Glass Houses and all that

It seems that what goes around really does come around. The latest is a story from Bloomberg (reported in the New York Post [link]) about Phil Angelides, the California Treasurer. For those of you who weren't paying attention this past summer, Angelides was a key player in the ousting of New York Stock Exchange Chairman and CEO Dick Grasso, and has been a vocal critic of the mutual fund companies that have been implicated in recent scandals.

The gist of Angelides complaints in the NYSE matter was that even if Grasso didn't do anything illegal, the appearances of impropriety in his pay package and his running of the Exchange were enough to warrant his ouster. Well, it turns out that Angelides might not have been as pure as the driven snow: according to Bloomberg, Angelides has solicited campaign contributions from at least 22 financial services companies and investment banks who were in a position to do business with the state of California.

Can you say "appearance of impropriety"?

But it gets worse. When pay-for-play [in which local and state officials accept political contributions from financial institutions, while awarding lucrative bond underwriting business to those same firms] was outlawed by the SEC in the early 1990s, Angelides and other state treasurers began using a huge loophole to keep the dollars flowing: money that is contributed by a parent company of a potential bond underwriter is not barred, nor is money contributed by lawyers or lobbyists for the potential underwriter. And how much has Angelides collected from these sources? Well, the Post is reporting that he's gotten $408,000 from lawyers alone.

Kind of speaks for itself, doesn't it?