ENCOURAGING DEBATE AND DEMOCRACY

July 2, 2006

Chicago Tribune

Perspective

The price of our city's efficiency: Corruption

Patrick T. Reardon, a Tribune staff reporter.

The garbage is picked up on time. In the winter, the streets are plowed quickly after each snowfall. In the spring, an army of gardeners nurtures the flowers budding in hundreds of municipal planters across the city.

Chicago is an efficient city. Decisions are made and carried out with dispatch.

That's the way it works in a one-party town, particularly in a place with one-man rule. No pesky debates to worry about. No need for compromise or consensus. No messy democracy to get in the way.

There is a price to pay, though: Corruption.

Federal prosecutors this week argued that "a corrupt clout machine" operated out of the office of one of Mayor Richard M. Daley's top aides, former patronage chief Robert Sorich. "The fix was in," said Assistant U.S. Atty. Julie Ruder.

No matter whether the jury ultimately convicts Sorich and his three co-defendants, all of them city officials, the fact remains that, for more than 70 years, the Democratic Party has run Chicago like a private ATM.

Consider this: On successive days in October 1974, then-U.S. Atty. James R. Thompson won corruption convictions of three top allies of Mayor Richard J. Daley, the father of the current chief executive--Ald. Thomas Keane (31st), Daley's City Council floor leader; Ald. Paul Wigoda (49th), Keane's law partner; and Earl Bush, Daley's press secretary.

That was at the beginning of a 26-year period during which 25 current and former aldermen were convicted of fraud, bribery and other violations of the public trust.

No alderman has been convicted since 1999, but that doesn't mean the council members have found religion. It's clear from the Sorich trial that, in recent years, federal investigators have focused their attention on the administration of the younger Daley instead.

War of words over Sorich

In his closing argument this week, Sorich's attorney, Thomas Anthony Durkin, asserted that his client was a hard-working city official who was the victim of an "intellectually dishonest" prosecution case.

But Ruder contended that the city was the victim--swindled by a scheme that Sorich allegedly oversaw in which political workers were hired while job tests, ostensibly to select the best applicants, were ignored.

"All of this was a charade, ladies and gentlemen," Ruder told the jury.

Chicago government has long been a charade. It has the appearance of the democracy that the nation's founders envisioned. But that's just window dressing.

In 1997, a team of Tribune reporters took apart a single City Council meeting, looking into the 2,749 actions by the aldermen during their 2 hours and 9 minutes in session. It entailed months of research.

The reason? Virtually every decision at the meeting was veiled in bureaucratic gobbledygook and further obscured by bombast. After all, during the meeting, the aldermen made an average of 21 decisions per minute. Hard for anyone to keep track at that speed.

The bulk of the actions taken at that meeting--it's the same now--were favors that Daley, the aldermen and, ultimately, the city were granting to Chicagoans who were friends of one sort or another, or who, grateful in the future, might one day be friends. The favors ranged from tow-away zones to tax-increment finance districts, from liquor licenses to new sidewalks.

Nothing has changed.

Aldermen and other city officials still stand up at council meetings and give the briefest of reports in the dullest of monotones, and that's it. Occasionally, there's a spasm of posturing over a particular topic (remember the banning of foie gras in April?), but any attempt to get to substantive issues is ignored or crushed.

This isn't democracy as understood by Jefferson, Adams and Madison--a government in which policy questions are debated and decided on the basis of the common good. This is government based on back-scratching.

Favors equal votes. It's a simple equation.

Lack of opposition

The Democrats have shaped Chicago into their own image because Republicans have long been an endangered species in the city. The only Republican on the council, Ald. Brian Doherty (41st), votes the Daley line with everyone else. (And note that three Republicans were among the 25 aldermen convicted of official corruption between 1973 and 1999, indicating that, instead of bucking the greedy Democratic trend, they jumped on the gravy train.)

Indeed, when it comes to the lock-step following of the Democratic party line today, there is only one exception--Ald. HelenShiller (46th). For nearly 20 years, the independent Democrat and former 1960s radical has been a lone voice in the council wilderness for public debate, discussion and decision-making.

When there's no opposition party to provide checks and balances to the ruling group, corruption is unavoidable. There was corruption in the Soviet Politburo, and in the court of Queen Elizabeth I, and in the inner circle of Roman Emperor Nero. If Attila the Hun had kept any records, they'd surely show skullduggery by his aides.

It's human nature to take what you can get.

In this vacuum, the Chicago news media has served as the closest thing to a loyal opposition on a day-to-day basis. Scores of investigations by the Tribune, the Sun-Times and other journalists have uncovered the same depressing pattern of secrecy and profit, decade after decade.

But reporters don't have subpoena powers.

So, when it comes to keeping the Democratic Party reined it--at least, a little--the series of U.S. attorneys, starting with Thompson and continuing to the present-day holder of the office, Patrick Fitzgerald, have been much more successful.

Yet news stories and criminal trials won't really make a dent, even if Fitzgerald is somehow able to net the biggest fish of all. As long as one party dominates Chicago government so completely, corruption will never disappear.

In a two-party city, debate would happen. Things wouldn't run as efficiently. That might impact garbage collection and snow removal. Not so many flowers might be planted.

But it certainly would make it harder for officeholders to lie, cheat, steal and defraud.

Maybe that would be its own kind of efficiency.

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