It's a Rich Man's World

By Thomas Frank, Harper's Magazine

19 June 12

hile visiting Kansas City last December, I read a local newspaper story lamenting the gradual transformation of Missouri into a reliably Republican citadel - a red state, as we like to say. In the past, I read, Missouri had been different from its more partisan neighbors. It had been a "bellwether" state that "reflected national trends," rather than delivering votes for any particular party. But now all that was over, and I assumed the article would go on to mourn the death of judicious public reason - the tradition of giving rival arguments a hearing and testing them with that famous "Show Me" skepticism.

I was wrong. Forget the death of open-mindedness. What was actually being mourned that day in the Kansas City Star was a possible loss of advertising revenue by the state's TV stations. If Missouri was no longer a battleground state, then the two parties and their various backers would no longer fight their expensive electronic war over the airwaves between St. Louie and St. Joe, and "spending on TV ads in the state [would] plummet."

This was the concern, not some airy nonsense about ideology or polarization. That would have been a mere matter of opinion, while this was so hard and so real it came with a price tag. Here is what Missouri's creeping Kansification was going to cost: in the last election cycle, the national candidates and their allied PACs blew almost $21 million on advertising in the state. Given Missouri's tilt to the right, every last penny of a similar windfall might be lost. Even worse: Missourians had squandered their battleground status just before what promises to be the biggest-spending political year ever. As the paper noted, campaign expenditures are predicted to skyrocket between now and November.

Thanks to their own ideological stubbornness, Missourians - or, more accurately, Missouri broadcasters - will now miss out on all that. The Star reassured readers that the hammer blows inflicted on their local FCC license holders "would not be fatal." Yet the ultimate lesson was clear: political conviction comes at a high cost. Unemployment in Missouri stands at 8 percent, and like other Midwestern states, it has been hemorrhaging jobs and industries for decades. Now it has gone and turned away the one bonanza that even loser states, as long as they remain appropriately fickle, have a shot at winning: campaign finance.

When I came across the Star article, I thought it was an outlier - a strange and peculiarly tone-deaf way to approach political questions. Before long, however, I started noticing the same thing elsewhere: a tendency to describe Campaign 2012 exclusively in terms of the massive amounts being spent to sway us. Financial journalists reported dispassionately on "how to play the ad glut," with even the drooping billboard industry preparing for a jackpot. "Without This Year's Elections The Ad Business Would Be Totally Screwed," screamed a January headline on the Business Insider website.

It wasn't just the business press that was fixated on campaign spending. On the night of the Nevada caucuses, for example, CNN anchorman Don Lemon could be seen reporting on economic hardship in that state: the foreclosures, the real estate collapse, the unemployment. The network even trotted out a Nevadan homeless person to make its point. Then, a short while later, Lemon was back with one of those interactive displays for which CNN is so famous - in this case, a screen tracking outlays by candidates and outside groups on TV commercials.

After recalling what a glorious burst of spending the campaigns had rained down on other states as they prepared to vote, Lemon observed that now it was Nevada's turn. Especially given the level of suffering there, said Lemon, "you would think the candidates may say, ‘Hey, you know, we want to put a little money into the economy.'" But now it was the anchorman's duty to report a lamentable fact. Those candidates were actually spending less in long-suffering Nevada than they had elsewhere, and some of them had declined to buy even a single minute of airtime in the Sagebrush State. "They're not add[ing] to the economy here," Lemon soberly noted. The effrontery! The heartlessness!

Political advertising, in other words, might correctly be understood as a modern-day form of largesse. When presidential candidates run TV commercials assailing one another, they are playing the role of aristocrats in some medieval ceremony, throwing handfuls of coins to the toiling masses. And beside these gilded personages stand the commentariat, marveling in song and rhyme at what a fine democratic tableau it all is.

Alternatively, we might see TV commercials as one of the few stimulus programs Republicans fully endorse. They are also just about the only form of redistribution from the billionaire class that the rest of us will ever see.

