By Steve Rhodes

The Chicago City Council’s passage of the “big-box” ordinance requiring stores such as Wal-Mart to maintain wages and benefits above and beyond those mandated to other businesses rightfully dominates the news today, and we’ll get to that soon enough.
My more immediate concern this morning is this: Can we sue special prosecutors Edward Egan and Robert Boyle for malpractice for their gross mishandling of the recenty released, $7 million, four-years-in-the making report on police torture allegations surrounding former commander Jon Burge?
The report’s many flaws have already been noted, but with the release of the transcript of the special prosecutors’ interview of Mayor Richard M. Daley, who was the Cook County State’s Attorney when the torture allegations first bubbled up to the surface, confirms that this report was either an exercise in incompetence or a whitewash rigged from the get-go.

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Posted on July 27, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

The City Council’s vote today on the proposed Big Box ordinance that would establish a separate, higher minimum wage for large retailers such as Wal-Mart is going down to the wire – the margin could be as slim as last night’s one-run victory by the Twins over the White Sox.
While pro-ordinance forces still hold an advantage, according to today’s media reports, Mayor Daley is twisting arms, and given the nature of our aldermen, it wouldn’t be surprising for a few to say Uncle, especially in return for, say, some extra street paving in their wards.
The question from the mayor’s point-of-view is whether he’s too late. If the ordinance passes, the Sun-Times‘s Fran Spielman writes, the mayor and the business community will only have themselves to blame.
“The business community didn’t wake up fast enough,” Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce President Jerry Roper told Spielman. “Over the years, the City Council has been somewhat pro-business. We’ve always known the mayor was there to be a bridge. We let the mayor down. We didn’t recognize early enough – two years ago – that this was an issue we should have engaged on.”
Roper diplomatically refused to lay any blame at the feet of the mayor. Spielman, however, reports that the mayor was “asleep at the switch.”

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Posted on July 26, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

The Sun-Times oddly shows little interest in the shameful aldermanic pay raise that now looks like a done deal, pushing it to page 11, but the Tribune (admirably) goes to town on its front page this morning with wit and verve:
“Foie Gras Forbidden. Trans Fat Endangered. Car Cell Phones Restricted. One Thing Alderman Won’t Ban: Their Raises.”

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Posted on July 25, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

1. The Tribune blows it in its big front-page profile of mayoral press secretary Jackie Heard, in The [Sunday] Papers.
2. “Call To Limit Cases Amuses Public Defenders.”
3. “Bush ‘Signing Statements’ Deemed Unconstitutional.”
The rest of his administration to follow.
4. “Some big American cities are flourishing as at no time in recent memory. Places like New York and San Francisco appear to be richer and more dazzling than ever: crime remains low, new arrivals pour in, neighborhoods have risen from the dead,” The New York Times reports in “Cities Shed Middle Class, And Are Richer And Poorer For It.”
“[T]he rich pour into what some economists now call ‘superstar cities,’ places like New York, San Francisco, San Diego, Boston and Washington.”
Boy the mayor’s been busy.

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Posted on July 24, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

The Tribune on Sunday managed to publish a 3,000-word front page profile of Jacquelyn Heard, longtime press secretary to Mayor Richard M. Daley, without answering (or apparently even asking) the key questions such a story would raise.
The paper chose to focus on Heard’s rise from the Henry Horner Homes on the West Side to mayoral confidante – with a stop as a Chicago Tribune reporter – instead of examining her role in shaping Daley’s media strategy and the ways she manipulates the press to control what the public knows.
Heard’s personal story isn’t uninteresting, but it’s also not unfamiliar.
What makes Heard a compelling profile subject at the moment is that the mayor is drowning in a sea of bad news, from the conviction of his former patronage chief and three other aides for their role in fradulent city hiring schemes designed to further the mayor’s political machine, to festering questions surrounding his inaction toward police torture allegations while he was Cook County state’s attorney.
Then again, this mayor is always in the midst of one scandal or another. Heard is the one who helps him navigate the resulting coverage, and just how she does that is the central question any profile of her should seek to answer.
On that count, the Tribune fails miserably.

