Tag: Chicago

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education and schooling insider corruption local leaders

Lightfoot, Heavy Hand

Lori Lightfoot, Chicago, corruption

When you’re right, you’re right.

And all of Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s critics are right that it was wrong for Lightfoot’s deserves-​to-​fail reelection campaign to solicit teachers to solicit students of the city’s public schools to work for her reelection campaign in exchange for class credit.

A former city inspector general called the move “deeply, deeply problematic.” Local teachers union honchos called it a “shakedown” and “exploitative and wrong.” Mayoral election challenger Brandon Johnson called it “outrageous, desperate, and downright unethical,” an abuse of power.

This may be a case of Corruption Grade B rather than Grade A if, as seems slightly possible, nobody on Lightfoot’s team understood that they were crossing another line in the endless saga of incumbents’ shameless misuse of government-​controlled resources for political gain.

First, Lightfoot’s campaign said “this is common practice” and that they were just giving students “the opportunity to learn.…”

Eventually, they ended up saying that out of an “abundance of caution, we will cease contact with [public school] employees.” Then that campaign staff were being admonished about the “solid wall” that must exist between the campaign and “contacts” with noncampaign government employees.

Is enlisting public school teachers to enlist public school students to help an incumbent mayor’s reelection campaign really so very different from other abuses we have seen before, especially in a super-​corrupt town like Chicago?

It doesn’t change the fact that when you’re wrong, you’re wrong.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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international affairs local leaders media and media people national politics & policies

Pawns in Their Shame

immigrants, illegals, Chicago, busses

“Let me say loud and clear to Greg Abbott and his enablers in Texas with these continued political stunts,” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot told a September 1 news conference, “Gov. Abbott has confirmed … he is a man without any morals, humanity or shame.”

Abbott’s alleged shame is busing a small percentage of the migrants streaming into Texas on to Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C. The bussed are volunteers: the migrants can choose to go or not. 

Not too shockingly, however, the mayors in all three cities are crying foul quite “loud and clear.” Which only makes the Texas governor’s point. Abbott wants to dramatize the cost, seeking federal help so Texas doesn’t bear the brunt of the massive influx of folks illegally crossing the border — a record 1.7 million last year, estimated to hit 2.1 million more this year.

What particularly peeved Mayor Lightfoot was the lack of any “level of coordination and cooperation” from Texas authorities. At issue? “Those huddled masses yearning to breathe free in the United States,” Washington Post columnist Ruben Navarrette, Jr. explains, “usually arrive with empty pockets.” They have needs.

Last Wednesday, 147 more migrants arrived in Chicago, where Lightfoot has declared they will be welcomed. But … well … within hours she sent 64 of those individuals to a hotel in (Republican-​voting) Burr Ridge, some 20 miles from downtown Chicago. 

Bussed, no less.

Burr Ridge Mayor Gary Grasso blasted the fact “that nobody from the city, from the state called and told me.” 

“This isn’t about them, the migrants are fine,” he insisted, but went on to complain that “they’re being used as political pawns by the governor and mayor.”

Add U.S. congressmen and especially the president to that list of shameful bussers, for Abbott’s tactic mimics the federal government’s transporting of migrants from border areas to other parts of the country. 

Sure migrants are pawns in their game. We citizens should sympathize, for we are pawns in their shame.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall

Lightfoot’s Dark Turn

Lori Lightfoot, Chicago

The mayor of Chicago is now refusing interviews with white journalists. Only “Black or Brown journalists” need apply.

The jabberwocky uttered by Mayor Lightfoot to justify her conduct provides no real justification. But her rationalization has something to do with the alleged virtue of conferring an unfair advantage upon individuals whose ethnic background is “underrepresented” in journalism.

There are many reasons that a person may lack interest in a particular profession or fail to find work in that profession. In any case, the appropriate response to actual injustice is obviously not to inflict further injustice.

Chicago Tribune reporter Gregory Pratt, a Latino and thus ethnically qualified to interview the mayor, has withdrawn from an upcoming interview in protest. Good for him. Ostracizing a mayor who is ostracizing persons because of an unchosen physical trait is one proper way to combat the mayor’s racist new policy.

Chicago voters are presently unable to recall their mayor, but state lawmakers have proposed a bill to give voters that power. It should be enacted. Immediately. Lightfoot should be booted. Immediately thereafter.

Like other personages in our culture, the worst of our politicians are working overtime to outdo each other in contempt for all rational standards. Having been taught that reason is irrelevant, they are acting on this assumption.

This kind of thing will probably get worse before it gets better. But let’s look on the bright side: there are only eight more decades of this century to go.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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term limits

My Kind of Mayor?

