The New Wall Street Racket Looting Your City, One Block at a Time

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/economy/155276/the_new_wall_street_racket_looting_your_city%2C_one_block_at_a_time/

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When Mayor Rahm Emanuel introduced a “new and innovative” financing tool last month to help Chicago renovate failing infrastructure without precipitating another budget crisis, many in the city were understandably critical.

Chicagoans have already endured the notorious 75-year lease of their parking meters to a consortium headed by Morgan Stanley. That sale promulgated a system wherein the public is held hostage by private finance, due largely to the inclusion of arcane legal stipulations like “non-compete clauses” and “compensation events” in the language of the contract.

Ellen Danin, writing in the Northwestern Journal of Law and Social Policy relates that: “Chicagoans learned about compensation events when CBS reported that the city’s parking meter contract required reimbursement for events like repairing streets. Public records showed that in the first quarter of 2009, the city was liable to the parking meter contractor for more than $106,000 in lost income during the slow months for street repair and street closings for festivals, parades, and holidays, as well as repairs and maintenance. At that rate, it is not unreasonable to predict that Chicago will owe roughly $500,000 a year to the private contractor.”

The city essentially acts as an insurer for the meter merchants, with the return being a one-time injection of roughly a billion dollars that the previous mayor, Daley the Second, haphazardly exhausted on closing budget deficits in the waning years of his two-decade tour at the helm.

[liberal N proud]

1. And another fat cat gets rich at our cost.

[marmar]

2. k/r

[pscot]

3. Local politicians don't have the skills or the smarts

to deal safely with the bankers. All they see is free money laying in the street. They turn a blind eye to the strings attached. And the public never sees the fine print until it's too late. This kind of tuff has been happening in the utility industry for years.

[raouldukelives]

4. It's out & out theft. But does anyone really care?

People will continue to invest & support Wall St and hope it self-regulates. Someday. Before everything so many great people fought and died for has been stripped of it's ideals and our waters, forests and wildlife ebb away into history. Many people claim to have strong beliefs in protecting the environment, animals or human rights. Nothing helps them quell those sentiments faster than the love of money.

[dickthegrouch]

5. A couple of contract lawyers deserve disbarment

for failing to see the danger in those clauses and negotiate them out of the contract.

[bongbong]

6. Don't worry

If the city fires them, they'll get nice "consultant" positions at the banks that got the benefit of their "legal advice"

[Hell Hath No Fury]

7. You're assuming --

the clauses weren't known about and agreed to.

Follow. The. Money.

Privatization, baby, it's what's for dinner. And the Rahm types LOVE it just as much as the GOPers, and want the campaign dollars it brings in as much as the GOPers.

[Blue_Tires]

8. Where are all the Rahm lovers?

There were a bunch of them on DU (cheerleading and pimping his run for mayor...Some were supposedly Chicago residents...