I recently wrote about (based on a good analysis from True News from Change NYC) how lawyer and developer money is dominating the NYC Comptroller's race. As background I will also refer you to the corrupt sweetheart deals developers routinely get in NYC. Basically, when I wrote that earlier article the Comptroller's race looked pretty lousy with Melinda "Developer's Quisling" Katz, David "Weasel" Yassky, and David Weprin who I don't know well enough to give the kind of nickname I hear from a new State Senator that I have become known for. Weprin had been my choice by default because he a.) wasn't such a clear developer shill as Katz, b.) hadn't supported the Bloomberg Putch like Weasel Yassky, and c.) actually had considerable experience in regulation of banking and financial industries.  read more »

Recently I wrote about how developers basically run this city for their own profit, getting sweetheart deals from our city and state government through backroom deals. The level of corruption that basically allows rich developers like Bruce Ratner to use our tax money to turn a profit and dominate politics is really quite amazing. Here I discuss the flip side of this: what the politicians get out of. The politicians get campaign money. Some developers will donated to pretty much everyone's campaign in key races to try and get a hold on whoever wins. This is why candidates who genuinely do not take developer money are important to reforming our system.

The NYC Comptroller race is possibly the most uninspiring one this year. Or at least so far. Seems no one wants to be the one to face the city's fiscal crisis. But apparently lawyers and developers (the latter not surprisingly) are very, very interested in who keeps track of the money in NYC.

This comes from True News from Change NYC:

Lawyers and developers contributed almost half of the funds to the three major candidates running for Comptroller. Of the 4,636 listed occupations (5,779 in total) on the contributor list, 826 are listed as lawyers. But even 826 is not the true number due to the fact that the candidates mislabel the contributors' occupations on the list. The same can be said for the 344 real estate contributors...Of the 200 contributions listed as CEOs, most are in real estate, law or banking. Many other listed professions that should have been specified as real estate include: Architect, Broker, Builder, Contractors, Developer, Director, Engineer, Management, Owner, Partner, President, Principal, and Self Employed....Of the 400 contributers listing their occupations as executives, many are developer’s lawyers and bankers. Talk about cooking the Comptroller books, Katz has a contribution listed as "Self Employed" and another contributer from Two Trees Mgmt listed as "Director" for his occupation, when in fact everyone knows that Two Trees is a very famous real estate development company.

There's more. The article is a good bit of digging around the finiancial disclosures of these candidates. And it is nothing new for developers to hide their professions...and for politicians to abet that hiding. Normally I don't have the hours in a day to do the kind of digging around True News from Change NYC did, but when a supporter of Brad Lander (running for City Council in Brooklyn) claimed that Brad took no developer money, I did some similar digging, mainly Googling the top contributors to Brad's campaign. Family members aside, almost all of Brad's top donors were developers and contractors, though few listed that as their profession. It took a simple Google search to find the executives, CEOs and the like were mostly working for developers. When the developers (and apparently lawyers) hide who they are, and the politicians make claims that they take no developer money when they do, that is basic lying in my book.  read more »