That Toddlin' Town

A new study by political scientists at the University of Illinois-Chicago claims to show Chi-town is the most corrupt city in the United States and has been so, more or less, for quite some time.

The first recorded conviction of a Chicago alderman for corruption happened in 1869 -- he accepted a bribe to rig a city contract. Since 1973, 31 aldermen have been convicted of corruption and about 100 different people have served as Chicago aldermen. This means that over the last 40 years, almost a third of Chicago aldermen have been convicted of corruption or, in Chicago terms, "gotten sloppy."

Illinois will become the first state to have the distinction of having back-to-back ex-governors serving time simultaneously. George Ryan (1999-2003) is doing a stretch for a 2006 conviction for his role in a scheme that handed out truck licenses to people whose qualifications consisted of a donation to the Ryan campaign fund. His successor, Rod Blagojevich, will report to lockdown in March to serve his conviction for using the Illinois governor's power to fill a U.S. Senate vacancy as his own sort of fund-raising tool. Ryan and Blagojevich along with two others make four of Illinois' last seven governors who were convicted of some kind of bribery or corruption charge.

The City Council corruption has some "only in Chicago" themes. Eighteenth Ward alderman William Carothers was convicted in 1983; his son Isaac served the 29th Ward and in 2010 was convicted on similar charges. Some wards have had several aldermen convicted at different times; the same zoning scheme got 23rd Ward aldermen Joseph Potempa and his successor Frank Kuta convicted in 1973.

The link comes via a story on NewGeography.com here, in which the writer suggests that one of the problems academic folk often have when they study or theorize about political systems is a belief that all politicians within those systems are people "that rise above petty self interest to promote the common good." This would make politicians unlike any other group of people since Australopithecus afarensis decided their hands worked better grabbing than walking.

Although folks studying politics in Chicago don't have the luxury of presuming a uniformly noble class of public servants -- they're studying politics in Chicago, after all -- one would hope they don't measure only by that yardstick. I may frequently refer to politicians as of lower than average intelligence and of greater than average greed, primarily because the consequences of their errors ripple a lot more widely than most folks' do. But the truth is that they are much like every group: A few good, a few bad and many many more who are a mixture of the two.

Plus, when we voters make our choices based on which candidates promise us the most goodies for free (or at least at someone else's expense), can we really claim to be all that separate from their corruption?