Sunday, December 20, 2009

More On The Chicago Way

Dorothy Brown is the Cook County Circuit Court Clerk. The Democrat officeholder is running for a more powerful position, Cook County Board President. According to the Sun-Times' Michael Sneed, public aid recipients in Chicago may have been forced to circulate her nominating petitions for Cook County Board President as a condition to their receipt of public benefits. "Several public aid recipients, who have been called before the grand jury twice, complained they feared they'd be dropped from the job-training program (which is administered by the state Human Services Department) if they didn't circulate Brown's petitions as part of their training," Sneed writes. And who would be in charge of their job training program? "The recipients were receiving job training at Mother's House, a South Side social service agency managed by Hassan Muhammad, who, until recently, was a field director of Dorothy Brown's campaign," Sneed writes.

3 comments:

Concerned Taxpayer said...

Gee...am I surprised, or what!

Anonymous said...

This, of course, is despicable.

Gary, have you covered Mitch giving $20.7 million in weatherization money (stimulus funds)to his political contributor BAGI? This in spite of the fact that they had no experience in doing weatherization. They were supposed to have 834 homes done by the end of Nov. They have done 3.

Giving the money to friends instead of groups that actually know how to get this job done slowed down the approval process as well as the actual work.
Screw the poor - as long as Mitch's contributors are taken care of.

Seems that you don't have to go all the way to Chicago for Chicago style politics.

fulpy said...

Greg, it's apples and oranges. This story is much closer to what Julia had rumored to have done when she ran for congress, in leveraging the Center Township Trustee office to force people seeking benefits to support her run. The BAGI thing is a bunch of crap the Star dug up instead of talking about Durham or Wishard. THe same non-profits that had been doing Weatherization for years are behind on their work too. There is no way they could have handled the additional funds this program rec'd. BAGI had to train their folks (as did a lot of other entities because of the expansion of the program). You can't spend money from day one if you don't have the capacity. My guess is you will see a steep increase in the # of homes done under that program by BAGI as well as the other agencies. Besides, it was a 1 year allocation to the agencies. If they don't spend it, they won't get it next year, meaning BAGI has a strong incentive here. There may be lots of things to beat Mitch up on but i don't think this weatherization thing is one of them.