We're Number ... uh ... 22!!

We're now less than a week away from the midterm elections here in the United States, and you can tell they're close because the frequency and viciousness of the attack ads on TV has taken a sharp upturn, and the volume of glossy political junk mail is also soaring. I've had to coat the inside of my mailbox with Maalox to keep it from throwing up.

How bad has it gotten? Well, here's one measure: a news headline announcing "US Slips to Historic Low in Global Corruption Index."

Yes, Dear Readers, Transparency International, a "global civil society organisation leading the fight against corruption," has published its 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index, which measures the perceived level of public sector corruption in 178 countries. On a scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 10 (very clean) the United States has scored 7.1, dropping it for the first time out of the top 20 "cleanest" countries (from #19 to #22). The most corrupt nation in the world, according to Transparency International, is Somalia, coming in at 1.1, and the most transparent and accountable are Denmark and Singapore, scoring 9.3 (of course, in Singapore you can probably be caned for being insufficiently transparent, but that's another issue). You can see all the results presented graphically and read the full report here.

Why has the United States fallen in the rankings? According to Nancy Boswell, president of Transparency International in the United States, subprime lending practices, the disclosure of Bernard Madoff's enormous Ponzi scheme and the furor over political funding have shaken public faith about political and economic ethics in America. She is quoted as saying, "We're not talking about corruption in the sense of breaking the law. We're talking about a sense that the system is corrupted by these practices. There's an integrity deficit." She also noted that the proliferation of financial scandals at state and city levels had encouraged the impression that regulatory oversight was weak and that influence could be bought.

An integrity deficit. You can see it in the wildly hyperbolic and grossly exaggerated slams directed against each other by candidates for office, and in the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission which removed limits on the ability of corporations and wealthy individuals anonymously to pump money into elections.

Just a little something to think about as you get ready to choose the lesser of two evils on November 2nd.

Somehow, "We're Number Twenty-Two!" just doesn't have the ring to it any of us would probably like.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo