Free People, or Helots. Hoosiers are Free People, for Now.

like donkeys suffering under heavy loads,
by painful force compelled to bring their masters half
of all the produce that the soil brought forth.
(Tyrtaeus West Fragment 6, trans. West)

Description

Helots - The helots were a subjugated population group that formed the main population of Laconia and Messenia, the territory controlled by Sparta. 

noun

1. a member of a class of serfs in ancient Sparta, intermediate in status between slaves and citizens.

   • a serf or slave.

I have been using this term to describe people of the middle class in Chicago, Cook County and Illinois for a number of years,   In ancient Sparta, Helots were the middle class, sandwiched between the upper class and slaves as we know the term. 

In Chicago during my life time (1952-2018) there, I watched the robust American middle/working class diminish, shrink and all but vanish from Cook County.   The upper classes and their stooges ( some journalists, activists, too many labor unions, private charities) have done everything to get people who pay taxes, work for a living and live happy lives get the Hell out of Dodge. 

A few weeks ago, one of the Oligarchy’s stooges with Chicago Sun Times  wrote a piece bewailing the departure of the black middle class from Chicago and positing the possibility of its return.   The stooges of Oligarchy have made Race the basis of everything, but the facts confound this lie.  The Black Middle Class is no different from the Polish, Swedish, Greek, Lithuanian, Bohemian, Mexican, Jewish and Italian middle class.  The only ethnic demographic of the Middle Class that does not get it is the Irish.

As a group the Irish serve the oligarchy with regularity and lick-spittle lock-step for the likes of Pat Quinn, Richie Daley, Toni Preckwinkle, Lori Lightfoot and JB Pritzker like no other.  

This is odd because the Irish were once in the forefront of creating the middle class.  My Grandfather was. a hairy pawed union slugger in the stock yards who helped form one of the most powerful and professional skilled trades unions in Illinois.  He went from coal heaver, to operating engineer, to union official always with a job in the trade.  He was a radical Big Jim Larkin off-the-boat bog-trotter in 1912, who eventually owned a huge brick bungalow for his wife and thirteen children at 7535 S. Marshfield, saw his grandson become a Norte Dame standout and Houston Oiler, but was as equally proud of that man’s younger brother who won an ITT fellowship in engineering design, because merit was a path out of the working class.  All of his 75 grandchildren became solidly middle class citizens. Those blue collar dreams came true in the early 1960’s. 

That was when John F. Kennedy became President and starred down the Communists in Berlin, Vietnam and Cuba.  Today, JFK would be excoriated as a Red-baiting, anti-abortion, Catholic deplorable. JFK would be a helot today.   Our world hates pugnacious people with moral centers.  The Fighting Irish is a logo.  Bishop Shiel is forgotten and the doughy mush Monsignor Jack Egan touted as a working class hero.  Today, a Pastor Michael Pfleger is treated with deference, if not the contempt that he works so very hard to elicit. 

The Irish tend to be generous to a fault, tribally loyal and willing to be counted.  Those same gifts allowed the Irish as a group to be co-opted by people and indeologies that detest them to the marrow.  Hyde Park buried Bridgeport between 1972 and the Progressive Hegemony that controls Illinois.  Abner Mikva and Dr. Quentin Young co-operated with City Hall and County Building and roped in the likes of Tom Hynes, Neil Hartigan and the young Daleys.  The Media, 501(c) # Fortunes and IVI-Good Government cache no longer assaulted The Machine. 

Mike Madigan understood that Ward power was over and played cent-field with Hyde Park.  The Irish fought no one and became most congenial. 

The Congenial Irish took the path of least resistance and all but erased the verbal fighting from their political, religious and moral lexicon.  The Irish got behind Neil Hartigan and went soft on abortion to the point that a mushy mope like Senator Dick Durbin walks publicly in a green sash. 

The Irish of the tail-end of the 20th Century get behind “great gals and guys” who take the coin, the endorsement and condescension of people who detest everything about being Irish. 

As such, huge voting blocks in neighborhoods in the 19th Ward have helped put shackles on the Irish and any ethnic group that marries into their flabby embrace. 

The Irish retain political influence in Cook County and Illinois because the Irish, as a group, go-along with the great enthusiasm.  

