a thing at all was bad enough, but Dunham also put it in E-Mail, apparently not aware that E-Mails sometimes get leaked. It was, thus, not enough for Dunham to do something wrong; he had to also do it stupidly. Despite this, Dunham continued to work for the Senate Republicans during their two-year stint in the minority, and in 2009, according to SeeThroughNY.net, he made $150,000 working for the Senate Minority. (Almost double what the Senate Democrats' disc jockey made.) One wonders how much he'll make in the Senate Majority.

For our third example we return to the Senate Democrats, and highlight the hiring of Senator Pedro Espada's son for a six-figure job, from which he was quickly removed after the hiring broke as a scandal, part of a small series of Senate Democratic hiring scandals.

Sadly, I have no impression these hires were atypical for the Senate. Any good people they may have hired have quite likely been simply drowned under the weight of the bad ones. It came as no surprise to me to read that the Senate Democrats had exceeded their staff budget by a considerable amount. It actually wouldn't surprise me if it turned out that the Senate Republicans had done it too, but I've read nothing that says so.

Political Scientist Alan Rosenthal once wrote that legislative staffing is an important element in building the capacity of state legislatures. A more-prepared staff means a more-prepared legislature. Political Scientist Michael Malbin has argued that at the federal level, legislative staff (which of course at the federal level means Congressional staff) has become so important to the legislative process that it endangers the principle of representation.

After two years, a little more, really, of the least competent State Legislature that I am aware of (the Senate casting a terrifying shadow over the State Assembly), I think New Yorkers are probably ready for a legislative staff that endangers the principle of representation, if such also means a Legislature that is run well and enacts policies that have at least the semblance of being thought out.

Now, let's be clear: None of this is staff's fault. The legislators' actions are ultimately the legislators' responsibility, and that includes building up staff.

I have to wonder, though if anyone told the Legislators any different. Did anyone drag Vincent Leibell aside and say, “please don't do this?” Did anyone tell Eric Schneiderman, “this millionaires' tax....what you're saying on floor of the Senate greatly exaggerates its potential?” Even if staff didn't know about Leibell's lack of ethics they surely knew of Schneiderman's wild exaggerations on the Senate Floor. Did they say anything? Were they even allowed to?

Or of the State Legislature, especially the Senate, has simply been hiring people who will help keep up the bubble?

If so, that's the wrong approach. It hurts the effort to make public policy that there's at least a good argument for. And, it hurts the effort to change the bizarre culture of Albany, which it seems only gets worse with increasingly strict ethics reforms. There are two aspects of Albany's corrupt culture that are within the State Legislators' direct control: Their own behavior, and who they hire to watch their backs. Someone can't watch your back when he's afraid he'll get fired for yelling in your ear. Or if he lacks the capacity to recognize a threat when one appaers.

In many ways, the key to good legislative staffing is to resist the temptation to stuff your ranks with political loyalists, cronies, and those to whom you owe favors. (Or, those whose families you owe favors to.) Currently, one could be forgiven for suspecting that staffing at the New York State Legislature is little more than a patronage mill. There are a few internship programs (for undergraduate students) or fellowship programs (for graduate students), in both chambers, that attempt to draw individuals with actual qualifications into both houses of the Legislature. But these are small in scale compared to the problem itself.

If ethics and good policy (or at least justifiable policy) aren't enough too make the Legislature think twice about who it hires, then consider this.

Competition was an important buzz word in Andrew Cuomo's 2011 State of the State message. Based on what I have seen and heard at the capital, the Legislature's staff, especially the Senate (both Conferences), is simply unprepared to compete with Andrew Cuomo. They will need smart, tough, educated, prepared people in order to remain relevant over the next few years.

Gubernatorial behavior, Legislators, is not within your power to control. Your capacity to respond to it, however, is. Good staff is your sword and your shield.