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If Blagojevich is indicted before November, do you think someone will wake up and put Hynes in?
I am stunned that the same crew can pass billion dollar budgets and implement sweeping changes to substantive laws. Those bills must be far less less complex.
Another favorite reaction is to claim we already have good enough laws on the books and we just need better prosecution. We all know that when some problem arises in Illinois, the General Assembly never passes new laws to deal with it, they simply tell the Executive Branch to enforce existing law.
Examples include:
The Mayor wants wrought iron fencing everywhere and his buddy from the fencing company gets an exclusive and probably illegal contract.
He wants plastic covered toilet seats at the airports and his pals get the exclusive deal.
He wants improveved concessions at the airports and his pals get the stores.
The Mayor wants a beautiful new park for the new millenia and sweet deals abound.
The Mayor wants to control employee sign in/out procedures so they install a multi million dollar swipe in/out card system in all city offices generating no bid contracts and actually making it easier for employees to cheat on their time.
There are countless examples of this formula bilking taxpayers. The way it usually works is the Mayor or the media find a terrible problem like the washrooms at O'Hare are filthy. How do we fix it? New toilet seats everywhere.
The other day headlines in both papers describe security problems with O'Hare's camera monitoring system. Apparently the software had a glitch so this was the lead story all over town. I would be willing to bet that the city will announce a new multi million dollar system that will fix any security imperfections. Of course the Mayor's cousin will be consulting on the project and his friends will have their fingers in it.
Maybe I am cynical, but if I dug into it I bet I could find hundreds of examples of this graft formula working our city. The media crisps are willing accomplices. Maybe a better word than accomplice is patsy.
Thank God that I am not Mayor of Chicago; I'd have the place picked as clean as Oprah's plate.
I remember when my public school buddies used to tell me that us Catholics had to eat fish on Fridays because the Pope owned all the fishing companies in the world.