A classic example of this redistribution: in Manchester, New Hampshire, one local TV affiliate broadcasts from an unusually luxurious building. According to the political journalist David Frum, the facility is known as the House That Forbes Built, in honor of the lavish ad buys made by Steve Forbes during his 1996 and 2000 campaigns for the presidency.

And what of the ads themselves? After filling us in on how much each campaign had spent, CNN's Lemon shared a few specimens. He told us exactly how many times each commercial had aired in Nevada and Florida, letting us calculate for ourselves the relative stopping power of each salvo. Did people's hatred for Gingrich continue to mount after the fiftieth time an anti-Newt commercial had run, or were there diminishing returns?

There is nothing new about money in American politics. It has twisted the people's will and infuriated the civic-minded for more than two centuries. Efforts to restrict the flow of campaign spending go back as far as 1757, when George Washington was taken to task for ladling out an excess of rum, beer, and hard cider to the voters in his district. Since then, a series of laws - including the Pendleton Act (1883), the Federal Corrupt Practices Act (1910), the Taft - Hartley Act (1947), the Federal Elections Campaign Act (1971, 1974), and the McCain - Feingold Act (2002) - have aimed to disrupt the synergy between cash and electioneering, with mixed success.

But it is different this time, in two ways.

First of all, there is the sheer size of it. Almost every modern election cycle sees a rise in spending over the previous one. This time, however, the increase will be much steeper. Think of the many outrages brought to you over the past decade or so by campaign dollars: the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth; the millions dumped by friendly billionaires into Americans Coming Together; the adventures of the Bush Pioneers, the Bush Rangers, the Bush Super Rangers. These will fade to insignificance when compared with the 2012 onslaught - the "coming tsunami of slime," as journalist Joe Hagan calls it.

How big will the tsunami be? No one knows for sure, since today we are operating under different rules than those that prevailed just four years ago. One way of gauging the wall of filth that is headed our way would be to note that the 2010 congressional elections - the first to be conducted in the wake of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision - saw more than a fivefold increase in "independent expenditures" over the previous round of midterms. And according to the Center for Responsive Politics, independent spending to date for the 2012 elections is already 108 percent above 2008 levels. At a minimum, then, we can probably look forward to twice as much slime as the last time around.

We have been heading in this direction for a while, thanks to trends in campaign finance that brought us bundlers and PACs and 527s. Citizens United upped the ante by effectively inviting corporations and unions to spend as much as they liked on "electioneering communications." What really changed, however, was neither the abolition of spending limits nor even the touching solicitude paid to corporations by equating their speech with that of human beings. No, Citizens United (and the related SpeechNow case) altered the political landscape most profoundly by ushering in the Super PAC.

What distinguishes the Super PAC from previous electoral-finance innovations is the deniability it affords the candidate it supports. By law, candidates themselves still cannot accept more than $2,500 from an individual. A Super PAC - officially designated as an "independent expenditure-only committee" - suffers from no such handicap. It can raise and spend potentially oceanic amounts of cash, as long as it maintains its nominal "independence" from a candidate. These slush funds are open to contributions from ordinary citizens, of course. But they have become the stalking horse par excellence for billionaire backers, who are now freed from the nickel-and-dime constraints of direct contribution - and much of this money, being theoretically separate from the candidates themselves, has naturally been poured into vitriolic TV ads.

It dawned on the world that we had reached a new level of campaign savagery during the weeks before the Iowa caucuses. For a brief moment, you will recall, Newt Gingrich, who had foresworn negative advertising and was behaving in an uncharacteristically congenial manner, took the lead in public-opinion polls. Almost immediately, Mitt Romney - which is to say, Mitt Romney's studiously non-aligned corporate doppelgänger, the Restore Our Future Super PAC - blitzed his slow-moving opponent with a storm of derisive TV commercials. The spots ran day and night, and utterly destroyed Gingrich's standing in the polls.

