Rubbing it in. The Wisconsin Electric Power Company recently held a media-briefing session to explain why it just had its seventh rate decrease in five years.
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“I’m consistently impressed by how dangerous people are who want to serve others,” writes Northwestern University’s John McKnight in The Other Side (January/February 1989). “The service ideology and its systems don’t work….they constantly steal money from people who are poor. At the center where I work, we’ve added up how much money the four levels of government–federal, state, county, and city–specifically target for low-income people in Cook County. It adds up to about $6,000 for every person with an income below the poverty line. (That figure is low; not everyone below the line participates in low-income programs.) For a mother with three children, that’s the equivalent of $24,000. Three years ago the median income in Cook County was $23,000.” So why is there still poverty in Cook County? Because 63 percent of that $24,000 came as services, not income. “If you’re a family of four, that means your servants walked away with over $15,000 of the money appropriated for you while you got less than $9,000. Bureaucracy is not the problem. (Bureaucracy eats only about 6 percent.) The money goes to health-and-human-service professionals: nurses, doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, public-housing administrators, land-clearance officials, welfare workers. It doesn’t go to poor people.”
Looking forward to 2389. Illinois Women’s Advocate (Winter 1988) quotes a Bella Abzug comment made at a recent Chicago conference on feminism and Judaism: “At the rate we’re going, we will achieve political gender parity in another 400 years.”
“Greylord was the most massive undercover project ever undertaken in this country and certainly the most significant ever directed at the judiciary,” Dan Webb tells Barrister editor Vicki Quade (Winter 1988). “It revealed massive corruption…. Our state government needed to respond to that in order to restore the public’s confidence in the institution of the judiciary. Unfortunately, the State of Illinois did not…. I always thought the legacy of Greylord would be the fundamental change in the way we select men and women who become judges. That is not going to happen.”
