How Government Corruption Works

in the nation's political cesspool, chicago

Over at former Chicago newsman John Kass’s website there’s a revealing story about one immigrant family’s experience with government corruption. Starting in the 1880s.

James Banakis’s ancestors started out in Chicago as fruit-sellers. Life was tough and challenging. But the biggest challenge was the corrupt government.

As a child I was told of the cops, bureaucrats, and elected officials (the bad guys) who shook down my great grandfather and great uncles (the good guys). Push-carts, the most indispensable part of their livelihood, sometimes disappeared or were destroyed overnight.

But somehow they managed. And graduated from a fruit-stand to a produce shop.

In time though the fruit carts evolved into a produce shop at the South Water Market. My Grandfather would tell me of how his father and uncles would have to provide all the politicians with baskets of fruit and Christmas trees every year. The cops would help themselves to produce daily.

Hey, who is satisfied with a produce shop. How about a restaurant and a coffee distributorship!

Paying tribute continued to be a cost of doing business in Chicago only now there were now more bureaucrats, sales tax examiners, and inspectors. Most all of them conducted the city’s business with their hand in small businessman’s pocket. Relating the experience to me, my grandfather… would narrow his eyes, lean in, and call the grifters, “dirty bloodsucking sons of bitches.”

Eventually, James Banakis himself wanted to start a business.

Years later, my opening a business in the city meant hiring a facilitator to guide me through the complicated process of who to know and who to pay obtaining all the licenses and inspections. The most galling part of the corruption I experienced was the confident condescension, and arrogance of most officials I had to deal with. They knew they held all the cards, and they had the only table in the casino.

Notice the progression in the government of the City of Chicago. First, it was a simple shakedown. You paid your dues or your push-cart disappeared. You know the line: “Nice little push-cart you got there. Pity if something should happen to it.”

But in due course the graft matured into a system of “bureaucrats, sales tax examiners, and inspectors.” And now, in the truly modern era, you hire a regulation expert, a “facilitator to guide [you] through the complicated process of who to know and who to pay obtaining all the licenses and inspections.”

This, experts agree, is progress.

Now I like to analyze politics through the lens of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and his distinction of the political as between friend and enemy. You can see that in Chicago the friends of the politicians get to prey upon the people through the mechanism of regulations and inspectors. For the politicians and their friends there is no real enemy, just the small-business cows that they milk every day. But for the ordinary person it is the politicians and their supporters that are the enemy: “the grifters, ‘dirty bloodsucking sons of bitches.’”

There has to be a better way…