A Chicago Blog

Is anybody but me curious about why Jim Thompson is so interested in orchestrating a state purchase of Wrigley Field? The easy answer would be that he’s getting a kick back from someone. And this is Illinois, after all. But the question is who is kicking back to who and where. My best guess at this point is that investigation would uncover a connection between Sam Zell’s Equity Group Investments and Jim Thompson’s Winston & Strawn (for which he is still registered to lobby).

There’s good background on the financial benefits of the deal at CapitolFax.

Here’s a good topic from Cory at BoingBoing. Just as technology frees up labor to be applied to other productive pursuits, thereby creating wealth in a free economy; so also does it free up cognitive ability to be used up in other cultural projects. Clay Shirky calls this cognitive surplus. Here’s one good passage:

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.

Here’s another:

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

I love the notion of Wikipedia as being a response to decades of wasted cognitive surplus. Though I suspect that the cognitive energy going into Wikipedia isn’t coming from the sitcom but instead from the workplace. Looking at online activity stats, it is relatively clear that most people are surfing at work and not at night while avoiding sitcoms.

Here’s the latest from our friends in Reford, MI who are trying to recall the Speaker of the Michigan House, Andy Dillon, because he supported tax increases. The really sad part, beyond the fact that Dillon is using the policy to discourage recall efforts, is that we don’t even have this much democracy in Illinois.

Meanwhile, Illinois Reason is viciously attacking Ann  Leary for viciously attacking Barack Obama. Leary argues that Obama encouraged gang violence when he voted against extending the death penalty to cover gang murders. As a libertarian who is AGAINST the death penalty, I agree with Argus that Leary has gone a little too far with this post. However, IR’s insistence that there are not public presidential implications to the recent gang violence in Chicago, does quite cut it either. The violence is further indictment both of irrational hand gun laws that prevent ordinary citizens from arming themselves and a public school system that is designed to ghettoize.  Obama has supported both and should be questioned about it.

I am rethinking my position on the good Reverend Wright. My initial reaction was that Obama’s relationship with this man mattered … and in some small way it still does. But I think, ironically, the more we see of Rev. Wright, the less we are inclined to hold Obama “accountable” for what he says. Is Wright offensive? Sometimes. But he’s also an incredibly dynamic speaker who clearly inspires many, even beyond the pews of his congregation. Obama can’t sweep him under a political rug. Wright is clearly a man who can’t be swept. And I think the more we see that fact displayed on the nightly news, the more inclined we will be to give Obama the benefit of the doubt.

From the Trib Editorial Page:

Two Chicago Democrats in the Illinois Senate paid a call on the Tribune editorial board last week. When prompted, Kwame Raoul and Heather Steans told us they don’t want a recall amendment added to the state constitution. They do, however, want an amendment to kill the mandate of a flat-rate state income tax, now 3 percent for individuals. They telegraphed urgency: Any potential amendment has to clear the General Assembly by May 4 to make November’s ballot.

When Raoul and Steans finished, we asked: So you want the people of Illinois to be able to vote in November on your income tax amendment—but you oppose giving them a vote on the recall amendment?

Pause for reflection on that irony.

“That’s right,” said Raoul, looking down.

I applaud the Tribune for taking this stand. The bigger issue to me though is why only legislators can decide which issues the people get to decide. There are 17 states that allow citizens to initiate a constitutional amendment; Illinois is not one of them. But it should be.

The Illinois Campaign for Political Reform has done the state of Illinois a major service by investigating how much local governments and government agencies spend to lobby state government for tax and funding increases. It published a report this week with the following details:

* In the midst of legislative debates on mass transit reform and funding, the Chicago region’s four mass transit agencies had combined spending of nearly $700,000 with 14 different lobbying firms.
* The $223,600 devoted to four lobbying contracts by the Regional Transportation Authority was the highest of all government bodies surveyed. The Chicago Transit Authority was a close second, spending $220,173 with four lobbying firms.
* Municipal governments make up the largest segment of the government bodies with lobbyists on contract. The 43 municipal governments with lobbyists range in size from the City of Chicago (population 2,869,121 with lobbying contract payments of $127,257) to the Village of Cordova (population 651 in Rock Island County with $7,500 paid to a lobbying firm).
* Fees paid by governments to lobbyists were wide ranging. Monthly fees ran from a low of $750 to a high of $12,500. Typical payments were from $1,500 to $3,000 per month.
* There were several inconsistencies between information provided by local government bodies and lobbyist disclosure reports filed with the Secretary of State. Some governments reported having lobbyists, but the lobbyists did not report the governments as clients. Several lobbyists filed state disclosure reports listing local governments as their lobbying clients, but some of the units of government denied having any relationship with the lobbyist.
* The practice of a lobbying firm hiring other lobbying firms as subcontractors clouds the transparency of lobbyist disclosure requirements. This practice, which also is prevalent with lobbying on behalf of private sector clients, makes it difficult to discern who is lobbying for whom.

Well, I’m finally back in Chicago after more than a week on the road. I feel like Johnny Cash; I’ve been to Seattle, Denver, Reno, and Vegas. Two days in Seattle were vacation days and I will be posting pictures and video shortly.

It’s good to be home, and the spring weather reminds me that I love this place between May and October. It’s also good to know that some things don’t change. The Rezko trial is dragging more and more names into court. Today we get Bob Kjellander.

Of course, this is not surprising to anyone locally.

The local appeal of tax increases has also become somewhat nostalgic to me. So my heart was warmed by the suggestion in today’s Voice of the People that Chicago should heavily tax ammunition in order to discourage gun violence in the city. I’m all for it. Especially since that would mean Chicago would have to lift its firearm ban that currently alleges to prevent gangsters from buying handguns in the first place. Hmmm.

Ahh Chicago … the city of Big Taxes.

And I missed the Cubs. It’s great to come home to a winning streak. But that also means that next time they lose my friends will say I’m the bad luck.

If you happen to live in Washington you’re in luck. Not only do you have a kickin think tank in the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, but they have a really sharp blog called LibertyLive.