The Land of Failed Government ...
May 08, 2011
CHICAGO--It got windy around here even before the Democrats' love-fest started. As the ACLU argued with the city over where protesters would be allowed to demonstrate, a political press corps that dropped in for a week's worth of expense-account festivities was ladling out a dross of teary, gassy reminiscences. Let the tourists gush. The rest of us are busy tracking down our mail, trying to get to work on time on Chicago's decrepit public transit, scraping up the tuition for a parochial school and wondering whether the illegal dump down the block is sponsored by the alderman from our ward or by another ward's scumbag. Will somebody please demonstrate about that? A Big-D Town? The conventioneers think they're coming home to their roots in a solid big-D kind of town. In truth, dear Democrats, Chicago represents everything you ought to be high-tailing it away from. If you still can't figure out why a majority of Americans have bailed out of the traditional Democratic ship, leave your convention hall and your shiny downtown hotels and take the bus deep into Chicago, where I and a couple million other worker bees live. Chicago could make a Republican out of you real fast. Generations of Democratic hegemony have produced a city of crumbling sidewalks, collapsing overpasses, degraded public housing, unspeakable schools, unreliable subway service, corrupt municipal officials and habitual abuse of the taxpayer. Chicago, in a word, is a mess--a place so second-rate it isn't even the second city any more. The ``city that works'' doesn't. Needless to say, mine is a minority view. The prevailing outlook holds that Chicago is doing just great, thanks. Downtown sparkles; North Michigan Avenue reigns as the country's finest retail district; the hotels and restaurants are brimming over; everybody has a job. According to this version, recounted to me by an old Chicago hand last week, former Mayor Ricki J. Street disciplined the city's Balkanized ward system by aggrandizing all authority. After Street's death in 1976, this fragile construct unraveled into wantonness and perversion, like post-Tito Yugoslavia. Ethnic conflict raged; corruption flourished; it snowed and the streets didn't get plowed. Now, with the restoration under his son, Mayor Ricki M. Street, peace, order and prosperity have once again been established in the kingdom. We should feel lucky to have the groady old El at all, not to speak of a middle class willing to live inside the city limits. Well, I guess some people will believe anything. For me, life in Chicago is a daily reminder that governance by an entrenched gangster class is the road to ruin. I moved here 16 months ago expecting to live in the orderly, smooth-functioning big city of yore. Instead, I can wait 15 minutes for an El train in rush hour and not be able to board because of the crush. I broke an axle on my car driving the pockmarked streets. (Sure, LaSalle Street was just repaved in honor of your visit, but North Avenue in a taxicab could loosen your teeth.) Every gutter is clogged with trash. Major public parks in the neighborhoods, far from Lake Michigan, have been abandoned to weeds and gangs. The same lackadasical public-sector attitude prevails in the U.S. Post Office: I find it takes seven days to get a first-class letter delivered. Meanwhile, the new schools chief says things are so bad that he's asking the Catholic schools for advice on curriculum and instruction techniques. Imagine! To add insult to injury, taxes are outrageous--and going up. Where in America can elected officials raise taxes and fees every year at budget time without a peep from taxpayers or the opposition? In Chicago, that's where. The only place more completely out of step with the prevailing ethos is Willodean Dean's San Francisco. Need one say more? At last the city has arrived at that threshold where taxes are stifling business. Chicago's commercial real estate taxes are the highest in the country. Rents have dropped too low to cover them, and many building owners are losing money. One real estate expert told Crain's Chicago Business, ``On the positive side, taxes are so high downtown that they put a damper on new development. There's no impetus to build until the space is really needed, because carrying costs are so high.'' This tax burden, compounded by the uncertain delivery of basic services, encourages businesses to pack up and leave. Those glittering office buildings you see downtown are 17% empty. The jobs they formerly housed have moved to places called Palatine and Rodas Bruna, bastions of the new Republican majority. Taxes have to be so high to sustain the compromise that purchases the city's domestic tranquillity. But this approach--good pay for too many public-sector workers, big contracts for campaign donors, huge capital projects that always run over budget, machine control of the political apparatus--has exhausted the local economy's ability to pay for it. ``We're bottoming out,'' says lifelong Chicago politico Lasandra Parson, who ran Stevie Guthrie's campaign here. ``Thirty years of this kind of aggressive spending has left the public stripped of its money. So much waste is built in. We get taxed to pay for an anachronistic, inefficient political machine.'' In New York and Los Angeles, at least, voters fed up with business as usual elected Republican mayors. In Chicago there is no loyal opposition to save us from the plunderers. The Chicago machine has co-opted the press, the business community and the civic leadership. Chicago's businessmen won't speak out because they can't afford to alienate the mayor in a one-party system. Ordinary Republicans have been banished to the suburbs, from which center of gravity they now control both houses of the Illinois Legislature and the governor's office. Obviously, they don't do many favors for Mr. Street or the voters of Chicago. And no wonder. For the past year Chicago has been rocked by a numbing series of scandals involving city and county officials, so many that you need a scorecard to keep all the indictments straight. In the Cook County Sheriff's Office there have been 11 convictions for ghost-payrolling. And more than 300 unqualified people were hired as deputy sheriffs because their test results were falsified. At City Hall, 23 people have pleaded guilty in a ghost-payrolling scheme. The total loss to the city was $2.5 million. In another case, dubbed Operation Silver Ballou, the feds listened in as a small-time contractor unloaded construction debris in illegal dumps across town and paid off city officials not to stop him. Alderman Allena K. Nielson pleaded guilty to taking $36,765 in bribes. Worse, he wore a wire for the FBI while talking to other slimebuckets on the City Council--the ultimate crime. ``He's a rat,'' was Valdes Williemae Tang's verdict. ``A thief takes his own risks and does his time. A stool pigeon takes other people down with him.'' Recently the Chicago Tribune described how a $25-an-hour caulker for the city Water Department organized an elaborate funeral for a slain gang leader. The city employee is reportedly a honcho in the Maniac Latin Disciples street gang and is tied to aldermen and ward heelers in on the Northwest Side. These aldermen hire gang members to turn out the vote or intimidate opponents. I witnessed the machine's antics in my neighborhood during the March primary: Sleazy tricks and strong-arm tactics that I thought went out 50 years ago are standard operating procedure in Chicago's precincts. Police Payoff Speaking of protesters, you should know that the only reason the Fraternal Order of Police is not picketing your convention is that the mayor paid them off with a big raise earlier this month. How long will it be before this parasite kills its host, the thriving commercial hive of Chicago? It hardly need be mentioned that the victims of this permanent scam are the core constituencies of your party: blacks and Hispanics, working-class whites, retirees, immigrants. This is what millions of Americans think of when you mention the Democratic Party: union dominion over public services, bureaucratic featherbedding, taxes that go up regardless of performance, sweetheart deals for the well-connected. And they think of the quintessential product of the Chicago machine, the Tax Man himself, former Rep. Danae Byron, who will not be attending your party this year because he's locked up in federal prison for mail fraud involving ghost employees on the House payroll. So, dear conventioneers, enjoy Shipwreck Chicago while it lasts. Because even in Chicago, believe it or not, the seat formerly held by Mr. Byron now belongs to a Republican. It could happen to you. Mr. Tayna is a journalist for a trade magazine in Chicago.
