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Truth and Consequences and January 6

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Reused with permission from Wikipedia

Like most people, I learned of the insurrection that resulted in five deaths and considerably more than 100 injuries to Capitol police from television news. Don’t ask me which channel; it was probably either CNN or MSNBC, but honestly, I don’t remember. I only remember what I saw—the searing image of American citizens attacking the seat of their own government on behalf of a President who lied to them because his twisted psyche did not allow him to admit that he had lost an election, fair and square. If he believes that the election was stolen, it is not because he has ever had any evidence to that effect. It is because he has repeated the lie to himself so often that he has internalized it completely. Such men are very dangerous.

There are plenty of good, well-written commentaries on the events of January 6, and it is not my aim to add another broad assessment of the day. The testimony before, and the final report of, the House Select Committee will add immensely to our knowledge, but it remains to be seen whether it can change minds. Even in 1974, as Richard Nixon was about to resign the presidency after a visit by a delegation of distinguished Republican Senators convinced him the gig was up, about one-quarter of the American public still sided with him, either disregarding or disbelieving the criminality on display from the Watergate affair. Even the most venal and corrupt politicians have always had their supporters, often until the bitter end. It is not as if the larger public is composed entirely of angels, after all. When the support fades, it is usually because the politician in question is no longer useful.

Corrupt and authoritarian politicians are almost always bullies who are highly skilled at making offers that their followers, and often others, cannot refuse. There is nothing new about this phenomenon. It is as old as civilization itself. The Bible is replete with evidence of such venality, dating back thousands of years.

So, what do I have to offer?

On the afternoon of the insurrection, I was preparing for a pair of sequential consulting meetings when the news caught my attention. That led to a mercifully brief text exchange with someone I will leave unidentified. I will paraphrase for clarity while sharing its essence. The point is not who it is, but his perceptions in the face of what effectively was a coup attempt. I understood his politics for many years beforehand; sometimes, he would needle me about it, and sometimes in recent years I was forced to terminate a conversation that, in my view, had departed earth’s orbit and no longer made sense.

But at that moment, I had to believe even this riot, insurrection, coup attempt, call if what you will, would be too much even for him. I was wrong.

I asked if he was still happy with Trump after Trump had incited an insurrection at the Capitol.

I was told that, after years of corruption that no one had challenged, except for Trump in the previous four years, “people are fed up.”

I want to step back here and make two points about this expression of frustration.

First, regarding corruption, this is a vague term that, without specifics, can be used as a broad brush against almost anything one disagrees with, and I believe that was happening here. There is, in my view, little question that corruption has at times affected both political parties. Personally, I have been perfectly willing to cross party lines to vote against candidates and office holders with documented records of corruption of any kind. I intensely dislike politicians who put self-interest ahead of the public interest. I am also aware that my disagreement with their policies does not constitute evidence of their corruption. Those are two different things, and we need to respect that difference if democracy is going to involve any kind of principled debate about what is best for our society. There are times when those lines are blurred, and times when it is clear. For instance, I was pleased last year when Democrats in the Illinois House of Representatives voted to replace long-time Speaker Michael Madigan, who had become entangled in a corruption scandal involving Commonwealth Edison Co. and its parent Exelon, with Chris Welch, who became the first Black Speaker in Illinois history. Welch may not be perfect either, but it was time for Madigan to leave. He has retired into obscurity, but he may yet face federal charges. I could name dozens of such situations in either party.

But to suggest that no one had addressed such corruption until Trump did so is ludicrous. It also demonstrates a willful blindness to facts. The litany of evidence of Trump’s shady transactions in both business and politics is overwhelming, from the $25 million fraud settlement in the lawsuit against Trump University, to the tax and insurance fraud charges now being brought against the Trump Organization by the Manhattan District Attorney, to the investigation of Trump’s demand of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to allow Trump to claim victory in that state in the 2020 election—the details have filled multiple books over many years. No matter the depth of evidence that Trump not only does not fight corruption, but personifies it, followers will insist on dismissing such evidence, almost surely without ever reviewing it. Nonetheless, it is absolutely clear to anyone reading all this, as I have, that Trump has never been the weapon against this corruption that this complaint suggests.

For those who may think otherwise, or want to better arm themselves to discuss this topic, I include a short, incomplete bibliography of Trump-related investigative literature at the end of this blog post. Beware: It may keep you occupied for weeks.

