Chicago - A message from the station manager

The [Monday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

“Former President Bill Clinton will attend Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s second inauguration ceremony Monday,” the Tribune reports.
Oh for fuck’s sake.


“The inauguration will take place at the Chicago Theatre, where the city’s 50 aldermen also will take their oath of office.”
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The anti-inauguration will be held at Beachwood HQ. Join me for Old Style talls and arsenic.
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Chicago’s oath, by the way, goes like this:
“Do you swear to avoid the truth – the whole truth – and tell nothing like the truth, so help you God?”
I do.
“Now, repeat after me.”
After me.
“Snitches get stitches.”
Snitches get stitches.
“Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.”
Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.
“Are you wearing a wire?”
Are you wearing a wire?
“No, I’m asking you.”
No.
“Good. Follow me.”
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Remember that time Bill Clinton came to town and this happened?
Now Clinton claims he never had relations with the Infrastructure Trust.
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“Chicago, now awkwardly playing the drama queen, teeters on a fulcrum – the legendary might of its big shoulders on one side, the dead weight of its sordid public finances on the other. Four years from now, in May 2019, will we say the rescue of Chicago started in 2015? Or is last week’s flurry of junk credit ratings a measure of this city’s future?”
If I’m not mistaken, last week’s flurry of junk credit ratings was singular, not plural. Moody’s was the only ratings agency that downgraded the city’s debt to junk.
But then, if anyone loves to play the drama queen, it’s the Tribune editorial page.
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“Now travel a different four years, back to this week in May 2011. Chicago inaugurated a new mayor who warned his city’s people of difficult days ahead. ‘One of the first things we must do is get our fiscal house in order,’ Rahm Emanuel said on his initial day in office as he made a small but symbolic $75 million in budget cuts. ‘That’s non-negotiable.'”
Yes, let us travel back, and wonder, does the editorial page read the rest of the paper?
“On his first full day in office, Mayor Rahm Emanuel proclaimed he’s already figured out how to cut $75 million from his predecessor’s final budget, just as he said he would,” the Tribune reported four years ago.

“These figures are not based . . . on assumptions of what might or might not happen,” Emanuel said. “They are based on the realities that will happen.”
But a look at what Emanuel unveiled Tuesday shows much of his planned spending cuts are estimates based on marching orders the new mayor gave to his staff. Other proposals lack specifics. So it remains to be seen whether they’ll pan out by year’s end.

My recollection is that they didn’t, because they weren’t real to begin with.
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Back to the Trib:
“Turned out many Chicagoans wanted to negotiate, preferably forever.”
Turned out, many Chicagoans wanted to negotiate – like, you know, participate in the process, instead of being ruled by fiat. Shame!
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“They concluded from looking at the flower planters and construction cranes that all was well, or well enough.”
Once again, the Tribune is projecting. No one concluded more strongly that all was right with the world under 22 years of Richard M. Daley based on flower planters and construction cranes than the Tribune editorial board. Maybe we oughta start a Kickstarter to fund therapy for the edit board.
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“So they fervently opposed the necessary restructuring of their debt-bedraggled city’s services and schools – a work in progress that has likely just begun.”
Oh, I see where this is going: Rahm declared on Day One that getting the city’s fiscal house in order was Priority One and four years later it remains so, which must be everyone’s fault except Rahm’s.
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“As a result of that public pushback, Emanuel didn’t have the simple stroll to re-election this year that he and his supporters had anticipated.”
Again, the stupid public gets in the way. If only the edit board and Rahm could rule without them!
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“We write often about the diabolical, hydra-headed challenges that now threaten Chicago – not only enormous bond and pension debts but also a culture of violent crime, a shortage of blue-collar jobs, a loss of population, a dissolution of family households that were this city’s bedrock, and a school system that produces too many young people unprepared to work in a 21st-century economy.
“Emanuel sits astride City Hall as these challenges intertwine to create the fourth great crisis of Chicago’s nearly two centuries: The Great Fire of 1871 that incinerated much of this city. The Great Migration that delivered Southern blacks to a city that welcomed their labor but paradoxically, often viciously, resisted their advance. The late-20th-century elimination of mill and manufacturing jobs here by the hundreds of thousands.”
How could such a challenge threaten Chicago after 26 years of Tribune-endorsed mayoral rule?!!!
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“Each time, Chicago survived and thrived.”
I don’t know what that means. The city still exists?
Not everyone survived, much less thrived, either. Plenty died – of hunger, mental illness, poverty-induced disease, violence. Plenty were sacrificed so Official Chicago could carry on.
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“In October 2013, when we launched our project to write a new Plan of Chicago, we said Chicago has huge needs that more money might resolve – more money for cops, for schools, for economic development, for infrastructure, for social services, for neighborhood needs, for job training, for physical, artistic and cultural improvements . . . But Chicago doesn’t have that money. Its city government has legacy costs that revenues have not grown quickly enough to match.”
So it’s a revenue problem. Agreed.
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Rauner’s Secret Government
Would you believe a “working group” called “Vegas?”
The Cub Factor
Team officially has something to blow.
Secret Hospital Rooms Of The 1%
Paging Northwestern! On a hunch.
The White Sox Report
These are not your fortnight’s Sox.
The Damen Silos
Detritus of the grain elevator lords.
The Weekend In Chicago Rock
Featuring: mr. Gnome; George Clinton, Towkio feat. Chance the Rapper; Ben Folds with yMusic, The Rentals, Azealia Banks, Gerard Way, All Time Low, Tonight Alive, and Tremonti.
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BeachBook
* The Pathology Of Rich White Families.
* Why Billionaires Don’t Pay Property Taxes In New York.
* Pension Funds Lose Money On Salesmen, State Retirees Pay.
* For The Highest Paid CEOs, The Party Goes On.
* Job Cuts Planned For South Side Oreo Factory.
* Oprah Winfrey: One Of The World’s Best Neoliberal Capitalist Thinkers.
* Math For Journalists Made Easy.
* NYPD Questioning Of Protesters Was Improper.
* Trial To Begin In Suit Against Salt Suppliers.
* It’s Not Diplomacy, It’s An Arms Fair.
* The Phony ‘Bad Intel’ Defense On Iraq.
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TweetWood


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The Beachwood Tip Line: Teach the world to sing.

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Posted on May 18, 2015