And in local news...

Too many viable headlines to choose from.

Perhaps, "Maybe it’s just, uh, Instant Water?

or "Turf war erupts between Water Department and China White Department."

or "Jeez, I always thought Revenue was in charge of trafficking, and Water was extortion?"

Decisions, decisions.

As a matter of introduction for those of you living in the non-Chicago segment of the planet, you may not know that portions of the Chicago city government are presently whatcha might call awash in scandal.

A certain level of this is not shocking to locals – it’s roughly equivalent to announcing that the alleys around Wrigley Field are awash in urine after a night game -- but sometimes it rises to a level that even we actually find alarming.

We have, for example, repeatedly had contracts let to firms under Minority and Women Owned Business clauses, only to find that the dead people or second-cousins who had signed for the contracts were simply fronts for White and Male and not-in-the-slightest-sense-minority friends and cronies of the Mayor.

Then comes the Shock and Outrage on his part that such things are happening. Steps will be taken, people. Mighty, mighty steps.

Then time passes.

Then it happens again.

And again.

And again.

Then came the Hired Truck Scandal; a journalistically perfect combination of corrupt city workers, the Mob and old friends of the Daley family all wired together in a scheme dating back years (well, decades, really) that defrauded the city out of millions and millions of dollars. And in this case, this exact scandal had also also broke out as a story once before.

And again, the outrage. The shock. The promises of reform.

Again time passes.

And, again, we find out that nothing whatsoever was done about it, it re-erupts, but this time it blowt it's lava cap at the exact moment when the city is laying off employees and “early retiring” thousands more, axing hundreds of teachers with no notice, cutting services, seizing and/or booting cars after three tickets, squeezing every drop of revenue out of meters and fees and generally crying poor-mouth every time anyone asks for anything.

When times were good and all was Fat City, Joe Public never really minded the unlovely reality of Getting Business Done here in my beautiful town. But it almost impossble not in invoke the Diety when pointing out the exquisitely bad timing of the City’s “Millions for Mobbed up Cronies” program being dumped all crawly and bloated out into the light at the precise moment that, say, the Summer Youth programs – once funded lavishly – have been slashed to near-zero. Where your potholes are suddenly your own fucking problems, and BTW, we just bumped up the fee for your car’s sticker.

At last count, roughly eleven million of Daley’s childhood friends, confirmation classmates, law school buddies and assorted other family retainers have been perp-walked out of their LaSalle Street offices and into other, less plush government-owned facilities, and, to date, his explanation is that he had not a single effin clue that any of it was going on.

Now let’s be cards up and honest: most people here like the guy. He clearly loves the City, the parks are spectacular (including Millenium, which went, what, +100 million over-budget?), the local economy is humming along pretty well and we have a helluva good national and international reputation...but these red-faced, sputtering expressions of aghast astonishment that we get every time one of the guys that sang at his kid’s wedding is indicted is long past comical; now it's getting embarrassing.

And let’s be a little clearer. We're not talking about getting indicted not for some stray bad act but rather for, say, for a rigged contract that his own Contracts Department approved for a piece of property that his own Aviation or Procurement department operates or for equipment that was leased by his own Fleet department and perhaps overseen by his own Streets & Sanitation Department.

When you have been Mayor for over 15 years and have appointed every single head of every single Department, approved all of the Deputies and hand-picked half of the Aldermen, standing in front of the teevee cameras and stammering in beet-red fury that you have no fucking clue how your dear, old friends and campaign supporters were ever given rigged, sweetheart deals...well let’s just say that he doesn’t have a vast well-spring of credibility to draw on any more.

Let’s just say it ain’t funny any more.

And let’s just say we are approaching a tipping point, where things could go very briskly downhill for a LOT of people, and the worst Department of the bunch in terms of indictments and bad press has to be Water.

And on to that tottering Jenga Pile is tossed this...

Crain’s Chicago Business.
June 8, 2005
Water Dept. workers charged in alleged heroin ring

Uh oh...

Water Dept. not charged with being part of drug-trafficking operation

(AP) Eight men and women, including two employees of Chicago's scandal-plagued city water department, were arrested Wednesday as federal investigators rolled up what they described as one branch of a Colombian drug-trafficking operation.

The water department itself, already awash in charges of bribery and other political corruption, was not charged with being part of the heroin distribution ring. But investigators did find that department workers "were engaging in this kind of conduct during weekdays, during workdays, when they should not have been," U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald said at a news conference.

Federal officials said the ongoing investigation got under way in February with a tip from a government informant and could produce more arrests soon.

The charges came as a fresh blow to the administration of Mayor Richard M. Daley, whose standing with voters has fallen as a result of corruption, according to the latest Chicago Tribune poll.

A number of water department employees - including the former first deputy commissioner, a longtime precinct captain in the Daley family's 11th Ward - have been charged with corruption involving the $38 million Hired Truck Program, which outsourced work to private trucking companies, some with mob ties.
...

Well fuckity fucking fuck-cakes. Not dealing a little weed. Not making a little book. No, running a Smack Ring out of the now-already-synonymous-with-corruption Water Department.

For the record, there are hundreds of nice, hard-working people who work there. And also for the record (there is a record, right?) the water cleaning and filtration system that supports City is an engineering marvel that is justly famous all over the world.

And none of that matter right now.

What matters is there comes a times when water can become so saturated with salt or sugar, that just dropping one more grain into it will cause it to start spontaneously forming huge crystals. My City is at that point; we simply will not tolerate another scandal, no matter how oddball or seemingly unrelated to those in power.

If Capone had been a bricklayer, no one would have cared that he cheated on his taxes, and if Nixon had been Jerry Ford, a burglary by underlings wold have been embarassing but comie to nothing. But once you’ve spend decades packing City Hall from floor to ceiling with tinder, oily rags and dynamite, don’t act all shocked when one freak spark from one squeaky hinge on one forgotten door sets it all off.

So no surprise that Johnny Cash’s cover of “Hurt” was running through my mind as I fought traffic on the way home and listened to the dirty details on the national news. After all, who ever did songs about drugs and regret better than the Man in Black (and yes, you Reznor purists, I know “Hurt” was about self-piercing, but Cash thought it was about heroin, so bite me.)

Anyway, this little bit sums up better than I ever could what I’d wager the mood is like up on the 5th floor of City Hall as old sins are transmuted into fresh headlines ...

What have I become?
my sweetest friend
everyone I know goes away in the end
and you could have it all
my empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt

And most especially...

if I could start again
a million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way