Why Isn't This Man Pissed?

Ten years ago, Da Mare was looking a lot like this

when a private company was caught badly screwing up its public obligations

The Fallout - Daley's not alone in pointing finger
By Gary Washburn and Susan Chandler
Tribune Staff Writers

Mayor Richard Daley and Commonwealth Edison have been at odds on numerous occasions over the last few years but on Thursday, Daley and ComEd Chairman John Rowe agreed on one thing: The utility that provides power to Chicago blew it when scores of downtown buildings went dark.

Daley, his face flushed with anger, called on ComEd to bring in outside experts and crews to work "24 hours a day, 7 days a week" to rebuild the company's aging and failing infrastructure.

"We are sick and tired of them, and they had better change," the mayor fumed.

In a phone call earlier in the day, Daley said he told Rowe, "You better go to ground zero with that company. You ought to get outside contractors and outside engineers and get it done immediately."

Rowe, who later termed his company's performance "totally unacceptable" and "a personal disgrace to me," told reporters he had this response to the mayor: "No excuse, sir."

While Daley clearly was angered by Thursday's outage, he was furious about what he said was the company's failure to provide advance warning about the possibility of power going down in such a critical area of the city.

...
Daley and ComEd ended a bitter dispute last March over the provisions of a 1992 franchise agreement that gave the utility the right to provide service in the city for 29 years.

The agreement ended an arbitration proceeding begun by the city over what Daley called foot-dragging on millions of dollars worth of improvement projects promised by ComEd under the franchise pact.
...

(And just as a point of reference, for you outta-towners, this is one ‘a them almost-lifelike digital rotoscopic cartoon thingies of Da Mare last year taking target practice on some of his pet alderman in a lesser-but-still entertaining rant

when a few of them didn’t vote the way he told them to vote.)

But now?

From the Tribune:

Daley: parking box meltdown caused by 'computer glitch'

Posted by Dan P. Blake
Mayor Richard Daley today blamed Wednesday's downtown parking pay box meltdown on a "computer glitch."

The company that took over running the city's parking meters earlier this year still is declining to say what caused the malfunction that led to Chicago police being told not to write tickets for much of the working day. Daley wasn't as mum, however.

"Yeah, but it's a computer glitch. How many computer glitches do you have in your company? So it happens, but I know the headline is important cause you need the headlines," Daley told reporters today.

The mayor also said he's told the private company that he leased the city's paid street parking system to for 75 years that they need to perform better.

"Let's be realistic, everybody's frustrated about what took place yesterday, the glitch that took place," the mayor said.

"So like anything, they're going through transitions, but like anything else we're frustrated and they know that," Daley said of the company.

But Daley said he's not considering terminating the contract because taxpayers would have to fill the budget hole such a move would create. The city got $1.15 billion upfront for its lease deal, though the private company now collects all the proceeds.
...

Fascinating, no?

Two controversial franchises handed over to two different companies. Two big fuck-ups – both right in the heart of the City -- each underscoring in big, bright, publicly-humiliating ways the stink at the heart of each deal.

Ten years ago (and on a regular basis before and since) Da Mare took to his Bully Pulpit and threatened the political equivalent of a public skull-fucking if executives didn’t get off their asses and fix their shit Right!Now!

But Metergate?

Metergate it’s just “Meh”.

And why?

Because you never scream at someone who has your dick in their mouth for fear their sharp little teeth will go bitey-bitey.

ComEd was perfectly safe and politically advantageous to pimp slap because they were already weak and publicly on bad paper with Da Mare, and because the average voter loves it when one of their elected officials gets just as hair-on-fire populist-angry as they are about the exact same thing that’s enraging them.

So out of that little tantrum Da Mare gets a shot and a beer.

And due to their unique genetic makeup, beating up on alderman has become as fine and ancient a Chicago tradition as reserving “your” parking space on the street with crappy, plastic lawn furniture after a blizzard, or the Cubs imploding in September. (You see, somewhat like the dinosaurs of “Jurassic Park”, most alderman here have had their electoral DNA so thoroughly tangled and contaminated that they are no longer able to reproduce without Mayoral Mitosis.)

