police union had previously called for an investigation<\/a> into whether Cook County State\u2019s Attorney Kim Foxx had tried to interfere in the investigation, and when the events which transpired were (bearing in the usual caveats around \u201callegedly, etc.\u201d) so egregious, with Smollett\u2019s hate crime accusation tarring a city as prejudiced and with unbelievable numbers of man-hours spent reviewing footage to find the alleged perpetrators.<\/p>\nAnd the city is one week away from an election in which the two candidates are pretty much indistinguishable (do you vote for the progressive-identifying black grandmother or the progressive-identifying black female LGBTQ person?) except that one of them (yes, Lori Lightfoot) has taken on the mantle of reform and given her supporters reason to hope that she will fight against machine politics and the other (Toni Taxwinkle, I mean, Toni Preckwinkle) trying, near as I can tell, to get voters to overlook her pop tax and view her as the one who is capable of actually running the city based on her administrative experience as Cook County Board President.<\/p>\n
And I\u2019m told that the timing of the charge-dropping is entirely unconnected to the election, and it\u2019s more of a spat between the state\u2019s attorney\u2019s office and the police, a means of sending a message of f*** you that the police will hear loud and clear.<\/p>\n
But it makes me angry.\u00a0 It is in fact a week before an election in which voters have one choice to make and that\u2019s whether to vote against the machine or not.\u00a0 (Again, these candidates are very similar, and, near as I can tell, their differences are not issues of overall principles.)<\/p>\n
This action by Foxx\u2019s office tells Chicago voters, \u201ccorruption is here to stay.\u201d\u00a0 Will that boost Lightfoot\u2019s chances?\u00a0 I worry that the opposite will happen, that Chicago voters will feel all the more resigned that everyone is corrupt, and your best bet is to be a beneficiary rather than a victim of corruption.<\/p>\n
After all \u2014 well, readers, in my Prior Life as an actuary at a consulting firm, we needed to view an anti-corruption training session annually, not so much as actuaries, but because the actuarial business was just one part of a bigger whole that was focused on insurance brokerage and dealt with global clients.\u00a0 The message that was repeated over and over again was, essentially, \u201cno, bribery is not just a \u2018cost of doing business\u2019 in various developing countries and even if you think that every else is doing it, it is not permitted for us to engage in it.\u201d\u00a0 I am also reminded of various attempts to convince teenagers that, no, everyone else is not \u201cdoing it\u201d (whether the \u201cit\u201d is having sex or drinking or doing drugs), because it matters so much whether they think of a particular behavior as simply the norm or not.\u00a0 And here, too, the same principle holds:\u00a0 the more inured Chicagoans are to corruption, the more tolerant they\u2019ll be \u2014 and given that corruption has real, tangible costs, that\u2019s a terrible outcome.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Image: \u00a0https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Wells_and_Adams_Street,_Chicago_Loop,_Chicago,_Illinois_(9181614950).jpg; By Ken Lund from Reno, Nevada, USA [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons<\/span>.\u00a0 Because, no, I don\u2019t have a picture that illustrates corruption, let alone fake hate crime attacks.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the news today at the Chicago Tribune (and pretty much everywhere else):\u00a0 \u201cMayor Emanuel blasts decision to drop charges against \u2018Empire\u2019 actor Jussie Smollett: \u2018This is not on the level\u2019.\u201d\u00a0 The State\u2019s Attorney\u2019s office claims that \u201ceh, he would have just gotten community service anyway and he\u2019s a stand-up guy who already volunteers\u201d (or, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[33,201],"class_list":["post-13271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-chicago","tag-corruption"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/p>\n