As a result, the middle class is being eliminated.  Why?  The middle class is anathema to the Oligarchy who blend Marxism with kleptomania. 

Cook County is Animal Farm.  Pigs get fat and everyone else gets slaughtered. 

Shunning, slogans, group hate and the daffy doings of the Bears and Cubbies numb middle class families  that still remain within the borders of the City and the State.  Like blacks and sharecroppers in the post-Reconstruction American South, the middle class suffer the same burdens hoisted upon their backs by Richie Daleys, Rahm Emanuel, Bruce Rauner and now the completely supine Lori Lightfoot. 

Individuals finally get a bellyful. I planned to move out of Illinois and found a home in Michigan City, Indiana.   Alas, my children will continue to live in Illinois.  

All three were born outside of Cook County, but all three love being close to cousins, aunts and uncles and grandma, as did I. 

I can visit.  They own homes.

Hoosiers have resisted the harness.  The news papers have no reliable stooges, but report on public affairs and actually have local high school sports data and stories,  One might mark the end of freedom in Illinois from the time that the sports pages became propaganda for lovable losers and the milquetoasts of the Midway,

More significantly, the newspapers are independent and a MEDIA.  There are no self-absorbed stooges like Eric Zorn, Fran Spielman, Carol Marin, Michael Sneed, Rex Hupke, or the appalling Mary Schmich.

Politically, there is not a huge block of Woke Millennial Irish to wrap Progressive initiatives like abortion in corned beef and cabbage. 

The editorial boards are not lickspittles for City Hall.  In fact, today’s. headline screams this: 

 La PORTE – Just days before the election, felony charges were filed against Michigan City Mayor Ron Meer for his actions following the arrest of his stepson earlier this month, but no judge has yet agreed to conduct a probable cause hearing.Court records show that on Wednesday – under seal – the La Porte County Prosecutor's Office charged Meer with one felony count of official misconduct; five felony counts of intimidation; and two misdemeanor counts of false informing resulting in substantial hindrance to law enforcement.
The charges were initially filed in Superior Court 4, but Judge Greta Stirling Friedman recused herself from "even finding probable cause on the basis that, among other reasons, the Judge's spouse, whose employment caused him to be included on an email chain and could potentially lead to his being a witness in this matter," according to court records.

No Bruce Dold, Chicago Tribune managing editor could spike the story.  No team of Yahoos like Mark Brown, Neil Steinberg, or Mary Mitchel could blare out distraction yarns of Racism, or Yellow Corn.

 Days before election Mayor Ron needs to gussie-up his resume.  I spoke with Michigan Citizens and some like what Mayor Meer has done for the downtown area and others said that he was jerk when they worked for him in City Government.   Everyone has a vote and it is not for barter.

I don’t have a dog in the fight and look forward to election day. 

Hoosiers are not helots - yet.   

Hey, How About That Property Tax Bill? Now, That's Progressive! Thank George, Paul and Daisy Soros.

Frannie Spielman of Sun Times reports on Mayor Rahm's vow to tussle with scofflaws - the Worker Bee, Helot, Breeders on the City teat! Call Andy Shaw! Naw, let Andy snooze.

Fran Spielman is a fine reporter on City Hall, but today seems to have copied the notes given by Rahm - in his order of importance. Has to do with numbers. City Workers who have not paid parking, speeding, moving violation tickets, or water bills, or assessments, or something. The breakdown of bad guys is a tad troubling, but consistent.

Let's do math on this fine Sun Times piece.

Now, Lookee here!

Of the 33,237 city employees, 2,380 of them, or 7.2 percent, collectively owe $882,366. Of the 67,864 employees at five sister agencies — the CTA, CHA, Park District, City Colleges and Board of Education — 5,883 or 8.7 percent together owe nearly $2.1 million.

The worst sister agency offender is the CTA, with a $714,544 debt shared by more than 20 percent of the mass transit agency’s employees.

The Chicago Police Department has 13,973 employees and 988 deadbeats who together owe $326,646. Of the Fire Department’s 4,983 employees, 285 scofflaws share $126,184 in debt. The Department of Streets and Sanitation’s 2,127 workforce includes 247 scofflaws who owe the city $104,816.

