Is it too soon to judge whether Mayor Lightfoot is living up to her campaign promises? One of her first tests is contract negotiations with the Chicago Teachers Union. Photo: CTU Local 1.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot has been in office for a little over three months. Is it too soon to judge whether she is “keeping her promises,” as protesters are demanding? Her “State of the City Speech may be vague on how she will address inequality and racism. But still there is a lot to learn from the speech about her intentions — and from the way corporate media have covered it.

Here are two ways to cover her speech, two ways, of framing “the state of our city and its finances,” as she says, “who we are and, importantly, the kind of city we will be.” One way: Make the story about Chicago’s staggering deficit of $838 billion, and then the pension payments of $1 billion more in the next three years. Make the story about how closing the deficit is the first and overriding priority for … not just the mayor, but for all of us — how we all have to “join together” to solve the problems. This is the way the big three papers frame the story in their editorials and main stories on the speech — the Tribune, Crain’s Chicago Business, and even the (partly) union-owned Chicago Sun-Times. How can the mayor meet the bill, with what taxes and what cuts and savings? Taxes and savings are what the bond market is demanding, and it’s pretty much all the editorials and news stories have been talking about.

But there’s another way to frame the story. Maybe the real story is not the cruel necessity of taxes and how we all need to share the pain. Maybe it’s about who should be paying the taxes and what the revenue should be spent on. (For that story, best turn away from the big three papers and listen to Ben Joravsky, in his Reader columns and recent podcasts.)  Let’s see if the Mayor’s speech “shines a light” on that.

Who will pay? Regressive or progressive taxes?

First, how does the mayor talk about who should pay? Does she want taxes that are regressive, like the current Illinois flat income tax, property taxes, sales taxes, and the fines and fees that are bankrupting low-income Chicagoans? Or does she want to rely on progressive taxes, like the Illinois Fair Tax, the graduated income tax scheduled for a referendum in 2020?

She’s still in her “honeymoon period” — shall we then be hopeful? This is what she says about Chicago’s revenue sources:  She begins by talking about “hard choices” and the “staggeringly large budget deficit,” hammering the lesson home throughout her speech. But she also says she “fundamentally rejects” “the old playbook” of a “historically large property tax increase,” “massive borrowing,” and “short changed pensions.” She also says that the city will be “curbing … Chicago’s addiction to a regressive fines and fees system,” reforming payment plans, reducing City Sticker penalties, ending drivers license suspensions for non-moving violations, and, most important, ending water shutoffs. Chicago like most cities depends heavily on this revenue — we learned how cities are predators on their poor after Michael Brown’s murder in Ferguson.

But if she wants to give up dependence on these old, reliable machines of extraction from us plebeians, what then could be the major sources of revenue (newspeak for taxation)?

What new taxes will Lightfoot and the City Council come up with? An old story: Here, Members of Parliament are dogs, taxing everything but John Bull’s skin. Thomas Rowlandson, hand-colored etching, June 23, 1806. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, (CC0 1.0).

Lightfoot is talking about a graduated real estate transfer tax on high-end properties (selling for over $500,000); a cannabis tax; hints in the speech about a congestion tax; and a casino tax. Of these, only the real estate transfer tax is progressive, hitting the wealthy and the big corporations. It isn’t often pointed out that the cannabis tax and the casino tax are regressive, and, worse, the business model for casinos is to prey upon lower-income and minority communities, devastating families, bringing homelessness and bankruptcies.

Progressive groups call for taxing the wealthy

What news coverage of the speech leaves out is the many progressive taxes and measures Lightfoot doesn’t mention and doesn’t support. In the avalanche of articles on the budget crisis, there are a few raising the progressives measures. Here are some measures that a coalition* of  progressive groups, fairly representative of Chicago’s progressive movements, has called for, which they say would raise more than $4 billion annually. (See their “Reimagine Chicago” platform.)

