Russell Lee photograph, taken on Chicago’s South Side in April, 1941.
Image from this source.
Tag Archives: Chicago
Why not challenge the constitutionality of Illinois’s pension-protection clause?
Illinois citizens are expected to sit tight as the cost of meeting state and local pension obligations brings their government ever nearer to bankruptcy. Everyday, we hear of a new head-ache: how our property-taxes are likely to begin sky-rocketing, or how short-term borrowing to pay pensions will soon destroy Chicago’s bond rating, and how people are leaving the state to avoid being stuck with the costs when the looming disaster of all-out bankruptcy finally arrives. Yet no matter how painful to the citizenry, our government must rake together the money for public-pension obligations that are burgeoning.
All because a section of the Illinois constitution stipulates that, no matter what, one class of Illinois citizens can count on protections that no others can: the benefits of belonging to a state pension system must not be diminished or impaired. In the service of this constitutional provision, the state may be driven into bankruptcy and the rest of the population held forever accountable for promises that by-gone politicians irresponsibly made. The needs of ordinary citizens are being choked off so that those of lawmakers and public workers may be fulfilled.
The power of the legislature to pass laws conferring benefits on themselves and other public workers is difficult to limit. The pension ‘system’ in Illinois is an irrational bricolage of myriad laws passed over the decades. The Chicago Tribune has described it as a “convoluted mess of provisions riddled with giveaways, funding flaws, excessive borrowing, and pension holidays.” The pension code is organic in the sense that’s easy to add to, but any benefit, once added, is virtually impossible to take away.
Consequently, the state’s pension system is an unholy mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly. It pays pensions to convicted felons like Jon Burge and to brazen scoundrels who had the luck to head up our towns and public universities. It pays millions of dollars in benefits to cagey officials who correctly perceived the advantages of ‘double-dipping.’ The fact that citizens are powerless to curb the excesses of the pension system feeds hostility to it, to the detriment of many decent and deserving public employees.
Why not take a page from the four Virginians who have mounted a potentially game-changing challenge to the Affordable Care Act by questioning the meaning of just one of its phrases? Should the public welfare of Illinois be sacrificed to secure the well-being of one special class in perpetuity? In fact, the pension provision defines a special class of citizens in terms of their distinctive relationship to the state and then confers unassailable privileges on them. How can this be constitutional?
Membership in any pension or retirement system of the
State, any unit of local government or school district, or
any agency or instrumentality thereof, shall be an
enforceable contractual relationship, the benefits of which
shall not be diminished or impaired.
As matters stand, the pension provision has become the yardstick against which any pension-reform legislation must be fearfully measured. Sensible legislation has been struck down while legality of this patently odious and inegalitarian provision has gone challenged. Illinois citizens should stand up and challenge the constitutionality of the pension provision itself. A requirement that leads to such unfair and destructive outcomes is an affront to the larger purpose of government. Does it really trump every other principle of constitutional law?
Given the urgency of Illinois’s fiscal condition, this question should be engaging the state’s best legal minds.
RELATED
Susan Barsy, “The Pension Stand-Off in Illinois”
An Early Aerial View of the University of Chicago
George R Lawrence was a pioneer whose specialty was panoramic aerial photography. A native of northern Illinois, he invented the means to take high-quality “bird’s eye” views using a camera hoisted aloft with balloons or kites. His most famous photographs are of a ruined San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake, but he also photographed Chicago, its waterfront and factories, and various towns nearby. Continue reading
‘Summertime 1944’
We saw this beautiful watercolor in an antique store and were immediately drawn to its vibrant color and technique. Bob liked it because it was a ‘happy’ picture. Its subject, the lush backyard of a suburban home in summer, was familiar. The back yard turns out to have been on Chicago’s North Shore—perhaps in Lake Forest or Highland Park, where the water-colorist, Frederick William Boulton, lived for several decades.
Boulton (1904-1969) was born in Mishawaka, Indiana, the son of a Lutheran minister. He came to Chicago to study at the Art Institute and the American Academy of Art, completing his studies in Paris at the esteemed Académie Julian. Returning to Chicago, he embarked in 1923 on a career as a commercial artist with J Walter Thompson, the ad agency.
Boulton was successful, becoming an art director and vice president at JWT, while continuing to paint in his spare time. He founded the Art Directors’ Club of Chicago and was honored as art director of the year by the National Society of Art Directors in 1955. According to the Highland Park Public Library, which owns one of his paintings, he lived in the Braeside area of Highland Park from 1938 until the late 1950s.
‘Summertime 1944′ has a signed inscription—’As George remembers it. And fondly dedicated to him’— that adds interest and charm to what we see. The house and garden, if lifeless, are perfect. The grass is manicured, the landscape and patio glowing with order and beauty. Whether painted in the summer of 1944 or later, this elegant depiction of a place ‘George’ knew well may well have been intended to make him smile or laugh.
Does ‘Summertime 1944’ faithfully represent a place and a moment, or is it an idealized souvenir of a past that never was, or was no longer, as tranquil and perfect as memory deemed? Whatever the case, its paean to the joys of home still sings.
Small Red House
The South Shore Line, an electric train that runs from South Bend Indiana into Chicago, runs through some of the most beautiful places along Lake Michigan as well as some of the poorest and dirtiest. The simple beauty of the dunes, marshes, and woodlands that line the Lake alternates with a landscape that industry and humble labor of many sorts have shaped.
The train runs along the beautiful old Calumet Trail, a prairie path that has existed since Indian times, following the curve of the Lake across boundaries separating town from country, blurring the distinctions of ownership and governing. All of northern Indiana and Chicago’s southern hinterland are seamlessly joined. On both sides of the train flow thousands of properties—neat and messy, beautiful and ugly, thriving and moldering—suggesting every condition of American society.
It’s a hard train ride because so many neighborhoods are decrepit and decaying. So many places—and people—are just scraping by. Our America is not a spotless picture-perfect place. Off the political grid are thousands of people subsisting in garbage-strewn trailer parks, or living in ramshackle housing with windows missing. They are exiles from the land of opportunity. Embarrassing aberrations with no place in the progressive narrative of the world’s greatest nation, they are geniuses of survival, disciples of the art of making something out of nothing. With luck, every day is the same, where social isolation limns the horizon.
Is this the nation our forebears intended us to become?