Tune Time

Los Lobos 'Good Morning Aztlán'

When The Culture War Had Armies

Reunion last night for 1968 Chicago DNC Disorder Preservation Squad; counter-reunion planned by Chicago Copwatch. (h/t Steve Rhodes of the Beachwood Reporter inspiring the choice of graphics.)

From WGN Radio:

Reunion Planned For 1968 DNC Riot Police

(WGN-AM)- The violent clashes between police and protesters during the 1968 Democratic National Convention aren't typically considered proud moments in Chicago history.

But some members of the Fraternal Order of Police want to change that. On June 26, the Chicago police union will hold a "Chicago Riot Cops Reunion" at its hall to set straight "what really happened," according to the reunion's Web site.

"The only thing that stood between Marxist street thugs and public order was a thin blue line of dedicated, tough Chicago police officers," the Web site says. "Chicago police officers who participated in the riots continue to endure unending criticism -- all of which is unwarranted, inaccurate and wrong."

Former Police Supt. Philip Cline is scheduled to be a keynote speaker.
…

Predictably, a protest to counter the event is being planned. Chicago Copwatch, a watchdog group, is organizing a march to the FOP hall the same night after a rally at Union Park at Ashland Avenue and Lake Street.
…

What a strikingly fucked up occasion for a reunion; nostalgia for the days when you could open up a hippy's skull with a club on national teevee and get away with it.

Of course these days, when protesters want to roll through the streets of Chicago to make a statement (like these cheerful, nekkid people and their, uh, Schwinns



the general rule of thumb is to meet with calm, even-toned reps of the Chicago Police Department and plan the whole thing out jointly, like the "Dark Knight" Production Management team and the Chicago Film Office figuring out how to stage the car chase on Lower Wacker.

This is a striking and auspicious change, and reason for the City to be proud, because once upon a time, the Chicago front of the culture war bristled with guns and clubs and mace.

That world and its politics are grudgingly, haltingly passing away, but it’s worth noting how sharply the opinions of many from that era still define the bright, white fault line that continues to run right through the heart of America and make people like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly absurdly rich.

It is all based on the belief that there was once a Golden Age of social order. A better, finer time with conservative, crew-cut white American men on top, everyone else on the face of the Earth shutting the fuck up and doing what they were told, and virtually every major social institution doing its part to aggressively enforce the hierarchy.

Its divinely ordained virtues were preached from the pulpit.

Its brutal discriminations were enshrined in the law.

Its righteous Murrican-ness was taught in the schools.

And when smartasses or punks or uppity minorities questioned the code?

Well that's why America had the CIA and FBI:



That's why Chicago had cops:


Back in the day, Mare Richard the First did not have po-lice as you or I might experience or understand them

He had a private army of Janissaries. Of cossacks.

And for many who will came to the FOP in walkers or wheelchairs or on two, strong legs, the moment it became unacceptable for cops to torture, beat down or simply murder anyone that stood in their way was the moment the world fell off its axis and the Real Murrica died.

In history, there are rarely any clean breaks with the past, and so from the story of “Torturin'” Jon Burges:

Feds Arrest Ex-Chicago Cop Jon Burge

CHICAGO, Oct. 21 - Retired Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge was arrested at his home near Tampa, Fla., today on charges of lying in a civil case about whether he and other officers under his command participated in torture and physical abuse of suspects in police custody dating back to the 1980s, according to the U.S. attorney's office.

Burge was charged with two counts of obstruction of justice and one count of perjury in a three-count indictment unsealed today following his arrest.

The charges alleged that Burge lied and impeded court proceedings in November 2003 when he provided false written answers to questions in a civil lawsuit alleging that he and others engaged in torture and abuse of suspects.
…

To the fate of Tony “Girl-beater” Abbate

the Chicago Cossack ideal that packing a badge means an absolute entitlement to do whateverthefuck you want still haunts corners of the CPD to this day.

And while I’d like to believe that the noble and irresistible tide of enlightenment is responsible for dragging the CPD towards the light, the truth is, the persistent pressure of litigation has driven the price tag for letting the Vic Mackeys of the world play cowboy on the public dime

past the point where City budget gnomes can laugh it off.

Hell, when you add it all up, paying for the continuing bad habits of douchbags with badges is no small part of the reason the City is [allegedly] so broke it has to sack workers by the thousands and hock its airport, bridges and parking meters... (from The Reader:)

Chicago forks over more money in lawsuits—especially lawsuits against the police—than LA, Houston, Phoenix, Philly, and Dallas put together.

By Mick Dumke

November 27, 2008

In January, after years of legal and political battles, the city agreed to pay $19.8 million to settle lawsuits by four men who were tortured by police under former commander Jon Burge. Signing off on the deal, aldermen condemned the abusive officers and hoped aloud that the settlements would let the police department start a new era. “I’m glad this is over,” said the Fifth Ward’s Leslie Hairston. “It’s definitely a black eye on Chicago and on our history. But it’s also an opportunity for us to get a chance to turn the page.”

Maybe not. The Burge cases are only the most notorious of hundreds of police-related lawsuits the city has been forced to contend with this year alone. And though their cost to the city’s reputation may not be as high, their financial impact is. By June the city already had paid out more than $62 million in 295 police-related lawsuits. Even if you deduct the torture cases, the city still spent more to close police suits in the first half of 2008 than it did for the entire year in 2007, 2006, or 2005.

…
Lawsuits involving the police account for about 44 percent of Chicago’s settlements and judgments. In New York and LA they account for only about a quarter. And the amount Chicago is spending to close police-related lawsuits is increasing—from about $23 million for all of 2005 to more than $62 million for the first half of 2008.

And so as time slowly closes over the True Believers as inexorably as the Red Sea closing over Pharaoh’s Army, it is hard for this liberal entrepreneur to know what to do.

Sit quietly and watch them slip away past the event horizon and into a history that has already fitted them for an eternity of harsh judgments?

Or knock together some crappy, tasteless collectibles

head on down to the FOP and make a few bucks overcharging them for ersatz memorabilia from their bullshit halcyon days that never were?

Richiemandias

(With apologies to Percy Shelley...)

I met a traveler from a Midwest land,
Who said: Two vast and rented trucks of clout
Stand in da alley deserted. Near a cone marked "Streets & San"
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose pout
And smirky lip and sneer of "I doan know nuttin",
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that signed, the contracts not bid;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Richiemandias, Da Mare;
Look on my Olympics, Milwaukee, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, rubbled from disrepair
Crappy pot-holed roads stretch far away.

