Corruption winds through Illinois politics | csmonitor.com: "In the annals of corrupt Illinois politicians, Gov. Rod Blagojevich may go down as one of the most brazen. But he has plenty of company.
Three of the state’s seven previous governors have been convicted and served time. Since 1971, by one count, 31 Chicago aldermen and some 1,000 public officials and businessmen have been convicted.
“We’re the corruption capital of the United States,” says Dick Simpson, a political scientist at the University of Illinois in Chicago and a former Chicago alderman, who maintains that state corruption count. “We have more [corruption] even than New Jersey and Louisiana, which are our competitors.”"
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Dick is the head of my department and the leading authority on the Chicago machine. The corruption here is so profound that criminal prosecutions, while necessary, do not have a deterrent effect. The politicians just factor in the risk of criminal conviction as one of the risks of doing business. When somebody falls to the feds, the rest of the crooks just try not to get caught the same way he did. Even if Patrick Fitzgerald nails the big fish--Richie Daley--it won't change the political culture.
Here is a modest proposal: maybe the state of Illinois needs to be put into political receivership and subjected to total reconstruction, just like the confederate states after the Civil War. Just a little thought experiment.
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