Rick Perlstein | The Nation

President Obama introduces Penny Pritzker as his nominee for Secretary of Commerce. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster.)

Did you know that in the early 1970s, the Internal Revenue Service investigated the Pritzker family, whose scion Penny Pritzker has just been tapped by President Obama to become Secretary of Commerce, because their Hyatt Corporation was paying no taxes? And that in the course of the inquiry, an IRS statement quoted an informant with access to the records of the offshore bank where they hid their assets that the family, “through their Hyatt Corporation, received their initial backing from organized crime”?

Did you know that this particular financial institution, Castle Bank & Trust of the Bahamas, was founded by a veteran of the wartime spy agency the Office of Strategic Services who specialized in creating front organizations for the CIA, and helped launder funds for attempts to overthrow Fidel Castro? That Castle operated by arranging for a Miami bank controlled by associates of mobster Meyer Lansky to accept the original deposits, which it then passed on to Castle with only code numbers, but not names, attached?

Did you know that the IRS dropped a major investigation of Castle in 1977, according to The Wall Street Journal, at the behest of the Central Intelligence Agency?

And did you know one of the bank’s cofounders, the late Burton Kanter, was on the board of the Hyatt Hotels Corporation, and that—as The Kansas City Times discovered in a 1982 Pulitzer Prize–winning investigation following the collapse of a shoddily constructed skywalk that killed 114 at a Hyatt in 1981—the Pritzkers were Castle Bank’s largest depositors?

Did you know that Kanter was the Pritzker family’s tax lawyer, and was able to reduce the IRS bill when patriarch A.N. Pritzker died in 1986 from the $150 million the government said the family owed for his estate only $9.5 million? (Or that family itself claimed his estate only possessed $3,000 in taxable assets?) Did you know that, twenty-four years later, a tax judge ruled that Kanter was the “architect” of “a concerted effort” to profit from kickbacks involving the siphoning off of funds managed by insurance companies? (The hustle included the invention of sham companies—“pure tax avoidance vehicles,” the judge said—the destruction of documents, and “implausible” and “incredible” testimony by Kanter.) This 2007 article by David Cay Johnston on the “overwhelming objective evidence” that led another tax judge to uphold the conviction places the Pritzker family at the center of the scam. And it notes that Kanter’s tax returns, now public, “show he never paid any significant tax. Yet he amassed a fortune big enough at one time to make him a credible bidder for the Miami Dolphins football team.”

Did you know that A.N. publicly denied ever using the legal services of fixer Sidney Korshak, for decades the notorious transit point between the mob and legitimate business interests in Chicago, before Korshak admitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission that he was in fact the family’s labor lawyer? That a Los Angeles Police investigator’s report said A.N. was “[c]losely connected with members of the Capone syndicate, Tony Accardo, and other underworld characters? It is believed by the undersigned that Pritzker may be active locally, as a front for Eastern hoodlum money to be invested in the Los Angeles Area”? That A.N.’s law partner Stanford Clinton was general counsel for the notoriously mob-connected Teamsters pension fund?

I got much of this stuff from Gus Russo’s voluminous book Supermob: How Sidney Korshak and His Criminal Associates Became America’s Hidden Power Brokers. It’s an over-the-top book, hanging all sorts of claims on insinuation and guilt by association, so I’ve only included here the stuff I consider solid. And let’s respectfully dissent from Shakespeare, who wrote in the Merchant of Venice, “The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children”: Penny is not responsible for the dodgy practices of her grandfather. It’s not her fault her late Uncle Jay, who bought Hyatt in 1957, deployed it as a platform for innovative “asset management” financial engineering that kept the family at arms’ length regarding risk and responsibility (nowadays with the assets coming from Chicago taxpayers). She can’t be held responsible for the way Jay, back before that, benefited from very questionable deals arising from his tenure in the Justice Department’s Alien Property office, responsible for assets seized by the government. Nor can she be held responsible for the mob money allegedly behind the expansion of Hyatt in the first place. “Behind every fortune lies a great crime,” is the Balzac quote Russo uses to introduce the Pritzker family in his book; but that’s not Penny’s fault either, is it?

