Corruptevich: The Legend Continues

7:42 pm, 12/12/08

Rod Blagojevich has now spent longer making it clear he has no intention of resigning than Eliot Spitzer spent deciding if he should. A few thoughts:

1. The media has barely scratched the surface of what's gone on.

Up to this point, national media coverage has revolved almost exclusively around what's contained in the federal complaint. Obviously, this is driven by the fact that it indirectly involves Barack Obama, but it does not accurately reflect how Rod Blagojevich ultimately ended up in handcuffs or what's really wrong in Illinois. The press is finally starting to dig a little deeper, but there may never be an accurate portrayal of how Blagojevich has systematically turned state government into a criminal enterprise. It's a rare man who thinks nothing of his daughter receiving a $1,500 check for her 7th birthday from a former campaign staffer, just days after giving the staffer's wife a well-paid state job (though she had, herself, failed the state's qualifying exams). Millions of Illinoisans have suffered from the crumbling of state government, and billions of public dollars, both state and federal, have been diverted and squandered in the (apparently incompetent) efforts of Rod Blagojevich to enrich himself and his associates.

Numerous top Blagojevich associates have already been indicted over the years, including Tony Rezko, slumlord and scammer of minority-business programs, and Chris Kelly, the "roofing contractor" whose sister was made head of the Bureau of Real Estate Professions five days after getting her real estate license and who Blagojevich's own father-in-law warned the world was selling state appointments for $50,000. Like Al Capone, they got him on tax evasion.

Dominic Longo, head of the hilariously-named "Coalition for Better Government" (a motley crew of Chicago Democrats with mafioso-nicknames and questionable pasts), ultimately turned on Blagojevich, accusing Blagojevich of ruining Longo's reputation, despite Longo himself being a convicted felon and vote fraudster. The cast of bizarre characters is endless, from a tire-slashing union activist to a cigar-smoking lycanthrope.

Once you get past the idea that the Blagojevich administration is a political organization, his suicidal decisions and insane policies start making a lot of sense: every policy is a confidence game, every photo op is a shakedown, and every newly-created office has an angle. Shortly after his election, a federal judge had to intervene to stop him from giving an effective monopoly over telecom service in Illinois to Mayor Daley's own brother.

In March, it was revealed that Blagojevich had allowed a million dollars to be sent to "the wrong place", an "error" that left the landmark Pilgrim Baptist Church without promised fire-reconstruction aid but which subsequently uncovered a festering pool of shady activity involving FBI informants, a "school" that had "mistakenly" received the money but which was also facing nine civil suits and owing substantial back taxes, a questionable gubernatorial pardon of one of the teachers, and, naturally, Tony Rezko.

Then there's Central Management Services, the state agency tasked with controlling costs. Their mission, as it turned out, was only taken ironically: the agency was so thoroughly corrupt that CMS employees were apparently getting fired because their crooked schemes were foiling the crooked schemes of other CMS employees. A 140-page independent audit revealed that of the six hundred million dollars in savings Blagojevich attributed to CMS, fewer than one hundred million could actually be identified, leading CMS to try and fail to accuse the Auditor-General of corruption, and Blagojevich to claim that they just had "different ways of doing business".

Despite the CMS mission, contractors, including IPAM, a subsidiary of Mesirow Financial, were found to be billing the state for things like parties to celebrate winning CMS contracts. IPAM lost their contract, but a year later, Mesirow was allowed to manage a billion dollars of bonds for the Tollway Authority, itself a hive of scum and villainy, part of a Department of Transportation seeded with unqualified Blagojevich lackeys dubbed "local agency liaisons" and used as a means for Blagojevich to give a six-figure job to his drunk-driving childhood friend Daniel Stefanski, a guy so dirty that the Teamsters, of all people, claimed Stefanski's presence had corrupted their organization.

We now know that even dying, poverty-stricken children were not beyond the grasp of Blagojevich's extortion racket, and the odds are that Republic Windows and Doors did not happen without someone, somewhere, writing a substantial check to purchase Rod's "divine intervention". How about the FamilyCare debacle, in which Blagojevich's attorneys admitted that they "can't identify participants or contact them, monitor premium payments or refund them, and don't even know how much they've collected in premium payments or where the money is"?

Legislators and auditors who got in the way of Rod Blagojevich found themselves blacklisted, as Blagojevich personally tormented his enemies by eliminating funding for anti-gang programs, floodwalls, pandemic flu preparedness, and other spending intended to protect the very lives of Illinois citizens. As part of his insane war to force the legislature to approve his budget, he even took the police power itself hostage, threatening to lay off 90% of the Illinois State Police if he didn't get his way.

Comptroller Dan Hynes even refused to sign some of Blagojevich's checks, opting to have vendors sue the state before he'd help Blagojevich squander more of the state's scarce resources on epic misadventure at a time when the state was sending as little as six bucks and change as "payments" against multi-million dollar debts owed to healthcare providers.