Among people who follow campaign spending closely, this seems to have been a sort of Hiroshima moment: the vast power of a new weapon was finally unveiled. Candidates like Romney could appear to be models of civic virtue, without an unkind or even combative thought in their heads, while their wealthy patrons came together to heap ridicule on their rivals, in unprecedented quantities of advertising and degrees of viciousness. All of the hand-shaking and diner-visiting and carefully drawn position papers were swept into irrelevance.

Romney's carpet-bombing assault in Iowa triggered an immediate campaign-finance arms race among the surviving candidates. But Restore Our Future retained at least a temporary edge over Gingrich's Winning Our Future and Rick Santorum's Red, White and Blue Fund and Ron Paul's Endorse Liberty. A few weeks later, Romney's secret weapon delivered the Florida primary for the former Massachusetts governor by once again outsliming the hapless Gingrich, reportedly by a factor of five to one.

The rise of the Super PACs, and the sheer volume of cash they enabled candidates to devote to mudslinging without ever dirtying their hands, was something new. Just as new, and equally alarming, was the public's cognitive capitulation to the process. Over the course of the past few decades, the power of concentrated money has subverted the professions, destroyed small investors, wrecked the regulatory state, corrupted legislators en masse, and repeatedly put the economy through the wringer. Now it has come for our democracy itself.

And by and large, we are pretty blasé about it. To judge by our society's consensus-approved commentary, the permissible modes of political discussion are narrowing by the day. We speculate about what campaign spending will do for regional economies, or how effective this or that TV commercial is at persuading voters, or (at the outermost limits of journalistic daring) whether that selfsame commercial might contain . . . errors of fact. But what this style of commentary virtually requires the media to ignore is that with every juicy morsel of hate, we are becoming more and more a rich man's country.

Newt Gingrich did not take the Iowa defeat lying down. Instead, he turned to a billionaire backer of his own, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, to fill the coffers of Winning Our Future. With his war chest thus replenished, Gingrich began running TV commercials in South Carolina that held Romney responsible for certain unsavory deeds of Bain Capital, the buyout firm he used to run. Largely on the strength of these bludgeoning ads, Gingrich proceeded to win the South Carolina primary.

Again, when I say “Gingrich,” I really mean “the Super PAC supporting Gingrich.” The candidate himself had absolutely nothing to do with the TV commercials that aired on his behalf.

And if you happened to turn on CNN the night of Gingrich's big win, you would have heard the centrist pundit David Gergen depict the whole electoral process as a kind of card game for billionaires. While Gingrich took his victory lap in a packed South Carolina ballroom, Gergen predicted his next move: "Don't you think he'll call Mr. Adelson and say, ‘Why don't you double down?'"

The line stuck in my craw. Its obvious but unspoken assumption was that the public may vote as its pleases, but that the parties to whom the candidates ultimately answer are the superrich, who will expect some returns but are also sometimes willing to invest in a sagging candidacy - buying on the dips, as it were. Even more disturbing is the unspoken but obvious follow-up question: What is the payoff for Adelson, or for any other major political contributor, if his long shot comes in?

Adelson himself spoke of Barack Obama's "quest to socialize this country" when Forbes quizzed him about his motives. He also had this to say:

I'm against very wealthy people . . . influencing elections. . . . But as long as it's doable I'm going to do it. Because I know that guys like Soros have been doing it for years, if not decades.

Foster Friess, the mutual-fund tycoon who is plowing money into Santorum's Red, White and Blue Fund, is also happy to discuss his munificence with reporters. And when he does, the conversation seems naturally to gravitate to the language of gambling, investing, and financial speculation.

When Bloomberg's Margaret Brennan interviewed Friess, for example, she persistently framed his patronage as a daring investment and potential ten-bagger. Friess, she explained, was "betting some of [his] fortune on a long shot." This was on January 27, when the campaign of the fresh-faced former Pennsylvania senator seemed to be fading. Brennan wondered whether it was time to diversify or even cash out: "At what point do you cut your losses? At what point do you perhaps back one of the front-runners?"

