Louisiana Wins!! . . . The Most Corrupt Award
This is not surprising whatsoever to anyone who has spent any time in Louisiana. When I was living there, people who had moved to the state would call the corruption ‘incomparable’ to what they had seen in other places, though it would take them a few years to discover exactly how bad it is. Though it doesn’t look as if Illinois is doing all so well either. That might explain the CTA fiasco (possibly gated).
Notes:
“The Justice Department is reporting only public corruption convictions that result from a federal prosecution,” Mokhiber said. “Convictions that result from a prosecution pursued by state district attorneys or attorneys general, for example, are not included in the Justice Department statistics. But the vast majority of public corruption prosecutions – perhaps as many as 80 percent – are brought by federal officials.”
“Also, public officials in any given state can be corrupt to the core, and if a federal prosecutor doesn’t have the resources or the sheer political will to bring the case and win a conviction, the public corruption will not be reflected in the Justice Department’s data set,” Mokhiber said.
Also, it is hard to not notice that southern states consume much of the top of the list. I’m curious as to whether anti-government sentiment (libertarian or otherwise), particularly in voting patterns, is at all correlated with levels of corruption in the various states.