But certain patterns still obtain. It is one of the most crucial stories for understanding our age: how tax-avoidance strategies of a previous generation that might have landed you in court are now legal—which does not make them any more ethical. In fact, it may make them less ethical—precisely because third-gen scions like Penny, born in 1959, have entered into the political establishment, where their representatives, their latter-day Korshaks and Kanters, do their laundering in the halls of government instead of in Las Vegas hotel room meetings with associates of Tony Accardo. The scumminess is the same, or, really, worse; as Charlie Savage wrote this week in The New York Times, “Republican senators are likely to be interested in the Pritzker family’s reputation as innovators in the use of offshore trusts and foreign bank secrecy laws to shelter their wealth from income, capital gains and inheritance taxes. Even after tax loopholes were closed, the family’s trusts were grandfathered in and it kept benefiting from them.” As well the Republican senators should. And, hell, Democratic senators, too.

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The crime is what is no longer a crime. Indeed, wrote David Cay Johnston, Burton Kanter regarded himself as the nation’s premier expert at “legally eliminating taxes.” He even proudly documented his techniques in legal journals.

Savage asked the White House what made Penny Pritzker suitable for a confirmation fight she was not qualified for in 2008. The spokesman responded that back then, she “had an ongoing obligation to oversee her family’s restructuring of assets to separate out the interest of various family members.” Now, that task has apparently been completed, or, as “a White House official involved in vetting her” put it, “they had since completed dividing up their finances.”

Got that? It took lawyers four years to figure out how to divest her from the sleaze. And that’s what makes her qualified for the job—a job not unrelated to the devising and interpretation of tax policy itself. And, not incidentally, a job concerned with subjects like this:

Tax evasion by individuals with unreported offshore financial accounts was estimated by one IRS commissioner to be several tens of billions of dollars, but no precise figure exists. IRS has operated four offshore programs since 2003 that offered incentives for taxpayers to disclose their offshore accounts and pay delinquent taxes, interest and penalties. GAO was asked to review IRS’s second offshore program, the 2009 OVDP. This report (1) describes the nature of the noncompliance of 2009 OVDP participants, (2) determines the extent IRS used the 2009 OVDP to prevent noncompliance, and (3) assesses IRS efforts to detect taxpayers trying to circumvent taxes, interests and penalties that would otherwise be owed. To address these objectives, GAO analyzed tax return data for all 2009 OVDP participants and exam files for a random sample of cases with penalties over $1 million; interviewed IRS Offshore officials; and developed and implemented a methodology to detect taxpayers circumventing monies owed.

That’s the abstract to a paper published two months ago and distributed by the Commerce Department’s National Technical and Information Service. I would give far more than a penny to hear Pritzker’s thoughts about that.

Read Part One of Rick Perlstein’s Pritzker commentary.

Bernie Madoff, pictured here after being placed under house arrest in 2008, is not the only one in the business of building pyramids. (Reuters/Shannon Stapleton)

Last year I published an article in The Baffler called “The Long Con” that demonstrated how practices we associate with snake-oil salesmen saturate the American right—not just in its ideological appeals but in the way right-wing politics corrals a fleecable multitude all in one place, which conservative publications literally rent out as a source of handy marks for con men. A lot of folks found this to be a revelation, a bittersweet pleasure for me. On the one hand, it’s a blessing to me to be able to teach people new things about the world around us. But on the other hand, it’s frustrating; I wish people already knew about this stuff. It reinforces a fact: America truly does harbor two separate and nearly incommensurate tribes, “Red” and “Blue,” if you will; how many of us Blue folks know that getting roped into coughing up hard-earned money you’ll never see again to Republican-affiliated “multilevel marketing” (MLM) companies—in hustles formerly known as “pyramid schemes”—is as common in Evangelical and Mormon culture as going to yoga class in our own?

