A look at what the details of Daley’s career in banking and the White House tell us about how he would run Chicago.

[For comments on the City Council candidates, see here.]

Why are Chicago’s most notorious billionaires shoveling money into Bill Daley’s mayoral campaign? His campaign literature gives us no clues, but let’s see if we can figure it out. Let’s decode his signature campaign promise to freeze property taxes, and then let’s look at his White House and banking career in a little more detail than we get from Chicago’s dailies.

But first, a note about why this election matters … and why, despite the lack of a charismatic candidate, it is not boring. Thanks largely to Chicago’s rising progressive movements, enough Chicagoans woke up to Rahm Emanuel to force him to withdraw from the race. The machine is in disarray, for the first time since they were, for too short a while, crushed by Harold Washington and his progressive coalition in 1983. This unhoped for moment leaves us with slates of progressive city council candidates, but without an authentic standard-bearer in the mayoral race. Progressives are focusing on city council candidates or divided between Toni Preckwinkle and Lori Lightfoot (more on them later). But to me Chicago’s more consequential decision is, Bill Daley or anyone but. Daley is the billionaire’s choice, and with his banking and political networks, he will be Rahm on steroids. Under Daley, a revived, neoliberal machine could now become entrenched for decades more.

“Property tax freeze”? Maybe on a cold day in hell.

Maybe you know enough to distrust candidates’ promises, but sometimes they can’t help but show their true nature even when they’re sweet-talking you. Take Bill Daley’s promise to freeze property taxes. You get that in his mailers and in his TV ad.  “Property Tax Freeze!” reads the display type. “Bill will put a moratorium on tax hikes to keep families in their homes.” But when you look closer, you see he has two messages, for his two audiences. If you’re in the elite audience of the City Club, or catch the right article in the dailies, you’ll know that he’s only promising to freeze property taxes for the first year. And he doesn’t mention that he’s only talking about freezing the portion of your property taxes that go to city government operations —only about 25% of last year’s property taxes, while the rest go to the schools and other agency budgets.

But there’s another twist: After the first year’s (partial) freeze, he vows “that any property tax increases would be met with ‘dollar-for-dollar’ cuts to city government.” Here you have the real Daley — posing as the liberal friend of the people, but in reality the neoliberal who matches tax increases for the middle class and poor, with cuts to government services.

Politicians speak in code. When Daley tells the Tribune editorial board he will raise property taxes after a year and seek a constitutional amendment to allow him to cut pensions for public workers, he’s not just talking about one tax and just one benefit for just some public employees. He’s signaling to his elite backers that he won’t tax the wealthy, while he continues taxing working families to pay off the banks and fund “growth.” “Growth,” you remember, is elite language for building up the business district, for billion-dollar developments like Lincoln Yards, maybe a give-away of a few billion to attract Amazon, and all the smaller projects for their one-percenter base.

Bill Daley and the parking meter giveaway

And let’s not forget his brother Mayor Richard M. Daley’s scandalous parking meter deal. Bill was his brother’s “closest advisor” at the time — people used to say that a lot before Richie’s approval tanked. Don Rose managed to get a reminder about “Daley’s double talk on parking meters” into the Tribune’s opinion section: Until Bill Daley announced for mayor, he still defended the giveaway — it was “good business sense.” That good business deal took 75 years of revenue for parking meters, a $10-billion dollar asset, and gave it away to banks and Abu Dhabi investors for $1.6 billion. (And Bill’s son, William Jr., helped put the deal together for Morgan Stanley.) Next time you pay your property taxes — or your rent — remember how those billions could have been used for your benefit. But that is just the kind of privatization that Bill Daley’s billionaire friends expect from him in the future.

Daley’s White House legacy — From NAFTA to Trump

Let’s look at his White House “successes.” Bill Clinton brought him in as point man for the languishing NAFTA deal, and Daley “led the charge on the hill,” giving away $20 billion in pork to get 100 undecided Congressmen to vote for it. Then, when he was commerce secretary, he was in charge of getting Congressional approval of Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China and China’s entry into the WTO — great successes for multinational corporations, not so good for working people.

Those trade deals passed Congress with more Republican than Democratic votes, because there was so much opposition from key elements in the Democratic base — labor, environmentalists, consumer advocates. This should have been a warning for the Democratic establishment, ominous for the party’s electoral future, and the ’90s saw more erosion of the Democratic base in the Midwest. There’s been good research on this since the 2016 election campaign, when Trump used these anti-labor trade deals, and Hillary Clinton’s support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to mobilize angry rust-belt voters. Here are MIT economist David Autor’s figures: 5.4 million manufacturing jobs lost between 1999 and 2007, during the period these trade deals led to offshoring and growing trade deficits.

Autor and colleagues also studied the political impact. In the period after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, the congressional districts most hit by the “China shock” went from Democratic to Republican majorities. And, according to this study, in 2016, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and North Carolina would have delivered their electoral college votes to Clinton and not Trump, if there had been 50% less Chinese import penetration in those states.

Daley and Obama’s “Grand Bargain” — “Grand” for whom?

