Dick Simpson began a recent talk on the Chicago machine with a quote from Chicago’s first black mayor — and our first and until now only reform mayor in living memory. Harold Washington said, in the euphoria of his mayoral win in 1983, “The machine is dead, dead, dead.”

History replied, too soon, “Not quite.”

Simpson now adds, Not dead, but dying.

Dying? That depends on how you define “the machine.” Simpson is the acknowledged authority — he’s battled the machine as one of the only independent aldermen in the first Daley administration and through his later career as political strategist and academic researcher. Among his books are a history of the Chicago City Council and, with Thomas Gradel, “Corrupt Illinois.” Following an election which is already considered a historic break from machine politics, Simpson then was an obvious choice as speaker, and the machine an obvious subject, for Civic Series’ first Chicago event, “Is the Machine Dead? The future of Chicago Politics.”

We no longer have the classic urban political machine, the machine under the first Mayor Daley. That version of the machine, Simpson said, is defined by patronage hiring and promotion, favoritism, crooked contracts, and nepotism. Chicago still has all of that, but what most characterized Daley’s machine was the armies of patronage workers who could be fielded to harvest votes at election time. Before the Shakman Decrees shocked the system with court monitoring, up to 35,000 patronage workers would flood the precincts to bring in votes for the machine’s candidates. Now there are, Simpson estimates, less than 5,000 political hires in Cook County.

The old machine and the new

The machine adapted. Simpson, who was one of Lightfoot’s early endorsers, points out that she and the reform aldermen were elected without the help of patronage workers. Lightfoot’s main machine antagonist in the first round of voting, Bill Daley, had no army to field either. Instead, he waged a Washington style campaign, putting millions in campaign contributions into advertising, just as Rahm Emanuel and the second Mayor Daley had done before him.   

The new machine replaced the lost patronage workers with money. The dizzying growth of the financial sector in the global economy has brought millions into campaign coffers; TV ad buys, direct mail, pricey consultants and polling have replaced the door-to-door vote harvesting by precinct workers. Rahm Emanuel raised $24.4 million in his 2015 campaign, half of it from outside Chicago; his reform challenger Chuy Garcia had $7.1 million. Once he was mayor, Emanuel then could rely on donors who had profited from contracts, zoning approvals, appointments. The new machine has no need of a patronage army; it  amasses millions in campaign funds and uses the power of wealth to control the council and deliver their votes to benefit the big donors with big contracts.

Should we still call it “the machine”? It may look different. Chicago has changed and has changed the machine — it’s a makeover. It still has patronage workers, bribery and extortion, nepotism, crooked no-bid contracts. But what defines the machine more essentially is the rubber stamp city council doing the mayor’s bidding.

The old and the new coexisted happily under the last two mayors. In effect, the machine is defined by this alliance: On one side, the political office holders, enmeshed in ward business, council theatrics, and their personal hustles on one side; on the other,  the mayor’s office, representing Chicago’s big donors and corporate elites. The basis for the alliance? Daley and Rahm secured “rubber stamp” voting from the machine aldermen, and in exchange tolerated their sleaze, extending some political protection and doling out money and perks from their huge campaign war chests. In a gesture of neoliberal idealism, even though his mayoral career was over, Emanuel doled out $20,000 to 25 city council lackeys in the last election; in 2015 he had given aldermen almost $700 thousand. Our reform-minded billionaire governor, J. B. Pritzker, gave almost a half-million dollars to 23 candidates this year, mostly to the council’s Black Caucus. (Not to say that some aldermen, like Burke, didn’t operate their own power centers; minor satellites and puny rocks in space also have a gravitational pull.)

What will happen to that alliance under our new reform mayor? The new city council has a comfortable majority who were loyal rubber-stamp aldermen under the last mayor. Since Lightfoot named some to committee posts, we can assume the alliance will persist, though the programs may be different.

The first time as farce, and the second time … also farce

Marx quipped that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, but the second time as farce. But in Chicago, it was farce the first time also. The old machine, notoriously corrupt, was a constant source of outrage seasoned with amused contempt. And yet the machine can still surprise, now brought ludicrously low, as we see from the indictment of party boss Ald. Ed Burke.  Truly low — after all, he was caught extorting not the Four Seasons, but a Burger King. Then we enjoyed the even more farcical story of zoning boss Danny Solis, caught trading political favors for dope, massage parlor visits, and … (wait for it) … Viagra. If only Mike Royko were here to tell the story properly.

As for Rahm. … He left office humiliated by polls so low he dared not run again for mayor. But let’s be fair and give credit where it is due: Rahm Emanuel made no small plans … and he handed out no small favors in exchange for Viagra. He deserves recognition as the exemplary mayor of the new urban machine.

Retail and wholesale corruption

Two news stories on the day of Simpson’s talk point to the two sides of the modern political machine. First, the FBI raided the office of Ald. Carrie Austin. Second, grassroots activists brought suit to stop city payouts for the construction of Lincoln Yards, a widely opposed project which would appropriate up to $1.3 billion in Chicago tax dollars to the developers, Sterling Bay.