Robert Fitzpatrick, the author of False Profits: Seeking Financial and Spiritual Deliverence in Multi-Level Marketing and Pyramid Schemes and an expert witness or consultant in more MLM cases than any other private citizen, estimates that the industry Hoovers $10 to $20 billion out of the pockets of Main Street Americans every year. And hardly any of us know anything about it. As he explained to me in an e-mail, “Just as the Tea Party exists as a kind of phantom, funded quietly and invisibly from on high, with amorphous, uncounted members, the MLM industry has permeated Main Street without media recognition of its scale or force and largely in disguise as ‘direct selling.’ ” But “the Tea Party is at least beginning to be studied, its funding traced, its leaders examined.” MLM? Not so much. His book, published in 1997, was the first on the subject, though the industry has been rampant since the 1970s—and, save for a notable exception two years later from the heroic folks at tiny South End Press, there have hardly been any others since. That’s why I’m beginning a series on the subject today—in the hope that people will spread the word as widely as possible, and start learning more, and even organizing, on their own.

Let’s start with some basics—with some key regulatory questions. Fitzpatrick wrote a report called “The Main Street Bubble” that he hopes members of Congress will use to enhance FTC oversight, and to persuade the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to put MSM scams under its umbrella. It notes, “When they began to appear in the mid 1960s, pyramid selling schemes were widely understood to be classic frauds and were widely prosecuted.” The model statute came from California, which in 1968 banned “endless chains”—in which a franchisee only or mostly makes money from recruiting further franchisees, not from selling actual retail products. (In the most extreme variety of pyramid scheme, there is no actual product.) Another, softer practice, “referral-based discounting,” was widely outlawed: that means franchisees had to recruit new customers if they wanted to buy the material they were supposed to be selling at the advertised price. “By design,” Fitzpatrick explains, both practices “doomed most consumers to losses.”

The marquee outfit practicing such hustles, of course, was Amway—short for “American Way”—founded by the DeVos family of Michigan in 1964. In the 1970s, the FTC lost a court effort to close down Amway as an inherent fraud. A 1979 administrative law decision, however, did limit the conditions under which it could operate. Via clever lawyering, Amway adjusted—which it found easy to do under the relaxed regulatory regime of the Reagan years. Endless chains could be successfully reframed as a legitimate “business opportunity” called “direct selling,” in which, Fitzpatrick writes, “Each new distributor was induced to purchase goods each month as part of the ‘investment’”—only at staggeringly inflated prices, with the profit designed to flow up the chain to fewer and fewer parties, ultimately to the company itself. In short, “without sustainable and profitable retail sales opportunity for the distributors, the reward can come only from one place: the investments of later recruits.”

Such companies “churn through 50–80 percent of victims annually, replacing them with new ones,” which proliferate like kudzu. They have to, in order for their sponsors to survive: without new marks, the base of the pyramid disintegrates. Their failure is the company’s success. According to the declaration of expert witness Peter J. Vander Nat in the case of Federal Trade Commission v. Trek Alliance, who studied a database of 22,281 distributors for a company that “sold” (not many) water filters, cleaning products, nutritional supplements and beauty aids, “Under several optimal scenarios in which the distributors do exactly what is needed to obtain the rewards proposed by the Pay Plan, approximately 98.8 to 99.6 percent fail to achieve any earnings,” and “in all likelihood more than 96% of Trek distributors experienced business failure.”

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Under the Clinton administration, regulatory efforts were stepped up. Vander Nat became the FTC’s senior economist, expert at teasing out the fraud behind “direct selling,” devising a test that determined what percentage of purchases by “distributors” would have to be resold to actual retail customers (instead of future “distributors” down the chain) for the “distributor” to actually make money without recruiting further marks. That number, he learned, was typically 70 percent, which virtually no one ever achieved. His schema made it easier to prosecute and protect the victims under Section 5 of the FTC Act, which regulates business fraud. Prosecutions began, gathered steam.

And what happened next? Tune in next time, when, likes the sands in an hourglass, a new presidential administration turns—a Republican administration. We’ll learn what conservative elites think about such sorts of business practices: that they judge them, well, as the American Way. Why not? They’re often the very same people.