A LaSalle Street tax, also called a “Robin Hood tax,” on financial transactions; a city graduated  income tax; an employee head tax, considerably higher than the one Rahm eliminated; a hike in the hotel tax; taxes on vacant commercial properties, office leases and industrial leases, luxury goods and services; and a real estate transfer tax, more progressive than the mayor’s, on home sales over $1 million. (Note that when she campaigned, she promised to dedicate the tax to homeless services, but now she qualifies the promise: It will “address” homelessness. She will use it also (mostly, you might think) to close the budget gap.

“I feel your pain!”

Lightfoot says she will explore “every reasonable option,” that means, “relieving the financial burden on those least able to afford it, AND not driving businesses out of Chicago.” And her speech is replete with empathy for “those least able to afford it.” (Someone far more cynical than I or you might say: This is the “I feel your pain” ploy of political rhetoric.)

“Clinton continued his quintessential “I feel your pain” answer.  At one point, the camera cut  to Bush, his mouth open in an incredulous smirk.” (The Week, 10.5.12)  Years later, the smirk resonates.

Lightfoot’s language is a clue. Look at her use of the first person plural, shifting from the “we” of her administration and the “we” of the rest of us; then to the inclusive we of the administration and Chicagoans; and then to “we,” the city and the state. They blur together and often you don’t know which “we” she means.

The purpose of the speech, she says in the beginning, is “to explain where we are today with the budget gap … and to ask for your help. We need to come together and find solutions to the touch problems that we face. We need to do that now. …  So where do we go from here? … I am willing to lead this charge . . . but I need you to join me.”   And she closes with the together we: “Together, let’s seize this moment to do the right thing, to chart a new course, and put our city on a stronger path and for all.”

The speech is full of the language of “hard choices” “hard options” “hard solutions” “tough problems” “tough decisions.”  When political leaders use this language, you know it means higher taxes and fees, cuts to services, layoffs, or the loss of jobs and assets to privatizations. She says that without structural change to the pensions and unless the state will lower the casino taxes, without which she says, we will need to resort to “other revenue sources —  and we all know what those are, the sources we wish desperately to avoid.” Translation: property tax increases.

Chicagoans: Expect a property tax increase — but that’s OK! “Why do you need a house? Don’t you have a first-floor room to live in? ” ‘The Friend of the people’, & his petty-new-tax-gatherer, paying John Bull a visit.” James Gillray, May 28, 1806. Courtesy The Art Institute of Chicago.   (CC0 1.0) 

Launch of a PR campaign: “Shared pain” — but when did we have shared prosperity?

The speech is a “campaign launch” to prepare us for massive taxation. Here is the argument: We’re different, we’re new, we’ve done real ethics reform and we are truly transparent, and to boot, I really understand your problems and care about you, so you can trust me when I say, there is no alternative if the state won’t bail us out (and if you don’t know already, you’ll soon learn that they won’t). So, in conclusion, dear voters, we really do have to share the pain. The city’s problems, created by the political and business class, are not their problem, they are our problem, and if the state won’t come to our rescue, then don’t blame me for raising property taxes.

So now, in a time when majorities nationwide want the rich to pay their share, the mayor makes a speech laying the groundwork for yet more regressive taxes

So now, in a time when majorities nationwide want the rich to pay their share, the mayor makes a speech laying the groundwork for yet more regressive taxes. At this point let’s remember the long list of “other revenue sources” proposed by the Imagine Chicago coalition. And there is one more source, which the Chicago Teachers Union in particular has been demanding for the schools: this year’s windfall TIF surplus.

Tax Increment Financing, or TIFs, are a mechanism for skimming the huge increases in property taxes in developing neighborhoods. Originally designed for “blighted areas,” they are used for massive developments like Lincoln Yards – $1.3 billion in our property tax revenue for that private project, revenue that is not available for our schools, parks, and other taxing bodies. Each year there are hundreds of millions in TIF surplus for the mayor to use as she likes, without City Council approval, and in funds and budgets hidden from us.

