This is a transcription of Rick Kogan's After Hours radio interview with Tom Gradel, Dick Simpson and Rick Perlstein. It is downloadable here. Perlstein's article can be read here.
Rick Kogan (host): Welcome back to After Hours. I have sitting in the studio with me Tom Gradel and Dick Simpson who have just written a book called Corrupt Illinois: Patronage, Cronyism, and Criminality. And I thought well I'm going to have them sit in here while I interview on the phone Rick Perlstein. Rick how are you?
Rick Perlstein: Oh, wow that's great to hear. A bunch of Chicago legends.
Kogan: And I don't I don't plan this show, it just falls together this way. Rick is a noted historian and a journalist and has written a number of best-selling books, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, all manner of other books. But we're here to talk about this (I found) terrifying piece in the February issue of In these Times, "How To Sell Off a City. Welcome to Rahm Emanuel's Chicago, the privatized metropolis of the future." How did you come to write this, Rick? Have you been following the adventures and misadventures of Rahm Emanuel for some time?
Perlstein: Oh yeah. I've been on the Rahm Emanuel beat for oh a good ten years now. When he was the head of the Democratic Congressional campaign committee, you'll recall the Democrats took back the Congress in 2006. There was a very obvious reason for political observers why that happened. It was because the Democrats opposed the Iraq war and the Iraq War was very, very unpopular. But there was our guy Rahm you know from Winnetka stumbling to the microphone to take credit for it, and if you actually looked at the races that the Democrats won, a heck of a lot of them are won by candidates that he refused to back. And a bunch of candidates that he went to the wall for, like Tammy Duckworth, lost.
So I've always kind of found him a phony and as we know now from the documents in the Clinton administration, a real hack too. I mean, he was really going to bat for NAFTA, and whatever it took to get votes or money for Bill Clinton whether it was in stiffer criminal penalties or fighting against immigrants, really whatever it took. And then, with the Obama administration when he was Chief of Staff, I was always stunned because he had this reputation as this tough guy, you know this bad boy, but we learned that when he was Chief of Staff his advice to Obama was never to go into any fight that he didn't know they would win in advance. So he was the guy who said we shouldn't be passing Obamacare. It took Nancy Pelosi to convince Obama to do that. So kind of everywhere down the road... and then of course he comes to Chicago...
Kogan: Did it surprise you that he ran for mayor of Chicago?
Perlstein: Did it surprise me that he ran for mayor of Chicago? I think he kind of wore out his welcome in Washington! I think he became a real toxic figure in the Obama administration, and yet he claims he always wanted to be mayor of Chicago.
Kogan: I thought he also claimed he wanted to be the first Jewish Speaker of the House, too, you know.
Perlstein: Well. That was wasn't happen going to happen. Right? I mean who knows, I don't find him very reliable.
Dick Simpson: One of the things we often say in Chicago is we send people off to Springfield and Congress to train them to come back to be aldermen. In this case Rahm came back and had a much higher office.
Perlstein: You know the mayor Addonizio of Newark said, there's no money in Congress, I want to be mayor of Newark.
Kogan: You must, in observing him - I mean you knew of course about Daley's parking meter deal and this intense kind of privatization mania -- I think you call it in here --that is germane to Chicago. There are a lot of other cities --before we talk about all the Rahm specifics -- there are a lot of other major cities who have not --
Perlstein: Yeah they've not gone down this road. The city of Atlanta sold off their water services to a privatizer. And it was such a disaster, the billing and the services, that you know, never again. Pennsylvania was thinking about a leasing a turnpike like we leased the Skyway and then they realized that it would cost people 80, 90, 100 bucks to cross the state of Pennsylvania, because basically the only reason investment bankers want these deals is they are basically given carte blanche to raise the prices. In fact that's why the Skyway is the most expensive chunk of road to drive in the United States of America.
So other cities have turned away, why has Rahm Emanuel gone for this? I think if you look to his two and a half years as an investment banker under the tutelage of the Republican, our now governor, Rauner, and realize he didn't seem to do much except lubricate these kind of deals for his buddies... And then you look at some of the new revelations. The Tribune finding that 60 of the 106 top donors got city favors. And then The International Business Times in this absolutely stunning scoop that I can't believe he's getting away with, pointing out that he's using direct voucher payments in City Hall which require no bids and no paper trail to hand out $38 million dollars to donors. And this includes things like 300 -- I'm sorry -- $1.2 million dollars to AT&T in direct voucher payments when they got no direct voucher payments before Rahm Emanuel was [mayor]. And for which their PAC rewarded him with $52,000 in donations. I think were looking at some real innovation in Chicago corruption that will be embarrassing us -- profoundly -- four or or eight years down the road, if we keep electing this guy.
Kogan: That's the voice of Rick Perlstein who has a tragic story kind of story in this issue of In These Times, which is published here: "How to Sell Off a City." Dick Simpson, talk about that, you've read the piece.
Simpson: I have read the piece. In fact, Rick,we want to try to incorporate it in in our next edition of Twenty-First Century Chicago. Yes, I thought it was a very well-researched piece. It had details about the intersection between the private campaign contributors and simply the large corporations. It fits well with the Tribune piece about two weeks ago that listed all of the favors Rahm has done for the people that indeed are his campaign contributors. But it's more than that, it's a sense that there's a sort of elite that are sharing back-and-forth power and money in Chicago, that goes beyond the individual.
Perlstein: Yeah and for Dick and Rick, I want to point this out. At least under the old forms of patronage, of you know, the kind of jobs patronage under the old Daley and pinstripe patronage under the next Daley, at least the money stayed in the city, whether it was in Bridgeport or Lasalle street. Now it's going to the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi or Aramark headquarters in Philadelphia. And the services that are delivered to return, Aramark which is a services firm, has a terrible record. They take over the janitorial services for CPS and lo and behold parents are forced to go to schools a week before school and cleanup rat dung! And the next thing Aramark does in response is fire a quarter of their work force. That's their response to inadequate services.