Lori Lightfoot, Chicago, mayor, term limits

Chicago, the nation’s fabled “second city” — though, now the third largest incorporated metropolis in these United States — sports a new mayor. On Tuesday, Lori Lightfoot won the city’s mayoral runoff by a whopping 47 points, tallying 73 percent of the vote. 

As reported, she is a mayor of many firsts. While Chicago has previously elected two African-​American men to be mayor as well as one female,* Lightfoot becomes the first female African-​American mayor. 

Additionally, Lightfoot is the first openly gay Chicago mayor.

And not to put too fine a point on it, she is also without a doubt the first openly gay, African-​American female mayor of Chicago named Lori. Or named Lightfoot, for that matter. 

But there’s more! 

I’m here to tell you that Ms. Lightfoot has captured yet another, far more consequential first. Something not dictated for her by birth — such as skin color, gender or sexual orientation — but chosen in her individual decision-​making process. 

Lightfoot advocates reform and — unlike any other Chi-​town mayor in history, from before the fire to now — she means limits on her own terms in office. 

In fact, her campaign’s position paper on “Cleaning Up City Government” puts it first: Impose a Two-​Term Limit on the Mayor.

“Chicago is the largest city in the country without mayoral term limits,” she notes, which “has led to entrenched leaders, a lack of new ideas and creative thinking and city government that works for the few, not the many.

“This will change when I am mayor,” she pledges, “and introduce an ordinance that brings Chicago into the mainstream by limiting mayors to serving two terms.”

Let’s do it. And why not limit the terms of city aldermen, too?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* In 1979, Jane Byrne became not only the first woman elected mayor of Chicago, but also the first woman elected to head any major U.S. city

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Lori Lightfoot, Chicago, mayor, term limits

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Accountability crime and punishment general freedom moral hazard national politics & policies privacy property rights too much government U.S. Constitution

Guilty of Innocence

Spencer Byrd, crime, asset forfeiture, police, Chicago, law enforcement, theft, stealing, government

If you are innocent of a crime, should you be punished as if guilty? Despite no arrest, no trial, no conviction?

If you say “Yes,” raise your hand.

I see no raised hands among my regular readers. But my readers don’t include the wicked Chicago officials who impounded the automobile of Spencer Byrd.

Byrd’s case is reported in a Reason article by C.J. Ciaramella. The author relates how Chicago extracts money by grabbing the vehicles of innocent people. The drug war and asset forfeiture laws help make it possible. 

Byrd is a carpenter and auto mechanic who sometimes gives rides to clients stuck without their cars. One night, when he was stopped on the road for an allegedly broken turn signal, police discovered that a new client riding with him was carrying heroin. Byrd was questioned but quickly released. He was never charged with a crime. 

But his car was impounded; it’s been impounded for years. This has hurt his business. For one thing, he has $3,500 worth of tools in the trunk. 

Byrd persuaded a judge to order that his car be returned to him. But the city still wouldn’t release it unless Byrd paid $8,790 in fees and fines (later reduced to $2,000). He is still struggling to retrieve his car, within a labyrinth the injustices of which I’ve barely touched on. 

May I suggest … ? If you do ever recover your Cadillac, Mr. Byrd, put pedal to the floor and get the heck out of Dodge.

I mean, Chicago.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability education and schooling free trade & free markets general freedom local leaders national politics & policies responsibility too much government

SEZ Ed

education, free trade zone, Shenzhen, Chicago, Detroit, regulations, reform

The great barrier to educational advance in our time is the federal government. The second great barrier? Your state government. The third great barrier? Your local government.

Proposals to break up government-​subsidized and ‑enforced school monopolies have ranged from tax credit proposals and voucher programs to charter schools and (the biggest success so far) home schooling.

But it may be time to advance something a little … more daring. Break the stranglehold of government on dysfunctional schooling.

How?

Apply the “free trade zone” (FTZ) idea to education.

We remember the FTZ proposal because of its rise in popularity amongst academics and policy wonks in the 1980s and 1990s. But the notion is an old one. And in China, where they are called “special economic zones” (SEZs) — and it is this term that is catching on — they have been amazingly successful, the former fishing village of Shenzhen being the most obvious example.

What about America? Take a devastated region, like inner-​city Chicago or Detroit,* and simply nullify the regulations and rules. (This probably would require federal enabling legislation on top of state leadership.) With the ensuing freedom and opportunity, entrepreneurs, established businesses and schools, teachers, community groups and activists could cook up new solutions to the oldest schooling problem there is:

actual education.

I’ve heard whispers of this Educational SEZ idea for some time now.

It is time for rational and quite public discussion.

And then the shouting. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Of course, any area could work. The reason to focus on demonstrably failed educational regions is that such areas have lost hope, and thus the politically resistant are likely to give in and allow it.

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