This Week: The US Slips Down A Step In Global Corruption Index

Experts, analysts and businesspeople polled by an international anti-corruption group perceive the United States as more corrupt than its been in years, Transparency International indicated in its annual global corruption index released this week. For the first time since 2011, the U.S. has fallen out of the world’s 20 best-performing countries on the group’s public sector corruption index, according to Reuters, which flagged the report. Importantly, the index measures perceptions of corruption, rather than corruption itself: At #22 in the world, the United States’ score on the 0-100 index fell to 71 from 75, its score when it ranked #16 in the world last year. At the same time, another report finds lobbying in Republican controlled Washington, D.C., reached an eight-year high in 2018. That’s according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which calculated that the $3.42 billion in reported lobbying expenditures was the highest since record-setting 2010. One more measure of a corporate-friendly year in Washington: The EPA’s civil…