Meanwhile, In Local Perfidy

Alderman Moneybags Burke continues to show why, increasingly, people feel defenestration is perhaps too kind a fate for politicians.

From the inimitable Steve Rhodes at "The Beachwood Reporter":

The [Monday] Papers
By Steve Rhodes

Don't you think it's time to make our elected officials full-time employees prohibited from outside employment?

Or maybe we should just ban the Burke family from elected office.

Not only is Ald. Fast Eddie Burke a lawyer on the side who represents clients before the county tax appeals board, but his brother Dan is a state legislator who is a - wait for it - lobbyist - on the side. (Ed Burke also slates judges for the Democratic party while his wife was scammed into a seat on the state supreme court, but let's set that aside for today.)

"[Dan] Burke, 58, is one of several elected officials in the Chicago area who also work as lobbyists," the Sun-Times and the Better Government Association report.

And that's not all.

Burke also collects a $68,828 annual pension from the City of Chicago where he was once deputy city clerk.

...

Without question there are a lot of problems with gummint: Gummint is broken; it's broke; it's drowning in dirty money; it's beholden to goofs and grifters.

All true, but there is another, even more closely-guarded secret about gummint -- Most people who work in it actually work pretty hard and try to do a pretty good job. They labor at catching bad guys, educating our kids, pulling our asses out of burning buildings, digging up ancient, collapsed, stinking pipes at 2:00 A.M. in the dead of winter so I can have a hot shower in the morning and the endless other difficult, important, unsexy nuts and bolts of keeping civilization from flying apart. And they do this work in exchange for the predictability of a steady paycheck and and a small pension.

When the cotton is high, they get called chumps by their friends who went into banking or real estate and pull down six-figure bonuses: when times are tough, these same people are suddenly castigated for daring to insist that society stick to the fucking bargain -- years of mostly honest labor in exchange for a small measure of security and a little set aside for old age.

You know, things that in this country we used to consider everyday, commonplace Middle Class Values; remuneration that, now that the Casino Economy has imploded and screwed everyone who fell for the supply-side okey doke, are suddenly considered -- without a hint of irony -- unforgivably lavish and greedy.

And that is what drives me up a wall with douchbags like Burke; the fact that he clearly doesn't care. He has worked his whole life to worm his way into a position where he and his cronies can sprinkle magic statutory dust on their slimy racketeering and -- poof! -- all their graft and gravy becomes as legal as sea-water.

If he had been hired or appointed, the City has elaborate ethics regulations that would, in theory, have gotten his grifting ass fired years ago. (In practice, somehow the Ethics Hammer seems never to fall on friends of Da Mare

no matter how blatant or public the offense.)

But Moneybags is elected, not appointed or hired, which means he and his pals get to rewrite the rules however they please. Which -- unless you are a congenital idiot or cosmically hoggish -- makes it infinitely easier to openly fleece the citizens of Chicago while technically staying on right side of the law.

While making it infinitely harder for those of us who are still in there pitching Liberalism and trying to convince a cynical public that government exists for any reason other than to allow douchbags like Moneybags Burke to loot the public treasury with impunity.