But there is also the claim that “people are fed up.” This deserves closer analysis. One could ask, Fed up with what, exactly? My correspondent cited Biden “bringing back old retreads that Obama had in his cabinet.” That is hardly a crime, of course, and may well have indicated a preference by a new president facing a crisis of confidence in government for choosing experienced people who know how to make government work. That is hardly cause for a riot, let alone a coup attempt, and I said as much, though admittedly I may have sparked further anger in referring to the corruption claims as a “bullshit excuse” for an insurrection—especially since the express purpose was to prevent certification of the election. He also noted the need for better trade agreements, for someone to “actually help the working person,” and the loss of manufacturing jobs. I would readily agree that these are all legitimate political issues, subject to debate both on the streets and in the media, and in Congress and state legislatures, but justification for an insurrection?

Reused with permission from Wikipedia

That was the red line I could not cross, nor could I accept that anyone else should be allowed to do so.

The idea that all this frustration, not all of it based on accurate perceptions, justified an attempt to overthrow an election underlines a sense of civic privilege that I find appalling. If your preferred candidate failed to make his case to the American people—and that is precisely what happened to Trump—it does not follow that the only path forward is insurrection. The presumption behind this logic is deeply rooted in white privilege, even if its advocates do not wish to consciously own that brutal truth.

After all, if anyone is entitled to a sense that they are pushing back against persistent injustice, it would be African Americans, who can cite centuries of brutal suppression and slavery prior to the Civil War, the use of home-grown terrorism through organizations like the Ku Klux Klan to suppress Black voting rights and citizenship and economic opportunity, Jim Crow laws that enforced inequality well into the 20th century, vicious housing discrimination, and violent police actions, such as those of the Alabama state troopers who assaulted peaceful demonstrators in Selma in 1965, all of which make pro-Trump protesters’ allegations of unfairness pale in comparison. Yet, most African American citizens have persisted across centuries to use what levers they have within the democratic system to achieve a more equitable society. Admittedly, there are times when tensions have boiled over, but who could reasonably have expected otherwise? I am not justifying violence, but asking reasonable people to consider the disappointments to which Black Americans have been subjected for generations before making comparisons to the complaints of the MAGA crowd.

Moreover, such issues of delayed justice have affected other minorities, such as Chinese, the subject of an immigration exclusion law for decades, the Japanese internment during World War II, and widespread prejudice and discrimination against Latino immigrants over the past century. One could go on, but the point is clear. All have sought doggedly to work through the existing system to resolve injustice.

That leads to the next element of the exchange, in which I insisted that any Democrat instigating such an attack would be accused of treason, and that to react otherwise to Trump’s insurrection is “blatant hypocrisy.” I wanted to draw direct attention to the double standard that was being applied by many Republicans in this instance. In fact, I added, “Coup attempt is crime.” Democrats made similar allegations, of course, in the second impeachment trial.

That led to the countercharge that Democrats were hypocritical in allowing “looting, burning, shooting and harassing of innocent people” in the demonstrations and riots that followed the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in the summer of 2020. He then referred to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot as “part of the elitist liberal problem in this country.” As with the corruption issue, we were back to the broad-brush approach to asserting problems without specifics.

At that point, I decided to end the conversation because it seemed clear that the discussion was going to veer off track. I made clear that “I have never endorsed violence and I never will.” But I added that in Trump’s case, “This is an official condoning this,” which separated it from mayors who did not like the violence in their cities, but were faced with challenges in deciding the best approach to handling it. His comments also ignored the fact that 93 percent of Black Lives Matter protests were completely peaceful. I contrasted such practical policy decisions to “federal crimes encouraged by a US president who should know better.” And with that, the exchange ended.

I realize, of course, that this is just one such conversation among millions of exchanges among friends and relatives with contrasting views across the country. I did not completely disagree with all of his concerns, but I also was deeply puzzled as to how those of us worried about the future of democracy when it is under attack by followers of a demagogue like Trump can wrestle with jello or shadow-box with phantoms, given the vague and disingenuous statements with which we are confronted, including some of his.

In the meantime, speaking of stealing elections, we are watching some amazing voting rights shenanigans, to say nothing of phony “audits,” at the state level. What will we say when the second insurrection anniversary rolls around? Will anything have changed?

 

Partial Bibliography: Recent Books on President Donald Trump and/or the Insurrection

 

Johnston, David Cay. The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family. Simon & Schuster, 2021.

Karl, Jonathan. Betrayal. Dutton, 2021.