A couple of weeks later, after Santorum was declared the surprise victor in Iowa and pulled off upsets in Minnesota, Missouri, and Colorado, Brennan spoke to Friess again. This time she asked, "Can you say at this point that your support paid off this week?"

The constant chatter of long shots and payoffs failed to rattle Friess. He cheerfully played along, noting that although he had contributed less to Santorum than Sheldon Adelson had to Gingrich, he had secured better political results. "I'm an investor," Friess joked, "and Sheldon is a casino guy."

Not that Friess is absolutely locked in to speculative metaphors. He also describes the millions he has put behind Santorum as the result of a political casting call. Musing to ABC News in February, Friess listed the candidate's strengths as if reading from a classified ad:

Fifty-three years old, starts each morning with fifty push-ups, is the grandson of a coal miner, has demonstrated the ability to win blue-collar votes by winning in Pennsylvania, which had over one million Democratic registration advantage, and grew up on a Veterans Administration hospital grounds where his father worked, and is a fellow of modest means.

Help Wanted: Working Man with Plutocrat-Friendly Views.

I haven't even touched on the billionaires who are making such an inspiring display of class solidarity behind Mitt Romney - John Paulson, Julian Robertson, Paul Tudor Jones, a Walmart heir or two. Nor have I broached the question that is no doubt vexing many: Where are the liberal billionaires we've heard so much about? Well, as it happens, the nation's number one progressive billionaire, currency speculator George Soros, is reportedly not jazzed about the presidential campaign. He is having trouble distinguishing between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, and his failure to take a stake in anybody's Super PAC has been treated as a news story in its own right.

Many efforts to grapple with the Super PAC phenomenon bog down in the slough of advertising criticism, which offers not one but two misleading schools of thought. One holds that advertising is diabolically powerful, capable of transmitting into the minds of the millions whatever views the man with the camera chooses. The other insists that advertising is not effective in the least, that consumers are wily and evasive, always charting their own course.

The aesthetic side of advertising criticism - which would point out that Super PAC ads are, by and large, clunky tirades apparently assembled in a matter of minutes by people armed with cheap editing software - is rarely part of the journalistic conversation.

Both views are clearly inadequate in the present circumstances. The idea that our votes can simply be purchased by a large enough ad expenditure is contradicted by the burnt-out hulks of gold-plated political campaigns that litter recent history - think of the floundering Steve Forbes, or the tongue-tied Rick Perry, or eBay CEO Meg Whitman's fantastically expensive 2010 bid for the California governorship. Yet the other argument, that we remain proud and free and immune to the barrage, is such an obvious rationalization that you hear it advanced only by people who stand to benefit from the present spectacle, or are actually in some way responsible for it.

The latter category would include Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, who told an audience of lawyers back in January that "I don't care who is doing the speech - the more the merrier." Then Scalia tossed in one of the great canards of our time: "People are not stupid. If they don't like it, they'll shut it off." All power, in other words, rests in the hand with the remote. Against the scoffing majesty of the American TV viewer, all the assembled efforts of the nation's tycoons are as gentle Mediterranean waves against looming Gibraltar.

As it happens, this kind of clueless optimism contributed to the Citizens United decision itself. In the majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy declared flatly that "this Court now concludes that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption." Got that? Independent expenditures are by definition clean, because those Super PACs are, you know, independent. The court continued unfolding its wisdom:

That speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt. And the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy.

History records that when the court made this amazing proclamation on January 21, 2010, the electorate was in fact in the throes of a wrenching crisis of faith brought on by precisely the "appearance of influence or access" that Justice Kennedy declared to be impossible: namely, the apparent power of Wall Street banks to get themselves a colossal government bailout, an occurrence that had prompted rallies and protests and talk-show jeremiads by the thousand. All the judges had to do to see how wrong they were was use that all-powerful remote and turn on the damn TV.