We have come to think of the machine in its old clothes, small time hustlers like Carrie Austin. But in Sterling Bay’s Lincoln Yards development we see the behemoth the machine has become — a system for legitimizing the transfer of massive wealth from taxpayers to private interests. Carrie Austin and Lincoln Yards show the machine’s two kinds of corruption. Borrowing a suitably crass metaphor, let’s call them retail and wholesale corruption.*

“Retail corruption” is narrowly transactional and, at least when prosecuted, involves a demonstrable quid pro quo. The best example is the use of “aldermanic prerogative” or “privilege” to extort cash or gifts in return for the wide range of permits and permissions aldermen control and can veto. Aldermanic prerogative allows aldermen to use these powers to block any routine business operations in their ward.

The retail corruption has been on the front pages since we learned that zoning committee chair Ald. Danny Solis was wearing a wire for the FBI for two years, embroiling who knows how many aldermen in who knows how many relatively petty one-offs, beginning with now-indicted party boss Ed Burke and now his close ally Carrie Austin. This corruption certainly mounts up to big money, but the individual transactions are truly petty when compared with monster deals like Sterling Bay.

It is retail corruption that typically sends our public servants to prison. It is easier to prosecute, while the wholesale corruption is for the most part quite legal and its players as respectable as they are important. But with wholesale corruption, we have the systemic and massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the top strata of the elites, giving billions (yes, it adds up to billions over the years) to private interests while leaving schools, health care and infrastructure starved of funds.

Wholesale corruption has rarely occupied the front pages, but grassroots activists forced it into the mayoral debates and the news with their dramatic and persistent opposition to Lincoln Yards and The 78. These two developments, offensive for so many other reasons, alone would have expropriated over a billion dollars in property tax wealth for private interests. As they were rushed through Mayor Rahm’s tame and lame-duck city council, taxpayers paid hefty tuition for an education in the complex and opaque mechanism for the deals — Tax Increment Financing (TIF).**

Retail and wholesale reform

To continue with the consumerist metaphor, corresponding to the retail and wholesale corruption, we can have retail and wholesale reform. Retail reform addresses the relatively petty corruption — the bribe taking, the extortion, the conflicts of interest that ought to be illegal (if only the legislators would pass laws against themselves).

This is the corruption Lightfoot called out in that dramatic moment in her inauguration speech, when she turned to face the alderman and warned, “Reform is here.” A fine exciting moment, but what kind of reform? She was looking in the wrong direction if she was serious about also addressing the wholesale corruption, Chicago’s “rigged economy” that makes the poor even poorer and the rich richer.

That passage of her speech shows she was talking about ending the “shady backroom deals” and “some people get[ting] their property taxes cut in exchange for campaign cash.” Will she turn to look at the agents of wholesale corruption as well, the financial and real estate elites? These are the people responsible for the parking meter deal, Lincoln Yards, and the gentrification and destruction of affordable housing that has forced hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans to leave the city. They look down with amusement from the C-suites while the Feds raid the storefronts of chiseling aldermen. Wholesale reform would face more serious opposition.

What would wholesale reform look like?  Lightfoot was very specific with plans for retail reform — from curbing aldermanic prerogative to giving the inspector general oversight over the council, contractors and city departments.

Her many promises to address inequality and poverty are more vague. Lead water pipes? She won’t replace them, she’ll “give homeowners viable options” to replace them. The taxes, fees and fines forcing thousands of Chicagoans into bankruptcy? The bond market will impose the answer — more regressive taxes to pay off the more than $700 million first-year deficit and the $1 billion in pension payments due by 2023.

What happens if Lightfoot wants to impose limits on development and force developers to build more low-income units? Or if she seriously shifts spending away from the 0.1% to invest in the “neighborhoods,” to replace the city’s lead water pipes, to reduce class size and adequately staff the schools, to reopen the mental health clinics. … What, then, will FIRE do — Finance, Insurance, Real Estate, Chicago’s ruling elites and the driving force in its economy and politics?

What will it take to defeat the real machine — the financial elites?

When Lightfoot and the progressive insurgents were carried into office by grassroots activists, they took FIRE by surprise. This was not a normal Chicago election. Think about the strange concatenation of events and forces leading up to it­ — years of social movement upheaval; the exposure of the coverup of the Laquan McDonald police murder, which exposed a systematically racist city; outrage at the election of Trump, inspiring a broad progressive movement and an upsurge of activism. Then the machine was thrown into disarray when FIRE’s champion, Mayor Emanuel, was forced out of the race to escape a humiliating defeat. Fourteen candidates confused the vote and crowded Bill Daley out of the runoff, and the FBI raid on Ald. Burke tainted Preckwinkle. All this upended Chicago’s normal machine succession, leaving Lightfoot the winner as the “reform” candidate in a change election, with six socialists joining the progressives in the city council.

You rarely have this degree of political upset without a singularly charismatic candidate capable of inspiring the alienated, non-voting majority, a candidate backed by a movement. Lightfoot, for all her brilliance, potential, despite her outsider identity in Chicago politics, she is so far still a conventional politician with an uncertain future. (To paraphrase ancient Greek wise men, Solon and Sophocles, count no politician honest until he’s dead.)

