Chicago Tribune: Yes, this is corrupt.
As Chicago’s 1991 municipal elections approached, Mayor Richard M. Daley was consolidating power for his first re-election campaign. In Springfield, two state senators — Daley’s brother John and his political ally Jeremiah Joyce — introduced a “shell bill,” an empty vessel into which lawmakers later would stuff an astonishing public pension giveaway to Chicago union officials.
That pension giveaway was among more than 100 provisions eventually added to the shell bill, but never debated by either chamber of the General Assembly. Instead, 10 members of a bicameral “conference committee” that evidently never held a meeting shaped the legislation to achieve their political goals. By the time the heavily larded bill was ready for passage by the two chambers, another Chicago Democrat, state Sen. Emil Jones, assured his colleagues that the bill wasn’t controversial. “These provisions incorporated within this bill have been agreed to by the (city) administration and the pension system and the laborers,” Jones told his Senate colleagues the day the bill passed in January 1991. “The people in the city of Chicago came together and agreed.”
That wasn’t true. As with most Illinois sweetheart deals, only the insiders who would benefit from this looting of city pension funds “came together and agreed.” Nobody consulted “the people in the city” who, as taxpayers, would foot the exorbitant cost of this legislation for decades to come. Nor did anyone ask rank-and-file union members who someday would rely on city pension funds.
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