Ya know, when I sit here and write about the current outrage of the day concerning the latest outrage du jour of the idiots Captain Jack Sparrow and the motley crew of his personal Black Pearl, if it occasionally appears that I may have popped one Xanax too many, there’s a good reason for that.
That’s because this is nothing all that new to me. Nor is it particularly new to Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC, nor is it new to a great many older Americans who had the somewhat dubious privilege of being born and raised in, or lived for an extended period in certain American cities. And although the cities involved may be different, the name for it is the same.
It’s called “machine politics.” In days long gone by, in cities like Chicago, New York, and Boston, the political climate, as well as the natural political leanings of the constituents, made it possible for one particular political party in the city to stop participating in the process of government, and instead to become the government. And once they came into power, they set up an entire internal organization in government to maintain and expand that power.
In Chicago, we just called it “The Machine.” And in my younger political junkie days, the owner and sole proprietor of that machine was one King Richard J Daley. The Democratic party was the dictatorial ruler of not only Chicago, but all of Cook County as well. And as not only the Mayor of Chicago, but also the Chairman of the Cook County Democratic party, “Boss” Daley ruled over all he surveyed. Sound vaguely familiar?
There are several striking similarities between the machine that a political savant like Daley ran, and the current administration that even a political ignoramus like Trump currently runs. One is that, as in any basically incestuous organization, there is a pecking order. In Chicago, you didn’t just decide to run as a Democrat for alderman, county clerk, commissioner, or any other public office. You got in on the ground floor, you knocked on doors, you paid your dues, and you had a political “sponsor.” Exclusion was easy. In Chicago, the dead have been known to sign nominating petitions for good machine candidates, but the board of elections is pretty picky about everybody else’s signatures. Sound familiar to Trump’s anointment of far right Trombies while trashing non loyalist incumbents? Or how about just scrapping primaries altogether in order to quell opposition?
You think that Tubby the Ewok’s Department of Justice is seriously fucked up? Well, not to a Chicagoan. We call that “old home week.” Judges in Chicago and Cook County were not appointed because of their legal expertise. They were appointed because of their campaign contributions to, and legal work for Chicago ward bosses. Those lawyers curried favor with the ward bosses, and when openings occurred, the bosses pushed their favorites for elevation to the bench. Justice in Chicago might be blind, but she sure knew what the weight of a shekel felt like on one of the trays of that scale.
Think ICE, DHS, and CBP are out of control in the Trump administration? Puh-lease, in Chicago we called those “the boys in blue.” The Chicago police department was the law enforcement arm of the Democratic party, not the city of Chicago. If you were black or brown in Chicago, that traffic stop meant a day wasted in court and a fine. But even the police had their limits. As iconic Chicago political reporter Mike Royko put it in his history of Daley titled “Boss,” “if you were white, well off and drove a nice car, the traffic cop had to be careful how he treated you, because he had no way to know if you were a friend of an alderman, in which case you could beat him over the head with his own billy club without a whimper.” But as with Trump with ICE, Daley found out that owning the law can be a double edged sword, when a flagrant police corruption scandal almost brought down his administration.
Think Trump’s administration are a bunch of petty crooks abusing their positions of authority? Oh brudder, are you a babe in the woods. Chicago city services ran on “the fix.” Your garbage pickup might be fine, but if there wasn’t a Daley sign in your front yard at election time, your old garbage can might not get replaced so quickly when it got dented and had holes. If you bought tickets to the ward bosses annual golf outing and fish fry, you could hand your check and property tax bill to your precinct captain, who would drop it off when he went downtown. If not? Take the bus, or pay the parking and sit at the assessors office half of the day in line.
Here’s my personal favorite. You think that Trump and the Russians in 2016 was a blockbuster? Shee-it! That was a mom and pop bodega operation. This is no bullshit. In Chicago, back in the day, we were blessed to have “Short Pencil Louie,” the hall of fame vote thief. And we can prove it isn’t a myth. In one of Daley’s very few close mayoral primary elections (Daley normally ran unopposed) a Chicago Tribune reporter managed to sneak into the counting room at one of the headquarters, where he managed to snap several surreptitious photos of Short Pencil Louie, bent over a table, furiously erasing X’s in the Adamowski boxes, and marking them in the Daley boxes instead. It was front page news the next day on every newsstand. And everybody in the city yawned, and flipped to the sports pages to find out how the Cubs were doing in spring training. As Sean Connery said in The Untouchables, “That’s the Chicago way.”
