That's the only conclusion I can draw from an article in the Chicago Tribune yesterday. Here's an excerpt.
The Tribune reported that in 1991, state law was quietly changed to allow Chicago union bosses to cash in and base their city taxpayer-funded pensions not on their wages from their city jobs but on their salaries as union bosses.
That neat little trick inflated the pensions dramatically. And who pays? When you're at a card game and you can't spot the sucker, guess what? You're the sucker.
So now, for example, Cement Workers Union boss Liberato "Al" Naimoli is receiving $157,752 in pension from a $15,264-per-year city job.
Chicago Federation of Labor retired President Dennis Gannon is receiving $158,258 for a $55,474 city job.
And Jim McNally, an officer with Operating Engineers Local 150, gets a $114,935-a-year pension for a $57,200 city job.
What's your pension like?
Back then, there was no debate. No official state analysis. And that's the way our politicians like it. And two decades later, some 23 bosses stand to draw $56 million from two weakened City of Chicago pension funds.
After I read Grotto's reporting, I was so angry I could hardly see. Desperate people are out of work in Illinois.
There are hardworking union people who never got such sweet pensions. There are coal miners in southern Illinois who've watched their fathers spit out pieces of their lungs and live on chicken feed pensions, and then the mines close and there's no work.
And there are hardworking nonunion employees who don't have such perks. And taxpayers who are getting squeezed don't have such perks. What do taxpayers get? Some get to lose their homes, and they'll be lucky to have dog food to eat if they live to be old.
But the winners will be just fine.
There's more at the link.
Y'know, if I lived in Chicago, and my rates and taxes were paying for this, I'd be tempted - mighty tempted - to hope that someone would see to it that the retirement of everybody benefiting from this boondoggle was as short as possible.
Just sayin'.
Peter
The first time I heard of Cook County was in the 1960 presidential election It was widely discussed that the stuffing of ballot boxes, and the voting of dead people, that swung the election for Kennedy. Illinois' electoral votes went to him, and thence the Presidency. The term "Cook County voting" was always a by-word for a crooked election ... and then the '68 Democratic Convention happened.
ReplyDeleteIt was bad in the '20s, and has been bad since. And I lived in Illinois in 1960, lest anyone say I'm casting aspersions from afar.
It's the most rancid cesspool of political corruption imaginable. And look what it's given us now.
Is it possible that this has been done in other places and the Chicago dipping is just the tip of the iceberg?
ReplyDeleteUnion leadership has been in bed with
ReplyDeletethe government pretty much forever; politicians figured out rather quickly that unions provided more votes than did the "robber barons." Of course the unions have become the robber barons, handing crumbs to their members while telling them how to vote.