These days, disgraced former Illinois governor Milorad
Blagojevich spends more time on trial trying to dodge
federal prison time for his laundry list of
alleged
pay-for-play misdeeds — including attempting to sell
President Barack Obama’s old U.S. Senate and — and defending his
name on
Celebrity Apprentice than watching his successor, Pat
Quinn, struggle to keep the governorship in Democratic hands
against little-known Republican state senator Bill Brady.
But even if he lands in prison, Blago Helmet Hair may be a
lot happier with his predicament than either Quinn or Brady will
be with theirs. No matter what happens in November, the winner
will be presiding over a state government that now makes
notoriously dysfunctional statehouses in California and New York
look exemplary by comparison.
The state currently owes $5 billion in back payments to
school districts, childcare centers, and other creditors,
essentially falling into the kind of default status associated
with banana republics. It’s getting worse. After months of
squabbling and backbiting, the state legislature passed a budget
without balancing a $12 billion deficit — then adjourned the
session altogether.
Declares Quinn, who is now acting unilaterally to balance the
budget: “[Legislators] didn’t want to…put their fingerprints on
any reductions or cuts whatsoever.”
The state’s long-term fiscal profile is even worse.
Taxpayers are on the hook for the teachers’ pension fund’s
deficit of least $35 billion (and as much as $70 billion,
according
to the Manhattan Institute), the worst in the nation, as well as
another $19 billion deficit for other state employee pensions.
This doesn’t include the $40 billion in
unfunded retiree healthcare benefits owed to civil servants.
Illinois’ total public employee indebtedness of $94 billion is
second only to California — despite having just a third of the
Golden State’s population.
Meanwhile the Land of Lincoln’s political culture — once
renowned for spectacular
corruption and amazing efficiency — has merely become
corrupt and incompetent. Blagojevich’s likely conviction
will mark the second consecutive conviction of an Illinois
governor in four years (Blago’s Republican predecessor, George
Ryan, remains a resident of the Federal penitentiary across the
state line in Terre Haute, Ind.). Quinn himself is taking grief
for his oversight
of the state’s secret MGT (Meritorious Good Time Credit) Push
program, which released 1,718 violent convicts as early as
six months before their time was served before it was ended
earlier this year. The Democratic nominee for Obama’s old Senate
seat, State Treasurer Alex Giannoulias, is swamped by his ties to
Broadway Bank, which was seized from his family’s control this
past April after falling into insolvency. His opponent,
Congressman Mark Kirk, has been caught puffing up his military
credentials and his work at a nursery school.
All this comes as the Illinois economy remains even more
mired in the current recession than the rest of the nation.
Unemployment remains in the double-digits with 10.4 percent of
residents still out of work. Despite the success of Chicago Mayor
Richard Daley (the Younger) in improving the city’s school
system, Illinois is one of the epicenters of the nation’s dropout
crisis; it will account for 3.5 percent of the nation’s 1.3
million dropouts this year. The statehouse isn’t all that
interested in doing much on either front: A school voucher
program championed by a onetime school choice opponent,
controversial state Senator James Meeks, was defeated earlier
this year.
Certainly Illinois’ peculiar history — especially the
competition and accommodation between Democrat city bosses in
Chicago and their Republican counterparts in the state’s central
and southern regions — accounts for some of the state’s
political, educational, economic and fiscal crises. But the
decades of thoughtless spending — fueled by decades of deal
making between public employee unions and state officials — is
as much a problem in Georgia and Iowa as it is in the Prairie
State. For taxpayers and politicians alike, Illinois’ plight
serves as a reminder that the best-managed governments eschew
overspending, forsake deal-making with civil servant unions, and
understand the critical role of government in public safety and
education.
GOOD, CLEAN GOVERNMENT HAS never been a slogan by which
Illini have lived. Joel Aldrich Matteson, a Prairie State
governor from 1853-1857, was caught attempting to cash $224,182
in counterfeit railroad scrip he claimed to have found in a
shoebox. Another governor, Lennington Small, was tried (and
acquitted) of embezzling $1 million in state funds (four of the
jurors in his trial received state government jobs after the
acquittal). Then there’s Chicago, whose big-city corruption even
made the denizens of New York City’s notorious Tammany Hall
blush. Among the Second City’s ne’er-do-wells: The Gray Wolves on
the Chicago city council — who once sold a city gas contract to
a shell company they created, then forced an existing provider to
buy from it — and infamous mayor William “Big Bill” Thompson (a
vassal of Al Capone and his Chicago Outfit).