From Clout Street:

Olympics bid team holding secret meeting with aldermen

Posted by Hal Dardick and David Heinzmann

On Monday, the Chicago 2016 Olympics committee leaders balked at the idea of publicly briefing the City Council about a wrinkle that could put taxpayers on the hook for cost overruns, but today they tried to reassure aldermen in a series of private meetings with aldermen at City Hall.

Aldermen were notified today by Mayor Richard Daley’s Intergovernmental Affairs Office that the meetings would start at 3:30 p.m. at City Hall, several aldermen said. Members of the 2016 Committee would do the talking, they said.

A Chicago 2016 spokeswoman said the meetings are not an about-face for bid organizers, who are led by businessman Pat Ryan. Rather, they were a decision the bid team made "as we're going throught this in in real time and hearing things and responding to them," said Chicago 2016 spokeswoman Mica Matsoff. "It wasn't that he excluded this on Monday."

Matsoff said the briefings to groups of about 13 aldermen today and tomorrow will be similar to the presentation Ryan made to reporters on Monday. That's when Ryan said it would take 45 to 60 days to brief aldermen on an insurance plan he said will prevent taxpayers from being on the hook.

The change in plan was "in response to the City Council and part of our own process," Matsoff said.
...

At which point one assumes Da Mare will calmly and patiently explain "teamwork" and how "a man becomes preeminent, he's expected to have en-too-zee-asms. En-too-zee-asms. En-too-zee-asms.
What are mine? What draws my admiration? What is dat which gives me joy?
De Olympics!"

to his litter of suddenly cheeky, sass-mouthed little aldermen.

Cancer, Heart Attack Fells

40-Somethings' adolescence.

From The Daily Telegraph:

Michael Jackson dead at 50

MICHAEL Jackson has died after suffering what is believed to have been a heart attack in Los Angeles.

The singer, 50, was pronounced dead soon after he arrived at an LA hospital.

The LA Coroner has confirmed his death.

Lieutenant Fred Corral told CNN Jackson was pronounced dead at 2:26pm (7.26am) local time after reportedly suffering a cardiac arrest.
...

From The New York Times:

Farrah Fawcett Dies

Farrah Fawcett, an actress, television star and pop-culture phenomenon whose good looks and signature leonine hairstyle influenced a generation of women and, beginning with a celebrated pinup poster, bewitched a generation of men, died on Thursday in Santa Monica, California, according to Paul Bloch, her spokesman. She was 62 and had been battling cancer since late 2006.
...

Radioactive Man

My Eyes! Zee Fiat Money Does Nothing!

California announces plan to pay future bills in

"SchwarzeCheddas"

Guarantees new currency to be

"Ten times manlier than punk-ass 'real' money!"

From the NYT:

California to Pay Creditors With I.O.U.’s
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

LOS ANGELES — Signaling that California is slipping deeper into financial crisis, the state’s controller said Wednesday that his office would soon be forced to issue i.o.u.’s to scores of the state’s creditors, the first time since 1992, when 100,000 state employees were paid with them.

Before that budget crisis — which pales in comparison to the current shortfall, even with inflation adjustments — the last time California issued the documents was during the Depression, something the controller, John Chiang, alluded to in his news release announcing the impending action.

“Next Wednesday we start a fiscal year with a massively unbalanced spending plan and a cash shortfall not seen since the Great Depression,” Mr. Chiang said in a written statement. “The State’s $2.8 billion cash shortage in July grows to $6.5 billion in September, and after that we see a double-digit freefall. Unfortunately, the State’s inability to balance its checkbook will now mean short-changing taxpayers, local governments and small businesses.”

The issuing of the i.o.u.’s would reflect the state’s lack of cash flow and its legislature’s inability to agree on a way to close a roughly $24 billion budget gap, as tax revenues have continued to fall in the state. On Wednesday, as Mr. Chiang made his announcement, legislators continued to debate ways to close the gap in preparing for a vote on a budget presented by Democrats that was all but certain to fail on the floor.

Democrats want to close the gap with a mix of vast cuts to social programs and an increase to cigarette, oil drilling and car taxes; Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has vowed to veto any and all tax hikes, and his party’s lawmakers agree with him.
...

Of course, since the Golden State can't change its name, pack up the Buick and sneak away to another town under the cover of darkness, Schwarzenegger's IOU's are a "promise to pay", backed, presumably, by the full faith and credit of the State of California.

Which means, for all intents and purposes, that Schwarzenegger's California is about to start printing its own money.

First, when I was just a wee driftglass way back in an era when such impossibly arcane topics as "government" and "civics" were required subjects in the public schools, I believe one of my evil, socialist, "not a really, really, for-real job" teachers might have given me the idea that the United States government and the Federal Reserve generally frowned on that sort of thing.

Second, if Ahnuld gets away with it, I shudder to think what Exciting!New! financial shell game Da Mare will announce a week later

to "pay" for his 2016 Daleympics.

Where In The World

Was Governor Appalachia?


From New York Magazine:

We Don’t Believe Anything Mark Sanford Says Anymore

The world may never know exactly what South Carolina governor Mark Sanford did while he was AWOL this past week, but at least we now know where he went. A reporter for South Carolina's The State caught up with Sanford in Atlanta's international airport this morning as he returned from ... Buenos Aires, Argentina. But didn't his staff tell everyone just yesterday that Sanford was hiking the Appalachian Trail? And doesn't that trail typically run through Appalachia? Yes! Apparently nobody — not his staff, not his lieutenant governor, not the police, not his wife — knew where Sanford disappeared to. But before you start dreaming up all the ways that a frustrated politician might relieve his stress during a secret trip to South America, rest assured that, according to Sanford's untrustworthy and probably disingenuous account, he spent the week alone, driving along the coastline.

While the world may never know where Lord Jim Governor Walkabaout really got to last week or why, perhaps this conversation he had with Sonny Perdue at last year's National Governor's Conference provides some clues...


Or maybe it's just that he

never could stand that dog.

Either way, a hearty “welcome back” to the Prodigal Sanford!

A fatted highway construction project has been slain in your honor.


UPDATE: On the other hand, never mind...

From Yahoo News:

SC Gov. Mark Sanford says he's had an affair
By JIM DAVENPORT, Associated Press Writer Jim Davenport, Associated Press Writer

COLUMBIA, S.C. – South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford says he's been having an affair with a woman from Argentina and will resign as head of the Republican Governors' Association.

The married father of four emotionally apologized to his wife, staff and others at a news conference after returning Wednesday from a trip to Argentina that followed a dayslong absence. His staff had said the Republican was hiking on the Appalachian Trail.
...

Epic Dick Move

Don’t make me drop dis poor, lil' baby!

If you want a definition of raw political hardball, this is it.

