THOSE HORRIBLE SOUTH WORKS AND RAHM EMANUEL’S CORE CONSTITUENCY

7/9/14

Earlier this week, in a story by veteran political reporter Lynn Sweet, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that developer Dan McCaffery has proposed placing the Obama Presidential Library on the site of the old U.S. Steel South Works along the shores of Lake Michigan on Chicago’s south side.

Whether the plan to place the Obama Library on the South Works site, or anywhere in our financially strained city, makes sense is grist for another mill.  More interesting to yours truly were the juxtaposed pictures of the old South Works site and the new Obama Library the Sun-Times ran with the story.  The old South Works are portrayed as belching out fumes, dumping detritus into the lake, and just being an environmentally obtuse corporate citizen in a number of ways.  The Obama Library, on the other hand, is, in the artist’s renderings featured by the Sun-Times, is a glowing architectural marvel, adding even further to our lake front’s breathtaking beauty.

The impression the Sun-Times, and other proponents of the South Works site for the Library, wish to convey is obvious:   the Obama Library is very, very good, a symbol of the new Chicago that will further blot out the bad old days of Chicago’s industrial history.  This is the narrative, by the way, that defines the worldview of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the dazzling young urbanites who form the core of his constituency:   Chicago is the new Emerald City, a town of “entertainment venues,” bicycle paths, high tech crapshoots, and Potemkin prosperity, not the bad old sooty industrial town on which we should close the history books.

The U.S. Steel South Works--in a busier (better?) time

You can see why such a narrative defines the typical Emanuel supporter’s view of the world; after all, s/he, having grown up in the suburbs and having no roots in the city, and certainly no recent roots in the city’s working class, care not a whit about what made Chicago Chicago but care very much about imposing their vision of a hip, chic, trendy new age city on all of us. 

But think about this for awhile.

Yes, the old South Works complex was dirty and the neighborhoods it spawned were gritty, tough, and bereft of fern bars, yogurt stores, cutesy-pie “coffee shops” (as currently defined, i.e., trendy Starbucks places, not diners by another name), jazz bars, trendy boutiques, and other necessities of newly urban life.   But the Works, and thousands of factories like it on a smaller scale, provided a decent living for thousands of families, good paying jobs for guys (very few women worked in such environments) trying to grab the first rung on the ladder to the American Dream despite their lack of education or family or political connections.   The Works generated tax revenues for the city and spawned innumerable businesses, mostly small, on its periphery.  The Works, while dirty and sooty and smelly, made some people rich and a lot of people well off enough to buy a small home and maybe send the kids to college.

On the other hand, the Obama Library will surely be environmentally pristine.  It will provide a few jobs for academics who want to further navel gaze about the momentous accomplishments of Barack Obama in addition to maybe a few hundred minimum wage jobs for docents, janitors, security people, greeters, etc.  It will not pay property or other taxes to the city and its wage base will be so small as to provide no meaningful income tax revenue to the state.  Its inevitable gift shop will provide a pittance of sales taxes.   Rather than generate appreciable revenue like, say, a factory, it will require massive subsidies ($100 million, at this early stage) from an already bankrupt state, and maybe city, to build and run.  It will make a very few people (like the politically connected Dan McCaffery and other friends of and contributors to Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama) rich and place an only slightly larger number just barely above water.

This is progress, according to the Sun-Times, the Emanuel Administration, and others with their own imported vision of what constitutes a great city.

Of course the South Works specifically, and steel and other heavy manufacturing, will never come back to Chicago along with their high paying jobs and other economic stimulation; natural economic evolution, plus trade policies seemingly designed to further widen the income and wealth gaps in this country, have ordained such activities on the new urban landscape to a permanent death.   Rahm Emanuel’s supporters cheer the death of industrial Chicago from the comfort of their climate controlled and oh, so immaculate offices and the trendy bars and restaurants they, like the obedient sheep they are, must frequent if they are to be part of the acceptable crowd.

But would it be such a bad thing if Chicago still had an industrial base?   Think about the good paying blue collar jobs huge, and not so huge, industrial complexes like the South Works provided to people with little education but a lot of desire to work to get on that first rung on the inter-generational climb to a comfortable middle class lifestyle.   What if those jobs were still around?   Would we be having the crime problems we are having in Chicago right now if there were jobs around that would afford people throughout our city the opportunity to buy and stay in homes, form families and communities and support those families and communities?  What if men and women, despite a lack of aptitude for high tech jobs, the legal and banking gigs, and other jobs Mr. Emanueland his “better” base deem acceptable, were able to go to work right out of high school, support families, and build some degree of wealth?   Would that be such a bad thing?

