Campaign Finance

“You work for the banks, they pay you, and yet you’re supposed to represent the public interest. ... Consultants have a financial incentive to do things to attract repeat business.”

—U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown at a Senate Banking Committee hearing on the conflicts of interests of consultants who are paid both by federal bank regulatory agencies and the banks, according to an article in yesterday's New York Times.

We often hear elected officials saying, "I can't be bought at any price." The assumption behind this statement is that there is no amount of money, no job offer, nothing that will make the elected official act or vote any way than the way he otherwise intends to act or vote, that he cannot be influenced.

Yesterday, Los Angeles' KCET-TV put up a database on it website to show who's giving to candidates in the current city and school board elections. You can see which city officials, business people, and others are giving, who's getting contributions from which zipcodes, and more. The database is a bit slow, at least today, just a few days before the first primary, but that's to be expected.

Intimidation is, I believe, the worst kind of ethical misconduct in government, because (1) it limits or changes participation of people in the democratic process, (2) it is emotionally damaging, and (3) it enables all sorts of ethical misconduct. Intimidation is a fundamental form of misuse of power and position. (For more about intimidation, see the section of my book on this topic.)

Read all about it! Local government ethics becomes a presidential campaign issue! Yes, you heard that right. According to CBS News, this very day presidential candidate Mitt Romney said "the person sitting across the table from [a teachers union] should not have received the largest campaign contribution from the teachers union themselves ... [It's] an extraordinary conflict of interest and something that should be addressed."

In this year of endless talk about voter fraud, there is not all that much talk about one area of fraud that has actually been proven to exist, and to make a difference:  absentee ballot fraud. This kind of fraud even comes with its own profession, the absentee ballot broker (boletera in southern Florida).

Boleteras are hired by local campaigns to go into nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and sometimes homes to help people fill out absentee ballots. The question is, how much help do they give? A little help is a good deed, a lot of help is fraud.

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break-in. For those too young to remember, President Nixon's re-election campaign had people break in to the Democratic National Committee's offices in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C.

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'.

A good followup to my last blog post, on Lawrence Lessig's book, is what Jack Abramoff said on 60 Minutes this Sunday, pushing his new book Capitol Punishment.

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.