First, spend months lying to your constituents that there is no possible way they will ever be on the hook for your last, great, vanity project: Da 2016 Daleympics. As recently as this February -- just after your last batch of layoffs based on the predicate that the city is dead fucking broke -- continue to build your entire political infrastructure and Da Daleympic on the Very Public Promise that:

Mayor Daley: No tax money for Olympics
February 7, 2009

Mayor Richard Daley today insisted that no tax money would be used to pay for the city to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games and said funding from the private sector and federal dollars for security and infrastructure would cover the costs.
…

"Tax money isn't paying for it," Daley told reporters this morning at an unrelated event. "The federal government pays for security, which is the highest cost of the Olympics ... The other thing they pay for is infrastructure ... There's no city tax money whatsoever ... We are very strong in that position ... in the regard to having that be sponsored by the private sector and others."

Even though you damned well know better:

“For months, Chicago lobbied the IOC to amend the standard contract that requires the host city to assume blank-check liability for the “planning, organization and staging of the Games.”

A few weeks ago, Ryan got a letter from the IOC saying the answer was no.

Instead of letting aldermen and taxpayers know what was coming, Ryan made a special trip to Lausanne, Switzerland to discuss the matter further while scrambling to line up another $500 million worth of insurance.
…

Second, go overseas and bald-facedly break that promise, because what the fuck? You’re Da God Damned Mare and keeping promises is for little, stupid, non-Mare-type people.

Daley: Taxpayer risk from Olympics is limited
June 18, 2009

LAUSANNE, Switzerland -- Mayor Richard M. Daley insisted today that Chicago taxpayers are on the Olympic hook for only the $500 million guaranteed by the City Council.

"We go to $500 million and that's it," Daley said in an interview today with the Tribune.

But Daley's assertion is at odds with language in a host city contract the mayor plans to sign, obligating the city to full financial responsibility for a Chicago 2016 Summer Games. The contract requires the city and the Olympic organizing committee to assume unlimited financial liability for the "planning, organization and staging of the Games."

Chicago 2016 bid leader Patrick Ryan, as well as a number of outside observers, have acknowledged the city would be on the hook if losses exceeded guarantees and insurance policies. This would only happen "if everyone was so inept that we go over," Ryan said Wednesday.
…

Look, I know that Da Mare’s pallie Pat was a big, swinging dick in the insurance business – and that since he Got Rich Playing With Money In The Private Sector, by Da Mare’s lights that makes him sevety-‘leven times more brilliant than dat Einstein fella -- but seriously, anyone who attempts to calm citizen concerns about the Daley Administration being stupid and profligate with the public purse by blurting out the phrase “if everyone was so inept that we go over” ten seconds after the entire city went ballistic over the stupid and profligate abuse of the public purse in “Metergate” (and twenty seconds after Da Mare reminded everyone that he thinks the people who work for him –

“On Wednesday, Daley had said, “'They’re not customer-related. They’re gonna leave at 5 o’clock. They’re gonna leave at 4:30 or 4:00. I’m sorry. We’re on a time clock. They walk out. But, in the private sector, when you have a customer, you’re gonna stay there making sure they’re happy and satisfied."

-- are mostly clock-watching goofs) needs to put on the Stupid Hat and go sit in the Public Relations 101 corner for the next six weeks.

Ryan also helpfully added in a different venue:

…
Chicago 2016 members spent most of last week in Switzerland trying to convince IOC members Chicago would be the best place to host the games. They did it with slick videos and direct talk to members. They believe it went well, but they say it would have all been for naught without a financial guarantee from Mayor Daley. And they insist they were hopeful up to the last minute they would not need that guarantee.

"We really felt that we had such a terrific plan that they would accept it as they knew that the US does not get national government guarantees," Ryan said.

That financial guarantee has some Chicago residents worried they could be on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars if Chicago 2016's financial projections fall short. Chicago 2016 CEO Pat Ryan admits the City Council could derail the city's bid, but he vows to present them with details of the plan within about 60 days that will reassure them there is little risk involved.
…

Ryan, the retired former head of Aon Insurance, says Chicago 2016 had no choice but to keep details of the plan to themselves until the last minute.

"I think had we announced something before we went over, we would have weakened our position with IOC members and maybe be a self-fulfilling prophecy," said Ryan.
…

Which translates as: "But if I’da tole the truth before, the pretty lady wouldn’ta let me fuck her!"

And the final step in Big Ballin' political brinkmanship? When confronted with the fact that you have broken your solemn word and painted an entire city into a dangerous fiscal corner to feed your gargantuan ego…dump it on the City Council!

Yeah, it all reeks. On ice, and in a way “The Reader” sums it up very well here:

…
Moreover, the mayor has not explained how the city—which is apparently not astute enough to operate parking meters—has suddenly developed the expertise to successfully develop real estate. Based on the ongoing debacle at Block 37, the downtown parcel that’s still not fully developed after 20 years and over $100 million in public funds, I’d say the opposite is true.
…

And I don't believe it is simply that no one ever explained to Hizzoner the difference between "broke" ...

broke (brk)
v.
1. Past tense of break.
2. Nonstandard A past participle of break.

Adj. 1. broke - lacking funds; bust, skint, stone-broke, stony-broke, poor - having little money or few possessions

...and "broken"

bro·ken (brkn)
v.
Past participle of break.
adj.
1. Forcibly separated into two or more pieces; fractured: a broken arm; broken glass.
2. Having been violated: a broken promise.

Because when you strip away this brand-new batch of smooth, fast-talking promises (OK, the slow, awkward, mumbly-talking promises) what is really going on here is actually pretty simple.

Da Mare is broke – so broke, he says, that he has to sell off the city’s roads, airports and parking meters, fire enough people to populate a small town, and make the rest of his employees take weeks of unpaid “days off” just to keep the doors open – but he also wants to buy a big, shiny new house.

A big, shiny new house in a notoriously volatile market, where mistakes, dumbassery or bad timing have already cost very clever people billions and billions of dollars.

So what do you do when you just gotta have that fucking house, but when the closing date rolls around, for all of your slick patter, the bank still demands that you to put up waaaay more cold, hard cash than you have?

Well, as you bust open their piggy banks, you start making a lot of lavish promises to your children that this time somehow it’ll all be different.

That this time the value of the big, shiny house will just go up and up and up regardless of past history, present circumstances or future uncertainty.

That this time everybody will go home in limousines because...because this time nothing whatsoever will go wrong.

Da Mare is doing nothing less than taking out the biggest fucking subprime mortgage in the history of the world, and putting the City up as collateral.

Because, hey, we all know how well that genius strategy has worked out so far.

Recount,

Schmecount


(via HuffPo and Getty Images)

Because any country where some


unelected council of


conservative mullahs


can just swoop down and


thwart the will of the people


is just a dictatorship staging a democracy puppet show for the cameras.