Oh, I forgot; giving people at the bottom real economic and financial opportunity would involve making a few yuppies “uncomfortable” with the condition of the environment and the possible spread of blue collar communities into the chic urban habitats Mr. Emanuel and his supporters deem acceptable for people of their lofty stature.   And so the response of the near north upscale crowd to the very notion of an industrial revival must be

“Let them get law degrees and MBAs!”

The Emanuel core need not worry, though; Chicago will never reindustrialize and the lower classes in this town will have to consign themselves to menial, low wage jobs at the “entertainment venues” that seem to form the core of every one of the Mayor’s economic revival proposals…if they can get jobs at all.  And the consequent urban blight will never reach those communities around the core of downtown, with their trendy bars and hipster hangouts and stupid restaurants at which the bill is in inverse proportion to the quantities served, that these bleating sheep inhabit.

 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. 

JESSE AND SANDI JACKSON: JUST HOW CLAIRVOYANT WAS H.L. MENCKEN?

8/15/13

Jesse Jackson, Jr., affectionately, or otherwise, known as “Triple J” in these parts, and his co-schemer and wife Sandi Jackson, were sentenced yesterday for their crimes involving misuse of campaign funds and failure to mention to the IRS their use of such funds for such vital campaign necessities as moose heads, furs, Eddie Van Halen guitars, Michael Jackson memorabilia, and a $43,000 watch.   Yours truly contends that anyone who spends $43 grand on a watch deserves to go to jail on general principle, but I digress.

As regular readers know, I have been deeply intrigued by this story for a long time.  (See, inter alia

JUST HOW DID SANDI JACKSONEND UP UNDER THAT BUS?, 2/7/13

LET’S FINALLY TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT JESSE ANDSANDI JACKSON, 2/16/13

A SORT OF DEFENSE OFSANDI JACKSON, 2/21/13

and posts in a former blog to which they will direct you.)   So the sentencing of these two felonious finaglers merits some comment from yours truly.

First, the sentences seemed a little light:   a year for Sandi Jackson and two and a half years for Triple J, both far under the maxima under federal guidelines.   If the Chicago Sun-Times Natasha Korecki and Lynn Sweet, neither of whom could be considered hostile to the Jacksons, are to be believed, at least Triple J agrees that he got off easy.  According to Ms. Sweet and Ms. Korecki in today’s (8/15/13, page 4) Sun-Times…

Jackson, Jr., 48, who had been blowing his nose and sobbing during his remarks to the judge, appeared to break into a half-grin as the news of the sentence settled in.

And it got better for the Jackson.  Rather than both going immediately to jail (and why has it taken this long?), they will go in sequence, with Jesse going first and Sandi going after him.  And they got to decide the order of their incarcerations.   Who else gets such treatment?

Still, yours truly is kind of surprised that Sandi Jackson got any jail time at all.   It’s not that I don’t think she deserved it.  But so much of the Chicago media and political establishments had bought into the “poor, poor put-upon Sandi Jackson” line of baloney, along with the “these kids need their parents” pile of horse dump that I feared, and suspected, that Judge Amy Berman Jackson (no relation) had drunken the kool-aid.  Fortunately, she didn’t.

Second, Triple J’s still vague emotional/mental malady was taken for the line of cattle detritus that it appeared to be.  Prosecutor Matt Graves, referring to Mr. Jackson’s purported illness, stated

“It’s quite clear there’s no ‘there’ there.”

Some might reply that, of course, Mr. Graves would say that; after all, he was the prosecutor in the case.  But Judge Jackson also gave the mental health angle no credence, pointing out that there was nothing sudden about Mr. and Mrs. Jackson’s, er, lapses of judgment, as would be the case if their thievery sprung from Mr. Jackson’s mental condition.   This was, the Judge pointed out, a continuing pattern of pilferage, and stated that there was

“…only once conclusion, and that is that you (Triple J) knew better.”

Yours truly is no mental health professional, but neither are the vast majority of people commenting on Triple J’s medical maladies.   Further, none of the mental health professionals the Jacksons were able to produce were all that convincing.   Maybe those of us who are, to put it mildly, suspicious of Mr. Jackson’s claims of the psychiatric equivalent of “the devil made me do it” are wrong.  Maybe Mr. Jackson really is sick.   If that really is the case, one suspects that whatever it is that Mr. Jackson has will clear up quickly…very quickly.  In fact, one suspects that his afflictions vanished as soon as his sentence was pronounced.   But they may make a temporary comeback if (when, probably) Mr. and Mrs. Jackson prepare their appeal.

