Sunday, May 12, 2013
Comparing corruption on a state level
In the wake of the recently revealed wire work by a number of New York State legislators, Gail Collins takes a look at the corruption levels in the various states to see who had more crooked pols.
Also, is New York’s State Legislature the most corrupt in the country? At last count we had 32 state officials get into deep trouble over the last few years, including four former Senate majority or minority leaders. The offenses ranged from taking bribes to throwing coffee in the face of a staff member. The last was not actually a corruption matter, but it was definitely behavior we wish to discourage.Gail does suggest that New Jersey is in the rebound phase from major corruption and merely looks clean until the next eruption of the legislative "urges". New York, on the other hand, has institutionalized its behavior, in a bi-partisan fashion.
It’s quite a record, but there are still other states in contention.
“We have three people in the State Legislature facing trial. Four of the last seven governors have gone to jail,” said Andy Shaw of Illinois’ Better Government Association. “And we’re a fiscal train wreck.”...
And then there was the Alabama bingo debacle and the Arizona Fiesta Bowl scandal. Louisiana showed up at the top of a study of political corruption that calculated the number of convictions per capita. Georgia came out as worst on a corruption risk report from the State Integrity Investigation, which measured factors like accountability, transparency and ethics enforcement.
New Jersey got the best grade.
“There was an audible gasp across the entire state,” said Debbie Walsh of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers.
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