The City Council has 420 employees and 40 deadbeats who together owe $12,530.

This last one is a head scratcher.

If the CTA is the worst at 20%, why is it that the City Council does not follow CTA with almost 10% Deadbeats?

Cops have 13,973 employees with 988 owing revenue. So, that's 988 X 100 =98800 Divided by 13, 973 = 7.07 and change.

Firefighters have 4,983 and only 247 'scofflaws. So, that's 247 X 100 =24700; Divided by 4,983 = 4.95685 and change

City Council ( that's the Aldermen) with 40 scofflaws X 100 = 4000;Divided by 420 = 9.5283 and change

CTA owes the most at 20%

Cops owe 7.07 and change

Firemen owe 4.95 and change

ALDERPEOPLE owe 9.5 and change

I am confused. Why would the ranking be last? Should it not be

CTA -20%
ALDERPEOPLE -9.5%
Cops - 7.07
Firemen - 4.9

?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Now, I might have err'd. I am human I err. I err all the time. But I ain't wrong.

This is all tied to Rahmalamadangdong's Grid Policy Initiative. He has a Case Book that he will toss to the City Council ( Alderpeople) and order them to vote the middle class out of Chicago.

The Chicago Media tosses us City Dogs and Worker Bees a bone in the form of some poor slob gaming the system. The banquet can be found in the policies that benefit the Forrest Claypools appointed to a big spot at the CTA, or a Gay Israeli Utility Player for the Chicago Police/Office of Emergency Management/Mayoral Chief of Staff/Chicago Public Schools/ and Chicago Transit Authroity.

The poor slob caught sleeping in a garbage truck goes to the guillotine. Claypools and Hubermans go up the food chain of the very systems they manage screw up by millions of wasted or policied tax-dollars.

Now, having read that bone to us mutts intended to get us to snarling and snapping, let's take a peek at yesterday's Second Installment of the Property Tax Bill from Maria Pappas.

Lookee h'yar

Why, the property value went down and the taxes went up!

Progressive! I wrote about the Progressive Plan to shrink Chicago's Worker Bee population and it is a plan.

A pal wrote to me in response to that post. He wrote, "A progressive passes a street person while en route to a commuter station (this happens in less than a minute) and boasts that he or she lives in a diverse neighborhood. In truth, they have no real interaction with such persons.

In order to facilitate that trendy neighborhood, Daley cleared out the subsidized CHA projects to speed up the pace of gentrification and handed the displaced residents Section 8 vouchers and sent them North, South and West (sometimes, including various suburbs under the auspices of the Cook County Housing Authority rather than the Chicago Housing Authority). Now, we are witnessing once stable, middle class enclaves beginning to decline on account of the new unassimilated Section 8 tenants. This is not fiction. It is a reality that I can testify to.

Adding insult to injury, the property tax bills arrived today. Property values have fallen, but the tax rates are much higher. The taxing bodies simply raised the rates to offset the decreased valuations."

You may say.

Yep. Here's the deal Ron Huberman, like our President was plucked and placed into our government a very long time ago. Why, because Soros said too.
Regular Democrats were told by their various Chinamen that the 'plucked' were really and truly great - Secret Formula Z-28 with Chrome! Why This Fiiiiiinnnnne Young Man is a Behemoth of Future Greatness and Was Found in the Weeds by a Beneficent Pharoh named of George Something' and they jumped into the game.


We waste our time on Tony Rezko and Bill Cellini and their misdoings, because they are the bones, like the poor Streets and San slob caught napping by BGA Mensa Man Andy Shaw.

Ron Huberman*, the son of poor Israeli immigrants, had his schooling paid for by Paul and Daisy Soros, kin to George who owns the DNC, the White House and the American Corporate Media. Patiently, and over the last decades the plucked and placeed have steered the likes of Daley, Quinn, and Rahm to the Progressive Policy Path.

Huberman, like Forrest 'Can't Catch a Vote' Claypool is a protected species of Policy. The genuine Boondoggles are not the victims tossed to the public in print by the players. The genuine Boondoggle begins and ends with same cast of charcters running 501(c) 3's stuffed with cash by Soros and his lesser lights. Public Policy has brought us our tax bills and the politicians who engineered them. The Progressive Public Policy that hides under the bones.