The Grassroots Collaborative and Raise Your Hand for Illinois Public Education sued the city to stop the Lincoln Yards TIF, on the grounds both that it’s racist and that it doesn’t meet the criteria for a TIF district. They claim the TIF is not in a blighted area (and that’s obvious, the area is already gentrifying) and it would be developed even without city TIF subsidy. Even worse, we just learned from leaked documents that the city and developers knew that property valuations, soon to be made public, showed that the area wasn’t blighted. Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his allies on the City Council rushed approval through before those valuations were published. Mayor Lightfoot could use this deception as a reason to change her position. But instead of agreeing with the complaint or at least remaining neutral, she sent her lawyers into court to defend one of the worst deals in the city’s history. Her lawyers won and taxpayers lost — a Cook County judge dismissed the lawsuit on grounds that the community groups had no standing.

Activists Protest Lincoln Yards Development Chicago Illinois 4-10-19. Photo by Charles E Miller via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Promises, promises …

The mayor made expansive promises in her campaign to address Chicago’s racism and inequality —but that would require massive investment. Now she is telling us the money isn’t there, and we’re learning she is uninterested in the revenue solutions posed by progressives — to tax the wealthy and the big corporations which have benefited all these years from the planned mismanagement of the city.

This is the “honeymoon period” when we are told not to expect and not to judge. And maybe the mayor sincerely wants to deliver on her promises and will show some serious effort to do so. But she has been very clear on the structural constraints posed by the massive debt, and she has shown little taste for taxing the wealthy. Without that, it is hard to see resources that could address Chicago’s big problems. Here are just a few that come to mind, all major issues in the mayoral and aldermanic campaigns:

• Staffing the schools: Teachers have up to 40 kids in a classroom, too many schools are without nurses, social workers, librarians. Watch her contract negotiations with the CTU, probably leading to a strike in October.
• Affordable housing: Chicago needs to build the units or finance non-profits, but the mayor won’t even support rent control or community benefits agreements.
• Eliminating lead in the drinking water.
• Addressing the gun violence and homicides on the South and West Sides, which cannot be solved by policing and imprisonment, but only by reversing the historic disinvestment in those communities.

Lightfoot sounded progressive on criminal justice reform in the campaign. Then, Lightfoot promised to address “the root causes of violence by revitalizing economically distressed neighborhoods, ensuring access to quality schools in every neighborhood, eliminating food and medical deserts, and providing a pathway to good jobs that pay a living wage.” But debt repayment takes precedence over the huge investment needed for such a progressive, evidence-based approach. Now, after saying “we cannot arrest our way out of our violence problem,”  she is buying into the familiar law-and-order framing of Chicago’s violence and homicide. Now she is blaming gun violence on judges and prosecutors for bail reform and “lenient” treatment of people arrested on gun charges; putting more police in the streets (as on July 4 weekend); publishing a database of everyone arrested, whether or not convicted, of unlicensed gun possession; maintaining the wildly inaccurate gang database, as well as other carve-outs in Chicago’s Welcoming City Ordinance that allow police to cooperate with ICE.

This column leans toward skepticism about Lightfoot. We hear promises and then see even seemingly progressive politicians become constrained by massive debt. Lightfoot’s supporters point out a few achievements and announced commitments, the most notable perhaps her city council reforms. Beyond that, Lightfoot has shown some efforts to serve working families. Here the biggest achievement so far is her support for the Fair Work Week Ordinance, which requires employers to give employees two weeks notice in scheduling. The restaurant industry and the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce campaigned against it. Maybe you have regular work hours, but imagine how your life would be stressed by frequent last minute calls to come into work — especially if you have kids or a sick grandma. Lightfoot continues to promise adoption of a $15/hr minimum wage in 2021. She also reiterated her campaign promises to end many abusive fines and fees — no water shutoffs, no license suspensions and lower fees for city stickers and fines, with easier repayment.

