The Fall of the City of Chicago

Whiskey's Place ^ | Whiskey

[ClaytonP]

Recent polls show Karen Lewis, the Jabba the Hut-like leader of Chicago’s Teachers shown above the odds-on favorite to unseat Rahm Emmanuel and become the next Mayor of Chicago. And this is the reality: the old JFK bargain, where White Liberal Democratic elites govern and give out special favors to Blacks (and Hispanics) in exchange for votes is ending. Chicago’s “FIRE” interests (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) had a good long run. But demographics is everything. Why indeed should Black populations with the majority or near majority of votes and most active voters (and least vulnerable to double/triple voting prosecutions) settle for a place at the table when they can run the place? Money is not everything, and we are seeing the end of the Oligarch bargain: welfare and various privileges in exchange for votes. Instead, the South African model, of the ANC dominance and control over everything, is rapidly coming to the fore. The fate of nearly all cities in America of any real size is Black political control. And that has some interesting results.


The recent retrospective of Garry Winogrand had had a revealing photo. The picture, above, of JFK at the 1960 Los Angeles Democratic Convention surrounded by a group of admiring Black voters and political leaders was the model for Democratic Politics up to Obama. White liberal Democrats would hand out various goodies, including special privileges under the law, welfare, and so on, and would vigorously enforce them socially as well as legally. In return, Black votes in urban centers, with the motto being “vote early and often” would put Democrats over the top.

What Obama has done is shatter the easy assumptions that the White political elite and its money and connections would be needed.

No longer do Blacks have to take a back seat in anything. If they can hold the Presidency (and Cory Booker, Oprah Winfrey, even Michelle Obama and Valerie Jarrett are better odds than Elizabeth Warren and Hillary! to succeed Obama) why not Chicago’s Mayoralty? Why not in all essentials, NYC?

Indeed, running a place like Chicago, or New York City, means not having to put up with a Rahm, or a Bloomberg, liberals but desiring to placate their FIRE friends, with limits on wilding, flash mobs, “youths,” and “teens” beating tourists, robbing stores, and ruining high-priced condo values, financial districts, expensive shopping avenues, and more. After all, look at Detroit. From a purely political perspective, it is a massive success. No matter what, it will be bailed out over and over again, by the State of Michigan and the US Federal taxpayer. Anything else would be “racist” and that’s worse than Hitler!

So Chicago like New York City, is doomed. Destined to become another Detroit, another Gary, another Baltimore.

The local politics of Chicago driving Emmanuel’s fall is the power of the Chicago Teacher’s union, nearly all Black, and Rahm’s desire to reign in the wilding and “flash mobs” of all those “teens.” Darn those “teens!” Meanwhile, Emmanuel wants the teachers to be held accountable for the failure of their students to reach federal, state and city wide standards in reading and math, which given the nature of Chicago public school students (nearly all NAM) would be impossible. Besides which, the Chicago public school system like most major urban and NAM dominated school systems exists to employ NAMs who are otherwise shut out of “professional” life. At semi-professional salaries with good to great benefits. Educating admittedly uneducable students is not on the agenda. Emmanuel is a fool enough to think that it could or should be. Emmanuel’s fall is at least as much due to his own true-believer status as anything else, though surely the success of Obama in seizing the Presidency from Hillary! made things worse for Rahm. Bill Gates can afford his idiocy, he’s just wasting pocket change from his fortune on a futile attempt to make Blacks and Hispanics score the same as White kids, let alone Asian ones.

But let us suppose that Karen Lewis succeeds in her Jabba the Hut campaign to “ho ho ho” seize control of Mos Eisly … er Chicago, and run the place according to the fine examples of say, Kwame Fitzpatrick in Detroit. What then?

Well, within five years fans will be clamoring for John Carpenter to make “Escape from Chicago.” Chicago as a serious business center will be dead. As dead in its own way as New York City is rapidly becoming. The recent jihad over a Black guy choked to death while resisting arrest for selling black market cigs, is indicative of Bill de Blasio’s desire to reign in the NYPD and allow Black and Hispanic criminals to do whatever they want, when they want, with no real effort at law enforcement. Because that is popular with his voters, and he does not need or want the money from Wall Street and real estate interests. Why would de Blasio care? He’ll get re-elected as long as he keeps the NYPD from interfering with Black and Hispanic criminals.

And this has some implications that are interesting.

