Brandon Johnson is driving Chicago to ruin
Earlier this year, while the establishment Chicago media was sleeping — which is usually almost all the time — Wirepoints’ Ted Dabrowski observed something quite important. According to Moody's Investors Services, the city of Detroit's credit rating is now above investment grade for the first time since it declared bankruptcy in 2013.
The Motor City stands at Baa2, while Chicago is one notch lower, at Baa3. Chicago’s Moody's credit rating is just one notch above a junk rating. Dabrowski points out Chicago has the lowest credit rating among America's big cities.
Chicago Public Schools, with a Moody's rating of Ba1, is at junk level — and in last place in credit ratings among major city school districts.
Bankruptcy is not an option for any governmental body in Illinois, state law prevents it.
For decades Detroit has been the worst-case scenario for American cities, and a common refrain among residents of other cities across America’s fruited plain is: "We don't want to end up worse than Detroit."
Chicago has plowed into that millstone regarding credit ratings.
Will Chicago become the 21st century's Detroit?
Let's hope not. If you love Chicago, or even if you are indifferent to it, you need to pay attention to developments in the city — and fight the decline. A Chicago financial collapse would be catastrophic.
Ray Bradbury, the Waukegan-born author whose best-known work is the dystopian Fahrenheit 451, remarked in a discussion about George Orwell's 1984, "The function of science fiction is not only to predict the future but to prevent it."
Prevention is the goal. Chicago, to borrow William F. Buckley, needs citizens who will stand "athwart history, yelling 'Stop!' at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who scourge it."
As any visitor to Detroit can attest, from the glitzy Renaissance Center in the reemerging downtown, to the nearly empty but once congested Brightmoor neighborhood — now mocked as Blight-more — as well as the sprawling mile-long ruins of the Packard plant, which is finally being demolished after being abandoned decades ago, the Motor City is still far from returning to its former self.
Detroit’s unhappy history is well documented.
Barack Obama biographer David Maraniss' 2015 book, Once in a Great City, offers far-reaching lessons for Chicago. Rather than directly focus on the fall of Detroit, Maraniss documents the years from 1962 through 1965, when the Motor City was seemingly on the ascent. Motown Records was a cultural powerhouse, the Big Three automakers dominated the domestic auto market — production and the iconic Ford Mustang had started — and the acrimony of the deadly 1943 riots seemed to belong to another era as Martin Luther King marched in Detroit alongside Jerome Cavanagh, the city's liberal white mayor. Detroit hosting the 1968 Olympics was seen as a near certainty.
When you drive through Chicago and marvel at the new high rises being built and the city's many cultural offerings, remember that Detroit's future seemed just as bright six decades ago.
One Chicago media outlet is repeating a Detroit mistake.
As already documented by Chicago Contrarian, Crain's Chicago Business, like Detroit leaders in the 1980s, believes that a marketing campaign is the elixir to turn things around for Chicago. Crain's Communications, the magazine's parent company is, wait for it, based in Detroit.
The SuperCity USA rebranding campaign for Detroit was a colossal failure.
Crain's Chicago Business and its podcast, the Daily Gist, are the leading media minimizers of Chicago's crime epidemic. Ignoring major problems does not make them go away. If you have a potbelly, never looking at it is not a cure.
What about voters?
Chicagoans last year elected a far-left Democrat, Brandon Johnson as mayor — and he constantly harps about race.
Coleman Young, who was mayor of Detroit from 1973-1993, was a union organizer prior to his political career, and he has even been called a closet communist. Young regularly retreated to racial divisiveness when being criticized, usually subtly, using us-versus-them rhetoric. With Young it was usually the suburbs-against-Detroit. In other words, white-against-black.
Last year, Brandon Johnson was elected Chicago's mayor. He is a former union organizer — for the far-left Chicago Teachers Union. It is fair to call Johnson a neo-Marxist, because his closest allies on the Chicago City Council are Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, his former floor leader, and the bombastic Byron Sigcho-Lopez, who Johnson tried to install as chairman of the powerful City Council Zoning Committee. Both aldermen are members of the City Council's Democratic Socialist Caucus.
Today, Johnson is embroiled in a multi-front battle over control of Chicago Public Schools. Earlier this week, in an ugly press conference at which he named, for the second time in a little more than a year, new members of the Chicago Board of Education, he compared opponents to his reckless spending plans as defenders of slavery in the South on financial grounds, stating that they believed "You can’t free black people because it would be too expensive."
Not even Coleman Young, who also held raucous press conferences, sunk that low. And while racism remains a stubborn problem in America, Young deserves some slack. He served our country during World War II, as a Tuskegee Airman, in the Jim Crow Deep South. Race relations are far better now, and, unlike the 1983 mayoral election when Chicago elected its first black mayor, Harold Washington, not only was race a non-issue in the campaign, race was rarely brought up.
"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," said Samuel Johnson, the compiler of the first English language dictionary.
Smearing critics as racists is the last refuge of a leftist politician. Mayor Johnson has dipped into that poisonous well too many times.
There are other Detroit errors Chicago needs to avoid.
Allies of Johnson with activist group Action Center on Race & the Economy (ACORN) authored a menacingly titled manifesto, First We Get the Money, that was released a few days after the mayor was inaugurated. It is a wacky, far-left wish list. One of those wishes is a wealth tax, which will include, for what the authors deem “the rich,” municipal income and commuter taxes. Fortunately, both levies require state approval.
Detroit has collected both taxes since 1963, other cities that have laid these onerous levies include Cleveland and Philadelphia, and both are failed municipalities. Tellingly, since he is a liberal, Maraniss mentions those taxes only twice in Once in a Great City. Which means that blaming all of Detroit's problems on the decline of the domestic auto industry is shortsighted.
City income and commuter taxes are prosperity killers — although moving companies understandably love them. To be fair, Brandon Johnson quickly distanced himself from First We Get the Money, but as he continues to show eagerness to search for and spend more money, even though Chicago faces a nearly $1 billion deficit for 2025, the mayor could reconsider ACORN’s outrageous demands.
Far-left politicians love big capital projects. In Detroit under Young, it was the downtown People Mover monorail boondoggle. Johnson favors the building of a new Chicago Bears stadium just steps from the glitzy one that opened just 21 years ago.
Rather than replacing Soldier Field, Chicagoans need to instead replace their mayor.
