OK for us to pay tax, why not OK for them too?

     Back in the Gilded Age of the 1890s, the philosophy used to justify the concentration of enormous wealth among a handful of folks was: They had earned it through hard work and moral superiority. God meant for them to be rich. Poor people, on the other hand, also deserved their lot, by being inferior, lazy and prone to vice.

     Plus, there was always the Horatio Alger path, open to all. With pluck and luck, the most humble newsboy could do a good deed, catch the eye of some titan of industry, get a job at the factory, marry the boss’ daughter. Happened all the time, in fiction.

     The social Darwinism mindset hit a rock during the Progressive Era, that asked why people born on the lower rungs of society had to live such miserable existences? Would the American dream really grind to a halt if the law forbade 12-year-old girls from working in thread factories?

     Now we’re in a New Gilded Age and social Darwinism is back. The rich do very well. We all agree on the rightness of that, just in case we ever become rich. The only question is: “How well?”

     A Republican article of faith is that the rich must be allowed to earn, earn, earn with as little interference as possible, and by doing so we all somehow benefit — I guess by being hired to clean their pools. They insist that even if they are asked to do a little bit more, they’ll just huff off to some tax haven in St. Kitts. And we tend to buy that.

     Yet if you look at past eras, taxes were much higher. During the Eisenhower years, the personal income tax rate topped out at 90 percent. Yet CEOs still showed up at the corner office. Look at other countries; they tax far more than us. Combine state and federal taxes and the U.S. hits 47.6 percent. In Denmark, it’s 60 percent. And now their middle class is earning more than ours.
     Among the many people responding to a recent column of mine were former Board of Trade President Tom Donovan, who explained why he passed a law, in 1981, to prevent financial transactions in Chicago from being taxed. To alter that, he said, "You'd have to go to Springfield and change the law." That's exactly what Rep. Mary Flowers, D-Chicago, intends to do.
     House Bill 5929 creates the Financial Transaction Tax Act, which "beginning September 1, 2014, imposes a tax on the privilege of engaging in a financial transaction on any of the following exchanges or boards of trade: the Chicago Stock Exchange, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Board Options Exchange."
     "We are merely asking that people pay their fair share of taxes," Flowers told me. "Some of these people do not. As the result of them not paying their taxes after making billions and billions of dollars, the very state we're in is crumbling apart."
     The tax is $1 for commodities contracts - say soy futures—and $2 for stocks and such, with retirement funds exempted.
     The tax is also a will-o'-the-wisp that has been pursued for years at the city, state and national levels. In 2008, the tax was suggested as a natural price to pay for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout. Nobody on Wall Street questioned the propriety of government aiding the financial sector; why, then, does putting the shoe on the other foot spell the end of capitalism as we know it?
     But maybe its probable failure, like that of Occupy Chicago, can have a benefit, can leave a lingering question: Is society the way it is now the only way a fair system could be structured? Flowers said most citizens are used to paying tax on the things they buy.
     "We do it every day," she said. "Every day, we pay taxes. If it's OK for us to pay taxes, it's OK for these traders to pay taxes."
     For instance: I bought my beef and broccoli lunch Tuesday. The bill included the 10.75 percent Chicago restaurant tax. I did not move to Liberia. If I can do that, I bet a trader can pay two bucks to buy 100 shares of TechDrek. I just can't believe financiers are really going to pull their kids out of the Latin School and move at the prospect of earning a little less.
     Here's what I find most interesting. Michael Lewis' new book, "Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt," looks at the shadowy world of high-frequency traders—those who, with the market's collusion, carved a niche in the few milliseconds between the time a stock order is placed and when it is filled. Adding a few pennies per sale created what could be a $29 billion, largely invisible industry.
     That near-scam gets only a cluck of approval from financial sorts—noblesse oblige, I suppose. Yet direct those same pennies toward the state to keep it from collapsing and you're anti-American. I just don't get it.

    

At least Billy Graham never embraced Stalin

     Let's be clear.
     I wasn't sorry about the amazing progress that the United States has made regarding gay rights over the past few years.

     A triumph for human dignity, a breakthrough accomplished far sooner than most would have guessed it might possibly occur.

     But I'm also a newspaper columnist, and one thought did cross my mind, just a few days ago, while gazing at an empty screen: as welcome as it is that all decent people suddenly realized it's cruel to oppress GLBT individuals and their families based on nothing more than musty theology, that does pluck one arrow out of my quiver. Good for society; not so good for those in the opinion business.
    Okay, I know. Boo hoo, it's like a medical writer complaining, after they cure cancer, because battling the disease was so interesting.
    So I don't welcome the news that burying the issue might be a tad premature. That it's too early to tuck away the issue on the shelf of dead social questions, along with Free Silver and the 8-hour workday.