Like the showdown we are edging toward today, the 1896 presidential contest between Republican William McKinley and Democrat William Jennings Bryan was one of apocalyptic rhetoric and superhuman fund-raising. Like Barack Obama, Bryan was perceived by a certain stratum of Americans as the representative of an alien, revolutionary tradition. With his fiery rhetoric and opposition to the gold standard, he seemed to embody the spirit of anarchism, or maybe Jacobin Paris. And so his opponents came together as a class to drown him under a deluge of money.

In his classic 1938 history of American graft, The Politicos, 1865 - 1896, Matthew Josephson tells how McKinley's campaign manager, the industrialist and über-fixer Mark Hanna, visited the New York offices of the nation's great corporations, impressing upon his listeners the "reality of the danger" and demanding from each a percentage of their capitalization in order to put down the Nebraska Robespierre. By and large, Hanna got what he asked. And with it he generated an unprecedented number of pamphlets and lithographs, fielded an army of canvassers, and caused a chorus of "the most violent class hate" to reverberate both in the press and on the lecture circuit. Some speculated that Hanna may have outspent the Democrats by twenty or thirty to one. And money prevailed, of course, even if McKinley nabbed only 51 percent of the popular vote.

Naked coercion was also used, in a pattern that might be familiar to us today. According to Josephson, job creators across the country threatened their employees with layoffs and outright closings should Bryan win.

This fall, office parks throughout the land will no doubt ring with Hanna-like calls to take America back from the hands of the Indonesian-socialist usurper. The parallel that really bothers me, though, involves yet another visit to New York City by an enterprising campaign manager. In February, spooked by the success of Romney's Super PAC - and also by a Koch Brothers conference at which conservative funders reportedly pledged $100 million to defeat the Democrats - the Obama campaign abruptly reversed its opposition to Super PACs. According to a Bloomberg News account, campaign manager Jim Messina was then dispatched to New York City to meet with representatives of the "financial services industry" and encourage them to chip in. During the meeting, the article reports, Messina "assured" his audience that the president would not "demonize Wall Street as he stresses populist appeals in his re-election campaign." In other words, to avoid the fate of William Jennings Bryan, the president is apparently prepared to jettison a large chunk of his party's legislative and rhetorical tradition.

Here we begin to see the real consequence of all this getting and spending. It's not that campaign money has direct power over the public mind - that one advertising dollar can be counted upon to yield one vote. Nor is it true that the public is invulnerable, that we judiciously weigh these messages and see through the lies. The problem is that by putting such a price tag on the White House, we have imported market logic directly into our politics. Yes, even the village socialist will still get to vote, not to mention the village idiot. But in order to be a candidate - to be the kind of person who can make those calls to billionaires and get them to "double down" - Americans will have to undergo a far more rigorous process of ideological winnowing and executive training. And anyone who isn't an absolute zealot about maximizing shareholder value will fail to make the cut.

For some, this seems to have been the idea all along; this is why companies have political action committees in the first place. In Honest Graft, a 1988 history of money in politics, Brooks Jackson tells us how Republican congressman Guy Vander Jagt barnstormed the nation in the 1970s, proselytizing for corporate PACs. This "preacher in the temple of free enterprise," as Jackson describes him, believed there would come a day when corporate money would act at long last in its rational self-interest and deliver up a Republican majority in Congress. When Honest Graft was published, however, the consummation of Vander Jagt's dream was still several years in the future. Corporate PACs had disappointed their prophet and were largely wasting their substance on the conservative faction of the Democratic Party.

To get us where we are today would take hundreds of millions more, a generation of super-lobbyists, and massive K Street projects designed to make the political market function as a political market should. What we ended up with is a system in which politicians answer primarily to the pressures of supply and demand, not to the blunt and obsolete incentives known as votes.

There is a profound irony, of course, in watching the fate of our proudly interconnected world get taken in hand by a collection of ad-hoc propaganda bureaus, broadcasting their top-down messages of gross stupidity via the definitive mass medium of yesterday, the television.