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Posted on July 24, 2006

By Natasha Julius

The Weekend Desk reports this Friday from New Zealand, where the mountains are gorgeous, the water is clear and the police misconduct is a whole lot easier to stomach.
Market Update
Despite growing consumer confidence and a strong market, it appears that Bonds yields will be much lower than anticipated. Experts stress, however, that a rollover could still generate interest.

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Posted on July 21, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

Far from putting us on the glidepath to closure, the long-awaited Burge report released this week has left in its wake an empty, even queasy feeling. Is that all there is?
Apparently not. In “Daley In Legal Cross Hairs,” the Tribune reports this morning that “attorneys for four men who say their confessions were coerced served federal subpoeanas on the special prosecutors Thursday, seeking records of Mayor Richard Daley’s testimony.”
The paper notes that “Daley was Cook County state’s attorney during much of the period in which police torture took place, special prosecutor Edward Egan found. Egan’s team interviewed Daley and the report devoted three of its 290 pages to what Daley did and did not know about the allegations.”
In an example illustrative of the reaction to Egan’s report, Channel 2’s Mike Parker described the special prosecutors’ treatment of Daley as “gentle.”

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Posted on July 21, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

Anyone who didn’t already know that former Chicago police commander Jon Burge & Co. brutally tortured suspects – think electrical shocks to the genitals – hasn’t been paying attention. In that sense, the long-awaited release of the $7 million, four-years-in-the-making Burge report on Wednesday was a let-down.
I’ve only just begun to plow through the 292-page report, but judging by today’s media accounts, the examination into police brutality by court-appointed special state’s attorney’s Edward Egan and Robert Boyle is heavy on a narrow reading of the facts of more than a hundred cases in question, but light on any explanation of how this could go on unimpeded for so many years with so few found responsible.
The report lays most of the blame, outside of Burge, of course, on former police superintendent Richard Brzeczek. And Brzeczek indeed ought to shoulder his share, although he wasn’t the only chief to lead the department in the years in which torture was not-so-secretly being carried out at Areas 2 and 3. And as Brzeczek pointed out on Chicago Tonight last night, the Egan and Boyle have very little to say about the layers of supervisors between he and Burge.
The truth is that the city’s criminal justice institutions – remember, this is a town where justice has historically been for sale – and leadership structure are broadly to blame. The culture of the Chicago police department didn’t much care if officers kicked the shit out of poor black men – or chained them to radiators during questioning – in the course of going about their business. And neither, it is clear, did the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, nor a healthy share of the (white) public.

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Posted on July 20, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

What is there left to say about Todd Stroger, aside from wishing he would just go away?
Actually, plenty.
And plenty to say about the puppet-masters pulling his strings. Our report, The Machine Must Die Part I, can be found on our Politics page.
Test Tinkering
Schools “CEO” Arne Duncan and his chief education officer, Barbara Eason-Watkins, went on Chicago Tonight last night to combat the notion that lowering the passing score on 8th-grade math tests from the 67th percentile to the 38th percentile had anything to do with fantastic new results called “historic” by the mayor.
Duncan found it odd that some reporters focused on that aspect of the latest exams, as well as other niggling differences such as giving students more time to complete the tests.
Duncan, trying very hard to smile as he recited his talking points, even went so far as to accuse skeptics of racism for not believing that urban schoolkids could do so well on an exam.
Here’s a question, then, for Mr. Duncan. Why don’t you just give everyone “A”s and declare school reform over?

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Posted on July 19, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

Sorry, The [Monday] Papers got lost in the shuffle and did not appear. But as always, you can still catch up with The [Sunday] Papers and The Weekend Desk Report. Even better, our Millennium Park package is already generating a hefty response. Please see Postcard Pablum: The Failure of Millennium Park; The Human Bean and the City; and Bean: A Love Story.
1. Hey, we made Wikipedia!

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Posted on July 18, 2006