In a just world, forensic accountants would make their careers hunting down everyone involved in creating this disaster, and it would become a literal textbook case for corruption among criminal justice students. We shouldn't be demanding Rod Blagojevich's resignation, we should be demanding seppuku, or perhaps that he be locked up in Arkham Asylum.

2. It is entirely possible that Rod Blagojevich is completely out of his mind.

I'm hardly the first person to suggest this, but Blagojevich has exhibited frightening paranoia since early in his administration. One of his first public embarrassments was the discovery that his office was diverting Department of Corrections prison psychologists to the Orwellian business of monitoring and analyzing media coverage of his leadership. This is a man who is so obsessed with appearances that a bodyguard was tasked with carrying his hairbrush (codenamed "the football", both for it's colossal size and as a reference to the nuclear launch codes carried with the President).

This is a man who, when Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn declined to accept a security detail, simply added Quinn's security detail to his own, then purged experienced bodyguards in favor of his handpicked, inexperienced cronies. The end result was a massive detail that posed a danger to themselves and others, creating a spectacle at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, drinking on the job, chasing skirt, losing their guns, and ramming Volkswagens while doing 90 mph on the shoulder. Blagojevich brought them with him, wherever he went, even closing roads in places as far away as California (apparently without permission of the host states) so that he could speed his motorcade along and make sure everyone "knew who he is".

This is a man who opted to live in Chicago instead of the state capital, because he "didn't want his daughter to change schools". Instead, he billed taxpayers for his staff to take thousands of flights back and forth to Springfield.

The governor's budget director flies on state aircraft nearly once every 2 1/2 days as he tries to find ways to control costs.

This is a man who was repeatedly dinged for ethical concerns over his habit of putting his name in large print all over state publications and websites, at times much larger than the word "Illinois", and who spent half a million dollars on new tollbooth signs for no apparent reason other than to be able to see his own name in lights.

When Eliot Spitzer first came under scrutiny in the incident with Bruno, there were widespread rumors that he had abandoned telephone communications to avoid leaving a trail. Instead, communications were conducted by messengers. By comparison, Blagojevich, fully aware of the scope of the investigation into his administration, didn't just use phones, he even had his wife on the line. Something is certainly wrong with this picture, but whether it's simply a matter of epic vanity, arrogance, and stupidity or a legitimate mental imbalance is unclear. Blagojevich father-in-law Mell says that he's now only concerned about the welfare of his daughter and granddaughter, and he should be: they're in the hands of what may be a narcissistic sociopath.

3. For Blagojevich, this is but another scam.

You might think this is the worst week of Rod Blagojevich's life, but he appears to have accepted his inevitable indictment long ago. The FBI's complaint documents him casually discussing his "legal situation" and plotting to give himself the Senate seat both to escape impeachment from the Governor's office and to give himself access to financial and political resources currently beyond his reach that would be needed to fight the Feds.

Dragged away from his home in handcuffs, Rod Blagojevich simply posted bail and went back to work, presumably to resume criminal activity. Insane or not, his current thinking is almost certainly that he now has an unprecedented opportunity to extort money and favors from all the people he could otherwise rat out to the Feds, something he is highly motivated to do, given that he may very well be facing the prospect of dying in prison. He thought he could get Bill Gates and Warren Buffet to fund his future, so his reality is pretty distorted.

4. Barack Obama thinks that we're all stupid.

It may very well be that nothing untoward happened between the Obama and Blagojevich camps. However, Obama's attempt to make this go away by pretending that they had no idea what was going on, that they hadn't discussed it with Blagojevich, and that we're all crazy to ask makes him look like he's lying in our faces. Indeed, he is, and Philadelphia's Democratic governor Ed Rendell agrees.

Of course they had contact about this, and if the Obama administration is all about transparency and honesty, they should provide complete answers to Politico's Seven Blago Questions for Obama. Instead, they're allowing Blagojevich questions to be censored on their new "Open for Questions" site.

Frankly, if Rahm Emanuel did indeed sell Blagojevich out, he should step right up so we can give him his medal, but instead, they're badly mishandling this. Emanuel claims he's receiving daily death threats, and that's just sad. There's no reason to believe to believe Emanuel has done anything wrong. However, if Emanuel is surprised and outraged that refusing to talk to the media is causing them to intrude further into his life rather than to back off, he must be incredibly naive about what MSM journalists actually do for a living.

5. The Blagojevich arrest should not be allowed to be the end of this.

The culture of corruption that bred the Blagojevich administration does not exist in isolation on the 16th floor of the Thompson Center. It rippled in from Chicago, and has rippled out to pollute nearly every facet of state government. Resolving this requires an extensive and sustained outrage from the electorate, and whipping it up requires getting the public to understand not just that what's happening is wrong, but that it's doing harm in the lives of Illinoisans and to taxpayers nationwide. It is not acceptable, it never was, and the perpetrators should be hounded relentlessly.