WE ARE SHOCKED…SHOCKED!...TO LEARN OF POLITICAL INFLUENCE AT METRA

7/15/13

It looks like we all know what happened with the quarter million dollar goodbye kiss for former Metra CEO Alex Clifford.   (See my 7/10/13 piece, METRA: THE WAY TO REALLY FLY…AWAY WITH OTHERPEOPLE’S MONEY), to wit…

 House Speaker, 13^th Ward Democratic Committeeman, and State Democratic Chairman Mike Madigan asked Mr. Clifford to give a raise to a cog in Mr. Madigan’s political machinery who happened to be drawing a check from Metra and to put another similarly positioned cog on the Metra payroll.  Mr. Clifford refused, citing not only the pay freeze in place at Metra at the time but also his aversion to hiring and promoting people based on politics.   Mr. Clifford was then summarily fired by Metra Board Chairman Brad O’Halloran, a Madigan associate who was doubtless put on the board, and made Chairman with at least the help of Mr. Madigan.  (Note, by the way, that Mr. O’Halloran is from Orland Park, a beautiful southwest suburb into which many of my former neighbors, along with many former Madigan constituents, have moved.  Over at least the last twenty years, one of Mr. Madigan’s projects has been extending his power base from the southwest side of the city into the southwest suburbs.  Mr. O’Halloran fits this script beautifully.  But I digress.)   Mr. O’Halloran fired Mr. Clifford not only because Mr. O’Halloran owes his position to Mike Madigan, and thus responds to Mr. Madigan’s orders with alacrity, but also because Mr. O'Halloran feared for Metra’s funding which, ultimately, is in the hands of Mike Madigan.   Since no one could know that offending Illinois’s uber power broker was the reason for Mr. Clifford’s demise (as if anyone would be shocked or surprised at this development, but I digress again), Mr. O’Halloran arranged for a quarter million dollar severance package for Mr. Clifford, complete with confidentiality agreements, and then made up some bovine excrement about 10 ride passes and the Englewood flyover (See, again, my 7/10 post along with my 4/21 post THE METRA BOARD:   PARADISE FOR POLTROONS, POPINJAYS, AND PATRONAGE PARASITES), a story for which no one fell.

Despite my rather blasé dismissal of the idea that anyone could be surprised by Mr. Clifford’s being fired for not acceding to Mr. Madigan’s (and God knows how many other politicians’) demands, apparently one guy was shocked and surprised…Mr. Clifford.   Apparently, he really believed what the Metra Board must have told him when he was brought in from California to run our troubled commuter rail system, i.e., that he would be able to run it in a professional, non-political manner. 

So while Mr. Clifford’s standing up to the Big Man and his legions of lackeys is admirable, it was clear that his firing was justified…for gross naiveté.   How in the world could someone, anyone, think he could come to Chicago and run any agency or, indeed, any kind of entity, public or private, without playing ball with the politicians who run this cesspool of corruption?  Anyone that ingenuous should never have been hired in the first place on general principle.  

Mr. Clifford’s big severance package, however, was in no way justified.   Why cover up something that, when revealed, was, or ought to have been, met with a collective yawn from a populace inured to the machinations of the puppetmasters and their stooges who run this place?

Perhaps less importantly, this latest bout of chicanery has only reinforced the conclusion of my 4/21 post:

…the Metra board is a repository for hacks, hangers-on, suck-ups, toadies, lackeys, and other virtually unemployables. 

See my two books, The Chairman, A Novel of Big City Politics and The Chairman’s Challenge, A Continuing Novel of Big City Politics, for further illumination on how things work in Chicago and Illinois politics.