Talk about ironic. The Daily News on Friday broke a story of corruption in the State Senate. (Shocking, I know.) Senate Secretary Angelo Aponte tried to convince the MTA to allow Martin Scorcese and the HBO to film in the subway after receiving a $25,000 donation for Senate Democrats from Time Warner, HBO’s parent company. And how did Pete Donohue get wind of this story? As Mobilizing the Region highlighted yesterday, the phone call between Aponte and New York City Transit was mentioned in part of the report from the MTA’s new Office of Legislative and Community Input, a body established at the command of the State Senate to increase accountability and transparency on behalf of the trainst agency. As Steven Higashide wrote at MTR, “transparency goes both ways.” Indeed.
State Senate Secretary caught in new MTA transparency measures
previous post
3 comments
If this behavior is illegal, than the illegality lies in favoring a particular company or person instead of a wide range of companies, which seems like a very narrow definition of corruption. US Senators get millions of dollars to push health care reform to benefit a certain group of corporations, and nobody finds any fault with that. Actually, making the phone call public seems to add legality, since all the information is now out in the open. And anyway, politicians are widely known for “making phone calls”, and this behavior probably can never be completely eradicated. Kudos to the NY Senate for working too hard on this particular part of the MTA bailout bill though.
I know a lot of people who think it’s heinous that big insurance is bribing Senators to take certain positions on health care reform.
I’m sure Big Labor is doing the same thing.