Rev. Billy Graham

Rev. Franklin Graham

    On the other hand, I'm happy to be able to point out this: No sooner did I stand, pouting, over the loss of an issue, then good old Rev. Franklin Graham, Rev. Billy Graham's son, stumbled out of his Appalachian shack (or, more likely, mansion) lets out a howl and starts blowing kisses toward ... ready, wait for it ... Vladimir Putin, who, when he isn't seizing the land of his independent neighbors and denouncing the United States, is oppressing and murdering gay people in Russia.

    In a column in the Washington Post Monday titled "Franklin Graham's detestable anti-gay statements," Jonathan Capehart shines a flashlight into the well of a Graham op-ed from the end of February, where the evangelist muses how America once "held the moral high ground," but now that has been snatched by Putin who, despite being a godless communist, at least has the moral sense to protect children from the evil designs of homosexuals posing as their parents. Graham writes:

    Isn’t it sad, though, that America’s own morality has fallen so far that on this issue—protecting children from any homosexual agenda or propaganda—Russia’s standard is higher than our own?
     In my opinion, Putin is right on these issues. Obviously, he may be wrong about many things, but he has taken a stand to protect his nation’s children from the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda.

     "Gay agenda" is a giveaway term, like "lib," which tells you that the speaker has been driven insane by bias and partisan politics. Of course, Franklin Graham only joins a parade of Right Wing haters flocking to Putin. "The Russian president has some curious bedfellows on the fringes of European politics," the Economist wrote this week, "ranging from the creepy uniformed followers of Jobbik in Hungary to the more scrubbed-up National Front in France."
    Birds of a feather.
    Although "driven" insane might be the wrong verb to describe Franklin Graham's journey. At the risk of paraphrasing Lady Gaga, he was born this way, or at least raised this way.
      As much as I don't like to visit the sins of the father upon the son, in Franklin Graham's case, what can you really expect? If you consider the career of the Rev. Billy Graham, what comes into sharp focus is how his faith inspired him to be on the wrong side of literally every significant moral issue of his time. He sat out the civil rights protests of the 1950s, preferring to baptize Eisenhower and turn up his nose at those “addicted to sitting, squatting, demonstrating, and striking for what they want.” In 1960, he rebuffed John F. Kennedy's pleas to tell his Protestant flock that they wouldn't go to Hell if they voted for a Catholic. He linked arms with Lyndon Johnson and mocked those protesting the Vietnam War. He was Nixon's apologist and lackey all through Watergate, nodding in approval and murmuring "amen" while Tricky Dicky raged against his enemies, including "The Jews." If Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchins and Sam Harris spent a month in a cabin working feverishly together, they couldn't come up with a greater indictment illustrating the ethical blindness that can go hand-in-hand with fervent religious faith than the career of Rev. Billy Graham.

     “A man in transit between epochs and value systems, he has chosen to disengage himself and distract us by shouting about the end of history,” Martin Marty wrote of Graham in the Sun-Times in 1965.

    Nearly half a century later, that sentence, true for the father, is now true for the son. With Billy Graham in his extreme age—he's 95— Franklin has picked up the baton. Barack Obama obviously won't let him come to the White House and whisper in his ear. Maybe Vladimir Putin will.
     Give Billy Graham credit for that much -- when Harry Truman banned him from the White House, at least he didn't try to make friends with Joseph Stalin. But then what son doesn't want to surpass his father? It is more his tragedy than ours that Franklin Graham has decided to rival his dad in combining moral myopia with fawning over power. Perhaps someday we'll see Franklin Graham standing before the cameras in Red Square, talking to the media about getting on his knees with Vladimir Putin. It's in his blood.

South Shore works site developer vies for Obama library

McCaffery senior project manager Nasutsa Mabwa at the South Works site.

     It could almost be a lonely spot on the far Michigan shore, with the blue-gray lake and the brown grass, scattered copses, bare trees swaying in the steady breeze. The dunes maybe.

     But north, there’s the skyline of Chicago, looming like Oz, and west, a massive wall, 30 feet tall and 2,000 feet long, which held ore off-loaded from barges when this was U.S. Steel’s South Works. Once the vibrant heart of Midwest manufacturing, it is now, and for the past 20 years, both a white elephant and a tantalizing possibility.