So, again, no downside to kicking 'em around on camera.

But Metergate is very different. Metergate is Da Mare’s own, personal Hongcheng Magic Liquid finance scheme; his paw prints are all over it and any mud that gets splashed is gonna land on him.

Which is why it rates only a shrug and a sigh and a “Well, waddya gonna do?”

And the thing is, you can always tell when Da Mare knows he has suddenly gotten himself chest-deep in Teh Politically Perilous Stupid when he starts seizing on single jargon words or magical explainy-sounding phrases like Rain Man --

Imaginary Mare: Wapner. The problem is definitely Wapner. Definitely.

Imaginary Reporter (made even more imaginary by the fact that she asks actual questions): "'Wapner' aside, Mr. Mayor, this company has one product: parking meters. And they were already under incredible scrutiny because of the way you wrapped several billion dollars in public assets up in a bow and practically gave it to them at fire-sale prices. So how is it possible that this parking meter company fucked up the installation of their one fucking product in the most amateurish and embarrassing way imaginable?

Imaginary Mare: I don't have my underwear. I'm definitely not wearing my underwear.

-- and obsessively repeating them over and over again.

Some days, Hizzonner's language-play really is the finest comic opera in town.

Of course, Da Mare's administration if chock full of expensive but much-less-public tax-dollar-wasting “glitches”. "Glitches" that people inside the Dark Tower speak of only in bathroom whispers lest the next round of layoffs find them clearing out their desks and being escorted under guard out of their jobs and into the teeth of the Great Recession.

Glitches like, say, CivicNet.

You never heard of it?

It’s a promise Da Mare made over ten years ago that was supposed to:

“…aggregate[] the communications requirements of the City, Chicago Public Schools, Chicago Park District, Chicago City Colleges, Chicago Housing Authority, and Chicago Transit Authority.

“CivicNet positions the City's requirements as an anchor tenant for the development of a new communications infrastructure. The City intends to partner with multiple entities in the private sector to build out this infrastructure, that will be managed and operated by the City's private sector partners and marketed by them to all interested parties in the private, public, and institutional sectors.

“The intent is to create a new communications infrastructure throughout the City for the Internet age, for everyone to use and to spur economic development.”

A fair chunk of your taxes got pissed away on that one, until it crawled away under City Hall and quietly died.

Of course, the nature of innovation is such that, for every one idea that works, even the best government pilots dozens of noble-sounding notions that fail. And CivicNet might have had that perfectly respectable epitaph chiseled into its headstone were it not for the fact that Da Mare keeps resurrecting its corpse every few years whenever his reputation as a “technology leader” needs burnishing.

It gets tarted up in zippy new threads, announced with great fanfare and at great expense --

(From the 2007 press release:

...
But to truly live up to the dream of full access, people need more than an available computer that has Internet access. They need training, business opportunities, mentors, and a high quality education that prepares them for the future.
That is why this new report, The City that NetWorks: Transforming Society and Economy Through Digital Excellence is so important.

...
The report recommends a number of strategies, including a Campaign for Digital Excellence, and a Partnerhsip for a Digital Chicago. These initiatives would mobilize the private sector to work with the City of Chicago and related agencies to provide leadership and resources to expand digital inclusion for all sectors of our society.
...

-- only to be hauled into the alley and quietly ganked a few months later once it has again been drained of its temporary P.R. value.

Chicago Scraps Costly Wi-Fi Project

Tom Jowitt, Techworld.com
Aug 29, 2007

City officials have scrapped plans to blanket the city of Chicago with an ambitious Wi-Fi network, citing costs and that too few residents would use it, as the principal reasons.

It was early last year when Chicago announced plans to blanket a 228 square mile area with a Wi-Fi network. At the time Chicago hoped to become one of the largest U.S. cities to offer blanket access to the internet.

However it seems that its negotiations with private-sector partners, including EarthLink, have stalled because any citywide Wi-Fi would require massive public financing. The city had hoped to provide only infrastructure for the network.

...

Expensive habit, these glitches.

Well, gotta go now.

Wapner’s on.