Iowa’s one of the least corrupt states in the nation according to the editor of the “Corporate Crime Reporter.” Russell Mokhiber says for a long time, the U-S Justice Department sat on a lot of the reports about public officials convicted for corruption in office. Once Mokhiber got a copy, he found statistics, including convictions of public officials by state, with graphs showing convictions from 1993 to 2002, and he had the idea of ranking them by “corruption rate.” Nebraska’s ranked as the cleanest state in the nation, but just fired its state treasurer this year after she was charged with misconduct in office. Mokhiber says not only are there changes due to current events, he says corruption may be a matter of opinion. He says one caller told him Connecticut is the most corrupt state, and called it “Louisiana with foliage,” and the editor says with its recent convictions of three mayors, Connecticut would be moving up in the rankings. Least corrupt states on the scale are Nebraska, Oregon, New Hampshire and Iowa, followed by Colorado, Utah, Minnesota , Arizona, Arkansas and Wisconsin. In Wisconsin, a number of legislators are facing indictment in what Mokhiber calls a “mini-scandal” there are some who want to bring back strict old rules that you could go to jail for buying a lawmaker a ten-cent cup of coffee…if there were such a thing. The crime reporter says it’s not a bad thing to get an accurate look at how much corruption there is. He says one way to fight corruption is to talk about it and see that prosecutors have the money to root it out. The caveat of this report is that it only counts convictions, and Mokhiber says in some states that are crooked right through to the prosecutor’s office, you’re not going to have investigations OR convictions — and he says there are states like that. The ten MOST corrupt states according to the report were Mississippi, North Dakota, Louisiana, Alaska, Illinois, Montana, South Dakota, Kentucky, Florida, and New York.