I hope you found my little trip down memory lane not only at least a bit entertaining, but a bit informational as well. One of the oldest sayings in the world is, “Nothing shocks me, I’ve seen it all before.” But when it comes to political shenanigans, if you’re a political junkie, and you had the privilege of growing up in one of those cities, at one of those times, then the old saying rather has the ring of truth to it.
To know the future, look to the past. before the insanity of the 2020 election, relive the insanity of the 2016 GOP primary campaign, and the general election, to see how we got to where we are. Copies of  President Evil, and the sequel, President Evil II, A Clodwork Orange are available as e-books on Amazon, at the links above. Catch up before the upcoming release of the third book in the trilogy, President Evil III: All The Presidents Fen
As someone born and raised almost all the way down on the other end of the state my only comment is that you understated Boss Daley’s rule – his machine controlled Springfield too and like other parts of the state outside Cook (and DuPage) county my own suffered at the whims of Daley. If money was wanted for something up there the rest of us were shit outta luck.
Years ago after leaving the Marines I wound up on the National Staff of the Izaak Walton League and in my work got to work with some federal Fish & Game folks from Louisiana. One of them (Dave Hall) even had a book written about him by Marc Reisner. Anyway whenever I’d hear them rail about corruption in Louisiana I’d shut them down fast by pointing out the even richer history of corruption in our home state. Looking back it seems almost like a given that a Gov. of Illinois NOT going to jail is the exception rather than the rule.
Southern Illinois (or “downstate” as we Chicagoans called everything outside Cook County) had its share of doozies, such as Paul “Shoebox” Powell who parlayed five years as secretary of state into vast wealth.
Chicago’s Democrats hadn’t corrupted the military.
L.A. had and has corruption, but not like Chicago. Here, it’s developers buying the planning commission’s okay to bulldoze more hillsides for unaffordable (to most people) “luxury” housing that’s shoddy and crowded (teeny non-master bedrooms).
And *someone* conned the people in charge of voting into buying machines where the actual recorded is a QR code, claiming it’s better than the ancient-but-working “ink-a-dot” system that’s been in use for decades. (They didn’t ask the voters first: it was presented as a done deal.)
Yeah. Breathing in Chicago under Da Mare was a patronage job. I laughed back in 2008 when the daily newspaper, the Plainly Republican (Plain Dealer), here in Cleveland glommed onto some petty misdeeds by a county commissioner and county auditor (OMG a construction company was awarded a $10,000 contract after providing the commissioner will some decorations for his backyard! Get the smelling salts, Mabel!) and started running a “County in Crisis” series claiming the “corrupt” in Cleveland was like nothing anyone had ever seen.
Oh please. I grew up in Chicago.
Anyway, they parlayed this into the idea that we had to totally change the structure of county government which they succeeded in doing with an off-off-year campaign, massive money and the help of a few Democratic traitors such as Nina Turncoat, who was in bed with the downtown corporate Republicans. (You got yourself a real “progressive” there, Bernie). The second half of that was that we’d be better off turning this new, consolidated, absolute power over to a Republican, since single-party Democratic rule had led to these “corruption” scandals. That part failed. A Democrat won this newly created super-powerful job they created to replace all the row offices and three commissioners (two of whom had no taint of scandal at all). A Republican friend of mine said the only reason Republicans hadn’t been involved in a corruption scandal in our country wasn’t because they were so pure, but be because they had no power, and that they in fact we even worse.
You also in passing make idiots of the fools on the left whose fair elections advocacy amounts to just screaming about paper ballots — possibly the most irrelevant aspect of fair elections. Paper ballots can be rigged too. I get tired of seeing this leftie CT distracting from the real issues: voter suppression, gerrymandering and big dark money.