Fracking is a public health disaster for those who live near it. Read Ellen Cantarow's story.

Not too long ago I saw, for the first time, the 1962 version of the film Cape Fear, directed by J. Lee Thompson. (You may know the 1991 Martin Scorsese remake.) It starred two men whose casting alone would have alerted early ’60s moviegoers about where their sympathies were supposed to lie. Robert Mitchum, famous for depicting characters of pure wickedness even at the risk of his status as a leading man (think 1955’s Night of the Hunter), plays an ex-con just out of prison. He’s convinced that one man is responsible for his incarceration: a lawyer played by Gregory Peck who saw him commit the brutal murder for which he went to prison. Peck played to type, too: a heroic, sweet, selfless lawyer, tough but fair, who would never cut a corner, even to restore order to a fallen world—just like the character he played in To Kill a Mockingbird, also from 1962.

I saw Cape Fear back when we were all discussing the meaning and ethics of Zero Dark Thirty. Remember that big old debate? Some, most prominently three senators in a position to know, argued the picture was “grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information that led to the location of Osama bin Laden”—and was, thus, objectively pro-torture. Others, like Michael Moore, said the interrogation scenes were so off-putting that no one could but to conclude from them, Moore wrote, that “torture is wrong.” Others pointed out that the full plot, in its byzantine complexities, suggests that the tidbit of information that broke the case came investigators’ way before those interrogations happened—so the movie could not be read as objectively pro-torture. I disagree with both those latter two arguments. The reason is simple: ZDT is a genre piece, a police procedural, in which convention dictates that sweating the suspect—good cop, bad cop, and all that; an unpleasant job but somebody has to do it—is but one of the required stations of the cross to move the plot along to resolution, and justice.

In any event I couldn’t stop thinking about that movie while watching Cape Fear—thinking about what the Zero Dark Thirty debate says about 2013, from the perspective of this very different movie from 1962.

In Cape Fear, the Robert Mitchum character reappears in the Peck character’s life to deliver a veritable clinic in how you terrorize a family—to reduce the victim to a puddle of fear and make it impossible for his family to live their lives without being possessed by that fear. Peck has a lovely wife and pubescent daughter—that’s central to the plot. First, his daughter’s beloved dog is poisoned to death. He next learns that the Mitchum character’s girlfriend has been brutally beaten. Mitchum then starts bird-dogging Peck’s daughter, leering at her, harassing her–then chasing her into a corner of a scary building. Peck confronts Mitchum in a bar and tries to pay him off to leave his family alone. Mitchum refuses, pledging to visit the “death of a thousand cuts” on his adversary instead.

Mitchum’s character, as clever as he is wicked, is careful to leave no actionable evidentiary trail to tie him to his acts. And also, all the while, a smarmy defense lawyer he’s retained—we’re to think of the lawyer as almost as wicked as Mitchum himself—spouts American Civil Liberties Union–style bromides, keeping law enforcement at bay, leaving Mitchum free to stalk his prey with a free hand.

Bottom line: we know Mitchum and his lawyer are evil—there can be no mistaking that. (“A man like that is an animal,” a character observes. “So you have to fight him like an animal.”) Just as obviously, Gregory Peck is a pure manifestation of goodness. And in a certain way of telling a Hollywood story, knowing that is enough: the plot merely becomes about good guy vanquishing bad guy, it really doesn’t matter how. Just like in Zero Dark Thirty, in which the means happen to be torture.

But here is the moral grandeur, by contrast, of Cape Fear: Peck refuses to surrender to his rage, refuses to cut civil liberties corners, refuses vigilante revenge. That determination structures the entire texture of the second half of the picture—until, by the end, as Mitchum plots the literal abduction and rape of Peck’s pre-teen daughter, Peck cunningly wins the battle by fighting fairly and within the law.