     Nearly 600 acres — almost the size of New York’s Central Park — of prime lakefront, where East 86th Street approaches Lake Michigan. Or remote lakefront, depending on your view. For developer Dan McCaffery, this is where Chicago’s newest neighborhood is about to spring into being, anchored by Barack Obama’s presidential library.

     “It’s so beautiful,” said McCaffery, who has been working with U.S. Steel for the past decade getting the property ready for development — the South Lake Shore Drive extension that opened in October was a major step.

     The Obama library is a greased pig that many are scrambling for: the University of Chicago, in the lead, but also the University of Illinois at Chicago and, trailing behind, Chicago State. A committee of the Illinois House voted Thursday to put $100 million on the table to try to make sure the library doesn’t go to Hawaii, Obama’s home state.

     One benefit of the South Works site: There is nothing there. A velodrome — a banked bike track — somewhat improbably, and the wall, which would have to be blown up. That’s about it. The drawback: It isn’t on the city radar. Not yet.
“Imagine this,” McCaffery said."If you were getting 1.5 million visitors a year down there. Navy Pier is our number one tourist destination. . . . Put a hydrofoil [boat] station at Navy Pier, and a hydrofoil station right in front of the library, walk up these grand stairs."
     Which raises the question of how many visitors an Obama library would draw. The Lincoln library in Springfield, a Disney-esque attraction built around our most beloved president, pulls in 315,000 visitors a year. Reagan does a little better. But Nixon only draws 90,000. That isn't as many visitors as hit Wrigleyville on any summer weekend. I could see the library kick-starting a vibrant new neighborhood. Or I could see it perched by itself on a lonely, windblown promontory.
     This is an area where I'm a notoriously bad judge. I remember walking along Navy Pier, back when it was a debris-strewn ruin, and thinking, "What kind of idiots are wasting their money by trying to turn this remote stretch of nowhere into some kind of pleasure dome? Nobody is going to want to come out here."
     Most popular tourist attraction in the state — nearly 9 million visitors, about twice as many as second-place Millennium Park.
     McCaffery is pushing the site to "whoever will listen," and is placing a formal proposal when requests are due June 16.
     "It is an area of town that is 2 miles from Michelle's house, 4 miles from his current house," McCaffery said. "A mile from where he was a community organizer."
Fair enough. But what if history judges Obama as closer to Nixon than Lincoln?
     "His library, I'm quite confident, is going to be a longtime draw," he said. "It is no small thing that this is the first man of color to be the president of the United States."
He's a lot more than that. Between health care, eliminating Osama bin Laden and ending two wars, Obama's museum will have a lot of exciting stuff in it, and if every Chicago public school kid visits once a year, that's 400,000 visitors right there. You can almost squint and see the buses lining up.
     But is this the place? "Far" is relative. I kept thinking of the Wrigley Building. It isn't an accident that it is gleaming white, glazed terra cotta, lit at night with flood lamps. That was done because, when it was built in 1921, there were no office buildings north of the river. Michigan Avenue had recently been Pine Street, a seedy area of warehouses and factories.  The Wrigley Building was designed to catch people's attention, to lure them across the river.      It had a restaurant and a bank so tenants could have services nearby. It worked. The city grew around it. That could happen here too.
     "To me, this is more than a site," McCaffery said. "This is an opportunity for a new city, that espouses all of the things he has spoken about during his presidency."
A daring, future-oriented move that some would immediately condemn as folly. That hasn't stopped Obama in the past. I took a good look around and tried to imagine the library, the townhouses, the neighborhood. Stranger things have happened in Chicago.

Chicagopedia returns! Ballon frame, goo-goo, Chicagoland and more.

The Sun-Times decided to revive Chicagopedia, an occasional definition of words and phrases of particular interest to Chicagoans. I kicked in four for the debut (click on the link to read my take on "Chicagoland"), including the one below, and plan to write a new one every week. I hope they're half as fun to read as they are to write. 

Editor's note: the paper's link is down, and the entries aren't on Nexis, so we'll have to settle for this one. Apologies.

balloon frame: (BAH-loon frehm) adj.
A technique of constructing buildings using a light lattice of sawed timbers, typically two-by-fours, as opposed to heavier posts and beams found in European mortise and tenon construction. Pioneered in Chicago in the early 1830s by carpenter Augustine Deodat Taylor. Detractors coined the “balloon” name in derision, suggesting light construction would make them blow away in the first strong wind. And they were so easy to take apart, they were nearly portable: an early balloon frame building, the city’s first Catholic church (St. Mary’s Church), at State and Lake, was taken down and relocated three times in 10 years to follow its shifting congregation. The technique allowed homes to be built far faster and cheaper than before, permitting the rapid growth of the city, and they spread quickly, not only across the city, but also the world. Today, three-quarters of the homes built in the United States are made of balloon frame construction, and the method is one of Chicago’s greatest contributions to modern life, though few realize it. – Neil Steinberg

Saturday fun: Where IS this?

