-By Warner Todd Huston
This debacle of Governor Rod Blagojevich endeavoring to sell a U.S. Senate seat for mere personal enrichment proves once and for all that the state of Illinois is no longer an American state. It is so far around the bend that there is no longer any legitimacy to either the state or any local government. Illinois is no better than the worst banana republic.
We have arrived at a time when lucrative state posts have been multiplied without necessity, when people have become pensioners of the state without bounds, and government is the single largest employer summarily supplanting any hint of capitalism. We are mired in a universal policy of governing by bribery and corruption, with all businesses being ignored and trampled under the foot of regulators and their open palms. All offices here are bought and sold at extravagant prices and the debt for this thievery is laid on the shoulders of the people with the highest taxes in the country.
Yet, even as the money flows uninhibited into the pockets of our “elected” officials in both parties, Illinois is falling apart. Roads, bridges, hospitals and schools are crumbling and those that have been built are of the lowest quality because so much of the money has gone to grasping unions, bribes and graft.
And, again, the people are hard squeezed to enrich the placemen that sit fat and happy with obscene health care and pension programs that far exceed anything that can be gotten in the private sector. These thieves at the public trough work a few years, maybe a decade of two, then spend half a lifetime on vacation assured by unelected union thugs and their accomplices in “government” that no further work is required of them. The forced “generosity” of the taxpayers is assumed the endless wellspring for funding their undeserved leisure time.
The injustice to the common Illinois citizen is complete. The rapacity of her “officials” is such that to be sated their wide-wasting prodigality and profusion has become a gulf that will swallow the whole state. In Illinois, numberless and needless state jobs abound, enormous salaries, pensions and benefits that far outpace the private sector are commonplace, bribes, under-the-table payoffs and back-room deals are de rigueur so much so that government from the smallest village to the biggest cities and thence to the state government itself will find in this land of plenty that they are forever in continual necessity of more.
These facts relayed above are merely confirmed by the last two governors, one that sold licenses to murderers on our highways and the other that trades the highest offices in the land for his own benefit.
There was a time when Americans would rise up and defeat such a tyranny. There was a time when men would band together and perhaps toss the object of hated taxation in a harbor or two. There was even a time when taxmen were afraid to leave their homes. But that was a time when men were not so bowed by an oppressive state that even the local police were more interested in filling their coffers with money than in even worrying about the safety of their constituents.
When will the enslaved people of Illinois wake up and realize that they are but one step removed from being in a state like that of a far flung Soviet satellite state of decades past? When will the people of Illinois wake up and realize that no politician cares at all about them and is only interested in filling their pockets and that of their cronies? When will the people of Illinois rise up and say that enough is enough?
When will Illinois come upon its battle of Concord?
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as newsbusters.org, Human Events Magazine, townhall.com, New Media Journal, Men’s News Daily and the New Media Alliance among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of publiusforum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston
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