Leonnig, Carol, and Philip Rucker. A Very Stable Genius. Penguin Press, 2020.

Leonnig & Rucker. I Alone Can Fix It. Penguin Press, 2021.

Raskin, Jamie. Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy. Harper, 2022.

Schiff, Adam. Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could. Random House, 2021.

Woodward, Bob, and Robert Costa. Peril. Simon & Schuster, 2021.

Woolf, Michael. Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. Little Brown, 2018.

Jim Schwab

2020 Vision

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In two days, those who have not yet voted by mail or in person at an early voting site will have their last chance to express their views on America’s future. It is by far the starkest choice in my lifetime, and I will add that Harry Truman was in the White House when I was born. I have participated in presidential and other elections since 1972. The Twenty-sixth Amendment, which prohibited age discrimination in voting for those 18 and older, was ratified in 1971, while I was a junior in college. I have never taken that right for granted In five decades since then.

But I find it a curious coincidence that we face this choice in a year that can be pronounced Twenty-Twenty, the optometric formula for perfect vision. I first experienced the joy of 20/20 vision without glasses after my cataract surgery last year, so it has special meaning for me after growing up attached all day long to serious eyewear. But as I noted in my introductory blog post more than eight years ago, as a writer, scholar, parent, and student of life, I have also learned that 20/20 vision can be a metaphor for simply seeing the world clearly by sorting facts from fiction. It may thus be little surprise that, in a poetic post a few weeks ago, I used a hall of mirrors as the lens for viewing a current popular addiction to conspiratorial world views that have led many into the snare of our current U.S. president.

This is, first and foremost, an election about decency, honesty, and democratic norms. Simply put, one side observes them, and one side does not. I have never said that before about major party presidential candidates. Both sides have typically understood that a functioning democracy requires that standards exist that are not controverted, lines that are not crossed. Even Richard Nixon eventually acceded to such norms when he resigned the presidency in August 1974, following the Watergate scandal. Perhaps reluctantly, he acknowledged his own mistakes and shortcomings, and for the sake of the country left us all in the hands of Gerald Ford, a conservative but mainstream Republican who thoroughly embraced the need to respect institutional norms. When he, in turn, facing the headwinds of the era, lost a close election to Jimmy Carter, he conceded and moved on, as did Carter four years later. And so it has been throughout the vast majority of American history. Running for any office inherently entails the possibility of losing and accepting the verdict of the voters. I faced the same verdict myself In a city council election in Iowa City in 1983. Looking back, I can honestly say that, while raising some serious issues, I headlined a campaign that was less vigorous and convincing than it might have been. It was definitely a learning experience. Within two years, I was married in Omaha and found a job in Chicago. In a legitimate democracy, holding public office is a privilege, not an entitlement. Life moves on.

But apparently not for Donald Trump, for whom wealth and power seem an entitlement, and truth and honesty merely convenient fictions in a transactional lifestyle. Books exploring this megalomania, including one by his own niece, Mary L. Trump, have virtually become a cottage industry. I cannot think of another U.S. president whose own psyche has been the subject of so much close examination, hand-wringing, and concern about his grip on power—and I have read at least one biography of every single president in U.S. history. The problem is that Donald Trump is one of the least introspective presidents we have ever seen, and his obsessions are a legitimate source of concern.

Those fixations and projections have introduced elements into the present election that leadership skills alone, on the part of previous candidates, have suppressed for the public good. In 2008, John McCain notably rejected the efforts of some supporters to make race an issue against President Barack Obama. In 2000, despite a U.S. Supreme Court decision that many regarded as blatantly partisan and unfair, Vice President Al Gore, who had won the popular vote by about 500,000 votes, nonetheless sought to tamp down partisan anger for the sake of constitutional and institutional stability. Trump appears ready to do no one such favors. It is all about his ego.

Take, for example, his campaign’s ridiculous demand that a winner be declared on election night, viewed against a backdrop of baseless complaints about massive fraud in voting by mail (which I myself did this year, without a problem, to avoid being in a crowd amid a pandemic). This demand has absolutely no basis in American history, which is replete with instances in which it has taken well past midnight, and in 2000, several weeks, before a decision was clear. Even a modicum of reading in U.S. presidential history reveals, for instance, that in 1948, it was the morning after the election when the Chicago Tribune printed the famous headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman,” which Truman subsequently waved as a badge of honor when the final tally proved otherwise. In 1960, when John F. Kennedy won the popular vote by a razor-thin margin of 0.17 percent, Nixon did not concede until the following afternoon. These are hardly the only such cases.

