Now, you might be thinking that all of this effort to be corrupt and insidious seems like a waste. Wouldn't it be far easier, you might be thinking, to simply run the city in a sensible way? Wouldn't that actually require less effort and be better for the people of Chicago? Perhaps, but then Chicago wouldn't have received the prestigious award of "most corrupt city", as it did this past week.
A report released Tuesday ranks Chicago as the most corrupt city in the country and Illinois as the third-most corrupt state.
"What we find is a very dreary picture. In nearly every sector, whether you talk about aldermen, you talk about Chicago schools, you talk about contracts, in every area corruption is still rife in the city of Chicago," said Dick Simpson, lead author of the "Continuing Corruption in Illinois" study and a University of Illinois Chicago political science professor.
We did it! Suck it, every city in New Jersey! My hometown is the corruptest place in the land. And, as the UIC report notes, Chicago won this much sought after award in no small part to the very red light camera system we mentioned above.
Chicago's red light camera scandal sent an assistant transportation department commission to prison for bribery and extortion.
"What that means is that it's harder to get businesses to come here because of its corrupt state, we're losing population and corruption is one of the reasons we're losing population. We have undermined faith in government," Simpson said.
Asked to comment on the UIC report, Mayor Rahm Emanuel responded by noting how awesome a job he's done at not being corrupt, despite that not being the framing of the question at all. But that's the kind of response you can expect from Rahm, who has overseen the most corrupt city's government for more than seven years now. It has been under his watch that the camera system has flourished into the corruption monster it now is, not to mention it being under his watch that the Chicago Police Department has become the butt of a national joke.
So pop the champagne, fellow Chicago residents. It took a lot of hard work and effort, but we made it!