     As soon as I stepped into this singular space I thought, "Maybe this will stump them." 
     Not too many clues. We are in Chicago. The structure I'm in is 30 feet tall and 2,000 feet long. It's part of something even larger, or was. You're certainly heard of it, but probably never been there. Few people have, lately. Otherwise, I'll tell you more about it after someone guesses the right answer.
     Or doesn't.
     Where is this? As always, the winner receives one of the ever-dwindling stock of this blog's way-cool, ultra-collectible-someday-perhaps poster. Post your guesses in the comments section below. 

Getting support the old-fashioned way: buying it.

     "The machine,” political guru Don Rose said, years ago, “could get 30 percent of the black votes for George Wallace over Martin Luther King.”

     Though we don’t have to raise hypotheticals. When the actual Dr. King actually did bring his open occupancy marches to Chicago, there was no shortage of black aldermen willing to rise in City Council and denounce King as an unwelcome outsider, their strings pulled by Richard J. Daley.

     Let me be clear: As a general rule, individuals will sell out the interests of their groups in return for personal benefit. It isn’t just a black thing. Jews collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, helping them to round up their own people in the hopes they’d be the last to go. The Republican Party will deny global warming until the ocean laps at Pittsburgh simply because doing something about it crosses the immediate profit of the coal burners and oil companies and carbon spouters who write the checks. No tobacco company has any trouble finding people who, at a hefty salary, stare into the camera and say no, all that lung cancer stuff is just fiction.

     Still, knowing this, I had to smile, broadly at Mike Sneed’s item Thursday on Hermene Hartman, publisher of an obscure Chicago African-American periodical, N’DIGO, who pocketed $51,000 of Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner’s bottomless pail of money and then decided, my God, he’s the man to back, the billionaire with a heart of gold that beats in time to the hopes of the black community. She wrote a lengthy tribute to Rauner’s “fresh approaches,” never mentioning the money she pocketed.

     That’s not a “fresh approach.” That’s the oldest, stalest, machine, buy ’em-a-beer-and-get-’em-to-the-polls approach.
     Though before I get down to the business of mocking Hartman, I should admit my own bias. Not monetary, but emotional. I'm the guy who, in 2011, wrote a column making fun of Hartman for running a poll that, she claimed, showed Carol Moseley Braun would beat Rahm Emanuel.  The poll was conducted among readers of her paper—African-American women, mostly— and while 27 percent did pick Braun, 23 percent chose Emanuel. To me, that clearly meant not eventual victory for Braun, but that Emanuel was taking nearly a quarter of black women, and he was going to crush her.
     In doing so, I also took a few choice shots at the local black leadership, which dithered about a "consensus candidate" and pointed out, with respect, that Harold Washington hadn't actually accomplished much as mayor (two readers argued this, citing sidewalks he put in front of their homes).
     Hartman's minions picketed the paper. You can see the video online. Protesters, with signs, demanded that I be fired as a racist, for pointing out the truth.
     Were this mere personal payback, I hope I'd manage to resist. But there is the larger issue here, of Rauner buying not just Hartman but a community. Lots of ministers with roofs to repair. I'd like to hear from any black Illinoisan—who's not in Rauner's direct employ—who thinks that arrogant rich guy is the man to run the state. And yes, Rev. Meeks, letting him jet you to his Montana ranch for a fly-fishing weekend, wine and dine and flatter and promise God knows what, counts as employ, though Hartman cut a better deal. Bad enough to sell out; worse to sell out for scraps. (Asked by Mark Brown about how he met Rauner, Meeks laughed and said, "When I saw how much money he was worth, I said, 'Sure, let the guy come on.' ")
    And come on Rauner has, checks flying.
     Will it work? That all depends. As much as people like to be bought, they still chafe at seeing their leaders bought. I don't think Rauner has raised himself so much as brought Hartman low, or lower, which I would not have thought possible.
     Gov. Pat Quinn has flaws. He's sleepy and shambolic, buffeted trying to keep the state together. But say what you will of him, he doesn't have to buy friends. Rauner is going to run TV ads until your eyes shrivel, saying how being rich, having no experience in government, he's the man to lead us. He's saying we should trust him. But I don't trust him. Then again, I haven't been paid $51,000 by his campaign — please don't offer; I couldn't take it. My boss would get mad.
     Here. I'll give Hartman more sympathy than she ever gave me: She's trying to save that rag of a paper, made a deal with the devil and is ashamed to admit it. I would be, too. Not much help for $51,000. Which leads here: If Rauner is willing to throw his own money away like this, what's he going to do when he gets his hands on ours?