However, before the era of television, the public rarely expected to learn the results on election night. This quick determination is a result not only of modern communications, but of the willingness of broadcasters to lure viewers with even the hint of making the first announcement of the apparent victor. What is different in 2020? Obviously, in a year of pandemic, early voting and mail-in ballots have far exceeded numbers seen in past elections; in Texas, such votes have already topped the entire voter turnout of 2016, perhaps because Texas is finally seen as competitive. Clearly, this high voter turnout is an indication that many more Americans have decided that the stakes are very high this year. But the false claims about fraud resonate with conspiracy-minded followers of the President, and combined with notable voter suppression tactics by several state Republican parties, they serve to undermine public confidence in the system to the advantage of no one but the incumbent. As I said, for Trump, it is all about Trump.

But it gets worse, as we have seen. By winking and laughing and refusing to insist that his own supporters observe at least the most basic democratic norms, Trump has enabled behavior that would be outrageous under any circumstances. For example, the Biden campaign was forced to cancel an event in Austin, Texas, when the campaign bus was surrounded on the highway by a caravan of dozens of cars of Trump supporters who slowed down in front of it, blocked its path, and in one case, rammed into an SUV belonging to a Biden staff member. Historian Eric Cervini, driving nearby, noted that the cars “outnumbered police 50-1.” This type of intimidation would have been both totally unacceptable as well as inconceivable in any campaign of the past. But not for Trump, who is probably amused. Where is his urgent call for law and order when his own supporters are the violators? Apparently, it is as ephemeral as it was after 14 men associated with a Michigan militia group were indicted on state and federal charges for plotting to kidnap the Michigan governor and put her on “trial” for what they imagined to be crimes related to protecting the public against the spread of COVID-19. Truly, we are operating in a funhouse reality when public health measures intended to save lives are viewed as crimes worthy of kidnapping and possible execution by vigilantes.

I could go on, but the point is already clear. Patriotic Republicans who still believe in democratic principles and in the value of American institutions of governance have already supported efforts like the Lincoln Project, which is backing Biden as the only means to return this nation to a semblance of sanity, in which presidents no longer mock science but listen carefully to experts and make reasoned decisions based on realistic perceptions of the threats to our nation’s health and security. One can be well-informed and skeptical of specific scientific findings, in part because science functions through a constant questioning and reanalysis to determine if inherited wisdom is sound or merits reexamination. As with everything from Joseph Lister’s development of sterility guidelines for surgery in the late 1800s to Albert Einstein’s theories concerning relativity to modern knowledge of the workings of DNA, that does not make science false. It is simply a process of making it better—far better than the silly ramblings of someone who would speculate about injecting disinfectants into the human body as a means of curing a coronavirus infection. We have huge challenges ahead in regaining our bearings on all these matters, and the fact is that the only viable alternative to Trump is former Vice President Joseph Biden, who benefits from long experience in the public sector and a healthy dose of humility, compassion, and empathy for his fellow human beings.

But I want to close on a special note for my friends and readers who may be independents or Republicans, or even Greens and Libertarians, or whatever other options may exist. I am not speaking here as a Democrat, although I will confess to that leaning. Throughout my life, especially in races below the presidency, I have been willing to cast aside partisan arguments to make independent judgments in cases where I felt specific public officials simply did not deserve my vote. This happened most often in cases of corruption, though ineptitude could also be a factor. I have, on occasion, voted for Republican and even third-party candidates when I felt the need to do so.

The most prominent example occurred in the 2006 gubernatorial election in Illinois. The tally would indicate that most Democrats supported Gov. Rob Blagojevich for re-election that year against Judy Baar Topinka, a Republican and former state treasurer. I had already begun to form a jaundiced view of Blagojevich’s infatuation with power and his own public image, and his frequent posing as a populist savior of the common man and woman. Something struck me as just plain wrong. In the end, I opted to vote for the Green Party candidate, but in retrospect, I should have just crossed the aisle to support Topinka, who was an honorable public servant. Disagreements on some issues were less important than a commitment to decency and honesty.