Urban centers exist because time and space matter. Chicago has historically been the place in America where agricultural commodities have been traded. New York City, the place where stocks have been traded. As electronic exchanges predominated, instead of dispersal around the country, “flash trading” or High Frequency Trading meant that microsecond arbitrage, by specialist trading firms seeing orders to buy and racing ahead to other exchanges to buy up the stocks before the order completes, only further concentrated trading and hubs around regional trading centers. New Jersey for NYC, and outside Chicago for the agricultural commodities.

All the death of Chicago will do then for the commodities trading is move the firms outside Chicago proper to “straighter” fiber roads right near the electronic exchanges in the suburbs of Chicago. But the other interests may finally take advantage of the internet and disperse into cyberspace.

If one can use Skype, and email, and the phone, and a computer, do you really need to have an office in what amounts to a Nigerian War Zone and the rerun of the Biafran Revolt? Certainly not for insurance. Real Estate will of course take a loss, and the future of real estate may well look like new homes put out ever further from city centers, rather than city-funded prestige projects where much of the financial risk is shouldered by taxpayers: gone big skyscrapers, luxury condo towers with a few “affordable housing” units, big stadiums; in will be risky build it on the gamble privately financed homes out in the exurbs, cheaply priced for cash and finance strapped buyers. For finance not involved in stocks, or commodities, well there already out all over the place. In Newport Beach, California (Bond fund PIMCO), in Connecticut, in Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley, in many places.

Desirable places to live, without too many NAMs or the possibility of NAMs, will predominate as the spread out business nexus but not urban centers of American life (or what passes for it in the future): Sun Valley Idaho, Jackson Hole Wyoming, Newport Beach and Torrey Pines, California, Marin County, Sanibel Island, Florida, and Martha’s Vineyard. Those will be the places where business is done, for the most part.

And this is something new, and old, in Western life. For up until the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West, cities played a vital role in European life. Up until then they were the place where bread was baked, where goods and services were traded, where most people lived. And then the Empire fell, unable to protect itself from the barbarian invaders because there simply were not enough Roman legionnaires. And until the 1100s, cities remained fragile, tiny, often wiped out, places that people avoided since there was no real money (coins stopped circulating), no real security (cities were the big target for barbarian, Muslim, and Viking raiders), and no reason to visit them much less live in them. The loss of the cities and flight into poverty in the countryside was enough of a cultural memory that Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings used that theme constantly for the cities under siege or destroyed by Sauron.

And the effect of America’s cities being turned into Detroit by Black political control, will be also powerful. It could either forge even greater PC/Diversity religious thought, with circle squared by vastly distributed and physically isolated Whites avoiding physical contact with NAMs and NAM dominated cities, or an effort to either remake new cities or reclaim old ones by asserting direct political control by new White elites self-consciously asserting a racial and ethnic identity. Whites deeply love PC and Diversity: witness the billions raked in by Oprah alone, not to mention the fortunes made by the Kardashian clan, Jay-Z, and other rappers. It might be a minstrel show, debased kind of PC/Diversity, but Whites love it nonetheless.

However, Western Europe in 500, after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, was almost entirely pagan. The population being thinner, poorer, and far less Christian than in the East. By the 900’s the great wave of conversions had already begun (in England Alfred the Great converted in the 800’s). Conversion from Paganism to Christianity had advantages: the Church provided scribes who being able to read could record who paid how much taxes. And how many men feudal lords who owed the King levies of man had actually mustered, the last time. These were not trivial things; a literate court that could track obligations outperformed one that could not.

Hopefully the conversion from PC and Diversity religion will not take as long.

The real object of interest, however, is what happens with the White elites, when they no longer rule.

The whole point of the JFK bargain, after all, was that JFK was President. What is Rahm Emmanuel if he’s not Mayor any more? If he’s merely the faded, empty, powerless aristocratic heir to an estate that does not even exist anymore? Emmanuel lacking political power is not merely a hapless Hapsburg heir, he’s more ridiculous and loser-ish than that. And the spectacle of Emmanuel being tossed will concentrate the minds wonderfully of the remaining White political (and cultural/social) elite.

What are they if they don’t rule? What is the Hollywood elite when they are all replaced by Tyler Perry’s cousins and Shonda Rhimes’s childhood friends?

John Derbyshire predicted the elites would turn racist. I think that is a fair prediction if and when the logic of demography means that elites are turfed out of politics, out of Hollywood, and out of political and social control that they have exerted since, say Bill Ayers bombed places in the 1960’s. Already you are seeing some of this pushback, tentatively and gently, from White male comedians who are stymied in career growth, opportunities being taken from them and given to women, NAMs, etc.

