I think Jon Stewart is hilarious,  He is a political satirist that used to host “The Daily Show” and now he will be bringing his brand of political comedy to analyze the conventions of the two party duopoly.  I heard him once say that major corporations “socialize their losses and privatize their gains”.  To socialize their losses means when they lose, like when during the housing crisis the FED enacted The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, also known as the "bank bailout of 2008" or the "Wall Street bailout" happened they would be made whole.  Under this law, our United States government passed a federal law which created federal programs to "bail out" failing financial institutions and banks. It created the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which utilized congressionally appropriated taxpayer funds to purchase toxic assets from failing banks. The funds were mostly redirected to inject capital into banks and other financial institutions while the Treasury continued to examine the usefulness of targeted asset purchases.  Wall Street and big banks made big bets on real estate and failed miserably.  Phrases like “too big to fail” were thrown around to justify the corporate welfare that they received from hard working US taxpayers.  

When they got back on their feet, what did those financial institutions do?  They privatized their gains.  They rewarded themselves, their shareholders, their titans of industry with obscene financial packages.  Just this week, we saw Elon Musk get a $56 BB pay package for Tesla.  While there will be a court battle over this package, he will undoubtedly be the first of many to test the waters and see how much pay they can squeeze from sleepy and co-opted board members.   Already the richest man in the world whose net worth is estimated at $214 BB, he has been at the government subsidy trough with an estimated $3 BB that his companies have received from various subsidy programs and contracts. This is just one of many examples of socializing losses and privatizing gains.

Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and current Mayor Brandon Johnson have floated an idea about converting failing downtown office buildings into residential with some even being affordable housing.  According to many media sources, the city of Chicago has announced plans to convert a collection of empty office buildings in the city's downtown into mixed-used and residential towers.

The initiative, called LaSalle Street Reimagined, would convert nearly 2.3 million square feet (213,676 square metres) of vacant office buildings into residences and retail in the centre of Chicago, an area known as The Loop.

The plan incentivises developers to make the conversions and locally owned businesses through grants to inhabit vacant storefronts, building lobbies and former banking floors – while incorporating housing into the towers above. The city said that it is providing "assistance" to developers who undertake these projects under the initiative and that "almost $1 billion in total investments" are being put towards the redevelopment. Wow. 1 billion dollars!

I grew up mostly in public housing in Chicago:LeClaire Courts on the southwest side.  We left North Lawndale right after the riots of 1968.  Public housing was pretty new.  We had great parks and largely two parent homes because black people could not live in all parts of the city.  It was not safe.  Unlike Wall Street though when public housing failed, there was no rescue.  When people lived in buildings that were not maintained by the landlords (largely the Chicago Housing Authority), the tenants were blamed for the conditions.  There was no outcry for massive subsidies being poured in.  What our City and Federal government said was “tear it down”!

Before we do anything in our country, we have to come up with a catchy slogan like TARP or LaSalle Street Imagined.  Under Mayor Richard M. Daley, we had the Plan for Transformation.  The only thing that transformed were thousands of people displaced from their homes.  Many were given Section 8 vouchers to leave their neighborhoods and many left the state of Illinois.  While Wall Street and LaSalle street were deemed “too big to fail”, public housing and the people that lived there were scapegoated and blamed for the failure.  It was so bad that even today, hundreds of public housing units that could be used to bring much needed affordable housing to our region, languish, sit vacant are a blight on neighborhoods.  LeClaire Courts was demolished in 2010 and still sits mostly vacant today just like most other public housing developments in our fair city.  Vacant…

This story is not just a Chicago story.  It is a national story centered on who is worth investment in our country and who isn’t.  As Chicago goes, so does the nation.  Other municipalities followed suit after Chicago made it tenable to tear down public housing.  Contrast that with LaSalle Street.  Those properties are owned by the elite of our nation.  They feel fully entitled to government funds to convert them despite the fact that these folks often work full time to skirt laws to pay a fairer share of taxes through various legal schemes.  They feel no obligation to pay taxes and contribute to the social safety net.  It would unfathomable for them to accept that despite all of their business savvy and MBA’s at the best business schools in the country that if their projects failed, they should be torn down, just like we did with public housing.  I am not suggesting that we should or shouldn’t.  I am merely pointing out the hypocrisy.

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