'You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.' -- Rahm Emanuel

                  

When the mayor can't find a good crisis, he manufactures his own. Taking a cue from House Republicans, he cooked up a budget crisis that, could only be avoided by shuttering 54 schools in primarily African-American neighborhoods. Despite all the evidence showing that boarded up schools and transporting tens of thousands of kids across dangerous territory, to overcrowded receiving schools, won't fix the city's money mess, the dye has already been cast. The crisis scenario worked. But now we have a real crisis facing us in the fall when schools open -- a crisis created by Rahm.

Lest we forget, this was the same city budget crisis scenario that led to the fast-tracked sell-off  by Mayor Daley, of the city's parking spaces to Parking Meters LLC. That arguably the greatest heist in Chicago since Al Capone.

Yesterday, Rahm used another crisis, the bombing in Boston, a thousand miles from Chicago, to do something he wouldn't have been able to do earlier. He announced that as a result of the bombing, he was going to hand out more contracts to cronies to plant even more security cameras around the city. The City is already up to its ears in camera/contract scandals. If the Boston bombing hadn't happened, Rahm would have simply waited for the inevitable next crisis.

The real rub here is that last week, Rahm's Communications Director Sarah Hamilton accused CTU leader Karen Lewis of "politicizing" the school closings issue after she announced a union campaign to register 100,000 new voters.

And so it goes.