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Applegrove: Corruption Spreads like a disease in an semi-autocracy which Kansas is
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They suffer from theft from various upper levels of funds which were supposed to be allocated to their military, but subsequently landed in various private pockets.
Also, as you said, the conscripts to their military are the lower income due to the buyout exclusion. It's an income gap exploitation for sure.
I think you're both correct here. 
no doubt. I live in a town in SW AZ near the border. It's common knowledge among locals that the sheriffs skim from drug money seizures. LE have retired as millionaires in more than one instance. No one does anything.
That's it--there is literally no reporting here anymore. The local paper is a hollowed-out shell owned by a hedge fund; won't cover city hall or the county equivalent. The teevee station(s) (they all broadcast the same thing) do only feel-good fluff stories and won't cover local government.
The town was no doubt always corrupt but now it's blatant. Developers run the county and there are no checks and balances on what the city and county officials do. No one knows what they're up to, no one understands why things happen as they do. At least in the county, where I live, the governing officials (board of supervisors) run unopposed. There is zero public understanding of their governing philosophy, which is: the only rights that count are developers' rights, county functions should be privatized whenever possible, and we don't need no stinkin' parks, green space, or anything else that would elevate this drab armpit of a town or confer some grace and beauty on it. It's like living in a third world country --the locals are fatalistic serfs with zero agency. I can't take it and am moving this fall. Can't wait to get out of here.
Just a few selected examples: BoS has one member who's a roofer and gets (already knows he will do the work) the contracts on developments he votes to approve. Another member is a self-described "lifelong friend from childhood" and some sort of in-law of a major developer, yet refuses to recuse from voting to approve his projects. The county says they "make their own rules" for disclosure of government records that should be public, and "we don't have to tell you what they are." The county has privatized and outsourced a lot of the public works/engineering projects to a particular well-connected local engineering firm, who also acts as agent for developments that get rubber-stamped by the county. I could go on and on...no one does anything, most residents have no idea of any of this. It's truly disheartening.
there have been studies documenting a correlation on the local level between the decline of local journalism and the rise of corruption. Couple that with a decline in civics education and lack of understanding of how local government functions, and you get what you get where I am (Yuma, AZ).
