Aldermen: We won't back Daley's tax plan

Hey I got a new idea and it came from this article with great credit to the Capitol Fax Blog for pulling out a great excerpt from the article this morning.

Ever heard of the Boston Tea party were as a result of some taxes on tea American colonists in Boston decided to take some action into their own hands. They decided to throw tea shipped or sold by the British East India Company right into Boston Harbor. The tea tax they were protesting on the evening of December 16th, 1773 were seen by the Bostonians as a way for the British to quash their freedoms.

Anyway let get to 2007, an Alderman got an angry email from a resident and it led to me to an interesting conclusion...

Ald. George Cardenas (12th) said he got an e-mail from an angry constituent who warned him to "get your hands out of my pocket, you stooge."

Now that my friends is interesting because I started to wonder if this individual has been watching too much Malcolm X. There was this scene towards the end of the film (directed my Morehouse College alumni Spike Lee) where Malcolm returns from his pilgrimmage to Mecca where to converted to Sunni Islam. He was at a press conference when someone yelled out of nowhere, "Get your hands out of my pocket!" It was yelled again just before Malcolm was shot.

I'm just giving you the plot points of a great movie that I like to watch just about every black history month. I want to get back to the article though, I don't want people to be too distracted by the film. Though I hope you do watch when you get the first chance.

Let me just say if you read this article, you're hearing the rumblings of the aldermen who don't know if they're with Mayor Daley on this tax increase he proposed last week. If this was any other time in the city of Chicago this could fly but now that Daley swagger may not do the job it had for years. Maybe this city council won't rubber stamp this, however, I hope for the mayor's sake that this won't turn into the drama that we've seen in Springfield for most of the summer. That is gridlock and a certain amount of humiliation because he would be unwilling to compromise.

Anyway here are some of the comments by some of the Aldermen...

"If this budget would pass right now with all these taxes, I suspect that probably half of the people who voted for it would not be in this Council next time around because this one has eyes. It's going to walk all over the place," said Ald. Ed Smith (28th), former chairman of the City Council's Black Caucus.
...
Ald. Richard Mell (33rd) was so desperate for a way out of raising property taxes, he proposed raiding the long-term reserve fund created to shore up the city's bond rating after the $1.83 billion deal that privatized the Chicago Skyway.
...
When Johnson warned that the fund was for "major emergencies like catastrophes," Mell said, "If you talk to some of the people I've been talking to -- to them, this is a catastrophe."

Ald. Pat Levar (45th), normally one of Daley's most reliable City Council votes, added: "This is my 21st budget. I've never been bombarded in my office as I have in the past four or five days about property taxes. ... We need to find other sources."

Levar also took a strong stand against Daley's $13.1 million plan to add 8 cents to the cost of a six-pack of beer, 7 cents to a bottle of wine and 24 cents to a liter of hard liquor.

Former Ald. Terry Gabinski (32nd), who sat through Monday's hearing, is a lobbyist for Anheuser-Busch.

Whenever people talk about tax increases people will invoke the memory of the Boston Tea Party. Now there's a new thing called telling tax revenue hungry politicians to get their hands out of your pockets or pocketbooks or wallets. Hmm that has got to be the new thing in protesting taxes. That's the idea.