Free Will Classic

10:23 pm, 11/14/03

Illinois: A Journey Into the Black Hole
Rod the Road Builder
Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is apparently steering my state directly into a fiscal oblivion for no reason other than to find out what's on the other side. (With any luck, a band of armed revolutionaries who worship Ronald Reagan as the Second Coming.)

There is no rhyme or reason to his policies. There is no underlying theme. It's a tangled web of layers of drunken spending and unreasonable taxes and fees, sucking up to one powerful lobby to placate another union to wreak vengeance on a political opponent, ultimately bringing more lobbyists to the door. If it were an electrical system, it would not meet fire code.

For reasons I do not understand, after being disgraced by one Chicago henchman, the people of Illinois elected another one and trusted him to fix the mess, including a $5,000,000,000 spending deficit. Getting out of the shitter was the major item in the Democratic primary. (After Ryan, the Republican campaigns were more or less a non-issue in 2002.) He promised he could bail us out, so here are some highlights of Blagojevich's conservative, frugal, penny-pinching spending policies, all revealed in merely the last 3 days:

-Blagojevich spent $1,800 in a week making three round trip flights between Chicago and Springfield on State aircraft. One, on November 4th, was for no reason other than to meet with "Hispanic leaders" (Can I be an "Ethnic-Scottish leader"? How much do you donate to an Illinois Democrat's campaign fund before you become a "leader"?) regarding giving licenses to illegal aliens. Blago intends to reimburse the state for one leg of that round-trip flight from his campaign fund, as he also attended a fund-raiser while there. Ironically, the day before leaving, Blagojevich dramatically accused legislators of a "spending orgy". (Link)

Chicago features direct Amtrak and interstate links to the capital, but noooooo. As Fake Governor of Illinois, I hereby decree that all state staff not travelling for dire emergency must travel via Amtrak when journeying through Chicago, East St. Louis, Carbondale, or Springfield, and all points inbetween. If that's not good enough, be a dedicated civil servant and pay for it yourself.

-Blagojevich stole $125 million in donations from a state-mandated independant environmental foundation in an attempt to shore up his pathetic budget plan. He is now being sued blind in federal court. (Link)

-Blagojevich has hired a dozen "local agency liasions" from loyal Party members who served in his campaign and donated large sums. (Does that mean they're "leaders", too?) They make over $600,000 in combined salary, and, when combined with benefits, over $800,000. Their job?

Transportation authorities said the liaisons' duties were to meet with local officials and speak to community groups about road projects and the distribution of state road funds. They also participate in conferences that help small business owners learn how to get state contracts.

That's not all!

At the same time, the Transportation Department is hiring public relations firms to perform some similar educational duties. One firm is getting $2.2 million over four years to publicize the reconstruction of Interstate 74 through Peoria, Ill. Contract costs for this year include $27,000 for "message development," $46,000 for "identifying groups for speaking opportunities," $25,000 for writing news releases and $17,000 to write newspaper opinion pieces and letters to editors. The agency is preparing to award a similar public relations contract for a $450 million rehabilitation of the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago and is seeking proposals for publicizing work connected to the proposed $1 billion Mississippi River bridge from Illinois to St. Louis.

They're spending millions on a massive public relations campaign so Blago can be remembered as "Rod the Road Builder". Again, briefly before hand, Blago dramatically claimed that helping political allies and wasting money was part of the "old way of doing business", and "has to change". (Let's start by having you resign, Rod.) (Link)

-The Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT, or IDiOT) has given the city of Marion, Illinois $40,000 in flowers to be planted along their part Interstate 57. (This is an attempt at the "Lion King" effect: When the evil ruler is deposed and the good ruler comes to power, we don't need to see why life is better. We are shown that the once-scarred waste has become a floral paradise, and as onlookers, assume that the rule must be wise and just, and thus, it's ruler worthy of re-election. It is also similar to the idealized "example communist farm" visitors to North Korea are allowed to tour, without being shown the death camps or the suffering workers beaten when they collapse from exhaustion.) The state has justified this by explaining that it will reduce the costs incurred by mowing the grass it will replace. It was the idea of Blago's wife, Patti, who wants to plant some $1.7 million of wildflowers at entrances to the state and along interstate interchanges, in order to make them look prettier to outsiders. (No mention about how she plans to make the 9.9% of Williamson County that is unemployed look pretty, though.) It will cost $5,000 a year to maintain in Marion alone, and after two years, the costs will be dumped on the local communities. Marion's long-standing Mayor Butler is considering rejecting the money, asking that it instead be spent on things they could actually, you know, use, like desperately needed bridge repair, pointing out that both he and his wife truly love flowers, "but we love them in appropriate places at appropriate times". (Link)

-Speaking of malfeascance on the highways, I'll make this a little homey for ya'll: Rod is also spending $57 million on Southern Illinois. Unfortunately, $51 million of that is going to expand a 6-mile stretch of Illinois Route 13 between Carterville and Marion. The "Route 13 Corridor" is the Highway to Hell, a crawling, snarling, narrow stretch of highway that is the main artery of Southern Illinois, linking Herrin, Marion, Carbondale, and, right in the center of it all, the regional airport, with a small "downtown" rising up in the juncture, a downtown of a city that doesn't really exist. It is an artery that is also about 97% clogged. Inexplicably, the Carterville-Carbondale leg of that highway is not being expanded, thus rendering the expansion rather self-defeating, and creating a potentially deadly bottleneck. Southern Illinois University (SIU, who will kick Northern Iowan ass tomorrow), for example, is on the far side of Carbondale. Many in the region are screaming that it if it isn't going to be expanded correctly, it shouldn't be expanded at all, arguing that the construction will wreak more havoc than it is worth. I'm on their side, because I used to have to cruise that stretch on a daily basis at lunch hour. The approximate rate of traffic flow was approximately that of your engine's idle. The State's full justification is apparently that the Carbondale side of the expansion runs through Crab Orchard Wilderness Refuge lands, and it'd just be too gosh-darn hard to get permits. Rod's ambitious road-building program, which he claims will pay for itself through resulting economic growth, will incur a new $1.5 billion in long-term bond debt for Illinois. (Link)

Might I also add that Blago's haircut makes him look like a casting reject from a college production of "West Side Story". Blundering leaders like Rod Blagojevich are exactly why my ancestors were willing to fight a bloody war over a half-penny tax. I can't tell if he's a sinister power-player trying to impose Chicago-based imperial rule on Illinois, or a well-meaning doof in way over his head, doing what the Chicago machine tells him "for the children". He seems to feature the same mix of insanity, denial, evil, and naivity as George III.