Lord Whorfin Mare Daley

(pictured here flanked by his Budget Director and Chief of Staff)

has more words of pure inspiration for his serfs.



From the Sun Times:

Daley to eliminate 220 vacant city jobs to prevent future tax hikes

October 19, 2009

BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter

Mayor Daley said Monday he would eliminate 220 vacant city jobs, cancel cost-of living pay raises for 3,500 non-union employees and order those bureaucrats to take 24 unpaid days off to honor his promise to keep his hand out of taxpayers’ pockets in 2010.

Together with cuts in non-personnel spending, the latest round of bureaucratic belt-tightening will reduce spending by $64 million.

The remainder of the city’s $550 million budget gap is expected to be filled by raiding reserve funds generated by city asset sales. That’s a controversial move that threatens the all-important bond rating used to determine city borrowing costs.
...

Now I might not have gone to no fancy Chicago Public School, but I can do math, and I do have a memory.

And I remember last Fall.

Vividly.

I remember that a year ago Da Mare was also using his Special Scary Voice to announce that brutal layoffs were coming.

They were described by Chicago Federation of Labor leader Dennis Gannon thusly:

"We've cut to the bone already," he said. "Now, you're at the bone marrow."

Then, of course, in the Spring we have yet another round of cuts, also described in the language of the abattoir (from the Tribune):

Daley aide says more job cuts likely

Mayor Richard Daley's chief of staff today announced $9.2 million in spending cuts and warned that more city workers could be laid off.

The city will try to save $6 million by making a 3 percent reduction in spending on "non-personnel costs like commodities, materials, supplies and services" across city government, said top Daley aide Paul Volpe.

Another $3 million would be saved by renegotiating contracts with companies that provide services to the city.

And about $100,000 should be cut "by reducing the number of employee car leases."

"We are not cutting fat," Volpe said. "We are cutting muscle."

Each announcement set off a frenzied scramble inside the Dark Tower. Not for extra skills training or a rational analysis of all options based on the good of the taxpayer...

...but a mad dash for phones as everyone who had ever helped an alderman's assistant stash a pregnant girlfriend, or had taken the weight for an up-and-coming Director caught making a drunk, panstless down-payment on future job security called in every favor they had.

Because everyone knows how such decision really get made (from The Reader):

Whether the city's cut too much or not enough is open to debate, but we all know what usually happens during layoff time: certain protected people stay on the payroll (or manage to get added to it despite the budget woes) whether they're necessary or not, and certain others are canned whether they're necessary or not.

And so we come again to the Fall budget season, and an even more gaping budget hole than there was in the Fall of 2008, or the Spring of 2009.

Are there still failing and failed projects sucking up City resources? Yes there are.

Are there still mouthbreathers and frauds drawing City paychecks? You betcha.

Are there still useless consultants dug into the City's exchequer like ticks on a sniff hound? Absolutely.

Will any of those things be cut -- or even mentioned -- when it comes to cutting corners this time around?

Of course not.

But what is even more super-special about this time around is that, after all of that bone and muscle cutting of the last 12 months, Da Mare has somehow managed to magically conjure up "220 vacant city jobs" out of thin air which can now be sacrificed, while also conjuring the wherewithal to dip into the city's massive reserves to cover the budget hole this time around.

What a surprise it must be to the people who listened, terrified, to all of that "cutting muscle and bone" talk, who were then thrown overboard during the last couple of layoffs and into the teeth of the worst recession in the last 70 years on the grounds that there were absolutely no other alternatives to learn that -- surprise! -- there were apparently lots of other alternatives.

What a surprise it must be to the people and to their families, and friends, and colleagues, and union brothers and sisters to discover that, in the end, their mistake wasn't that they didn't work long enough or hard enough or ably enough, but that they never figured out which dick they needed to suck to make their services more valuable than one of "220 vacant city jobs".