Right?

I See "They" Still Hate Us

For




Our



Freedom.

(h/t Getty images via HuffPo)

The Fall of The House of Hearst

Notes and observations from a comfortable seat at the end of the world.

In the middle of what sure looks like a full-blown collapse into chaos, I was reassured by Rich Gordon’s (Medill) intermittent “Media in America” history lessons during the “Chicago Media Future Conference” on Saturday. During the "Whither News?" panel, Rich reminded us all that the last few decades of stability, consolidation, “objectivity” and MBA-culture in the media are historical flukes. That for most of the last 200-plus years, journalism in America has been a roiling, partisan, street-fight (my words, not his), and that what looks like collapse is more than likely journalism returning to its natural state.

Like banking and health care, journalism has been the indentured servant of corporate interests for far too long, so who but stockholders gives a shit if the days of Imperial Media are coming to an end anyway?

And in this revolution, we are privileged to be present at the creation, so we've got that going for us.

The day was interspersed with plenty of those kinds of hopeful, uplifting glimpses of the future, which balanced out some of my other, somewhat darker observations.

Peak Prose:

A lot of the discussion centered on the work of amateur or citizen journalists. As I recently told a group of Russian journalists with whom several local bloggers were invited to meet, the rise of blogging was a reaction to the catastrophic failure of traditional media, reminiscent of the cause/effect relationship between the epic Social Compact Fail between American citizens and their institutions in the 1960s and 1970s.

During the Age of Bush, a somnolent middle class found -- yet again and in rapid, concussive succession -- that their elected government routinely lied to them, sided with corporations which fed them poison, shoveled their children into a military meatgrinder on false pretenses, tortured other people’s children in their name and generally wiped their asses with the United States Constitution while wrapping themselves in the flag.

And they found out, yet again, that their Fourth Estate (with several, notable exceptions) were either too incompetent to understand the truth, too cowardly to tell them the truth, or simply complicit in gaslighting them on behalf of powerful, moneyed interests.

Out of that lethal vacuum, blogging as we know it today was born; a social movement with a journalistic-aspect.

Facing a future that seemed destined to be dominated forever by the dark, barbaric energy of the Rove Republicans, the weak, placating pussies of the Democratic Leadership Council, and a truckling, servile media The Left had to save itself. And they did it just as the nation’s founders envisioned: an movement built on the spare time and spare change of people who were doing something else until they had to put down their plows, leave the farm and take up the cause because the status quo had become unbearable, and because no one was coming to save them.

But therein lies the problem. Because social movements ebb and flow, and as The Revolution gets a better suit of clothes and becomes The Institution, technocrats charged with implementing what the rebels envisioned become the movements new foot soldiers.

All fine and good for, say, labor and education policy or clean energy initiatives where we have institution that are capable of can absorb new ideas and but that evolutionary model seems doomed to fall spectacularly apart when it comes to the media.

In the last two years I have seen a startlingly large number of organizational models from both the public and private sectors proposing that they turn to some form of “crowdsourcing” to get around the old “ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag” problem of too much work chasing too few people.

And each time I read about it, I smile.

Thirty years ago, “personal computers” were the Philosopher's Stone that organizations were blindly promising their shareholders would let them do vastly more with less.

Twenty years ago it was “re-engineering”, which, as it turned out, usually meant nothing more than promising the shareholders to double their profits by firing a third of the staff and then threatening the survivors with economic extinction of they didn’t work 14 hours a day.

Ten years ago, every sycophant who wanted a promotion was vying with every other sycophant to be the first to yell, “Build some kinda database!” at every problem, and then bitch that the “tech guys” were to blame when it failed.

Then it was the internet and corporate websites for all! Cellphones, which almost instantly became corporate collars attached to leashes that could reach into your car, your shower, your bedroom. Then palmtops. And blogs. Blacberries, WiFi, and little blue eyes blinking from everyone’s ears.

I’m sure you have your own list and, arguably, almost all of these changes come bearing real gifts, but taken collectively they amount to a massive failure to set priorities (and make difficult decisions based on those priorities) on the part of leaders everywhere. Because rather that risking career or status by telling stakeholders “No, you cannot have everything you want. You have to pick one or the other and live with the consequences”, waaay too many leaders have instead used “technology” as a massive hocus-pocus to pretend they can deliver it all, on time and under budget.

Which, in the end, always seems to translate into dumping the responsibility for delivering on their promises into someone else’s lap.

But there are only so many hours in the day. And only so many people know how to fit a sentence together in way that makes you want to read the next one, and the next, day after day. And while anybody can take a picture of a mayor or a plane’s forced landing, only a very few people in the “crowd” can tell you the back-story of the guy standing next to the mayor, and why its important. Or what kind of piloting is involved in putting an aircraft safely down in a river.

So what happens to the New Journalism when that journalism turns out to have been built on the “cheap oil” of the increasingly scarce “spare time” of knowledgeable volunteers? What happens once the cheap oil runs out and we reach our “Peak Prose” moment when those volunteers who were brought to The Cause during the crises, return to their farms, or have to get a second job to feed their family, or just get tired of the burden of reading everything every day, and writing before dawn?

The tyranny of experts during a time of change:

This from Athenae at First Draft sums it up nicely:

Nobody Knows What To Do

That's primarily what I took away from Chicago Media Future this afternoon, that and a dislike of Patrick Spain of Newser.com, who spent his entire time on the afternoon panel making the following assertions:

1. Nobody with fewer than 5 million hits daily is making any money online.

2. Politico has replaced the Washington Post as a source of good political information.

3. HuffPo will replace the New York Times.

4. The New York Times will not exist one year from today.

That being said – or, rather, declaratively intoned by Mr. Spain – no one was able to successfully answer the question of who Huffington Post would steal from once it drove working reporters like those on the New York Times out of business.

Rich Gordon was on the previous panel and could match Patrick Spain white-hair-for-white-hair, but in Rich’s case, his genuine love for his profession and his ability to provide a broader social and (dare I say it) “moral” context for the subject at hand made him a pleasure to listen to.

Active listening vs. the illusion of knowledge:

For fun, I checked out the row where I was sitting. Based on my unscientific survey, in that row at any given time during the 3.5 hour conference, seven out of nine people were busy texting/surfing/twittering. Not briefly or glancingly, but fairly steadily. Look down the row and you’d have seen 78% of the faces bathed in a tiny, phosphorescent glow while 78% of the eyes focused intently on itty-bitty screens.

In the row in front of me, the ratio was four out of five.

