Have you ever wondered how to bribe New York governor Andrew Cuomo, and to do it legally, without incurring any consequences?  One way to do it is to ask the governor to write a book and to give him a tremendous advance.  Although I'm not calling it a bribe, that's what publisher HarperCollins just happened to do, paying Cuomo $575,000 to write a self-congratulatory book entitled All Things Possible: Setbacks and Success in Politics and Life, detailing what a great governor and human being he is (obviously, they didn't interview his ex-wife).  The book, which is rated "one star" out of five on Amazon, the lowest rating, has sold only 3,000 copies in hardcover.

For this Cuomo was paid $575,000 with possibly another $125,000 to come.  Now, why would HarperCollins or any company pay such a huge advance for what they must have known would be a book that wouldn't do so well?  Well, HarperCollins is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which has a lot of business interests in New York.

An International Business Times review of New York state documents reveals that News Corporation gave Cuomo a book contract after Cuomo’s administration backed a series of state initiatives that benefited the media giant.

One of the initiatives was a bill that created a special sales tax break for online-only publications that charge for subscriptions. News Corporation, which was one of the two companies that lobbied for the bill, was at the time investing tens of millions of dollars in such a publication. Another initiative was a special tax exemption that Cuomo’s administration created for electronic books, which are sold by, among others, HarperCollins. State records list News Corporation as lobbying Cuomo’s tax department in the months before the exemption was announced. And, while News Corporation lobbied the governor’s office in 2012, Cuomo championed an expansion of controversial film and television tax credits that have benefited News Corporation’s films, and that News Corporation had lobbied for in the past.

I'm not saying, of course, that the enormous advance HarperCollins paid Cuomo was a bribe in this particular case.  But, generally speaking, if you did want to bribe Cuomo, paying him a huge sum for a non-book book would be the way to go.

At American Thinker, we're fair and balanced: we report, you decide.  We're just looking out for the folks.

This article was produced by NewsMachete.com, the conservative news site.