A surprise arrival at this year's Seder: not Elijah, but the Palestinians

     Religion is supposed to impose hardships and obligations. That’s the whole point.  Fulfilling them, you earn your spot on the team. It’s a kind of hazing.

     Thus I look at puzzlement at those who rip through their Seders in an hour. Why not dye Easter eggs while you’re at it? What’s the rush? My kin do the full, six-hour, sail-past-midnight, 14-point, Kiddush-to-conclusion Passover meal, with frequent pauses for questions and comments and readings.

     At the Seder, we tell of Exodus, the flight from Egypt. Thus much about freedom from biblical bondage and from smaller, modern slaveries. Monday we ceremoniously shut off our cellphones. I read Shelley’s ode to the futility of ego, “Ozymandias,” whose shattered pharaoh’s “sneer of cold command” surveys the empty sands. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

     So not just our Egyptian slavery, but slavery in its many forms. My wife read the Emancipation Proclamation, and we spoke about the lingering pernicious influence of black slavery. Native Americans got their due. Other ostracized groups too; women were mentioned. An orange on the Seder plate, used to symbolize the inclusion of women, now is applied to gays and lesbians. We don’t confine our left leaning to pillows.
     One by one, suffering groups were named. Slowly, something began to dawn on me.
     It jelled during the answer to the Four Questions: "We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt and the Eternal our God brought us out from there with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. Now if God had not brought out our forefathers from Egypt, then even we, our children, and our children's children, might still have been enslaved to Pharaoh in Egypt."
     Hmm. "Our children and our children's children." That made me think of a particular group not being drawn under the blanket of liberal Jewish goodwill toward everyone oppressed. I sucked my front teeth and pondered. Just my loving family here. No risk. And yet. Should I? Nobody likes someone siding with the enemy. The day before, two Jewish centers in Kansas were shot up; we sympathized with those victims, too, even though they weren't Jewish. Big-hearted people, embattled people, that's us.
     At one point in the Seder, you flick a few drops out of your wine glass to symbolize, among other things, the suffering of the Egyptians, perishing so we could be free.
     "You know, " I finally announced, "we don't have to go back to biblical times to find people suffering so we can be free. Metaphors are imperfect, and they certainly aren't slaves. But as I'm reading this, all the 'stranger in a land not their own' business, I can't help but think of the Palestinians."
     Silence. Everybody looked at me. I pushed onward. "The question I always ask is: 'What's going to happen next?' Because both sides get lost rehashing history. I'm not saying to put a bowl of chickpeas on the Seder plate to represent the Palestinians. But why not mention them? This is about freedom, and Israel is being pushed, however unwillingly, into the Pharaoh role. The world increasingly sees them as Pharaoh, and not without justification. That's bad. We need to do all we can so Israel doesn't become Pharaoh." Or words to that effect.
     Is that bad? What's the point of being Jewish? To eat matzo balls and spend six hours — or 60 minutes — conducting a ritual meal, pausing to recount what a raw deal we had in Egypt 3,000 years ago? And how great it is for us to be free now and how we care so deeply about the freedom of every marginal group on the planet except for the one we have a hand in oppressing, since doing so would question our loyalty to the spunky little nation we so love that has done us proud, the past decade notwithstanding?
     Three choices: The 4.5 million Palestinians either, a) form their own state, b) remain captive in an expanding Jewish state, or c) are assimilated and the state isn't Jewish anymore. The first option is best —75 percent of Israelis support it. The second is the status quo and untenable over time. The third is bad only if being Jewish means something beyond representing just another flavor of self-interest.
     I thought Jews were supposed to stand for something more. I thought, having suffered, we are attuned to suffering. That having been slaves, we should then be reluctant pharaohs. If nothing happens, the problem will be handed to our children and our children's children. Not to minimize the difficulty, but Exodus was easy in comparison. There God helped. This he has left to us. Something to think about while nibbling your matzo this week: If Jews are so smart, why can't we figure this out?