ProPublica ran an excellent article yesterday by Kim Barker and Al Shaw about campaign, PAC, and Super PAC coordination and self-dealing, primarily at the presidential level. What is so special about the article is that it follows the money to where it is being spent. The authors found that many PAC and Super PAC vendors are the same vendors, or different vendors owned by the same people, as the presidential campaigns'. In other words, presidential consultants are also PAC consultants or vendors.

This is also a problem at the local level, especially with local public financing programs, where coordination with PACs is less of an issue (the money is spent on other campaigns). What is prohibited is the taking of funds from PACs. What happens instead is that PACs sometimes pay a candidate's consultants and other vendors, including landlords and utilities when they share an office.

But that's only one of the ways local candidates use vendors to get around prohibitions and limitations.

Lawrence Lessig's excellent new book Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It (Twelve, Oct. 5, 2011) is about Congress and mostly about campaign finance, but it is also an important look at institutional corruption that has some valuable things to say that are relevant to local government ethics.

Lessig, who is director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University, came to government ethics in an interesting fashion. As a law professor specializing in copyright law, he sought to make out-of-print but copyrighted books available to the public. But his efforts, as reasonable, as clearly in the public interest, and as consistent with the Constitution (which actually mentions copyright) as can be, went nowhere. Instead, copyrights were extended more and more.

Institutional Corruption
Lessig came to realize that what caused these extensions, institutional corruption, is "the gateway problem: until we solve it, we won't solve any number of other critical problems." True reform, in any area, is impossible as long as the current institutional situation remains. Therefore, he switched his focus from copyright to government ethics, with an emphasis on campaign finance.

Two months ago, a book was published called The Jersey Sting, by two Star-Ledger reporters, Ted Sherman and Josh Margolin. It provides the history of an enormous federal sting operation which led to the arrest of dozens of government officials, most of them from local governments, on July 23, 2009 (see my blog post of that date). It's a real page-turner that shows how things work and how easy it can be for anyone with money to make deals with elected officials, at least in New Jersey.

The actual sting operation is not really a local government ethics story, but rather a tale of an ethics environment that is so poor, criminal conduct is just waiting for the money to start it going.

If nothing else, this book should make it very clear to local government officials all over the country how valuable a good, independent ethics program is. The books shows very clearly what can happen when there is nothing to prevent an ethics environment from getting this bad.

In a letter to the editor in yesterday's New York Times, two lawyers who represent clients seeking to gut Arizona's Citizens Clean Elections public campaign financing program end by calling Arizona's program "a vision of unconstitutional dystopia, not free speech."

I administer the public campaign financing program in New Haven, CT. These programs are intended to prevent candidates from being seen to owe their election to special interests, including contractors and others doing business with government, as well as to prevent elected officials from actually feeling indebted to them. These goals are similar to the goals of government ethics laws. So let's try out what these gentlemen said by applying it to government ethics.

According to an article in today's Wall Street Journal, business organizations are arguing that government employee unions have a conflict of interest that should prevent them from supporting candidates for office. "Public-sector unions have a guaranteed source of revenue—you and me as taxpayers," the executive director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Workforce Freedom Initiative is quoted as saying. The argument is that union dues come from government employees' salaries, which come from taxes.

Update: September 26, 2010 (see below)

Disclosure forms are important. Sometimes, even secondary information can be important. But it can take a lot of work to get behind the information that appears on disclosure forms. And when you do get behind the information, it can look real ugly, even if it's completely legal.

Here's a good example from the WNYC radio website last week. The same address showed up 14 times on a candidate's campaign contribution disclosure forms, so the reporter visited the address. It turned out to be leased by the NY State Thruway Authority (the Thruway is the state's big toll road). But the contributions weren't from Thruway employees.