Friday, February 06, 2009
~~~Watching for what IL and Chicago get in stimmy $$$
FROM
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0206edit2feb06,0,4849605.story
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... and skirting ‘scrootens’
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“We are looking at it, yes, we are,” Daley said. “We brought the Law Department, the Purchasing Department. We have brought all the agencies together. . . . It’s very complicated.”
Wow. Controversial and complicated. But that doesn’t explain why these public plans to spend public money have to remain hidden from, um, the public. So the Tribune’s Dan Mihalopoulos had the temerity to inquire, “Why not be more transparent?”
This foreign concept, transparency, evidently amused the mayor. “Read some of your newspapers,” he said. “Heh, heh.”
Here we sit, surrounded by piles of newspapers, reading and reading to learn whatever it is the mayor divines. Our guess is that he doesn’t want anybody to “scrooten”—that’s a Daley term of art—his list of projects.
Isn’t pinstripe patronage just another term for pay-to-play?
Monday, February 09, 2009
There it is .. BHO acknowledged it years ago. Welcome to your new world, America.
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In Chicago politics, pinstripe patronage refers to a political payback system where instead of rewarding voter loyalty with city jobs, significant campaign contributors receive government contracts.
It’s a by-product of the age of big media. Obama learned about pinstripe patronage as an attorney at Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland, as a July 21, 2008 article by Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker, entitled “Making It: How Chicago shaped Obama,” documents.
E. J. Dionne, Jr., of the Washington Post, wrote about this transition in a 1999 column after Daley was reëlected. Dionne wrote about a young Barack Obama, who artfully explained how the new pinstripe patronage worked:
a politician rewards the law firms, developers, and brokerage houses with contracts, and in return they pay for the new ad campaigns necessary for reëlection. “They do well, and you get a $5 million to $10 million war chest,” Obama told Dionne.
It was a classic Obamaism: superficially critical of some unseemly aspect of the political process without necessarily forswearing the practice itself.
Obama was learning that one of the greatest skills a politician can possess is candor about the dirty work it takes to get and stay elected.
At the time, Obama was growing closer to Tony Rezko, who eventually turned pinstripe patronage into an extremely lucrative way of life.
Despite the element of corruption indigenous to the pinstripe patronage that became part of executing Daley’s Plan for Transformation, back in 1999 Obama glossed over the approach, seemingly endorsing it.
Shortly after becoming a state senator in 1997, Obama told the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin that his experience working with the development industry had reinforced his belief in subsidizing private developers of affordable housing.
“That’s an example of a smart policy,” the paper quoted Obama as saying. “The developers were thinking in market terms and operating under the rules of the marketplace; but at the same time, we had government supporting and subsidizing those efforts.”