* Ron Huberman

Born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1971, Huberman is the son of Holocaust survivors. Huberman and his family moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee when his father, a cancer researcher, began working at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He moved to the Chicago area for his high school years, where he came out as gay at age 15. Huberman later attended the University of Wisconsin, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Psychology and English. While working as a Chicago police officer, Huberman attended night classes at the University of Chicago and finished with master’s degrees in both Business Administration and Social Service Administration. Huberman was a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow and an Albert Schweitzer Fellow while at the University of Chicago.

Forrest Claypool

Forrest Claypool is an American politician and political operative. A former Democratic member of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, Claypool serves as president of the Chicago Transit Authority. In 2007-2008, Claypool served as a key member of Barack Obama campaign's media team, in his capacity as a longtime partner of David Axelrod. . . .On Tuesday, 19 April 2011, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel -- a longtime political ally of Claypool -- appointed him president of the Chicago Transit Authority

Wikipedia - it ain't the OED, but, for Progressives, it is washable.

Dan Proft - The Only Candidate for Governor Offering a Real Solution to School Reform

I love Clout. I'd love to have some. Like my helot neighbors, I watch the checking balance dip close to the danger zone each pay period - mortgage, groceries, McAuley Tuition (paid), McAuley books for one ($ 600 + Paid), gas ( $30 fill-up), Mr. Swifty Dry Cleaning (Priceless), Cable ( $58), ComEd ( a lung), People Gas ( the other lung), ATT ($$$$) and of course my extravagant lifestyle that takes me to the Islands ( Blue Island, Stony Island & if I am very good Treasure Island in Old Town).

Clout is that thing you read about in the newspapers and hear on TV - it is a very good thing. I once witnessed a Cook County Board Reformer bully an underling at City Hall Office of Special Events for his Taste of Chicago VIP passes, only to see him on Chicago Tonight with the nodders as he railed against the Bosses!Bosses? The fact is the only genuine exercises of Clout that I have ever witnessed were performed by the Pilates Class of Reformers -"Do You Know Who I Am?"

Yes, Madam, and what you are!

Well, now Dan Proft is running for Governor as a Republican. I just voted for John McCain and have yet to get over that gum scraping.

However, I have always been charmed - charmed I tells you - by Dan Proft's simple declarative sentences that lack any and all passive/aggression that so clearly marks a Progressive, or a goof.

Pat Quinn is earnest. He always seemed to be too good of a guy to be a Progressive, but he plays ball with them and that is enough to put this boy off his Hungry Man dinner. Poor Pat Quinn is staked out for the dingoes.

Dan Hynes? He'll be fine; he always is.

But Dan Proft is the only man in the race talking the truth about Clout for School Reform. Proft's Clout should get him every vote of every Illinois voter who understands that Public Education in Illinois is a Fixed Deal - an Old Country Buffet of empty calories.

Proft wants to make every Illinois school child and their families Clout Captains. Proft is a hard kid. He will brook no guff or back sass from the Nose Gays in the News Business or the Cadillac Commies of SEIU. He has taken some hard hits and yet always manages to get a nice Knuckley one between the lamps of the cheap-shot artists.

Wouldn't you like to have the same "clout" as the politically-connected,
particularly when it came to the education of your children?

Are you tired of a system that discriminates against families based on
their income and address?

Well, under a Proft administration, you have been pre-selected for the
"clout list".

With 13,000 Chicago Public School families with children on waiting
lists to attend charter schools, is it any wonder that a few parents
with political connections would try to get their children into one of
Chicago's elite schools? Of course it isn't. It is entirely natural for
parents to want the best education possible for their children.

Instead of scrambling over a pile of other politicians and media elites
to more vociferously denounce the CPS clout list, I pledge to do the
opposite: I will formalize it and to expand it. It's as simple as this:

If your name is in the phone book, your name is on the clout list.

As governor, I will create a Universal Clout Program.

In a Proft Administration every family, regardless of address or income,
that is currently faced with the prospects of sending their children to
schools that we know will fail them, would be able to send their child
to the school of their choice. Instead of sending education dollars to
centralized bureaucracies like CPS, a Proft Administration will attach
those dollars to the students, allowing their parents to choose which
school is best for their child.