Subsequently, Blagojevich, following Obama’s ascent to the presidency, was charged and convicted on various charges of corruption, including an attempt to sell Obama’s seat in the U.S. Senate. He was impeached and removed from office by the Illinois legislature, and convicted by a federal jury and sent to prison. He is now out of prison because President Trump commuted his sentence, and as an act of gratitude, this Democrat who once appeared on The Apprentice is campaigning for Trump. Surprised? Not me. They are two peas in a pod. This year’s election is ultimately not about partisan affiliations but about public standards of behavior and decency in the White House. Which side are you on?

Harking back to my theme, this year is about viewing the options with 20/20 clarity. We can afford nothing less.

Jim Schwab

Frog-Marching Illinois into the Dark Past

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Photo of Gov. Bruce Rauner, from Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Rauner.

Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner, elected in 2014 and up for re-election this year as the Republican nominee, has made manipulative politics the centerpiece of his first term, at the expense of passing a budget through a Democrat-dominated legislature. Illinois has had such split governance before, but other governors at least understood that their first responsibility was to pass a budget so the state could pay its bills, even if that required some compromise. Rauner instead has thrown down the gauntlet repeatedly, often on issues such as right-to-work legislation that were not directly related to the budget but became his bludgeons to get what he wanted. The result was a two-year stalemate that saw Illinois continue many of its programs under court mandates rather than through legislation. Finally, enough Republicans bucked their own governor last year to force the issue and approve some tax increases to begin to pay down the state’s backlog of debts to social service providers, school districts, and state universities, among others.

You might think that, by now, Illinois would have had enough of such counterproductive, divisive politics. Compromise and disagreement always have co-habited in politics, mostly by necessity. Even in the era of Donald Trump, even in a gubernatorial election year, acting like an adult should still count for something.

Instead, Rauner on Monday used his line item veto power to revise a gun law passed by the legislature to attempt to reinstate the death penalty. The gun law would establish a 72-hour “cooling-off” period following the purchase of an assault weapon. Legislators have considered several proposals in response to the recent wave of incidents of gun-related violence around the nation and in the state. Rauner also stated that he believes the 72-hour rule should apply to all gun purchases, and proposed other gun-control measures, but it is hard to take him seriously when he makes the legislation contingent on an unrelated death penalty provision. Rauner understands all too well the political divisions inherent in gun policy, having barely survived a primary challenge from St. Rep. Jeanne Ives, a right-wing Republican from Wheaton, in the conservative evangelical heart of the Chicago suburbs. It is far easier to see a streak of raw cynicism behind Rauner’s move: How desperate are gun-control advocates to get something passed? Desperate enough to split the Democratic base by supporting reinstatement of the death penalty?

It is important to understand just how cynical this is in the context of recent Illinois history. The last Republican governor, George Ryan, placed a moratorium on the death penalty in 2000 because he found himself increasingly troubled by the number of wrongful convictions in Illinois and the possibility that, in denying clemency, he could be signing the death warrant for an innocent person. In 2003, before leaving office, Ryan commuted the sentences of all death row inmates. Despite considerable criticism at the time, Ryan mounted a stout defense of his actions.

This has been no small matter in Illinois. The list of exonerations in recent decades runs on for pages. The City of Chicago has already paid out more than $100 million in reparations for wrongful convictions resulting from forced confessions, extracted through torture, by police detective Jon Burge, subsequently convicted himself in federal court for obstruction of justice and perjury. That is not even close to the end of the story; the overall total of settlements for police misconduct, according to the Better Government Association, totaled well in excess of $500 million by 2014. Thus, the move by Ryan served to open the floodgate of grievances and reservations that finally led the legislature to abolish the death penalty in 2011, signed into law by Gov. Pat Quinn.

In the meantime, Ryan himself went to federal prison on corruption charges, followed a decade later by his Democratic successor, Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who himself seemed intent on proving that one need not be an adult to hold high office. Blagojevich is still appealing a 14-year sentence and hoping for clemency from President Trump. Illinois has had a colorful, but hardly confidence-inspiring, political history.

It is thus small surprise that there is little voter sentiment for what Rauner has now suggested. The notion that it may be better to let a murder convict sit in prison, where at least he or she may still be alive if or when a wrongful conviction is overturned, seems to have become the dominant sentiment among most of the body politic. Illinois does not need to revisit that conclusion so soon after achieving this historic landmark in its long history of criminal jurisprudence. We still don’t know what other innocent persons might be sitting on death row if the state had not ended the death penalty.

