Who will clean up New York?

Gov. Cuomo's claim this week that he has "zero tolerance" for corruption sounded tough. Yet his stance didn't seem to deter the players involved in the Malcolm Smith bribery scandal, who proceeded with their scam for months all the same.

Let's be blunt: Cuomo presides over state government. He vowed to clean up New York's political dysfunction.

So far, he's failed — royally, as this week's arrests so depressingly show.

New Yorkers want, and deserve, to trust their public officials. Not to be shamed by them in late-night comedians' jokes.

Yes, Cuomo's made gestures toward cleaning up the mess — through ethics reform, for example. But plainly, he hasn't made much of a dent, let alone drained the swamp as promised.

Gov. Cuomo

Nor has City Council Speaker Christine Quinn done nearly enough to stem the corruption coming from her own members, despite her expressions of outrage over the scandal.

She, too, holds a position of responsibility and, indeed, aspires to the mayoralty. She shares blame for a system that all but begs pols to go rotten — namely, the "member item" game, which lets council members dole out public funds (i.e., pork) at their discretion. That system should have been scrapped long ago, as we've long argued.

Quinn, of course, stands by her member-item "reforms." She says they would have made it impossible for the council-related part of the scheme, involving Councilman Dan Halloran, to have succeeded.

But it's hard to take that seriously, given the history of New York pork.

Member items, as we've often noted, are inherently corrupt. They let pols buy loyalty and votes. They also tempt them to steer taxpayer money to themselves and folks of their choosing — as Halloran offered to do, according to the charges.

Quinn herself saw fit to grant Bronx Democrat Larry Seabrook $350,000 in pork, even as he faced federal charges of funneling it to phony groups he controlled.

And the kind of blatant corruption that's made headlines this week doesn't even include the sort that is all too legal in New York — as when Quinn, for example, backs a paid-sick-leave bill solely as an election-year present to politically powerful public unions. Or Cuomo gives teachers unions a destructive role in designing teacher-evaluation programs to curry their favor.