…that toddling town
First the sort of good news. the Bank of America has blinked in the Republic Windows and Doors affair and the workers should be receiving what is owed them under the law. Obviously the BofA didn’t want to get cut out of any of the free money the Hedgemony is handing out to banks because of bad publicity.
I’m not even sure that the tribulations of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich even qualifies as news. I would have thought that every newspaper in the state would have a fill-in-the-blanks boiler plate story about the governor being arrested for corruption. They should just have all newly elected governors post bonds, designate criminal defense attorneys, have their prints and mug shots taken, before being sworn in. It would save a lot of time.
Daniel Gross of Newsweek has an informative little piece on the life and times of the once king of leveraged rag-picking, Sam Zell. Sam would have been fine if the bubble hadn’t burst before he could break-up and sell off the Tribune empire.
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Sam is still fine. He invested only a small percentage of his fortune in the Tribune properties. So he still has plenty of dough. Too bad about the former Tribune employees though.
Regarding Blago,yeppers. But this time he made a *big* mistake. One thing you don’t do, in machine politics, is go make demands of the Boss. If the Boss asks you to do something, you don’t say “what’s in it for me?” You just assume that at some point in time the Boss is going to take care of you, and you give the Boss what he wants. Well, Obama is the Boss now, and Blago apparently didn’t figure that out when he tried to jack Rahm Emmanuel around over getting Obama’s chosen successor appointed to the Senate, thus the reason why suddenly the heat got turned up by a prosecutor who’s looking to be re-appointed. Make no mistake about it, Rahm’s fingerprints are all *over* that knife in Blagojevich’s back. Meanwhile, Obama was kept out of the loop in order to maintain plausible deniability, that’s the Chief of Staff’s job, to be the dude who takes care of sh*t like this and keeps the principal’s hands clean. Machine politics, yessiree. Deal is, machine politicians know how to take care of their constituents. So that ain’t necessarily a *bad* thing. But you gotta know your place if you’re part of the machine, dig?
Regarding Bank of America, they were looking at losing millions of dollars of State of Illinois business for the foreseeable future if they didn’t fork over the dough. So it isn’t as if they’re doing this out of the goodness of their heart. Like I said, machine politics. Blagojevich is a machine politician and his constituents were the ones being jerked around, so he basically told Bank of America that they were dead to him and to the State of Illinois unless they changed their mind. Heh.
The nice thing about machine politics, it always gives bloggers something to blog about. But man, I gotta tell you, having competent machine politicians in office rather than those idiot Mayberry Machiavellis sure is going to be fun. The Busheviks were so goddamned *stupid* that half the time you were just jaw agape saying, “he did *what*?!”. That ain’t fun. That’s just goddamned depressing, when you’re talking about the most powerful office in the land. So I’m looking forward to the entertainment to be provided by a real pro at machine politics in charge of things. For one thing, machine politicians might be corrupt as hell, but they do tend to get shit done…
— Badtux the Popcorn-muchin’ Penguin
Perhaps research should be done into creating a legion of Clinton Tyrees gore election as governor. Okay they may have the problem of quitting mid term to become a hermit but they would never be done for corruption!
I’m sure Carl Hiaasen wouldn’tmind….
Yup, what tux said before I could get here to say it.
This was no surprise to anyone that lives in Chicago. The feds have been after him for years. He knew that! What shocked me is that he made it soooo easy for them. I can’t wait until he starts blabbing names, dates and places. Hehehehe.
He had Patrick Fitzgerald on his case, for crying out loud. The guy wasn’t bothered by taking on Darth Cheney, so why in hell would Blagojevich think he was going to get a pass? He was just so blatant about the whole thing.
This is a major problem with machine politics – they sometimes promote incredibly stupid people. It may be that the bosses think that such people are easier to control, but when the office is high enough they generally revert to form in very public ways.
There’s a movement to call a special election to fill the vacancy in the Senate, which is a much better idea, and should be the standard procedure instead of appointments. Parliamentary systems are much better on this problem than the 50 systems that operate in the US.
Jams, Carl Hiaasen loves the Florida political system. He makes a lot of money writing novels about the people it produces. If you are familiar with South Florida you can put real names to the characters in his books, although he occasionally combines a couple of people to produce one character.