But that is the way the market rolls. There was a period in the first term of George W. Bush when the polite-thinking world trembled to hear Republican strategists talk about building a "permanent majority" - a new coalition that would make the GOP the dominant party for decades to come. It is too early to tell, of course, but perhaps with Citizens United they have finally done it. As the syndicated columnist E. J. Dionne has written, the Supreme Court decision is best understood as part of "a larger initiative by moneyed conservatives to rig the electoral system against their opponents." It will take time before the legislative follow-through is completed, of course, and Republicans will continue to lose elections here and there, but sooner or later, the weight of the money will tell. The market will speak.

Rahm Emanuel Still Hates Democracy

By Rick Perlstein, Rolling Stone

19 June 12

his past April I published a piece here I wanted to call "Rahm Emanuel Hates Democracy." Cooler heads in the front office prevailed, and the piece ended up being called "Rahm Emanuel Has a Problem with Democracy." Here's the sequel: Every time I gave a radio interview in Chicago and mentioned my original title for the piece, some newsroom guy just about kissed me.

There have been innumerable articles about Mayor Rahm Emanuel in national publications. Mine, I learned, was the only one anyone could think of that had been critical. Fawning, should-know-better journalistic big shots praised Rahm, at Rahm's word, as a model of democratic openness. Which made the guys I was talking to - guys used to having mayoral flacks feed them questions for the mayor while they were live on the radio interviewing him - just about ready to spit.

Sequels: For today's installment, a few more. I've been writing a column in this space for over five months now. My subjects - Romney, Rick Santorum, Rahm Emanuel, the NATO 3 and Cleveland 5 and Florida white supremecist Marcus Faella - where are they now?

Let's start with Rick Santorum - remember him? I wrote in March that he had half a point when he claimed President Obama was a "snob" for wanting all Americans to go to college. I pointed out that broadly speaking, liberals do oversell college, in ways that empower crooked for-profit "education" schemes, shortchange those whose best option might not be college - and, most of all, weigh down a generation of graduates with more debt than their degrees might actually be worth. New reporting has since clarified that the problem is even worse than we thought.

CNN showed that student loans have tripled over the last decade, approaching a trillion dollars, and that this was "the only form of consumer debt to substantially increase" since 2002. The AP found that half of new college graduates are either unemployed or employed in jobs that don't require the degrees for which they went in hock. And finance blogger Yves Smith put two and two together: Considering that the average college debt is around $23,000 and the average graduate's income is about $27,000, the people pushing degrees have become more and more like snake-oil salesmen.

Rebuild the Dream - the organization started by Van Jones, whom I interviewed here in April - has been curating the wreckage. Like the grandmother who begged her grandson to go to college and co-signed his student loans, which eat up much of her Social Security check, who is now harassed daily by Sallie Mae, one of whose reps helpfully suggested she get her unemployed grandson to sell his plasma to pay off the loans. Another member of the Rebuild the Dream community was told by a Sallie Mae rep of their instructions to call debtors up to eight times a day - and if they couldn't reach them, to badger their parents, even if they weren't on the loan.

Worst of all - and what Rebuild is most focused on changing - this is often not even seen as a problem, just as the way things are, or even should be. Writes Smith, "One of the distressing things in [a recent New York Times student debt] article was elected officials and even students arguing it was completely reasonable to expect students to carry most of the freight of their education."

How our nation has changed.

California became the fourth biggest economy in the world in the 1960s in large part by building a free public education system. (Joke's on them, or more precisely, on the people of California: The more expensive tuition has become and the more the system's campuses become like private universities, the lower their rankings have become). A great way to bring America back would be to make college education free for all who want it now. Scholar and social critic Adolph Reed has long maintained that you could do it for about two percent of the federal budget, which wouldn't even require an income tax increase. He even started a web site, freehighered.org, to back the campaign - but don't click the link; it's dead. Apparently his campaign didn't go very far. Blaming the victim is more the fashionable thing now.