Planned mismanagement

A final note on the decades of mismanagement of city finances which landed us in this mess. It’s a mistake to attribute the city’s budget problems to corruption and incompetence. We should call it planned mismanagement, because it’s so clear that both the machine and the financial elites were benefitting: not funding the pensions; selling off city assets for a fraction of what they are worth (e.g., the parking garages and the parking meters);  corrupt contracts and outsourcing of city jobs  — like the contract with Sodexco-Magic for janitorial services that laid off unionized city workers and left the schools filthy and verminous; and the predatory fines and fees that have bankrupted so many Chicagoans. It’s a mistake to call this mismanagement and attribute it to the corruption and incompetence of bad actors in city government, when so many in the financial sector were knowingly complicit. Enriching the already wealthy while starving the schools and neighborhoods was not the crime of some bad apples in government— corrupt officials were joined at the hip with the financial elites.

FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) did just fine with a corrupt machine, and if Lightfoot manages serious ethics reform, FIRE will do just fine with “good government.”

The 2019 elections were a turning point — the machine candidates for mayor lost, socialists and progressives defeated machine aldermanic candidates and pushed others to the left. The super-rich who had financed Mayor Rahm, then Bill Daley,  put their money on Lightfoot in the runoff and are still pouring tens and hundreds of thousands into her campaign fund. Why did they prefer the “good government” outsider to the career politician, County Board President Toni Preckwinkle?  Was it because she had become a “machine” player, tainted by her ties to Ald. Ed Burke and the defeated County Assessor and party boss Joe Berrios?  I suspect they had less difficulty with Preckwinkle’s ties to corrupt machine players than with her ties to the Chicago Teachers Union and SEIU. FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) did just fine with a corrupt machine, and if Lightfoot manages serious ethics reform, FIRE will do just fine with “good government.” Now that we see how deep Chicago is in the hole, and with voters clamoring for taxing the rich, maybe even the elites are ready to move on from the old corruption. The business-friendly developments and contracts will continue, and the elites will continue to benefit at our expense, but with more transparency and more oversight … and some chunky morsels from the predators’ feast, spiced with dollops of empathy.
—Paul Elitzik

Additional notes

Cannabis tax. Here a reminder that the social movements wanted decriminalization of marijuana to reduce mass incarceration, not to raise revenue. Taxing weed means that anyone growing too much in their homes or carrying too much is going to be subject to fines and prosecution, as will consumption in public places and by minors. I think this means we can expect disproportionate drug busts in minority communities to continue to feed the prison-industrial complex. Maybe we also have to see legalization as an attack on the underground economy — low-income neighborhoods need bootlegger-growers to bring money into their communities.

Casinos. The mayor has bought the claim by the gambling industry that the Illinois law regulating casinos makes them poor investments and without changing the tax structure in their favor, they won’t build casinos in Chicago. The mayor is acting as a lobbyist for the gambling industry, asking the governor and legislature to do its bidding.

“I feel your pain” is the reporter’s description of Clinton’s answer in the debates, but the video clip is not from the debate. It is from CNN’s recording of an exchange between Bill Clinton and ACTUP activist Bob Rafsky, at the Laura Belle nightclub in New York, transcript in the NY Times, March 28, 1992.

Crains reports: Grassroots Collaborative, Raise Your Hand, Black Lives Matter Chicago, Chicago Teachers Union, SEIU Healthcare II, United Working Families, joined by some neighborhood groups and some progressive aldermen, but not by the Chicago City Council Progressive Caucus.

 “A progressive evidence-based approach” to violence and homicide. See the case against the law enforcement framing in this report from the Great Cities Institute: The Fracturing of Gangs and Violence in Chicago: A Research-Based Reorientation of Violence Prevention and Intervention Policy,  summarized in this article by John M. Hagedorn.

Mayor Lightfoot has been feuding with the county for their efforts to reduce mass incarceration through bail reform. Lightfoot is against releasing “violent offenders,” which for her includes anyone on the wildly inaccurate gang database, or people arrested for unlicensed firearms. That could mean the taxi driver, the delivery person, or the secretary taking the CTA home from work — packing for safety is a common practice in high-crime communities. Strict enforcement and prosecution of people with unlicensed guns is one of the feeders of mass incarceration.