It demonstrates a difference between that time and our own: the simple point that Americans then found the idea of hunting down genuine evildoers without violating due process or constitutional liberties credible. (It was a Cold War thing: civil liberties are what makes America American. Without civil liberties, there was no America.) Even more importantly, it showed that audiences then found such a plot device entertaining. There was pleasure in watching evil being put paid by good guys who didn’t descend to the level of bad guys. That changed, of course, by the 1970s, when revenge movies—like Dirty Harry (1972) and Death Wish (1974)—began wallowing in the pleasures of heroes who were heroes precisely because they sunk to the level of villains. Who agreed with the Dick Cheney who infamously put it regarding the watershed our nation had supposedly passed when confronting post-9/11 “evildoers,” “We have to work the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world.” Just like the good guys do in Zero Dark Thirty.

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And, we are now to believe, just like the good guys are doing with Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

We are to understand that a novel “public safety exemption” prevents Tsarnaev from hearing that he has a right to remain silent, and the right to an attorney, that if he cannot afford an attorney one will be provided to him. Instead he is now being sweated out by authorities old-school style, perhaps by a “bad cop” boxing him around the head and the ears with a phone book (maybe Tsarnaev has never seen a cop movie, and doesn’t know that he doesn’t have to say anything…). Which makes no logical sense, because any competent defense lawyer would understand his first responsibility as keeping his client from being executed, and would thus encourage his client to sing like a bird about any possible wider plot. Meanwhile Senator Lindsay Graham added a mockery to constitutional mockery, insisting Tsarnaev be treated as an “enemy combatant”—whatever that means by this point, other than “scary not-really-American person we don’t like.”

Andrew Sullivan has recently pointed out the absurdity of the national pants-pooping that’s been going on after the Boston attacks. Citing the libertarian writer Ronald Bailey, he notes calculations that the “the chances of an American being killed in a terrorist attack over the past five years is one in twenty million. The risk of being struck by lightning is one in five million. The risk of dying in a car accident is one in 19,000. More strikingly, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism found that the number of terror attacks in the US in the decade before 9/11 was forty-one a year. Since 9/11, it has been nineteen a year.” He adds, by way of contrast, veterans are committing suicide now at a rate of twenty-two per day. And yet somehow none of us has seen fit to overturn the Constitution because of any of that.

Instead, the nation has surrendered to an inherently right-wing idea, one that I’ve written of here in the context of the gun control debate: the notion that the world is easily parsed into god guys and bad guys, never the twain should meet—and the corollary notion, which I’ve also written about recently, that once the world has been so divided, vanquishing the bad guys licenses any procedural abuse.

Indeed it is now hard for Americans to imagine the world working any other way. If someone tried to make a Cape Fear today, in the same basic way it was made in 1962, ask yourself this: would Gregory Peck even be conceivable as a hero?

More on fear: Americans' insulated existence gives us little perspective on terror and violence, Rick Perlstein writes.

Teachers, students and parents protest the plan to close 54 Chicago public schools. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast.)

I've been watching a lot of adolescents cry these days. First it was twelve-year-old Jasmine Murphy, on a media bus tour led by the Chicago Teachers Union to demonstrate the devastation likely to follow from Mayor Rahm Emanuel's plan to close fifty-four schools. She was relating how she felt when the elementary school she loved and in which she had thrived was shuttered in 2011. Then, this week, all over town, Chicago Public School bureaucrats have sat before hearings to hear public comment on each individual school set to close this coming September. In my neighborhood, Hyde Park, I joined seventy-five or so community members who sat—and, angrily, stood—in an auditorium at Kenwood Academy High School, six blocks directly east of Barack Obama's family home, to address the closing of a middle school next door known as Canter Leadership Academy. The whole thing pretty much went down like this. Picture a tough-looking black teenage boy. His name is Shane Ellis. Shane takes the microphone for his allotted two minutes. He begins listing all the schools he's attended in Chicago. He says, "Of all these schools, Canter is the only one that showed it actually cared." He relates a story about the principal telling him that given all the things he's been through in his life and with his family it's a testament to his depth of character that he can carry on at school all.

It is upon that recollection that Shane breaks down. A pal approaches, comforts him; Shane breaks down again, overcome, overwhelmed, beside himself. He can't continue. He leaves the hall, head hung low. That's how much losing his school means to him.

