What’s wrong with Illinois?          

Eamon Javers, Fred Barbash

A visibly disgusted FBI special agent Robert Grant stood

at a podium in Chicago during a press conference today

announcing the arrest of Gov. Rod Blagojevich and hurling

his contempt at the entire political culture of the state of

Illinois.

...

So just what is the problem with Illinois?

...

Fitzgerald, who is known as a crusading prosecutor for his

role in the Valerie Plame CIA leak case, seemed to throw

up his hands in despair, saying: “We’re not going to end

corruption in Illinois by arrests and indictments alone.” He

stressed that rooting out corruption would depend on the

willingness of the people of Illinois to solve the problem.

In that, Fitzgerald may be on to something. It turns out that

a state’s culture is at least as important to its degree of

corruption as the aggressiveness of its law enforcement

officers.

And it’s also true that some states are just plain more

corrupt than others.

In an early attempt to explain why that is, the late Temple

University political science professor Daniel J. Elazar

argued in the 1960s that the United States can be divided

in to three general political cultures, moralistic, traditional

and individualistic.

In a moralistic culture, the professor argued, government

is considered to be a good thing, and officeholders

expected to look out for the general welfare. In a

traditional culture, citizens expect a hierarchical society.

And individualistic cultures value private efforts over

collective ones. Broadly defined, the moralistic areas of

the US were New England and the Midwest, the

Traditional areas were clustered in the south, and

individualistic culture centered on the Atlantic seaboard in

states like New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio

and … Illinois.

It’s the individualistic states, where there is an ethos that

encourages people to be out for themselves, where

corruption most easily takes root, argue some political

scientists. Just look at the states that make up the group:

“That’s the corruption rogues gallery,” says Colgate

University political science professor Michael Johnston.

“Every state has its own flavor,” he says, “but they all

have a very high level of risk for corruption.”

But the regional theory has one big flaw: The most corrupt

states aren’t in the “individualistic” part of the country.

In 2007, the publication Corporate Crime Reporter

crunched Department of Justice statistics to rank the 35

most populous states of the nation by corruption. The top

three? Louisiana, Mississippi and Kentucky – which can

be better thought of as broadly representing the

“moralistic” states. Illinois didn’t even break the top five,

coming in sixth on the list.

What gives? Colgate’s Johnston says that there’s more

to it than just regional character. He’s been studying

political corruption since the 1970s, and has concluded

that there are several key ingredients for political

corruption. He says those include

multiple political cultures competing for dominance, such

as rural versus urban voters,

tightly balanced party competition, and

an elite political culture in which politicians expect to see corruption in their daily lives.

“Corruption becomes a self fulfilling prophecy,” Johnston

says. “There’s a real qualitative change when people walk

out the door of their home each morning expecting to

have to make payoffs.”

That certainly seems to be the case in Illinois.

The scandal involving Otto Kerner Jr., for example, only

came to light because one of the participants deducted

the value of bribes paid in the 1960s -- to win freeway

exits and other favorable treatment for her horsetrack -- in

her income tax returns. The logic was that the payments

were simply a part of doing business in Illinois. By the

time the payments for services rendered came to light in

the 1970s, Kerner was a federal judge and resigned in the

scandal.

With that kind of political tradition, Blagojevich may have

presumed that he’d find a receptive audience for his

alleged pay-to-play entreaties to other Illinois political

figures.

...

Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards was pursued by

prosecutors for virtually his entire four terms. He relished

the image of a populist rogue, and contended that voters

in Louisiana didn’t care about conventional corruption.

The only way to lose an election, he famously cracked,

was to be “found in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.” In

1988 he was convicted and sent to Federal prison after

being found guilty of racketeering, extortion and money

laundering in connection with help he provided Edward J.

DeBartolo, Jr., in securing a casino license.

Maryland, part of that Atlantic coast “individualistic”

culture, had an amazing run of corruption of its own in the

1960’s and 70s. During that period some 15 high elected

officials were convicted of political corruption, the most

famous being Spiro T. Agnew, who resigned as Richard

Nixon’s vice-president in 1972 after pleading no contest

to charges of accepting tens of thousands of dollars in

cash from contractors in exchange for state contracts.

Agnew’s successor, Marvin Mandel, took office as

Governor in January, 1974 promising that the state would

no longer be “a postmark for greed, for corruption, for

kickbacks and payoffs.” Three years later he was

convicted on Federal charges of accepting roughly

$350,000 in gifts and favors from close friends in

exchange for state contracts and sent to prison. Mandel’s

conviction was overturned after he served his sentence

when the Supreme Court said the law under which he was

prosecuted was being misused.

It became clear during that investigation that bribery had

become part of the business model for many state and

county contractors, and in quick succession, the county

executives of suburban Baltimore County and Anne

Arundel County were indicted and convicted of similar

crimes.

One of the more candid of those officials, then-Anne

Arundel County Executive Joseph Alton, said in interviews

at the time that he had simply been playing by the rules as

understood in Maryland at the time. “It’s like I got caught

going 35 in a 30 mile zone,” he said.

New Jersey, another so-called “individualistic” state, also

has an infamous political culture.

U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie, based in Newark,

prosecuted more than 130 public officials during his seven

years in office. Among them were the mayors or

executives of Paterson, Irvington, North Bergen, Essex

County and Newark itself as well as the president of the

State Senate.

...

Colgate University’s Johnston says one good thing about

making a career of studying political corruption is that it

never goes away.

“You never run out of things to talk about,” he said. “And

everywhere I’ve been in the United States, people say, ‘If

you want to learn about political corruption, come to our

town.’”

The Corrupt States of America?

The publication Corporate Crime Reporter crunched

Department of Justice statistics in 2007 to rank the 35

most populous states of the nation by corruption. The

publication calculated a corruption rate, which it defined

as the total number of public corruption convictions from

1997 to 2006 per 100,000 residents.

These are the results:

1. Louisiana (7.67)

2. Mississippi (6.66)

3. Kentucky (5.18)

4. Alabama (4.76)

5. Ohio(4.69)

6. Illinois (4.68)

7. Pennsylvania (4.55)

8. Florida (4.47)

9. New Jersey (4.32)

10. New York (3.95)

(以下略去)

轉貼自︰

http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20081209/pl_politico/16391

(伊利諾州州長因試圖標售歐巴馬當選總統後所空出來的參議員位置被 FBI逮捕)