Perfectly nice people, every one of them, I’m sure – and sincerely interested in the subject at hand -- but there was something half-ominous/ half -funny about being in an auditorium with people who had given up the better part of a beautiful Saturday to discuss the Very Important subject of the future of the fourth estate…an amazingly high percentage of whom were clearly unable to pay patient attention to what was happening right in front of them for more than a few minutes at a stretch.

From entertainification, to the price of paper, to the collapse of ad revenue, to an unsustainable, debt-based business model, there are certainly a lot of knife wounds in journalism’s gut, but one that doesn’t get nearly enough attention is this: the radical narrowing, shortening and dumbing-down of the apertures through which knowledge itself passes.

It an admittedly unfair example, consider the Twitter-max of 140 characters, you get cut off before the end first sentence of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural (a speech in which he assures his audience that he’s going to keep it short):

"AT this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the fi"

and after about 1/6 of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution:

"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except"

This is the face of the convergent media landscape as it is now; people trawling their immediate surroundings with loose, peripheral drift nets, trusting that their reflexes will pop them back into attentiveness when their personal mental keyword search scores a hit.

Or when the driver in front of them stomps on their brakes :-)

But whatever else it is, it isn’t listening, and in that just-in-time, bullet-point, “gimme the elevator version”-saturated world, the first casualty of narrative is context.

And of shorn context, “news” ceases to “the voice of the voiceless”, “the information you need as a citizen in a democracy” or even “what happened” and becomes mere noise.

That's it for now. More goodness from fellow travelers can be found here:

ChicagoItaliano (1,2)
“Lou Grant” at Chi-Town Daily News
Athenae at First Draft
Mike Doyle at Chicago Carless
Matt Wood at The Negotiation Limerick File
Whet Moser at Chicagoland
RyanBlitstein.com
Windy Citizen comment thread
CivicMediaUSA

The Wanktastics

Your liberal media strikes another blow for appeasement.

Our brand new "Political Correctness" has nothing to do race, gender or religion.

Our new PC is centrism, and if you want to get yourself shunned in the media and shut out of the discussion, all you need to do is express aloud the heretical idea that one side of the political spectrum is in any way more or less reasonable or more or less unhinged than the other side.

NPR's Neal Conan (pictured here) just spent 40 minutes conducting one of his master classes on the the subject, vigorously circle-jerking Kathleen Parker (syndicated columnist for The Washington Post Writers Group) and Jamie Kerchick, (assistant editor of New Republic and author of "The Religious Right Didn't Kill George Tiller" for the Wall Street Journal) on the subject of "Right-Wing Extremism".

The panel concluded that while the mouthbreathers on the Right firmly believe a great many stupid fantasies (Obama is coming for your guns. Obama is going to shut down the poisonous teat of Hate Radio with the Fairness Doctrine)...

...both sides are equally bad.

...both sides are equally wrong.

...out of the whole of the people on the Right, crazies represent just an eensy-weensy-tiny fraction of a rounding error.

...Keith Olbermann and "crazy Kos bloggers" are just as bad as Bill O'Reilly and his ilk.

...Teh Internets are just as bad as Hate Radio.

...(Parker) the "real" problem with Conservatives is that they don't have a leader. Democrats have Barack Obama, but Republicans got nuthin'.

And every single fucking time an inconvenient caller or topic threatened to drag those unwanted party crashers -- "facts" and "history" -- in with them and upset the happy horseshit "everyone is equally bad" folie à trois, Conan heroically steered his little raft of NPR opium eaters back into safe waters and away from the scary possibility that someday, somewhere the suggestion that the Right is actually, qualitatively, measurably, more vicious, stupid and wrong than the Left might go unrebutted.

If this all sounds drearily familiar, that is because this kind of pandering to that final Conservative firewall -- that however despicable they may be, they are no worse than those Evil Liberals -- is nothing new for Conan or "Lefty" NPR.

Two years ago when I wrote this, the show was the same, the host was the same, and the subject was "Why the hell has the Senate gotten so damned partisan?"

...

Caller Isabelle from New Jersey chimes in and gets the bullshit rolling.

Isabelle: I think the problem right now is not so much between the Republicans and the Democrats as it is between those with an ideological approach to politics and those with a pragmatic approach.

Isabelle: So when you have people like Alan Simpson or Christine Todd Whitman who have a more pragmatic approach to politics they can discuss [issues] with Democrats, whereas when you have a very ideological person like President Bush or Sam Brownback…it’s more difficult to come to a compromise because their ideology is based on ideology not on reality.

And then, completely unprompted, Conan helpfully leaps in with this:

“I would suspect to be fair that there are at least a few Democrats who have an ideology of their own too…”

driftglass translation: Whatever explicitly Republican high crimes, scandals, lie or treasons are under discussion, Something Very Bad will happen to me if I don’t automatically and doctrinally butt in with no evidence whatsoever and assert that, somehow, Democrats are equally bad.

Later, caller "Jim in Oklahoma City" brought up the effect of Religious Fundamentalism on politics.

Jim: “Reasonable people are willing to compromise their political stances, but it is probably extremely difficult for people to compromise what they believe are their religious principles.”

Got it? The question Jim asked is about the dangers that come when Religious Zealots get into politics.

And since political extremism jacketed in fundamentalist religious fanaticism is a particular disease of the Right, this is a clearly a shot right into Simpson’s Party’s political wheelhouse.

So how does Simpson answer?

First he rambles uncomfortably and incomprehensibly all over God’s Little Acre and back again (for Simpson-watchers, this is a sure sign that he is about to lay out a fat line of bullshit), and then fires back with this:

“I can tell ya, when you have zealots on both sides, and they’re getting’ pumped up on one side by Rush Limbaugh or Al Franken on the other, you got problems in River City.”

...

Progressive Radio arose because politicians like Alan Simpson were, for twenty years, perfectly content with looking the other way and harvesting the electoral fruits of the poison tree that their Conservative/Christopath/Racist Hate Radio, Hate TeeVee, Hate Satellite, Hate Cable and Hate Publishing so lavishly watered and fertilized.

Because the GOP was never concerned with the destruction of political comity…as long as it was working to their advantage.

As long as all of the screeching Orwellian hellfire was coming from the Right, they never said a fucking word.

But now, finally, after twenty years of unilateral disarmament, now that the Left has at last decided to fight back hard, suddenly old Republican loons like Simpson get all gooey for the glory days of cellulose collars, nickel candy bars, whale-bone corsets, heroic cavalry charges and a politics of gentle, ruffled fisticuffs followed by brandy, cigars and top-shelf hookers.

Suddenly it is “zealots on both sides” that have torn his beloved Temple down.

Well fuck you, Alan Simpson. Fuck you sideways for your bogus hand-wringing and crocodile tears.

