This Week In Helpful Local Translations

Political Officer Ivan Putin would like a word with you.


In "The Hunt for Red October"

most people were probably introduced to the idea of the "political officer" for the first time. He was the man from Moscow -- the Kremlin's personal representative -- and acted as...

...the supervisory political officer responsible for the political education (ideology) and organisation, and loyalty to the government of the military
...

The political supervision of the Russian military, was effected by the Political Commissar, who was introduced to every unit and formation, from company- to division-level, including the Navy. Revolutionary Military Councils (RVS) were established at army-, front-, fleet-, and flotilla-level, comprising at least three members — commander and two Political workers.

What a lot of people do not know is that the City of Chicago has an identical office that performs an identical function; quietly and remorselessly enforcing Da Mare's political will, insuring the loyalty of his directors and commissars commissioners, and guaranteeing the no counter-revolutionary elements are allowed to take root opposition is allowed to develop.

Except in Chicago the office is called the IGA: a department with a rich and pungent history of being at or near the center of many of Chicago's most embarrassing scandals, and within which there was a sudden shake-up last week (from the "Sun Times"):

Joan Coogan named city IGA director

December 21, 2009

BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter

Mayor Daley on Monday abruptly changed horses in the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs at the center of the city hiring scandal.

John Dunn, who has served as IGA director since 2005, resigned his $158,364-a-year job to take an unidentified “position in the private sector.” Dunn will be replaced by Joan Coogan, an 11-year veteran IGA employee who has worked to advance the mayor’s agenda in the City Council.

Dunn was not a City Council favorite. Earlier this year, he unleashed a profanity-laced tirade against Ald. Joe Moore (49th) in front of stunned aldermanic colleagues after Moore dared to aggressively question the mayor’s acting budget director during a City Council hearing.

Although 12 aldermen voted against the mayor’s 2010 budget, Dunn’s close ties to union leaders were credited with helping to deliver furlough days and other cost-cutting concessions that helped Daley reduce 1,600 threatened layoffs to just 431. All but three city unions ultimately agreed to the mayors demand.

“He gets along well with [Chicago Federation of Labor President] Dennis Gannon. He could pick up the phone and talk to these guys,” said a City Hall source, who asked to remain anonymous.

“Joan Coogan doesn’t know labor relations. She’s loyal. She’s been around. She’s hard-nosed. She’s tough. But she can also be a little bit abrasive. She’d be better off as chief of staff. John Dunn and [his predecessor] John Doerrer were smoother.”

...

Coogan is a graduate of St. Mary’s College and Loyola Law School and spent six years working for then-County Board President John Stroger before joining IGA in 1998.

In 2005, IGA was at the center of the city hiring scandal.

Then-IGA director John Doerrer resigned just days after the mayor’s patronage chief Robert Sorich and two other high-ranking city officials with close ties to the mayor’s native 11th Ward were accused of presiding over a “massive fraud” — complete with sham interviews, doctored test scores and color-coded charts to track political sponsors — to rig city hiring in favor of pro-Daley political workers.

Sorich was subsequently convicted. Doerrer’s predecessor, Victor Reyes, was implicated — first as an unidentified “co-schemer” in the alleged conspiracy to reward soldiers in the mayor's political army, then by name — in an explosive federal court filing unsealed in December 2005.
...

Former City Clerk Jim Laski, the highest-ranking official convicted in the Hired truck scandal, has also said that he brokered Hired Trucks through Reyes, Sorich and convicted First Deputy Water Commissioner Donald Tomczak.

Reyes has never been charged.
...

Not exactly steeped in a tradition of "Duty, Honor, Country".

And since nothing in Chicago politics happens in a vacuum, this latest departmental defrag needs to be understood in the light of recent events, so consider how much movement there has been just behind the scenes in City government.

The belly-flop of the Olympics bid means that, instead of running a powerful shadow gummint in Da Mare's name, a lot of Hizzoner's top people got caught out in the cold, and a lot of Hizzoner's top allies got stuck with a fistful of worthless political and financial IOUs. Several departments have been reorganized and centralized for the second or third time in as many years (at least one department has disappeared altogether). Some bosses still carry the title of "acting" long after tradition dictates that those positions be permanently filled. And having shown a perfect willingness to fire city workers and cut hours en masse to balance his budget in the past, Da Mare has suddenly done a major about-face and is about to spend virtually all of the loot he got from frittering away the city's parking meters on a 75-year lease...to balance a one-year budget hole and throw Chicagoans a token bribe bit of property tax relief.

So combine the fact that there simply are no more fiscal gimmicks left to prop up Hizzoner's regime and pay off all his political debts, with the reality of a demoralized government that has way too many of its moving parts in unpredictable motion, and all signs point to the Great Machine heaving itself into frantic action to shake up the city's political Etch-A-Sketch (about which Fran Speilman does a fine job of cataloging here) --

...
The Daley shuffle continued with the appointment of CTA President Ron Huberman to replace Arne Duncan to head the city's schools.
...

The City Hall version of musical chairs also shifted Aviation Commissioner Richard Rodriguez to the CTA. Huberman is an education neophyte. Rodriguez has no background in mass transit. Both moves exposed how thin the mayor's bench of trusted advisers had become.

The mayor later also replaced his chief financial officer, chief procurement officer, budget director, inter-governmental affairs director and inspector general in 2009, along with the CTA Board chairman and commissioners of streets and sanitation, aviation, health, human resources, general services, fleet management and animal care and control.
...

-- once again in a way that will further consolidate and concentrate power into hands of Da Fifth Floor.

There are about to be simultaneously many fewer seats in the lifeboats -- and more demands for them -- than at any other time in Da Mare's long career, and for that scenario, Da Mare does not need someone "smooth" overseeing the execution of his political will down to the level of "every unit and formation".

For that, he needs an Enforcer.