Submitted by arlenegloria on Tue, 11/10/2009 - 11:06

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The Selling of the City

by Don Rose, regular columnist, Chicago Daily Observer

“Rome had in very truth become the city where everything was for sale,” said Edith Hamilton in her classic “The Roman Way.”

Chicago has, too, but in a different way now than in days of yore. In the old days—say four or five years ago and going back to its roots—one rented a piece of the city short term if one wanted to do serious business here.

You wanna open up a bookstore at O’Hare airport? OK—easy enough.

You just gotta accept a couple of partners at no cost to them—friends of the mayor’s family, who may never have been inside a bookstore—but now you are ensconced in a hot piece of real estate and you’ll do very well peddling your books, even sharing the profits with your new partners. (This technique was perfected decades ago by famed Chicagoan Alphonse Capone, who left the city but left a tradition behind him.)

You wanna put up “street furniture”—ad-bearing bus shelters and newspaper vending stations? OK—easy enough. Just hire the right “consultant,” preferably one with ties to the mayor, and for his very modest million-dollar fee he will deliver unto you the contract for street furniture. Even if you are French.

Go back far enough and you find that utility companies and transportation firms were required to give the alderman a gratuity if they wanted to lay pipe or cable or track through his ward. Look beneath the surface and you find some odd turns and detours in those pipes where a company chose to bypass a greedier alderman and route things through a cheaper ward.

And why not “tip” an alderman for services rendered? After all, you wouldn’t stiff a washroom attendant, would you?
Much of the old game has been curbed because they removed most of the truly lucrative aldermanic perks and we now call the tips “campaign contributions.” Today the stakes are huge, the prices much higher, but you can get a very long-term lease—a virtual sale—of much of the city. And it’s all on the legit.

It is called privatization.

It’s not the old Roman way, but the new Chicago way, whose maestro is our beloved Mayor hisself—Richard Michael Daley.

Said mayor has been spending the city into a financial hole deeper than our Deep Tunnel. Granted, an adverse economy has played a part in recent years, as in other cities and states; but we also have something here called a corruption tax—which doesn’t show up on your real estate bill.

It’s the cost of patronage, of defending the guilty, of no-show employees, of “hired trucks” and the countless ways we support the insider political system with public funds. Former Alderman Dick Simpson, who heads the UIC political science department, did a study estimating the cost of corruption to be $300 million—well

Photo by Chicagoist

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