I once drove past a park (the corner of Carrollton and Claiborne Ave to be precise where the St. Charles Streetcar ends) in New Orleans with my brother the first night in New Orleans to move there for grad school. We went past a police scene where news reports detailed one Black man beat his friend to death (also a Black man) with a piece of iron pipe over $20 worth of crack. Would the most ardent liberal PC Hollywood producer turn into a Klan member to preserve his mansion and private schooling for his kids? Sure. He’s no different in basic human motivation than that Black guy who beat his friend to death over $20 worth of crack those years ago. The same can be said of political leaders.

One might of course, question how much the White population will have invested in a nation and the concept of the nation when within a few years, people who look like them disappear from TV, from movies, from Comic Books (the new Captain America in the Comics is Black now), and from politics. Will Whites simply withdraw, or fight, if the people running cities, states, Hollywood, and appearing in movies and TV and the ultimate reality show that is the Presidency all look like Oprah or Jay-Z?

Certainly White women love the Kardashians, rappers, Jay-Z, rap music, Obama, and Oprah like a double helping of Eat Pray Love. But White men?

Well, what’s the worst that could happen? It is not as if having a lot of White guys who are demonized and have no investment or possible investment in society could ever have any real consequences.

[nascarnation]

Ping to #19

[Octar]

I think the coming black dictatorship of Karen Lewis in Chicago is a great development.

Is she pretending to be black like VJ, Rev.Wright and other whites who wanted a race card to wave?

[1rudeboy]

And now whites are moving back into Detroit. Sure, it’s been more than a few decades, but things change.

[blackdog]

Feeding the alligator, hoping he eats you last.......

A Rumsfeldian quote.

[GeronL]

The problem is that eventually they elect crazy leftist leaders who don’t KNOW they need them. Look at what Zimbabwe, Argentina and Venezuela did to the private sector they needed.

[stanley windrush]

You left out high crime.

[Arm_Bears]

John Derbyshire predicted the elites would turn racist.

The white Dem elites already are racist--Shoot, they're among the worst.

They just never get called on it because they say the right things on TV.

[Da Coyote]

Quickie synopsis...Chicago is doomed.

Get out while you can.

[umgud]

White liberals in CA have for years swelled their ranks with Latinos who are now pushing the white liberal elites out. They got permanent dem majority, but are now losing their jobs and their power.

[1rudeboy]

If you own any real estate in the South Loop, or points north, I’m looking to buy. pm me

[Mariner]

" White guys who are demonized and have no investment or possible investment in society could ever have any real consequences."

Not only have White Men perfected superior organizational principals and are the font of every military technology today...they have also perfected killing on an industrial scale.

It's best to allow that dispassionate focus to remain dormant. It's not healthy for most folks.

[Fungi]

Thanks for the advice—don’t live there. One visit in winter was enough for me.

[SAJ]

I suppose I’m right behind the times. I had thought it meant ‘Negroes Aggravating Mankind’, but that’s obviously not ‘hip’ enough.

[SoothingDave]

“Rein in,” not “reign in.”

[SAJ]

Speaking as a commodities trader of over 40 years' standing, the actual history is considerably more complex than you suggest.

Briefly (the actual history would take volumes), Chicago founded the Chicago Open Board of Trade (now extinct) in 1845. The famous Chicago Board of Trade was founded 3 years later, and dealt solely in grains.

CBT was a backwater until the Civil War, at which time some genius (unknown now to history) persuaded the government to use CBT to hedge its requirement for oats, for the cavalry. This effort was so successful that, within 30 days of the signing at Appomatox Court House, both Grant and Sherman traveled to Chicago to thank CBT for their assistance during the war (hint: the government saved MILLIONS on oats).

Although Chicago later on became a hub for trading in meats, this WAS NOT CBT, but rather what was originally known as the Chicago Egg and Butter Exchange, later known as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The futures contract on hogs opened in the late 1950s and the contract on cattle opened in 1967 (pls allow me one year plus or minus). The meat contracts came to dominate the Merc (as it was known) almost immediately, and the older contracts (eggs, butter and cheese) either went extinct or became irrelevant.

The Merc now owns the old CBT (and that history is worth telling, too), but Chicago was, originally, a grains center (read Frank Norris' old muckraking novel, "The Pit" for a slightly biased perspective, but a good read), and only much later became the center for trading meats (including the infamous and now extinct Frozen Pork Belly contract).

A bit more careful with your historical narratives, please.

FReegards!

[expat2]

But how many? And how many of those will stay after they find out how much crime and incompetence there is in the city?

[Arrowhead1952]

BFL.