Putting New Perspective on Illinois Corruption

Andy Shaw, right, executive director of the Better Government Association, carries a stack of reports about corruption in Cook County. Shaw and Dick Simpson, left, delivered the reports to the offices of the Cook County Board President and to Board members Thursday February 18, 2010 . Jose More/Chicago News Cooperative

Dick Simpson stood somberly on the fifth floor of the century-old Cook County Building last week, in an area between two banks of elevators with the faint aroma of cheap institutional cleaner. His topic was as dispiriting as the ill-lit environ chosen for a no-news press briefing.

“Corruption in Cook County: Anti-Corruption Report Number 3” was the handout for the event, and Mr. Simpson was joined by Andy Shaw, the longtime television reporter who now runs the Better Government Association, and Representative Mike Quigley, a North Side Democrat who did time on the Cook County Board of Commissioners.

We’re lucky to have Mr. Simpson, a University of Illinois at Chicago political scientist and former Chicago alderman, who humorlessly chronicles corruption here just as Edward Gibbon, the 18th-century English historian, detailed the Roman Empire’s rise and fall. Mr. Simpson’s latest handiwork is a directory of skulduggery, with the tales of nearly 150 convicted county politicians and officials.

And, yet — as I listened to the presenters talk about documented misdeeds being just the tips of icebergs; the “corruption tax” we pay in more expensive services; and the virtual non-efforts of Cook County’s state attorneys — I couldn’t help recalling a distant night in El Salvador. It was in the late 1980s, during the civil war in which the United States supported an often-odious government. I was at a spaghetti dinner in the capital, San Salvador, with veteran foreign correspondents who debated this: Who’s the biggest crook ever?

There were citations of billion-dollar thefts and whole industries nationalized to enrich a single family. There were many strong candidates, but not one American was mentioned.

It’s partly why one might wonder about the unceasing refrain from Rush Limbaugh and his ideological confreres in Washington about “the Chicago way” of doing business. It’s all tied to bashing President Obama and top aides as being products of a culture of chicanery.

Invoking the phrase is too facile by half, even conceding the convictions of 31 Chicago aldermen since the 1970s and the fact that former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich awaits trial as his predecessor, George Ryan, sits in prison. You can stipulate to the corrosive nature of money in Illinois politics but still argue convincingly that we’re minor players on the world stage of public perfidy.

By some measures, corruption in Illinois even trails that in five or six other states, with Florida leading the way. And we’re pipsqueaks if you exhibit a broader perspective than, say, a City Hall news media corps that tends to see Mayor Richard M. Daley — perhaps America’s most successful mayor — as a duplicitous, dissembling, omnipotent, one-person evil cabal.

“Compare the corruption of an alderman who takes a few thousand dollars from a developer to the corruption of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the head of the Pakistan nuclear program, going around the world, selling atomic bomb technology to Libya, North Korea and Iran to make a buck,” said Moisés Naím, editor of Foreign Policy magazine and a former Venezuelan trade minister who writes about the ravaging impact of corruption worldwide. “Look at the differing scale of consequences.”

If one inspects Berlin-based Transparency International’s respected rankings of corrupt societies, the United States is pretty clean, said Nancy Boswell, who is the president of the agency’s United States branch.

We’re not in the same league as drug traffickers managing billions of dollars and undermining governments, the robber barons of Russia or the pirates of Somalia. “There’s no ground for comparison,” Mr. Naím said. “It’s comparing an elephant with a dog.”

And factor in a free media. Carles Boix, a Spanish political scientist formerly at the University of Chicago and now at Princeton, notes a correlation between newspaper readership (and an informed citizenry) and lower levels of corruption.

Robin Wright, a former foreign correspondent now with the United States Institute of Peace, said, “What Blagojevich may have done was disgraceful, but it’s small potatoes compared to the likes of Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, who stashed tens of millions of dollars in personal bank accounts and commandeered the national airline so his wife could go shop in Paris.”

Ms. Wright has interviewed Mobutu, Idi Amin of Uganda and other rogues. “Whether it’s the Somali pirates, who created a national economy based on corruption; the drug lords in Afghanistan and Colombia; or the Mafia in Moscow, corruption elsewhere dwarfs the worst crime in Illinois, New Jersey and New York,” she said.

Of course, there’s a more insidious culture that can pollute officials, regardless of party or their hometown. It’s the Washington way.