Dat Toddlin' Town -OR- Freed Parking

Your mama don't dance and your daddy don't rock n' roll.
"you pull into the drive-in find a place to park"...

That big drive-in theater that is Downtown Chicago has a new look.
You can actually FIND a "legal" parking place on the street. It'll cost you
dearly, but you can pay with plastic on many streets at one of the new pay stations.


Meters are still around and you'll have to pump it full of quarters to get an hour, but the fact that you can actually pull up and park like a normal person elsewhere is a whole new experience. Other places in Illinois have casinos, Downtown has Parking Meter Roulette.

Other than that, there has been zero benefit and monumentally bad public relations in Hizzoner Junior's sell-off of Chicago's parking meters. To be fair, math was never his strong suit, English neither for that matter. He has people for that.

He used to have different people, but scandal by scandal they've fallen away into the federal penal system. The replacements don't know from Old School. Dey don' have no sense of loyalty nor tradition.

What they have is Business degrees and MBAs and their uncle/aunt, brother/sister/mother/father-in-law who's "active" in the Aldemanic Wards loyal to Da Mare. They're old man Daley's foot-soldiers thrice removed. They are NOT his father's Oldsmobile. Their ideas are new, their thinking is wrapped up, not in providing service, but rather in monetizing anything and everything. Cha-Ching.

Daley II's new Masai have killed the cow to provide a feast. The meters that formerly provided a substantial daily Daley cash flow are now the property of
Morgan Stanley -who needed to replace their hedge fund, "bundled securities" Golden Goose- who've jacked the rates for prime areas, streamlined/computerized ticket writing and collections which provided no end of good will toward Da Mare and his
bright idea.

The remnant egg on da mare's face from the need to purge his patronage army of small-time crooks is now being freshly coated with egg substitute from the short-sighted, business acumen of the rookie bookies. If Da Mare hadn't always had that deer in the headlights aura about him, these new wrinkles might have been alarming.

Lost in the feeding frenzy surrounding this most recent debacle is the fact that
Chicago use to woik. Sure da boys took dere percentage off da top, but dey weren't stoopid enough to take too much, all at once. Da federal prosecutors have put an end to that. Dey provided da cure. Dey exposed da inner workings of big city politics.

They've also made Chicagoan's positively nostalgic for the Old Shackman Decree days.
This new, improved, ethically dubious, technically legal, open-faced shit sandwich is putting less food on fewer tables and simultaneously providing less and fewer constituent services at the Ward/Precinct level. It's Stoopid, but at least it's legal?

What da fuck is wrong with that picture?