Yesterday’s (i.e., Sunday, 3/27’s, page A4) Chicago Tribune reported that Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel has asked the MacArthur, Joyce, McCormick, and Spencer foundations to come up with a total of $200,000 to finance the transition (?) from the Daley administration to an Emanuel administration. These foundations have willingly complied, opening their checkbooks for a reason, one imagines, their founders could not have envisioned. Mr. Emanuel’s minions, when asked, defended this “request” by pointing out that Mr. Emanuel has already reached out (doubtless the words they used, though I didn’t see a quote containing them) to the business community (ditto) for money for his campaign and for the war chest he has assembled to influence City Council elections. Even Mr. Emanuel, who made his bones asking people for money so that his friends could avoid getting real jobs, is not so shameless as to ask people for gobs of spondulicks three times in a 12 month span. Further, the Emanuel team points out, the city has no money to pay for the transition. One supposes that the reason the city has no money has a lot to do with the quid-pro-quos proffered by the Daley administration for similar “requests” for political money, but I digress.
Those who are uncomfortable with change should thus be reassured that, despite the drivel that Mr. Emanuel delivered, during a campaign funded and sponsored by agents of the status quo, about wanting to deliver change, the era of the shakedown, Chicago style (i.e., usually with nary a peep from, indeed the full acquiescence of, the shakedownees) is alive and well in Chicago. Not only is the Chicago style shakedown still the defining trait of the politics of our town, but the scope of the shakedown has been broadened to, doubtless in Mr. Emanuel’s estimation, a better class of shakedownee. Look for it to be deepened as well.
Oh, the joys of doing business in Chicago!
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