11/18/03  Re -- Witches' Brew

Having grown up in Massachusetts in the shadow of the Jim Curley machine (elected Mayor of Boston, while serving a Federal sentence for corruption as a US Congressman!) I have to yawn at the City Hall alarm at the skullduggery by hired hands Hasan & Lara, acting on behalf of their Council rabbis, Fantroy (read Lipscomb here!) and Garcia.

What can we expect in a major city government without control of patronage, in exchange for voting patterns, racial and economic?

Curley was a crook, but he was our crook, and he delivered! His minions at the precinct levels gave out the turkeys at Thanksgiving, transport to the polls, the coal and oil deliveries in the middle of winter and the ditch digger on up to Police Commissioner appointments to the masses who simply voted right, and they kept track through the precinct voting numbers!

Here,  we have a powerless Mayor, with only a bully pulpit, trying to herd Council cats  & a City Manager who have no politically cohesive organizations, all scratching against unity and scrambling for minipower in unorganized neighborhoods!

The old days, under the downtown oligarchy of  bankers Bob Thornton & Fred Florence, the Citizens Charter boys and their anointed rising leadership, who made their bones in small time committees before being trusted to run for Council, gave us a functioning and growing city. They bought off the Medrano organization and Rev. Wright & his black ministers with crumbs from the political table and they dispensed what patronage was allowed! 

Who can speak today, with authority, for the Black or Hispanic voting blocs and the political power and clout they represent?  No one!

We have no Maynard Jackson or Henry Cisneros as a rallying force. Ron Kirk was simply an extension of the Perot/Hicks/John Ware clique and he delivered the city to the moneybags! Political ineptitude and chicanery always fill a leadership vacuum.

Hasan, Lara are symptoms, not the disease.

Editor's Comments:  Am I the only person in Texas who remembers Henry Cisneros ALMOST went to federal prison for lying to the FBI before his federal appointment about giving money to his white chick on the side?  He plea-bargained to a misdemeanor and resigned his position, and Bill Clinton later pardoned him.  It was a huge scandal when he was San Antonio's Mayor, and he destroyed two families.  sb