10/29/21
Now that I have started writing for this blog again (See today’s
other post.) after a five-month absence, I thought I’d amalgamate some letters
I have written to various newspapers over the last few months for my readers’
convenience and, of course, reading pleasure:
I wrote this letter to the Chicago Sun-Times back in
September after Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the Chicago School Board selected Pedro
Martinez, a man with no teaching background, to run the Chicago Public Schools. The letter was published on 9/19/21:
9/14/21
In the wake of the selection of Pedro Martinez to head
the Chicago Public Schools, politicians and others who opine for a living go
immediately to Mr. Martinez’s ethnicity, pondering whether it is a good thing
for CPS, and/or for the Mayor’s political fortunes, for a Latino to be in
charge of the city’s schools. What serious
people think would be a more relevant question, i.e., whether it is a good
thing for a man who does not have an education degree and has never held a
teaching position to head the CPS, pales to the point of insignificance when
compared to the only trait that seems to matter about anybody nowadays, i.e.,
his or her race or ethnicity.
The debate regarding Mr. Martinez’s qualifications is yet another
instance of the ironic failure of those who most piously profess to oppose
racism to see anything beyond race.
I wrote the following letter, on one of my favorite
subjects, to the Wall Street Journal back in July as the growing crime
wave in Chicago achieved even greater prominence as a national story. It was published on August 5:
7/31/21
Congratulations to Joseph Epstein (“Crime is No Longer a
Family Business in Chicago,” Opinion, 7/31/21) for committing the dual
effronteries of calling for vigorous law enforcement as a remedy for the crime
that plagues our hometown and for pointing out that the disabling of the Outfit
was not an unmitigated positive for our city.
Federal prosecutors crippled the Outfit with a series of high-profile
trials over the last thirty or so years, the most salient of which was the
Family Secrets trial in 2007, which resulted in nearly the entire upper echelon
of the Outfit, including Joey “The Clown” Lombardo, Frank Calabrese, Sr., and
James Marcello going away for effective or actual life sentences. Perhaps the prosecutors were overcome with
naïve notions of the perfectibility of man that have become so popular of
late. More likely they were just doing
their jobs and doing them well. However,
if they and those who cheered them on thought the result of their efforts would
be an abatement of crime in Chicago, they were sorely mistaken or at least
obviously disappointed. The disabling
of the Outfit in Chicago, and of the broader Mob throughout the country, has
resulted not in less crime but, instead, in the replacement of organized crime
with disorganized crime.
I wrote this letter to the Wall Street Journal back
in June when, in one of the early iterations of its schemes to grab more money
from workers, investors and other productive types, the Biden Administration
proposed a retroactive income tax increase.
The missive was published on June 7:
6/1/21
Not only is the Biden Administration’s plan to make
its income tax increases retroactive (“A Retroactive Tax Increase, 5/29/21)
bad fiscal and financial policy, it makes no sense if the objective of the tax
increase is, as the Biden Administration claims, to raise revenue rather than
to punish the successful, as many suspect.
A prospective tax increase would, if history, common
sense, and human nature are to serve as guides, result in a flurry of stock
sales before the imposition of the tax increase as investors sell to avoid
pending confiscatory rates. Those
sales, of course, would result in a windfall of capital gains tax revenue for
the federal government at, ironically only to the naïve, the pre-increase
rates. A retroactive tax increase
provides no such opportunities for tax avoidance selling and hence no resultant
windfall for the federal government.
I wrote this letter to the Wall Street Journal in May
after Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced that she would do one-on-one
interviews only with journalists of color.
It wasn’t published, but it should have been:
5/21/21
There
is a profound irony that the Wall Street Journal missed in its Review
& Outlook piece on Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s recent declaration
that “I will be exclusively providing one-on-one interviews with journalists
of color.” (“Racism at Chicago’s
City Hall,” 5/21/21) This declaration
came from a mayor who did not carry a single black ward in the February,
2019 first round of Chicago’s mayoral election. While Mayor Lightfoot trounced the hapless
Toni Preckwinkle in the run-off with decent, though not overwhelming, Black
support, she got into the run-off on the strength of her vote in the trendy,
“progressive” wards on the near north side.
Not only are these wards overwhelmingly White and at least relatively
wealthy, but they are also the types of places in which the White reporters she
has now excluded from one-on-one interviews live.
Maybe the Mayor is bent on
political suicide, and who would blame her for wanting to at least figuratively
get out of town, given the hopelessness of the job she now holds? A better bet, though, is that Mayor
Lightfoot feels that the “progressive” voters who put her in office are
sufficiently cowed by actual or potential charges of “racism” that she can
count on their support in 2023.
No comments:
Post a Comment