Most of the graft and scandal was tolerable because state
and local governments — especially Chicago under the legendary
Richard Daley — were also well run. The state’s location in the
middle of the country, next to the Great Lakes and other
important tributaries, also blessed it with the kind of strong
economic growth that allows taxpayers to forgive such sins. By
the 1970s, Illinois could claim such corporate giants as
Motorola, McDonald’s and Sears, Roebuck and Co., as well as the
status as the nation’s transportation hub thanks to
always-congested O’Hare International Airport.
But in the following decades, corruption has become more
prominent in Illinois than Lincoln’s tomb or the Golden Arches.
One thousand politicians and businessmen have been convicted of
public corruption since 1970, according to a 2008
report by University of Illinois at Chicago scholars Thomas
J. Gradel, Dick Simpson and Andris Zimelis. This includes 17 Cook
County judges caught in the federal “Operation Greylord” case,
and former governor Ryan — who was convicted in 2006 for taking
bribes in exchange for awarding trucking licenses while serving
as secretary of state.
In the past couple of years, the cesspool of moral and
ethical turpitude in Springfield (and the rest of the state) has
only gotten worse. The University of Illinois system has been
mired in allegations that its officials admitted academically
unqualified children of politically connected players into its
schools. Then-university chancellor Richard Herman, for example,
allegedly forced its law school to
admit the child of one of Blagojevich’s cronies. Illinois
Democrats found themselves in an especially embarrassing
situation this past February when it was revealed that its
nominee for lieutenant governor, Scott Lee Cohen, had been
accused of allegedly holding a knife to the neck of an
ex-girlfriend. (The party hurriedly moved Cohen aside for the
daughter of former U.S. Senator Paul Simon.)
For Quinn, who has proclaimed himself a squeaky clean
politico (the same way Blago did during his ascent up the
political ladder), the early release scandal has been quite
painful. He not only found himself admitting that at least 56
ex-cons were re-arrested after their early release — he ended up
signing into law a bill ending the practice that was co-authored
by Brady, his gubernatorial rival.
Political rivalries among statehouse politicians have been
as much a fixture of the political culture as corruption.
Blagojevich’s tenure was marked by his sparring matches with
legislators such as the state house speaker, Michael Madigan, and
fellow executive branch officeholders such as Quinn (then
lieutenant governor) and speaker Madigan’s daughter, the attorney
general. In 2007, Blagojevich sued Madigan over his refusal to
caucus legislators for one of the numerous special sessions he
called that year in order to pass an $8 billion tax increase.
Quinn himself has sparred with the state comptroller, Dan Hynes,
over the budget; the brawling spilled over into the Democratic
gubernatorial nomination.
The worst forms of mismanagement have been happening for
decades, as state officials and civil servant unions have struck
deals that have enriched both sides. Within the past decade
alone, the state’s police, fire and teachers unions have won
numerous perks — including giving teachers service credit for
two years of unused sick and paid time off upon retirement and
allowing state employees to retire at age 55 with annuity
payments equal to 80 percent of final annual salary. For the
taxpayers, it has been devastating; the total pension deficit has
nearly tripled since 2005, as the deals (along with moves by
state officials to not fully fund the benefits and pension
investment losses) have come to roost.
Until recently, the state’s solution for these problems has
been to finance spending with debt. In 2003, Blagojevich
successfully floated $10 billion in bonds in hopes of paying down
the teachers’ pension deficit; it didn’t work. Earlier this year,
his successor, Quinn, proposed to float a $3.5 billion offering
to cover pension payments for the fiscal year (it didn’t fly this
time around). Since then, Quinn has actually proposed something
rare for Illinois: Cutting pension payments for teachers and
other public employees. In April, he signed a
measure that increased the age at which teachers can gain
full benefits from 62 to 67. This hasn’t exactly endeared him to
either the state’s National Education Association affiliate
(which held its nose and endorsed him) or its American Federation
of Teachers’ unit.
The move has given Quinn something of a profile in courage
amid a rather weak group of statehouse leaders (even if it hasn’t
helped him against Brady in the
polls). Whoever wins the election will have to take even
bolder action in order to keep the state from going completely
bust — and Lincoln from turning over in his grave.