Now Mitt. He might soon be your president. Back in January I said that predictions that Evangelicals would balk at supporting an adherent of a faith many of them don't consider Christian would come a cropper. He's since glided to imminent nomination in a party all but run by the Christian right - so that much has been borne out. What about in November? Will the vaunted Republican "base" turn out? Most decidedly. I still maintain that whether Romney is a wingnut, or of what kind, remains of little interest to movement conservatives now that they have their horse to take down the Great Satan Barack Obama. "Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line," I always keep repeating.

This week CBS News disagreed, collecting a panoply of quotes from Christian right leaders at the annual Faith and Freedom Conference in D.C. to argue that this was still an "uneasy embrace." Here's Tony Perkins: "There's some question as to can we really trust him." And here's how CBS's Brian Montopoli adds it all up: "While the social conservatives gathering for the conference have largely made peace with Romney ... they're not exactly bursting at the seams with excitement about his coming coronation at the Republican National Convention."

It never ceases to astonish me how poorly top American political journalists understand the utterly predictable ways the American right actually works.

Perkins is playing the game. For over thirty years now, "grassroots" conservative leaders like Richard Viguerie regularly showed up in the Washington Post ritually repeating, "there's some question as to can we really trust him," about both Bushes, about Bob Dole, and, yes, even about Ronald Reagan, whom they only began worshipping as a hero after his two terms were up. Questioning politicians' conservative bona fides is a strategy to build power on the organized right. (It's never done on the organized left, because the press would never play along.) Leaders like Viguerie set themselves up as popes, masters of some supposed army of uncompromising grassroots right-wing warriors whose support they could tap or hold back at will - if the man in the White House would not compromise. It's a neat little double trick: it nicely intimidates the politicians and nicely aggrandizes the movement leaders' power. It's sad how little reporters learn from watching it go down again and again.

But you, dear reader, are now in the know. Watch more such popes come out of the woodwork this summer, and watch the top-drawer journos hang on their every hustling word.

But meanwhile, back to Rahm.

Hizzoner's mighty display of authoritarian muscle, the Chicago NATO summit, came and went to decent local reviews. No matter the nearly six dozen reports of police brutality, his cops still got to enjoy a free White Sox game, mingling with the players on the field as general manager Kenny Williams praised their "bang-up job" (unfortunate language!), "an exercise in patience and tolerance at every level." Chicagoans' patience, however, may be coming to an end.

There's been an astonishing, astronomical increase in murders in the city this year, for which the mayor scapegoats liquor and convenience stores while cutting $9 million from youth anti-violence programs. Cutting is Emanuel's bag - which may be why I saw, for the first time ever in front of my tranquil Chicago building five blocks from the Obama family's home, a schizophrenic ranting and shrieking up and down the street. Rahm has closed six of the city's twelve public mental-health clinics - and his cops have been arresting people protesting on the sidewalks in front of them without charges.

He says he's doing it all for the children. Like, for instance, when he says, "Without pension reform, we'll be forced to mortgage our children's future." Because, as you know, pensions don't help support any children. Last month he traveled to the state capitol in Springfield to bark that unless he was able to increase the retirement age for public employees by five years, suspend their cost of living increases, increase their pension contributions, and give them a "choice" between having defined-benefit pensions or those failing 401(k) plans beloved of Wall Street, he'd have to increase property taxes 150 percent. And, of course, he shut out the unions from these discussions of their members' fate. That's his bag, too.

But Rahm's management style is catching up with him, too. At the end of May his appointed second in command at the Board of Education resigned - the fourth high-ranking city education official to quit in about a month, even as the city rushes to implement over a half dozen major changes to the system. Changes like lengthening the school day, which you might remember he had hoped to do without paying teachers commensurately for the increased work. But teachers, united, will never be defeated. In the beginning of June an astonishing 89.73 percent of teachers - that's 89.73 percent of the entire membership, not just the ones who showed up - voted to give their leadership permission to call a strike this fall if their demands for fair compensation and a role in the process aren't met by the city.