Rauner is trying to parse the distinction between potential wrongful convictions and legitimately convicted murderers by limiting the application of the death penalty in his amendatory veto language to those who murder police officers or kill two or more people. Asked why his proposal should not include murder of firefighters or teachers, Rauner declared himself open to expanding the list of victims for which the new death penalty would apply.

And thus, Rauner begins the process of frog-marching Illinois back into its dark past, picking scabs and reopening old wounds from a past that most of us have already chosen to put behind us.

Rauner also introduced in his amendatory veto a new standard of “beyond all doubt” in place of “beyond all reasonable doubt” for such convictions. But in practice, how does a jury, or a judge, truly distinguish one from another? If any doubt exists about convicting a defendant in a murder trial, shouldn’t that doubt be “reasonable” before it is even considered? In light of past miscarriages of justice, who will guarantee a just result before imposing the death sentence? Rauner’s tweaking of language does almost nothing to resolve the manifold doubts that moved public opinion toward the elimination of the death penalty in the first place.

The legislature, as always, has two options. One is for enough Democrats and Republicans, bipartisanly sick of this brazen manipulation, to override the amendatory veto with a three-fifths vote in both houses. The other is to do nothing, in which case the legislation goes nowhere. Legislators are also actively pursuing other measures concerning state licensing of gun dealers. The possibility of approving Rauner’s version of the bill creating the cooling-off period is, in fact, almost nonexistent, and Rauner’s true goal may be to satisfy the Republican right wing by killing the gun-control measure that passed and blaming its failure on Democrats. If so, voters may want to consider just how cynical they want their governor to be.

Jim Schwab

Related links for this article:

“Rauner’s death penalty ploy,” Chicago Tribune editorial

“In Rauner’s gun proposal, politics ahead of policy,” Chicago Tribune column by Dahleen Glanton

“Lawmakers revise plan to license Illinois gun stores,” Chicago Tribune

On Taxes and Public Trust

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A very curious op-ed article appeared Monday (July 6) in the Chicago Tribune. Tom Geoghegan, best known as a liberal lawyer who represents labor unions, made a plea for more taxes. Not just any taxes for any reason, but “Tax me, please, so Illinois can compete.” Let me set the stage for this commentary.

First, we have a mayor who has been adhering religiously to maintaining property taxes at a relatively low level, compared to many suburbs, while struggling to make the city’s books balance amid pressure to keep the city’s pension funds solvent. Pension funds for both city and Chicago Public Schools retirees promise reasonably generous benefits that include a three percent cost-of-living yearly increase, which certainly beats Social Security in most years because its increases vary with the Consumer Price Index. (For the record, my wife is a Chicago Public Schools retiree.) These agreements have been in place for many years, but for many years the city and the school system have not met their obligations to fund these pensions adequately. The city is also making its perennial argument in Springfield that Chicago residents pay twice for pensions because their own teacher pension fund relies on local property taxes while all other systems in the state rely on state income taxes, which, of course, Chicagoans also pay. Suburban and downstate legislators counter that Chicago gets more of other types of state support because of higher numbers of families in poverty, an argument that strikes me as lame because Chicago is hardly the only city in the state with poor people.

Welcome to the twisted logic of politics in Illinois. We also have a constitutional provision that cements flat-rate income taxes in place. We could only enact a progressive state income tax by first amending the state constitution to allow such a thing. Meanwhile, Illinois is undergoing a bruising battle between a conservative rookie Republican governor, Bruce Rauner, and a legislature with large Democratic majorities in both houses. It is now July, and they have not agreed on a budget, and a judge has ruled that, without statutory authority in the form of an enacted budget, the state cannot pay its workers more than the federal minimum wage until this gets sorted out.

It is not apparent to me, or many others, that either the state of Illinois or the city of Chicago lack considerable wealth or the ability to pay their bills if we sort out our priorities and match spending with revenue. Rauner refuses to budge on the revenue until the legislature adopts at least some of his pro-business, anti-union agenda—he basically wants to make Illinois a right-to-work state—and the legislature is busy enacting budgets that necessarily entail large deficits, so Rauner vetoed their most recent attempt. A standoff is throwing Illinois into turmoil.

