Chicago’s political leadership is floating a pension buyout program as evidence it is seriously addressing the city’s thirty-six-billion-dollar unfunded pension liability, but Mark Glennon, founder of the Illinois policy research organization Wirepoints, said that the proposal moves debt from one column to another rather than reducing it, and that the broader fiscal picture facing the city continues to deteriorate across every measurable dimension. Audio here.
She’s right. The $500 campaign contribution to the alder-individual (for those non-binary entities that don’t identify as ‘human’) as a prerequisite for a zoning change is pure corruption. Ed Burke’s first indictment stems from the fact that he could send a streets and sans guy to ticket a Burger King for a driveway permit that they had already obtained.