Don Rahm, that vaunted tough guy, appears to be quivering. "Chicago teachers deserve a pay raise," he suddenly and uncharacteristically announced the day after 4,000 teachers union members rallied downtown, sounding for all the world like the very Teacher's Union president he had told "fuck you" during earlier discussions of the work-without-pay plan. It speaks to a point I addressed to Occupy activists back in March: If you're fighting for justice, a smart, explicit, well-timed demand can move mountains.

Emanuel boondoggles multiply apace. A plan to rent bikes on the streets was left to an Oregon company, Alta Bicycle Share from whom the Commissioner of Transportation pocketed a $10,000 consulting fee shortly before receiving his city appointment. The intern who wrote the request for proposal was a former Alta employee, and was subsequently hired back by the company - which didn't have a Chicago business license when the requests for proposals began, so - voila! - the CFP was then cancelled, conveniently giving them time to get one. Their bid costs the city $9,600 per bike - compared to the less than $6,000 proposed by the experienced local vendor who was shut out.

Small potatoes, though, compared to what City Hall announced as a $7 billion "infrastructure trust" plan the mayor claims will create 30,000 jobs, repair and replace and improve streets, schools, and parks, and beam all Chicagoans to work on a brand-new commuter unicorn system powered by rainbows and laser beams. Well, not really. In actual fact, no one knows what an "infrastructure trust" is, how much it will cost, how it will be accountable to taxpapers, and how it improves upon the ain't-broke-don't-fix-it system of floating bonds that has served cities perfectly well for centuries. The announcement alone, though, was enough to charm the panties off of the New York Times as well as the city's zombie-like aldermen, all but seven of whom voted to approve the "idea."

The bright side? It may well be that Chicagoans have had enough. In my "hates democracy" rant, I wrote about Rahm's speed cameras boondoggle, in which his administration put forward made-up numbers to argue that an automatic system that happens to be made by a company with ties to his number one political crony was not about raising revenue but merely "doing the right thing for the children." Turns out only 22 percent of Chicagoans believe him. 54 percent oppose the idea outright - though the Kremlin, I mean the City Council, passed the bill 33-14 anyway. 62 percent of citizens like the idea of extending the school day - but then, before Emanuel was inaugurated, 78 percent liked it. Meanwhile, the teachers are winning the battle for public opinion: 86 percent of citizens and 92 percent of Chicago Public School parents said that "if teachers are going ot teach longer hours, they should be paid more for it." 40 percent said they "side the most" with the teachers and just 17 percent with the mayor.

Overall, the approval rating of a man some say wants to be the first Jewish president is 52 percent after his first year in office. Mayor Daley, the man whom he replaced and who invented the sort of pinstripe patronage I gave Emanuel too much credit for pioneering - thanks to the excellent local blogger Whet Moser for correcting me - consistently enjoyed ratings above 60 percent.

Except for the schizophrenic dude, it turns out, my neighbors are pretty darned sane. Saner, I'm beginning to think, than the judges overseeing our corrupt regime of entrapment-based "anti-terrorism" efforts. Last sequel: bail notes.

Here in Chicago last Tuesday, the three NATO protesters being held on $1.5 million bond were indicted under the state terrorism statute. They came to court in irons, although even accused murders usually get to go to their hearings unshackled - though we don't know why the state considered them so dangerous, since, in a move that baffled the judge, their indictment is being kept secret.

In Cleveland, two weeks back, a federal judge delayed ruling on a bond request so he could review the 50 hours of conversations recorded by their friendly neighborhood infiltrator. The charges include "use of a weapon of mass destruction." Watch this space, dear reader, to see how and whether the government will be able to convict these boys whose lawyer says "couldn't blow their noses let alone blow up a bridge": Already, the judge told the prosecution to shut off the surveillance video taken before the men's arrest because the audio quality was so bad.

And in Florida, the white supremacist leader Marcus Faella, was arrested for organizing paramilitary training for "race war" while fashioning fake "Occupy" signs as weapons with which to beat up hippies; the guy who failed in his attempt to manufacture the poison ricin walks free on $50,000 bail. I'm sure I won't be writing a sequel any time soon about him, because if I do, I'm certain there will be dead bodies involved.