One year of Daley’s life shows you what he stands for — his year as Obama’s chief of staff. Daley can use his Obama connection to win some black and liberal votes, but he won’t mention his role in negotiating the “Grand Bargain.” Many liberal admirers of Obama don’t remember the “Grand Bargain” he was offering Republicans — cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Social Security and Medicare were long supposed to be untouchable, and who are Democrats if they aren’t defenders of the social safety net? But powerful Wall Street interests have made privatizing those entitlements a long-term, strategic goal, an ideological fetish as well as hunger for billions in commissions, and over the years Democrats have joined Republicans in this neoliberal fantasy. Bill Daley was “the number-one advocate for a bold package including concessions on Democratic sacred cows” — cuts to Medicare and Social Security. It should be no surprise that Daley was there at the center of the failed betrayal, and he was blamed for it by White House staff. Daley’s a banker, and, to paraphrase Willie Sutton (or some reporter), bankers want to steal Social Security because that’s where the money is.

Back among the bankers

Daley spent the next decade racking up millions as president of SBC Communications and then midwest chairman of J. P. Morgan Chase. There he was put in charge of “corporate responsibility,” their Orwellian euphemism for lobbying government. He made millions in the years that led up to the housing bubble, when J. P. Morgan Chase joined the other banks to sell subprime and fraudulent mortgages, creating the housing collapse that left millions homeless while the banks bailed out with taxpayer money.

Daley also worked to oppose the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — his charge, at J. P. Morgan Chase, was of course to oppose any financial regulation. He was even on the record in a Meet the Press appearance opposing prosecution of any financial executives for their massive mortgage frauds. At that time, 2010, J. P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and the business community were attacking Elizabeth Warren, when she was proposing the CFPB. Time’s senior writer on financial matters says that Rahm Emanuel, when he was Obama’s chief of staff, called Daley to ask him for the bank’s support for the CFPB. Daley, of course, said no.

There are some details of Daley’s earnings during those years in a Tribune report. But his real wealth and its sources are hidden, because he refuses to release his tax returns, except for the two front pages from 2017.

Obama’s trade deals, and more

Obama brought Daley in as chief-of-staff to improve relations with the business community and, he hoped, Republicans. Carrying out this pro-business agenda, Daley worked well with Congressional Republicans, but not so well with Democrats. He particularly alienated Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who was enraged at Daley’s push for the “grand bargain” with Boehner and then by the free trade deals with Columbia, Panama and South Korea. Democrats were divided, with Hillary Clinton praising them and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid voting against them. The Teamsters and the AFL-CIO opposed them, with AFL-CIO President Trumka saying: “Should we say yes to the Korea [pact], which will destroy 159,000 U.S. jobs? Should we approve an agreement with Colombia, where 51 trade unionists were assassinated last year? Should we trade away even more jobs to Panama, a country that routinely tramples workers’ rights and shelters money launderers and corporate tax dodgers?”

Daley also angered women officials in the White House when he tried to exclude the requirement that church-run hospitals and universities provide contraceptive coverage to employees under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). Glenn Thrush and Carrie Budoff Brown reported HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, in particular, were furious when he made the “power play.” “It was no secret inside the West Wing that Bill Daley, a Catholic with deep connections to the church hierarchy, vehemently opposed the administration’s proposal.” The reporters also noted that Biden joined Daley in warning Obama that the proposal would “sink the president with Catholic voters.”

In another sign of Daley’s drive to accommodate business and Republicans, Obama “forced his Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw tougher ozone standards” (National Journal, Jan. 12, 2012). The Times reported a White House meeting with EPA officials and health experts: Daley “listened politely” as a pulmonologist offered statistics on deaths associated with higher ozone levels and stressed the effects of smog on even healthy children. Then Daley replied, “What are the health impacts of unemployment?” and when another supporter of tougher regulation cited polls showing public support for tougher rules, Daley “cut him off with an expletive, saying he was not interested in polls.”

Thanks to these initiatives, Obama lost some credibility with the Democratic base, and Daley was held responsible for urging him to the right.

Reporters could also look into Daley’s role in Third Way, a right-of-center think tank funded with Wall Street money. Daley became a member of its board of trustees, largely executives from the financial sector. Its position on Social Security included “raising the retirement age, means-testing the program, cutting COLAs, and funding private retirement accounts for younger workers.” (Eric Laursen, “The People’s Pension: The Struggle to Defend Social Security Since Reagan” (Oakland, 2012), p. 605.) Daley was on the board in 2013, when they were attacking the “economic populists” in the Democratic Party and feuding against Elizabeth Warren, who was calling for regulation of the banks that caused the mortgage meltdown.

And what will he do as mayor?

Daley’s ads say he is “someone we can trust.” Some of what he says sounds good, but even there notice how vague and evasive he is on details. With someone like Daley, the best way to judge is to look at his history — not the campaign biography or even the recent newspaper accounts. Look at his history in the White House and the banks — I wish Chicago reporters would — and you’ll see, revealed, his true character and his real friends. He says he is “proud to be pro-business.” Maybe after years of “pro-business” government, that pro-business identity has become the wrong kind of identity politics.
—Paul Elitzik