From Bloomberg.com:

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s campaign fund took tens of thousands of dollars from law firms representing clients his office investigated or accused of wrongdoing, state records show.

[snip]

Cuomo’s donation forms ask contributors to sign a statement saying they have no “matter” pending with him. That rule “does not extend to attorneys representing persons or entities with matters before the NYS Attorney General’s office,” the form states, mirroring predecessors’ policies. The exception creates the appearance of impropriety, ethics experts said.

[snip]

Excluding large groups of donors might make Cuomo a leader in ethics while hurting his chance to be elected, said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause, New York, a nonprofit that promotes honesty in government.

“People who run for office are between a rock and a hard place,” she said. “The system stinks. If you don’t want people running for office to be influenced by campaign contributions, then you have to give them public money to run.”

Richard Bamberger, a Cuomo spokesman, said in an e-mail, “Lawyers appear constantly before all sorts of government agencies, whether it is the Mayor’s Office, the Governor’s Office, or countless agencies and boards. No one would argue that lawyers can’t donate to candidates for any of these offices. Indeed, the ABA and New York State rules specifically encourage lawyers to participate in the political process.”

No doubt that the system stinks, but the solution is not to finance the system with taxpayer money which would be yet another bailout to try to save a rotten system. The solution is first to ask why there are millions of dollars involved in elections. The answer is that there is political power and millions or billions of dollars at stake in the outcome of elections. Those dollars are to be spent by governments on their welfare programs, on corporate subsidy programs, on public employees involved in all aspects of your life, etc. And that’s what needs to be changed; that’s where the system stinks. Politics now infests nearly every aspect of our lives. Every group wants to use the state and its power to benefit its members at the expense of everyone else. Political office is a career choice, not a means to secure our rights. Democracy is not the will of the people, it is the will of the corrupt. What we need to do is destroy all or most of government and take back control of our lives from the political process. Elections and what passes for democracy these days only insure tyrannical rule by the rich, the powerful and the self-serving who care nothing for the people and their rights.