And a big "fuck you" to Neal Conan and NPR for continuing to serve political expediency at the expense of the public interest.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

“Drag Me To Health Care” edition

At some point during the Great Digital Conversion, the sleepy little mouse inside the wheel that powers the local CBS station transmitter decided to “Go Galt” and hasn’t been heard from since. Which means CBS has effectively gone dark for We Of The Rabbit Ears. Which wasn’t entirely surprising since for as long as anyone can remember, CBS’s signal strength has been of the near-beer variety for anyone not sleeping on fire escape under their transmitter.

(What are the real-world consequences of this?
Well, when I saw him at Da Jewels,
I almost didn’t recognize teevees Jay Levine

because he didn’t look like this.)

Now if I had the license to print money that comes with owning a teevee station and I was locked a state of perpetual and aggressive competition with other local stations, making sure customers are able to, y’know, receive our effing signal would be very high up there on the priority list.

But that’s just me, and even though I attended yesterday’s Chicago Media Future Conference, took reeeal good notes and learned many short, clever, declarative and mutually-annihilating sentences about the state of journalism (about which more later), judging by my ongoing mystification over things like why – as the mainstream media continues to cry poormouth and shed thousands of jobs – talent-free meatsticks like Bill Kristol and Richard Cohen continue to collect paychecks...it is clear I know nothing about the media.

Oh the embarrassment.

So, who knows; maybe the whole CBS thing is a kind of agricultural subsidy?

Maybe over at McClurg Court they get big, gummint checks for promising not to shovel slop like “How I Met Your Mother”, “The New Adventures of Old Christine” and “Million Dollar Password" any further than you can throw a pizza underwater…while down the dial former ghost channels that show “Hellenic Heartbeat” and reruns of “Kate Loves a Mystery” pour through the screen all sparkly and clear.

This explanation would deeply delight me on some perverse level, but wouldn’t explain why NBC also suddenly cut out mid-sentence: a clean , strong digital signal one minute and flatline the next.

So until I grid out the castle and start moving from square to square holding my antenna like Diogenes looking for an honest man, Sunday Morning is being patched together out of remnants from the channels that are left and streaming video.

And what was squirming under the rocks this Sunday?

Very little.

George Will let America know that Iran is full of kids, who have access to thingies called “computers” and “cell phones” and “satellite dishes”, and under that withering technological onslaught, maintaining an “intellectual autarchy” is impossible.

Leaving aside the fact that technology is pitilessly agnostic (and that, far from being smasked by tech, Iran’s “intellectual autarchy" sailed into power at least in part thanks to the 1970s version of the iPod), Mr. Will may be right or he may be wrong, but I'd have a whole lot more confidence assessments of the fate and future of Iran vis-à-vis Farsi youth culture halfway around the world if it weren’t so painfully evident that those predictions were coming from someone who’s overall comprehension of humans under the age of sixty is marooned somewhere between the "Village of The Giants"


and "Hair".



George Will also said that Americans are perfectly competent to navigate the foot-thick-contract, claims-denying viper pit of the private insurance market because Americans have mastered the ice box...their wireless Marconi devices... Velcro “computers”.


I don’t know about what sort of “computer” George Will yells at when the toast doesn’t pop out

but the ones I use on a regular basis don’t operate on a profit model where Dell or Apple get paid based on how successfully they deny me access to the internet.

Will also lightly echoes Mitt Romney’s

horror movie vision of Obamacare.

(Romney here demonstrates what he believes
health care in an Obama Administration

will look like.)

Romney cheerfully explained that Democrats are rapacious monsters who – if given a chance to shape health care policy in any way (apparently excluding all of the dozens of health care programs the Gummint already successfully runs) – will rip you off, kill you and sell your parts to evil doers.

Which is weird, because I though only Republicans sold American arms

to terrorists.

Boo-ya!

But seriously, if every American who works in public service is a socialist idiot who destroys everything they touch, why can't we just import a bunch of Iranian 20-year-olds?

I mean, if they're verging on something as grand and difficult and revolutionary as text-messaging Iran's “intellectual autarchy" into the ash heap of history, then surely with their “computers” and "blue teeth" and fancy Twittering toasters they can figure out a way for Americans to have universal, affordable health care.

Tune Time

The outlaws had us pinned down at the fort
Cisco came in blastin', drinkin' port

Layoffs, Nephews And Da Family Bidness

Today, Da Mare got to fire another 1,500 Chicagoans because the city is dead ass broke. (It's not, but that's another story.)

Yesterday, Da Mare got to whisper out a paragraph of carefully lawyer-wordsmithed remarks about how he din’t know nuffin about his nephew -- Robert Vanecko -- at whom the City threw $68 million in pension dollars for no explicable reason.

Why are these stories related?

Because Chicago is a hereditary monarchy, and to understand how things roll here you really have to understand the difference between The Royals and The Vassals.

If you’re a vassal -- whether you’re a genius technocrat or a court jester, a baron with a private army or a foot soldier with a kid in college, a wizard or a wastewater treatment engineer -- you are ultimately expendable.

Now of course if you’ve done some favors for the Royals in the past, you can expect those chits to offer you some protection when the seas get a little rough and the time comes to start jettisoning a few warm bodies to keep the Machine from capsizing.

But when the going gets scary, Edmund Fitzgerald-ugly and the lifeboats start hitting the water with Royals and their favorite pets and courtiers aboard, then every vassal is just another dreary fuck from steerage, and nobody cares if you said nice things about Da Mare at some Rotarian dinner in 2003 or got your picture taken with him at Millennium Park that one time.

In really ugly times, things that vassals have been taught since childhood were genuine coins of the realm -- whether it be flattery, or hard work, or proximity to power, or an obsessive focus on getting every ridiculous detail of some trivial project just so “because Da Mare would want it dat way” -- suddenly turn out to be so much fairy gold.

Which is exactly why everyone knows the story of Da Nephew who wanted to play Mogul stinks like the proverbial whorehouse at low tide.

In a city where grown men have nervous breakdowns over whether or not they’ve used the right font on a three-line memo that Da Mare may or may not ever glance at before it goes into the shredder, it is inconceivable that word of a decision to toss the Bridgeport Halfling Prince $68 million in city pension dough never reached the 5th floor.

And in a city where a word from Da Mare can obliterate airports, smash stadiums and axe thousands of men and women, it is preposterous to suggest that -- having heard that Da Nephew was standing on the porch waiting for a multi-million dollar handout -- a word from the 5th floor could not have killed the deal dead.

Or, as Steve Rhodes put it so neatly in today's "Beachwood Reporter":

See, that's the problem with Fran Spielman's stenography today: if the family is as close-knit as she wrings her hands over, how could this deal have gone down without the mayor knowing about it?

Add in Daley's microscopic knowledge of city business and it's just plain unfathomable.

