Chicago Area Corruption Lecture Series

By Sean Corbett in News on Oct 5, 2006 7:29PM

The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) is doing a lecture series on local government issues in Chicago. Of interest to those of us particularly concerned with corruption in Chicago and Cook County are the lectures "Reform of Cook County Government" on October 11, and "The Future of Corruption in Chicago" on October 13, both running from 12:00 to 12:50 p.m. UIC is not pulling its punches when it comes to addressing these issues. Sounds like a great forum to discuss Chicago politics with some very knowledgeable people, and you can do it over your lunch break! We didn't think Chicago was really that corrupt until we started reading the news….

To keep up the tradition of comparing ourselves with other big cities in the USA we ran a little test on Google. We often use Google to give us a quick and dirty measure of how popular certain ideas are in the collective mind of humanity. “Corruption Chicago” returns 8.9 million results, “corruption ‘Los Angeles’ OR LA” 9.3 million and “corruption ‘New York’” 30 million! It’s good to know that there are lots of people out there thinking about corruption in New York and LA, not just in Chicago.

Going global on the corruption kick, Transparency International brings us the map of perceived levels of corruption in countries around the globe. What about corruption that’s happening between multiple countries? Is that even considered corruption? “The top three nations of the G8 walked into a bar. The US said to France….” You get to fill in the rest.