Kogan: It is. Rick Perlstein in your voice and you've written this some time ago, but I can still hear the outrage that you feel, and I think anybody who reads this piece will feel it, hang on the phone for a while and when we come back I have two experts who are going to talk to you too, Tom Gradel and Dick Simpson. We're on the phone with Rick Perlstein whose piece is in this month's edition of In These Times titled "How to Sell Off a City." For me, it's a chilling, chilling, chilling piece. So stay tuned. We'll come back to After Hours. This me Rick Kogan.
I'm in the studio with the Tom Gradel and Dick Simpson who have collaborated on a book called Corrupt Illinois: Patronage, Cronyism and Criminality. And it just so happens on the phone is Rick Perlstein who has a fascinating (but what a lot of people -- I posted this on Facebook and a lot of people just reacting to it saying "frightening and fascinating") it's titled "How To Sell Off a City. Welcome to Rahm Emanuel's Chicago, the privatized metropolis of the future." Rick,the argument that he and everybody else would make is "Oh we're broke so we have to do this." That argument does not wash with you does it?
Rick Perlstein: It most certainly does not. First, the TIF issue. No one knows where the $1.7 billion in uncommitted TIF money is sitting, what it's going to be used for, all the rest. The fact of the matter is that you look at something like the school closings, they're just not reliable when it comes to how they're spending money, and what the budget situation is. I mean, WBEZ did this absolute stunning report on eight serially different reasons why they're closing fifty schools, and each one of them turned out to be a lie at worst and a misperception at best: you know the schools are undercrowded, the schools are overcrowded etc. etc. etc. So you know, there's just not enough transparency for them to be able to make the claim. I mean, Rahm Emanuel claims to be running this transparent administration but when International Business Times asks them about these direct voucher payments and where they go for, they gave them absolutely nothing! I've sat in that studio where you are right now and one of your colleagues at WGN told me that when he interviewed Rahm Emanuel, one of his press secretaries was sitting next to him, the interviewer, and telling him what questions to ask. So how can we even trust this guy when it comes to a dollar or a dime or a penny?
Kogan: Dick and Tom, react to that. What are your thoughts on this notion of transparency in the Emanuel --
Dick Simpson: The Emanuel administration has dumped a lot of information out like a fire-hose into the Internet but that doesn't really interpret the data in a way that's meaningful to the citizens. The TIF is an example. There's more information on TIF than there was, but it doesn't tell you whether it's going to be spent properly. Or another example is the city clerk does indeed put up -- for the last 10 years -- has put up the divided rollcall votes of the city council, but if you want to assemble them in trying to determine how your aldermen voted say with or against Emanuel in the last three and half years you have to spend thirty, forty, or fifty hours to do it for the 67 rollcall votes.
Kogan: Rick Perlstein, talk to me for a moment about the charter school operators.
Perlstein: Well I mean when it comes to UNO, the United Neighborhood Association, we're just talking about the new boss is the same as the old boss. Basically Castro is giving his family members these contracts. Just like what happened in the good old days under Papa Daley. And we have no evidence whatsoever that charter schools work better than neighborhood public schools, and the lack of documentation that they're doing better is becoming more obvious all the time. And the only answer you can reach for is that it's creating basically a new class of sort of teddy plutocrats who want to run the education system in the city of Chicago, and exploiting the children to do so. Just like they're exploiting the preschool kids with these social impact bonds which basically use three and four year old kids as collateral for money that they're putting out the door to investment banks.
Kogan: Whew. What about Deborah Quazzo? You mention her prominently in your piece.
Perlstein: Why isn't she a household name in Chicago? No one knows who she is. Basically for our listeners out there we're talking about the seven member school board. One of the members of the school board runs an investment company that only invests in companies that make money when functions of public school systems are privatized. I mean she literally is in a position to write herself checks. And the evidence seems to suggest that that's what she's done. Companies that she is invested in I think increased their billing to Chicago Public Schools three or four times. A lot of these new contracts are for $24,999 because $25,000 or more requires some sort of accounting for how the money is spent. And she has recused herself from no school board decisions including ones she has a direct financial stake in.
Tom Gradel: I just want to say that is a perfect example of non-transparency: you deliberately make the contract so that it's under $25,000 so nobody can check on what they're for. I mean why does the guy claim he is transparent?
Kogan: Rick Perlstein, do think Rahm Emanuel -- you do say that he is sort of gliding toward reelection. Do you think he will get the 50% + 1 that he needs with this field?
Perlstein: You know, Barack Obama's visit to the city. Has that happened yet?
Kogan: No.
Perlstein: Unfortunately I'm in San Fransciso where it's 70 degrees.
Kogan: No, Thursday, five days before the election.
Perlstein: Barack Obama, who is by the way one of the big legislative supporters of housing privatization down in Springfield, coming to Chicago to "not campaign for him" might just put him over the top. And like I say, Chicagoans might really come to regret that in the years to come. There is going to be a big humiliation coming when people catch up to the kind of stuff he's up to.
Kogan: Rick Perlstein this is one of the most compelling articles I've read sometime "How To Sell Off a City. Welcome to Rahm Emanuel's Chicago, the privatized metropolis of the future." It is in this month's In These Times. Rick I can't thank you enough for coming on. Keep at it pal. And the next time you're around come on in the studio we will talk at length.
Perlstein: Anytime brother. Cheers.
Kogan: Thank you. Thanks Rick.