Third, we have been hearing much about “wasted talent” and “a promising career” of “a young man who had the ability to go all the way” being “thrown away,” and other such bullroar from those die-hard liberals in the local and national media who “just wanna believe,” and can’t be convinced otherwise.  

Yours truly never bought into this hype.  Triple J was at best a passable Congressperson, at worst a lazy, entitled son of privilege who was clearly in over his head.   Until recently, he had a very good Congressional attendance record, but one wonders what he did other than attend.  In his 17 years in Congress, he never managed to win a committee chairmanship, despite the sycophancy most of his fellow Congressman showed him due to his last name and the perception that it carries a lot of weight with black voters.  He did manage to win a seat on the Appropriations Committee, but his record of achievement in that all-important Committee, like his overall record in Congress, was slight, at best.   He made a lot of noise about what came to be seen as his pet project, a third Chicago airport in distant Peotone, but there is still no airport growing from the cornfields in that bucolic burg.  He also proposed that each school child in America be given an i-Pad, courtesy of you, the taxpayer.   Hmm…perhaps we should be grateful that JJJ was unable to get anything done.   Even his much lauded oratory was only so much fulmination, much art and little substance, jargon and catch-lines amounting to nothing but pap and pabulum for the already converted.

When Mr. Jackson first came to Congress in 1995, all we heard about was what a terrific, wonderful, super hero of a young man he was, truly outstanding, upstanding, and all around beatific in every conceivable way.  It seemed to yours truly that such talk was just another orgiastic manifestation of the “just gotta believe” phenomenon among starry-eyed liberals with not even a passing familiarity with life on the ground in Mr. Jackson’s 2^nd Congressional District.

We had heard nearly the same kinds of hosannas about Mel Reynolds, Mr. Jackson’s predecessor as Congressman in the 2^nd District, when Mr. Reynolds defeated Gus Savage in 1992 to assume the seat.   Mr. Reynolds was described in nearly the same beatific tones as Mr. Jackson.   Mr. Reynolds was a Rhodes Scholar and he was….,well, given Mr. Reynolds’ thin resume and an inability to talk in anything but empty platitudes or understand the core of any issue, no one could come up with anything other than his Rhodes Scholarship.   In fact, Mr. Reynolds’ only qualification for Congress, let alone the sainthood his true believers seemed to be recommending him for, was that he was not his race-baiting, anti-Semitic predecessor Gus Savage.  

Mr. Reynolds went on to develop, or maybe just further indulge from a position of power, proclivities toward teenage girls, especially Catholic school girls (“I think I just won the lottery,” Mr. Reynolds response when he was told by what turned out to be an informant that the informant could set him up with a girl who attended a Catholic high school, is perhaps Mr. Reynolds’ most famous utterance, but I digress.) and lie to law enforcement about it.   Consequently, he was provided lodging in a federal facility  and was replaced by the equally underqualified Mr. Jackson.  The same people who just three years before were telling us how terrific Mr. Reynolds was began telling us that we had been visited by an even more celestial personage in Mr. Jackson.  I never believed it because there was never any basis for it other than the “just gotta believe” attitude that affects those whose minds are so open their brains fall out.   But Mr. Jackson’s obsequiants may have had a point; Mr. Jackson had at least one more qualification than Mr. Reynolds:  not only was Mr. Jackson not Gus Savage; he also was not Mel Reynolds.  As H.L. Mencken, one of the truly great figures in American history said,

“An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will make a better soup.”

Fourth, there is much talk already about a Triple J comeback.   Don’t discount the possibility.  Young Mr. Jackson is not yet fifty and he’ll be out in about a year and a half.   He managed to win re-election by a landslide in 2012 despite his absence from both Congress and the campaign trail in the wake of suspicions regarding his dalliances with former Governor Rod Blagojevich about Barack Obama’s old senate seat and, of course, the onset of his mysterious maladies.  

Further, as H.L. Mencken also said in a widely misquoted observation…

“No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

So we have not yet heard the last from Jesse Jackson, Jr. and his accomplice, Sandi Jackson.   As Mr. Mencken also said, perhaps gazing at the 2^nd District from far off Baltimore

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

And, perhaps having a vision of the not yet born Jesse and Sandi Jackson, Mr. Mencken also observed

“Government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.”

Mr. and Mrs. Jackson are living, breathing, walking, talking manifestations of the wisdom of Mr. Mencken.

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.