To be brutally honest, I could never hope in this short blog post to do justice to all the intricacies of this situation. I am providing only a broad outline of the conflict as background to the Geoghegan commentary. Basically, his perspective is that school closings driven by budget cuts drive middle-class residents to the suburbs for better schools for their children, which they pay higher taxes to achieve. In short, lower taxes make the city less competitive in attracting talent, resulting in a less competitive business climate. He bolsters his argument by pointing out that other big cities facing many of the same macroeconomic challenges have survived the recession and are thriving in ways that Chicago is not. And in ways that Illinois also is not. People in those other states pay higher, progressive income taxes that support public services that make their states and cities more competitive. In short, he says “blue states that collect higher taxes thrive and red states with lower taxes do not.” I am sure one can find some exceptions to his general rule, but he has a point. Taxes alone do not make a state less competitive, especially if used wisely to create better public education and amenities and infrastructure. All these things matter. Then comes Geoghegan’s clincher:

“Illinois is a blue state that tries to govern like a red state. And that’s why the state and its crown jewel, Chicago, are about to go belly up.”

So far, so good. Geoghegan concludes with his plea to “tax me, please,” to achieve better public solvency and make the state and city more competitive. But his article fails to answer or address the question of why a blue state would try to “govern like a red state.” There is an understandable, though also cowardly, fear among legislators and aldermen about raising taxes because there is public resistance. Some public resistance to higher taxes is always to be expected, but in many places it can be overcome with a solid explanation of how that money will be used or invested. It is when it is repeatedly misused or poorly invested that public suspicion becomes a cancer that afflicts the trust people must feel before they are willing to open their wallets to the state and city.

That is where a new book by Thomas J. Gradel and former Chicago alderman Dick Simpson becomes important. Simpson, now teaching at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was an independent who was once a thorn in the side of Mayor Richard J. Daley, the Democratic party boss, subject of the famous Mike Royko book, Boss, whose son Richard M. later ascended to the same office. Richard M. Daley retired before the 2011 mayoral election, when Rahm Emanuel was elected mayor. Corrupt Illinois is a no-holds-barred attack on the pervasive culture of corruption not only in the city but the entire state of Illinois, now famous for having sent two recent governors to prison, Republican George Ryan and his immediate successor, Rod Blagojevich, who ironically had promised to clean up the mess Ryan left behind. Instead, he created his own mess, including the attempted sale of the U.S. Senate seat vacated by President Barack Obama.

There is not room here to review the hundreds of cases of corruption the two authors discuss, stretching from the city of Chicago to numerous suburbs, including the notorious case of Cicero, to downstate communities where clerks and mayors have stolen public funds, to the state capitol, where matters now speak for themselves. What Gradel and Simpson document is the high, very high, cost of public corruption in the erosion of public trust. Taxpayers like to know that, when they fork over more money that is supposed to build roads and bridges or support schools or social services, that money will not end up illicitly in the back pocket of some operator tolerated by politicians who look the other way, or worse, pocket some of it themselves or find other ways to violate the public trust.

Moreover, this is not a partisan issue, as some would like to contend. Both parties have participated in the skullduggery in their own ways. The book supports an observation I have long shared in talking about other states with similar issues, like Louisiana: Once a culture of corruption takes hold, it becomes a bipartisan enterprise. The same can usually be said of the virtuous cycle of comparative honesty in states where such practices meet with immediate public condemnation. I have long encountered people who have difficulty believing me when I tell them that, when I once ran for city council in Iowa City while a graduate student at the University of Iowa, by city ordinance the limit on contributions by any individual to a candidate for a specific election was $50. There are no missing zeroes. It was 1983, but even allowing for inflation, that limit comes nowhere near the inflated sums that float around in Illinois elections. Public tolerance makes a huge difference.

Rauner attempts in his ham-handed fashion, driven by the personal certitude of a hedge fund millionaire, to pose as the enemy of the political class in Illinois. What he does not understand is that his pose might sell far better if he did not also make himself the implacable foe of organized labor and the minimum wage, and if he did not have such a tin ear about the damage his policies are doing to badly needed services for the poor, disabled, and mentally ill. That undermines any public sympathy he might otherwise muster for a legitimate campaign to root out public corruption, which seems at best to be only a secondary target.

If you do nothing else to understand the hole that Illinois has dug for itself, read this book. At times, Corrupt Illinois may seem repetitive, even slightly monotonous, unless you develop a perverse fascination with just how corrupt a state can become. That is because the authors have so much raw material to work with that it is a wonder they fit it all into just 200 pages. They try mightily to be concise and to the point, but the point they make is unavoidable. Until Illinois voters insist on cleaning up this mess, and their political leaders finally grow a conscience and respond, there is no way out of our current impasse.

 

Jim Schwab