Of course, the mayor could have cleared all that up but he refused to take questions on the matter.

Nobody else is talking either.

Besides -- regardless of how various “inside sources” spin their little tales of how Da Nephew was warned not to run with multi-million-dollar scissors now that the it has all gone to shit and landed on the front page -- back when he was pressuring his uncle's underlings to buy $68 million dollars worth of his

shitty Girl Scout Cookies, what possible grounds could Da Mare have had for objecting to Da Nephew dilettanting around with other people's money?

That slouching after a buck in the private sector was bad? (From local NBC):

On Wednesday, Daley had said, “'They’re not customer-related. They’re gonna leave at 5 o’clock. They’re gonna leave at 4:30 or 4:00. I’m sorry. We’re on a time clock. They walk out. But, in the private sector, when you have a customer, you’re gonna stay there making sure they’re happy and satisfied."

That the real estate business was shady? (From the Chicago Reader):

…
Then there was the Michael Reese deal, approved 47-0 in the City Council on December 17. Daley unveiled this proposal in July, when he told reporters the city intended to borrow $85 million to buy the 37-acre hospital site from Medline Industries, the current owner. Medline would then—follow me now—make a $20 million “charitable contribution” to cover the cost of demolishing the hospital and cleaning up the site. Sounding a little like one of those old Celozzi-Ettleson Chevrolet ads, Daley and planning commissioner Arnold Randall assured us that the deal would cost taxpayers nothing: Unnamed developers were lined up to purchase the property for the full $85 million so they could build as many as 7,500 units of housing, which would be set aside for about 15,000 athletes during the Olympics. The developers could then sell them off later at a profit. But the deal would go through even if Chicago didn’t get the Olympics, Daley and Randall said, because apparently it was just too good for any sensible developer to pass up.

It seemed the city had discovered the secret that has eluded so many other great deal makers: how to buy something without spending any money. “This is a very creative financing solution,” Randall told reporters.

The City Council was set to approve the deal—and by the way, I don’t think Brezhnev got as much support from the politburo as Daley gets from the council these days—when estimates for the cleanup came in at well over $20 million. The administration hit the brakes, and the city and Medline returned to the table. After about four months, they announced what’s supposedly an even better deal for taxpayers. Instead of $85 million, the city would borrow $86 million, and Medline would hike its charitable contribution to at least $27.5 million.

But little has really changed from the first deal, at least as far as taxpayers are concerned. It’s still a speculative real estate deal, and if things don’t go just right, the city—in other words, taxpayers—could be saddled with all or part of the loan.

...

The emphasis on the donation is sleight of hand. The real issue, which you could well miss for all the distracting details, is not whether the city’s getting a good price, but whether buying this property makes sense in light of Chicago’s many pressing needs.

Moreover, the mayor has not explained how the city—which is apparently not astute enough to operate parking meters—has suddenly dev­eloped the expertise to succes­sfully develop real estate
...

That using insider contacts to get rich in real estate was naughty? (From the Chicago Sun-Times via Congressman Jackson's website):

$1 Billion O'Hare Pact Gets City Council's OK

By Fran Spielman, Chicago Sun-Times
Thursday, March 8, 2001

Without a word of debate and no formal commitment to bolster minority participation, the City Council on Wednesday approved the largest contract in Chicago history to build the first of two new terminals at O'Hare Airport.

The vote allowed Mayor Daley's newly retired political enforcer Victor Reyes to deliver a $1 billion contract to his client, T-6 Partners, in his maiden voyage as a Chicago lobbyist.
…

No, like our Corrupt Ex-Governor, all Young Robert was doing was following a trail blazed for him years ago by his elders, paved for him by generations of Street-‘N-San guys with “borrowed” asphalt, and neatly fenced off for him by construction firms like G.F. Structures:

“A clout-heavy contractor who made millions from Mayor Daley's affinity for wrought-iron fences has been awarded a pair of contracts worth $10.6 million to convert a vacant military building at O'Hare Airport into a new home for city employees.

“That makes G.F. Structures the big winner in a $22.5 million move designed to free up 500,000 square feet of lucrative terminal space for new concessions.
…”

In a state where converting votes into power and power into dough has long been da family bidness of the Royals, Young Robert's problems did not come from his acts nepotism, but from their timing and volume. And so, before vanishing for a few months down the memory hole until it is safe for him to sneak back and start turning his uncle's Rolodex into Big Cake again, Young Robert will now suffer a ritual public spanking, while his uncle will somehow endure seeing a few more embarrassing headlines in the rear view mirror as he jets away to Lausanne, Switzerland next week.

All of which is cold comfort to the 1,500 men and women who just got sacked today right into the teeth of the Great Recession.

1,500 vassals who have no retinue of press agents, clout-rich relatives and well-connected captains of industry standing ready to catch them when they fall.

I’m So Old…

So if I understand the arguments coming from the Right…when millions of indomitably hateful, batshit idiots in this country build their daily routines around communing with the fearmongering muses on Fox teevee and Hate Radio -- when they listen to O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Beck and their squalid ilk with the high-focus crazy of a Charlie Manson playing "Helter Skelter" for the thousandth time- - well that’s all just enter-fucking-tainment!

And yet I am troubled by vague recollections of an era now obviously lost to history and the memory of Man.

An all-but forgotten age when Konservatives Kulture Krusaders marched by night through torch-lit streets in celebration of something called “Justice Sunday”.

When men of God openly terrorized members of the federal judiciary because judges who did not obey the dictates of the mullahs of the American Taliban were all worse than “a few bearded terrorists who fly planes into buildings.”

And so it was back in those ancient days that a Very Prominent Republican known as “John Of The Cornyn” was more than willing to link “words” and “violence”, just as long as it served his sick, theocratic agenda:

“
Senator Links Violence to 'Political' Decisions
'Unaccountable' Judiciary Raises Ire

By Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 5, 2005; Page A07

…
Sen. John Cornyn said yesterday that recent examples of courthouse violence may be linked to public anger over judges who make politically charged decisions without being held accountable.

In a Senate floor speech in which he sharply criticized a recent Supreme Court ruling on the death penalty, Cornyn (R-Tex.) -- a former Texas Supreme Court justice and member of the Judiciary Committee -- said Americans are growing increasingly frustrated by what he describes as activist jurists.

"It causes a lot of people, including me, great distress to see judges use the authority that they have been given to make raw political or ideological decisions," he said. Sometimes, he said, "the Supreme Court has taken on this role as a policymaker rather than an enforcer of political decisions made by elected representatives of the people."

