“A WHOLE LOT OF SHAKIN’ (DOWN) GOIN’ ON”

6/23/11

That the G-8 and NATO will be meeting in Chicago in May, 2012 is being widely hailed by the local and national media as an example of the kind of national and international clout our new mayor is bringing to the former Hog Butcher for the World. A sensible person, however, would ask the logical question: Who in the world is going to pay for the security and logistical nightmares these opportunities for pompous pontification present? The city is broke and our police force is already stretched far too thin. And now we have to come up with the spondulicks and the gendarme to host a tempting target for truculent terrorists and assorted yahoos who think they have a point worth making, the latter both outside and inside the venues for the various meetings.

We are told, of course, that the payoff is the “international recognition” such an event will bring. This is the same old canard pulled out of the drawer by pompous politicasters when they want to raid the public purse for purposes of perpetual self-promotion. The payoff is nebulous and ephemeral while the costs are large, quantifiable, and seemingly never ending. When we are in the precarious financial posture in which we are currently positioned, more than “international recognition as a world class city” is needed to justify the kind of spending involved in these events. Further, did you ever notice how the local pols are always claiming, and rightly so, that Chicago is a “world class city” when trying to curry the favor of its voters, whose most salient characteristic may be a well justified though perhaps a bit exaggerated pride in their hometown? If we are already the “world class city” obsequious pols tell us we are, why do we have to spend so much money to become a “world class city”?

The scariest aspect of this latest dividend of Rahm Emanuel’s mayoralty is that Mr. Emanuel recognizes that we can’t afford this latest manifestation of the bread and circuses to which the pols treat us with our own money. He stated, in the speech in which he gave us the great news that we have won the opportunity to spend our money to provide a pack of poltroons (again, both inside and inside the conferences) a forum to bloviate on the public dime,

“And one of the things I’m gonna be working on is raising the private resources necessary to supplement what we have to do.”

Leave aside the fact that we wouldn’t “have to do” anything if Emanuel and his pals in Washington didn’t bring this latest flying circus to our otherwise normally sensible and, when necessary, happily provincial, town. What is really scary is that Mr. Emanuel is proposing to do what he does best: shake down private businesses in order to advance his own political career and those of the people who have hired him to advance their flights of self-aggrandizement. I have commented on this tendency at least twice before, on 3/28/11 in HEY, THE BOYS NEED A LITTLE LUNCH MONEY… and on 5/17/11 in “STEP RIGHT UP, FOLKS, STEP RIGHT UP…” In the eyes of Mr. Emanuel and those, like him, who have never held a private sector job that involved any more than selling the influence they garnered in the public sector, private businesses are little more than funding sources for the types of spectacles, for the permanent campaigns, that keep politicians in office. In many, if not most, cases, those being “asked” to “contribute” to whatever the latest project a pol has cooked up to make himself look like a leader, if not an Olympian, are not put-upon innocents; they are (again, in many, if not most, cases; some, if not most, of those “asked” to “contribute” are indeed shakedown victims wondering when it will all end while contemplating moves to polities populated by more prosaic pols) willing accomplices, always ready to come up with spondulicks in order to garner favor with the pols “asking” for “private resources.” Don’t think for a minute that the motivation behind such private generosity is civic pride. Those who “contribute private resources” to the PR efforts of public sector poltroons seeking the next rung on the ladder do so in order to be remembered when your money is being parceled out for some public project.

So, as one famous and, by modern standards, not all that crooked, pol used to say, make no mistake. Such exercises as the NATO summit and the G-8 meeting have as their purpose promoting the political aspirations of the poltroons who propose them. You pay for such flights of self-aggrandizement. And you pay even more when “private resources” are solicited to fund such escapades. And the era of the shakedown is perhaps more alive and more well than it has ever been in Chicago.