Lightfoot and the progressives haven’t yet faced the coordinated power and wealth of the real machine, the financial elites who worked through Rahm Emanuel and Daley before him.  Here is where Lightfoot’s mandate looks thin: 74% of the only 33% of registered voters, or, 24% voted for her — and that is even a much smaller share of all the eligible voters, a few hundred thousand of whom are unregistered. She won all 50 wards, that and 74% may be a mandate to take on corrupt aldermen, but FIRE is an enemy that can’t be raided by the FBI or voted out of office. (Maybe we should call it “the deep machine”!)

To take on that kind of power and bring about fundamental structural reform, a different kind of mandate is needed. Historically, such change has only happened when masses of people, all the excluded, the non-voters and the “low-information voters,” are mobilized in social movements, to wage disruptive and destabilizing campaigns that scare the ruling elites into paying their share.

What will Lightfoot do? After all, social movement mobilization is not the way even progressive politicians think, let alone act. And Lightfoot was opposed by the organized progressive movement — the teachers union, the service employees unions, and many community activists, all of whom saw her as the establishment candidate with an identity formed and marked by her career in corporate law, the US attorney’s office, and police boards that covered up police crimes. Police reform activists called her a “cop.” Will she make her peace with them, or only with the machine? Will she build the “black-brown coalition” we haven’t seen since Harold Washington’s victories, or limit herself to conventional media politics?

What will progressive activists do?

A question more to the point is what will the progressive activists do? They were able to unite against Bill Daley, but they were divided between Lori Lightfoot and Toni Preckwinkle — both candidates with very similar progressive platforms. The division at first seemed roughly between good government reformers supporting Lightfoot, with Preckwinkle supported by grassroots activists and left unions. Lightfoot had been relatively unknown to voters, but then she won the endorsements of Chicago’s exemplary and influential reformers — Dick Simpson, political strategist Don Rose, career-independents Cook County Clerk David Orr and Alderman Scott Waguespack. They certified Lightfoot’s branding as an anti-corruption candidate in a “change” election, while Preckwinkle was tarnished by her alliance with machine bosses Joe Berrios and Ed Burke. But Preckwinkle was supported by the left unions that were the backbone of Chicago’s progressive movement; she made a point of walking picket lines and showing up at the Bernie Sanders rally in Navy Pier. I argued here and here, that both candidates were flawed and ambiguous progressives, proclaiming left-wing platforms but embedded in different establishment circles and politics. Each was taking a different path to change: Preckwinkle a reformer from within the machine, Lightfoot a corporate insider as reformer.

Progressive activists differed not only in candidate preference. They also had different ideas of how to change Chicago and occupied different positions in the Chicago’s progressive networks. The good government reformers focused on institutional change and targeted corrupt officials and practices —retail corruption; the social movement reformers focused on social movement mobilization and targeted the financial elites — wholesale corruption.

In some ways this certainly oversimplifies. Both groups of activists share many of the same values when it comes to ending race and gender oppression, poverty and inequality; both want both retail and wholesale reform; both want to shift city spending from big developments to invest in the neighborhoods and schools; and both have been shaped by the left shift in Democratic Party politics nationally toward redistributive programs attacking the super-rich. Both need to mobilize the non-voting majority to advance their agendas, but some are more and some are less open to independent social movement power.

This is a strange time in Chicago politics, mixing in unprecedented proportions the normal and the weird, continuity and destabilization, alienation and activism. Lightfoot, constantly interesting, certainly offers hope. But more important to watch is how movement activists take advantage of this opening in Chicago politics. Like Lightfoot, to take on the financial elites, they need a real mandate: the support and involvement of the many, Chicago’s excluded.
—Paul Elitzik

*Borrowed: Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman distinguished “retail” and “wholesale” terrorism, the small-scale terrorism of insurgents with the large-scale terrorism conducted by states in pursuit of their foreign policy ends.

**Tax Increment Financing (TIF) is a tool to finance development, intended for blighted areas and for development that would not occur “but for” the TIF subsidy. The way it works: Property taxes in a TIF district going to the city’s schools, parks, the city and county budgets are frozen for 23 years. During that time, the value of property in the TIF district increases as development occurs, but all the taxes collected above the frozen value go into the TIF fund — vast amounts of that to the private developers. David Orr, then Cook County Clerk, reported in 2018 that over 30% of property taxes in Chicago, and over 1/4 of all properties, were in a TIF, with $660 million in tax revenue from its 143 TIFs in 2017. Common criticism: Chicago’s TIF funds are opaque and with no accountability to the public and the rubber stamp city council, with the overwhelming majority of funds going to already developed areas, including the downtown business districts and rapidly gentrifying areas; and to private interests, who would invest in development even without the TIF subsidy.

The law suit to stop the Lincoln Yards development by the Grassroots Collaborative and Raise Your Hand for Illinois Public Education charges that the TIF does not meet the two criteria required for a TIF district: that the development is in a blighted area and that development would not occur without the taxpayer subsidy. You can read their complaint for injunction here — it is one of many clear accounts of TIF abuses.