As governor, I will invest in children, not Soviet-era bureaucracies
like CPS.

Competition works.

I like Clout. Hope we all get some.

Joel Kotkin's 'Gentry Liberalism' - Defined and Indentifiable Among the Yanks

Gentry -

In more modern American society, gentry is often used to refer loosely to the highly educated professional upper-middle class, this use of the terminology is inconsistent with the British use of the same term as the American use would include those without confirmed aristocratic roots (as is required under the British definition). This sense of the term is often pejoratively used in the term "gentrification", a term that could alternatively be called "bourgeois-ification". Attitudes stemming from the phenomenon of the historic American gentry help clarify the current use of the term in U.S. society, and it is still loosely applied to people from old-monied and landed families in the United States, though the term "gentry" is very rarely used in America for cultural and historical reasons.

- Read Yuppies, Trust-fund babies, like Billy Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Ted Kennedy, Friends of the Parks, Schakowsky Voters, most members of the Chicago Media, and people who never ever look at the balances in their checking accounts.

Gentry Liberals (Progressives) want Mass Transportation, because they rarely if ever need it; they want Public School Funding, because Catholic/Lutheran-Dutch,Baptist & Protestant/Jewish/Muslim schools are values based educations; they want SEIU/ACORN to do whatever the hell they please, because they promote whatever agenda the Gentry embrace.

America is involved in a Class War. Gentry ( anyone who plays ball with them) and the Helots.

I'm a Helot - a worker bee/blue collar value/pro-Real Labor/anti-abortion/Mom and Dad Marriage and Gays can have a happy life with each other/tax-paying American.

I go to the ATM, not to draw out cash, but to make sure that I have enough Buckos to cover bills and obligations. I used to have more nickels at the end of the pay cycle. Gas costs a lung; groceries a kidney; tuition . . . enough with the internal organs. My neighbors are getting laid off.

The Gentry are loud. They get attention. They are not cops, firefighters, nurses, school teachers, pipe fitters, electricians, accontants, clerks, plumbers, and carpenters. They sure as hell are not housewives - housewives do not lunch or join Friends of the Parks, or PETA, much less Planned Parenthood.

The Gentry join gyms, don't smoke, attend theatre, opera, the best restaurants, and the Progressive Political Grassroots - working stiffs go the above when they have two nickels to rub together. Helots do not hold Subscriptions to any of the above; they buy tickets. Helots are not subscribers; they do not have enough disposable income. The Gentry are Public Television and Radio.

Helots work, provide for their families, pay too many taxes and die.

Joel Kotkin has been writing about the American Gentry ( Liberal Progressive) for decades, but his recent Forbes article warning President Obama about America's swing to Socialism, while Europe is returning to grassroots capitalism, hit a nerve*.

http://www.joelkotkin.com/

Kotkin illustrates Gentry Liberalism:

You have to wonder what average Brits must make of the likes of Jonathon Porritt, the head of the government's Sustainable Development Commission--a member of the gentry in both attitude and lineage. The Eton-educated Porritt's recent pronouncements include such gems as a call to restrict the number of children per family to two to reduce Britain's population from 60 to 30 million. He also has scolded overweight people for causing climate change.

These do not seem like sure electoral winners. Today extreme green policies that were once merely odd or eccentric are becoming increasingly oppressive, leading to even more actions that disadvantage suburban lifestyles. Environmental activists' solution for the country's severe housing shortage--particularly in the London region--is to cram the working and middle classes into dense urban units resembling sardine cans and force even more suburbanites off the road.

Even so, large-scale house production over the past decade has lagged behind demand and, as a result, the tidy single-family home with a nice back garden so beloved by the British public may soon be attainable only by the highly affluent--and, ironically, that includes much of the gentry. What an odd posture for a party supposedly built around working-class aspirations.

"New Labour has brought in 'New Urbanism,' and the results are not pretty," suggests University of Westminster social historian Mark Clapson, as he showed me some particularly tiny, surprisingly expensive new houses outside of London

Familiar? Vote accordingly.

* Click my post title for many articles on Gentry Liberalism