State officials make lofty promises when it comes to ethics in government. They tout the transparency of legislative processes, accessibility of records, and the openness of public meetings. But these efforts often fall short of providing any real transparency or legitimate hope of rooting out corruption.
That’s the depressing bottom line that emerges from the State Integrity Investigation, a first-of-its-kind, data-driven assessment of transparency, accountability and anti-corruption mechanisms in all 50 states. Not a single state ”” not one ”” earned an A grade from the months-long probe. Only five states earned a B grade: New Jersey, Connecticut, Washington, California and Nebraska. Nineteen states got C’s and 18 received D’s. Eight states earned failing grades of 59 or below from the project, which is a collaboration of the Center for Public Integrity, Global Integrity and Public Radio International.
I disagree. California deserves an [b]F.[/b]
ELVES-
the link is dead
[i] The link just worked fine for me. [/i]
-Elf Lady
Well, their detailed report on Maryland is pretty much on the mark.
I read the story on the only state I am familiar with, South Carolina. While we have our problems, the story was essentially worthless. It mosly involves very liberal activists criticisizing Republicans, beacuse the generally liberal FEDERAL Courts have declared portions of our ethics laws unconstitutional allowing PAC’s to give large amounts to Republican candidates. The story fails to mentiuon thsi is true in all 50 sates, even the ones that got gigh grades–but in places like California the PACs give money to Democrtas–so no crtiicism? It goes to great lenghts to talk about things that happened as much as 200 years ago, which I hope we have and are overcoming. The story should have been about the 1895 constitution which was created to keep the elite out of power so Ben Tillman and his “agarian” Democrats could subjugate African-Amerians and steal their land. No time for a SC history lesson, but it makes the legislature preeminent over the Governor and keeps them in charge of most departments of government, so many of them can feather their own nests. One should be asking what value such a constitution has in 2012 and why we do not have a centralized management system for state government, under a Gubernatorial cabinet system.
I actually though their assessment of SC was accurate. Upon what did you base your analysis that the authors were “very liberal activists chritizing Republicans?”
There website says,
“The Center for Public Integrity was founded in 1989 by Charles Lewis. We are one of the country’s oldest and largest nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organizations. Our mission: to reveal abuses of power, corruption and dereliction of duty by powerful public and private institutions in order to cause them to operate with honesty, integrity, accountability and to put the public interest first.”
Do you have evidence that is not true?