Cornyn continued: "I don't know if there is a cause-and-effect connection, but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. . . . And I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some occasions, where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in, engage in violence. Certainly without any justification, but a concern that I have."
…”

Of course, being a Republican, when the actual facts of the case did not in any way support his venomous talking points, Cornyn just made shit up (citation of vintage Tom DeLay fatwa included for no extra charge):

…
Cornyn, who spoke in a nearly empty chamber, did not specify cases of violence against judges. Two fatal episodes made headlines this year, although authorities said the motives appeared to be personal, not political. In Chicago, a man fatally shot the husband and mother of a federal judge who had ruled against him in a medical malpractice suit. And in Atlanta last month, a man broke away from a deputy and fatally shot four people, including the judge presiding over his rape trial.

Liberal activists criticized Cornyn's remarks, and compared them to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's comments last week following the death of a brain-damaged Florida woman, Terri Schiavo. DeLay (R-Tex.) rebuked federal and state judges who had ruled in the Schiavo case, saying, "The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior."

Ralph G. Neas, president of People for the American Way, said last night that Cornyn, "like Tom DeLay, should know better. These kinds of statements are irresponsible and could be seen by some as justifying inexcusable conduct against our courts." The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee called the senator's remarks "an astounding account of the recent spate of violence against judges, suggesting that the crimes could be attributed to the fact that judges are 'unaccountable' to the public."
…

But of course that was all thousands of years ago.

On a different planet orbiting a different sun.

Show Us Your TIFs!

File under: “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire
We don't need no water
let the motherfucker burn”

So there are two water towers in your town: One marked “MUNICIPAL SWIMMING” and the other marked “FIRE DEPARTMENT”.

During a typical year, both contain several hundred thousand gallons of H20. Both get topped off regularly at taxpayer expense.

But this is not a typical year.

This year, there is a wildfire sweeping through your town. A bad one. A firestorm howling through the streets, igniting the air itself and blasting houses, churches, schools and factories into embers and ashes.

And your fire marshal has just informed you that the tank marked “FIRE DEPARTMENT” is running dry, but the tank marked “MUNICIPAL SWIMMING” is top-full of water.

So as a responsible city manager, what do you do?

From Progress Illinois:

As Layoffs Loom, Daley Sits On A $1 Billion TIF Surplus

by Angela Caputo

Over the past month, Mayor Daley's tax increment financing (TIF) system has attracted some much-needed scrutiny. First came the news that the city is forking over $3.8 million to insurance giant Willis Group Holdings to refurbish their swank new Sears Tower headquarters (despite the fact that the company's annual revenue exceeds $2 billion). Then we learned from the Sun-Times that condo owners in Chicago's University Village had benefited from TIF subsidies, only to flip their "affordable housing" for a profit (essentially pocketing those taxpayer dollars). Cook County Clerk David Orr recently summed it up well: "We’re looking at massive abuse. ...TIFs can be a good tool, but this has become a giant slush fund in the city of Chicago.”

While we could write on and on about the "massive abuse" of TIF, we're going to shift the focus slightly today -- to the hoarding of unspent TIF dollars.

During a City Council Finance Committee hearing last Monday, Chief Financial Officer Gene Saffold and Community Development Commissioner Christine Raguso found themselves on the hot seat as a handful of aldermen demanded some long-overdue answers about how the $500 million in annual TIF revenue -- along with the proceeds of the city's parking meter, Skyway, and parking garage leases -- are being managed. Ald. Ed Smith (28th Ward) got right to the point, saying, "Show us all the money. Where we can see it. All of it."
...

Well the City of Chicago has yelled “Fire”. It’s the reason they’ve already whacked hundreds of city workers, and plan to sack a thousand more, and a thousand more on top of that from the public school system.

It’s the reason they raised every fee, stuck revenue cameras on hundreds of corners and pawned the parking meter system.

“Sorry,” they say, “we realize this is all really brutal and fucked up and means that we have to cut back yet again on services to Chicagoans that we believe are vital, but we have no choice.”

"We are not cutting fat," Chief of Staff Paul Volpe has said. "We are cutting muscle."

They must, we are told, because “tax revenues are coming in $50 million below projections.”

Because the tank marked “FIRE DEPARTMENT” is running dry and so we have no alternative but make some very ugly, triage decisions and let part of the town be consumed by the conflagration.

Except, of course, that the tank marked “MUNICIPAL SWIMMING” has an extra billion dollars in it. Which would seem – if I've gotten my take-aways and gazintas right – to be sufficient to make up for a $50 million dollar shortfall...20 times over.

And there is nothing magical about TIF money; it isn’t local scrip currency that can only be spent at Chicago Company Stores, and it isn’t printed on special, trick paper that will disintegrate if it is taken out into the sunlight. It’s MONEY, that does come with some restrictions on how and where it can be spent, but those restrictions are not laws of Nature or ordained by God.

Tax increment finance laws were made entirely by ordinary, grubby people just like you and me, and can be unmade and remade by those same people if there is the will to do so.

Now in other cities, getting a bunch of lawmakers to sprinkle magic legislative pixie dust over TIF regulations to spend the dough in different ways -- even in a emergency -- might be a problem.

But not in Chicago.

In Chicago, we have our own Maximum Mayor For Life,

Richard M. Daley.

This is Da Mare who gutted a national landmark sports stadium and turned it into a grotesque, battleship-sized bidet that’ll be hanging its tin ass over Lake Shore Drive as a monument to his ego for the next 50 years...because he and some of his real estate pals just fucking well wanted to.

This is Da Mare who sent a battalion of bulldozers to raze an FAA-regulated airport in the middle of the night on a whim.

This is Da Mare who has spent the last twenty years training the City Council to

play “dead” on command.

This is Da Mare who runs big chunks of the governments of Cook County, various suburbs and the State of Illinois like a squadron of Predator drones, and has the leader of the free world on speed dial.

This is also Da Mare whose Administration moved heaven and earth to set things right when the City flooded, and put together a massive Chicago response to Katrina almost overnight.

Because those were crises.

So for all the gov-speak double-talk being thrown at the media, this is actually a pretty simple, binary decision.

Either what is happening to Chicago’s capacity to provide for its citizens right now is a crisis, or its not.

If it is a crisis -- if shouting “Fire!” is the appropriate response -- then treat it like a God damned crisis already. Bust open the “MUNICIPAL SWIMMING” tank, use it to extinguish the blaze, and worry about refilling it some other day when the embers have cooled and the smoke has cleared.

And if it’s not a crisis?

If it’s not a crisis then Da Mare and his people need to shut the fuck up and quit using scare-tactics to head-fake legislators into Hurry!Hurry!Hurry!Now!Now!Now! selling off irreplaceable public assets at fire-sale prices, and sacking thousands of workers everyone knows Da Mare has been itching to rid himself of for years.