City workers and the public got screwed, but everybody else made out like, well… bandits. And the bandits are good friends of Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, of Illinois Senator Mark Kirk, of the mayors of Atlanta, Philly, Sacramento, the governors of California and New York and everyplace in between. Kwame Kilpatrick didn’t snort Detroit’s pension funds up his nose, he gave them to the same folks Rahm gives Chicago’s to. Wall Street gave Kwame Kilpatrick a medal for that, and Rahm’s friends who do business with the city have put millions in his campaign coffers. Thanks to them, Chicago to some extent is already Detroit.
Getting out of the city’s debt trap will require some real creativity, but there are answers. The state of North Dakota, with maybe 30% of Chicago’s population, has its own bank, where state funds are exclusively deposited. There’s no good reason why Chicago can’t do the same, and have its own funds in its own bank, available for investment in the region’s own economic future. A city-owned bank could invest those funds in job-creating green technologies that might put large numbers of young Chicagoans, now out of the labor force altogether, to work. It could do what private banks refuse to do and invest in refitting and construction of affordable housing, and transit, and job-creating municipal broadband, like the city of Chattanooga has already successfully deployed.
Senator Kirk’s threat isn’t national news because staring it down lays bare the predatory habits of our politicians and their funders, and might even lead us to real solutions. But the next step, at least in Chicago, is to fire Rahm Emanuel on April 7.
For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web at www.blackagendareport.com
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