Imagine stories like this happening again and again and again. That was how I spent last Friday evening. An earlier hearing a week ago about the same school drew two hundred community members and was, I'm told even more passionate than this.

The question of whether a school like Canter closes down, as the school board wants, or stays open, as the community overwhelmingly desires, will provide a case study for whether the mayor's school closing plan can truly serve the city's children, parents, teachers in any sort of humane way. It also offers a window into the larger meaning of what the billionaire stats-besotted ideologues driving what our benighted political discourse insists on labeling education "reformers" have in mind for the rest of the country. By the Gradgrindian statistical reckoning of Rahm Emanuel's school board, Canter's closing is an open and shut case: it is a "Level 3" school, the system's lowest rating; if it closes, its students will be spread across two schools all the way across the neighborhood that both rate as Level 2. Which, on paper, looks like an obvious improvement. At the hearing, though, it becomes plain that absolutely none of the stakeholders involved—students, parents, staff, and assorted community members, all of whom unanimously and passionately speak against the closing—see this as an improvement. What they tell is the kind of stories statistics don't know how to register.

Diane Hamm, a theater artist and wife of a Canter teacher, who speaks third, gave an especially articulate summary as to why: a "school is a microcultural environment in itself." Canter being an especially "safe, caring, and vibrant" such environment, closing it "simply creates chaos." Her husband, she says, "has taught in many school environments that were not as supportive," including ones in neighborhoods of great privilege; Canter, by contrast, by hard work and by design, maintains a community and is maintained by a community. Another wife of a Canter teacher provides an illustration as to how: "students who've been randomly dropping by his classroom for twenty-one years because they know where he'll be." Their family runs into families of these kids while walking the family dog, shopping at Hyde Park Produce; all are embedded in "a community that transcends the school environment." This is one thing would be lost.

Here is another. There are other students who do not come from this particular neighborhood, and speak to the school's value yet more eloquently. For they come from much worse neighborhoods, their parents having busted their tails to get their kids into this safe, caring, and vibrant environment (one parent described how she risked homelessness so her kids could get educated there)—where, like Shane, they consistently thrive. The fact that a school like Canter gets a "low" rating seems a paradoxical testament to strength: it is a welcoming school—it welcomes bad students, and makes them better.

I use the word welcoming with irony: "welcoming schools" is the slyly Orwellian phrase used to describe the buildings where kids from closed schools are being shunted off to. But community, a speaker says, that precious, delicate thing, "does not transfer to a welcoming school."

Over and over, students at the hearing attest to the transformations this supposedly "failing" community has worked in their educations. "All my teachers are the best people I've met in my life," says a kid named Elizabeth Johnson, who graduated on to a college preparatory high school. She starts sobbing, then addresses the panel directly: "What type of people are you?" She names her teachers one by one—Mr. Fishbein, Mr. Papczun, Mr. Paranjape, Mr. Windsor (a wizardly math teacher who helped eighteen out of twenty students in his algebra advanced placement class last year test out of high school algebra): "They've changed my life! It's outrageous that you're going against the community and the kids and the teachers! I just don't understand."

Mr. Papczun tells of students relating to him their victimization by gangs at other schools, and how safe they feel at this one: "I think we really save these kids.... And this is going to be lost.... We are not a failing school! We are a great school!" A kid named Jose, a salutatorian and honor roll member, asks of his "better" school, "Would I be valued at that school just like Canter valued me?" (He walks back from the microphone, and Mr. Fishbein gives him a fist-bump.) A student says she never learned anything at her last school because of all the bullying (bullies aren't tolerated at Canter), and because there were forty students in her class ("And I understand that's why you want to close Canter!"—because there aren't forty students in every class). A kid named Darius testifies that he got all F's on his report card at his last school "in all the easiest subjects. But this year, as I came to Canter, it actually changed me. This year, I'm actually working on all the things that are inside me." He concludes, "We really, really love this community. We're all in this together." Can't have that.

A pastor points to a word obsessing the city's black South and West Sides these days: violence. He turns it around, and applies it to the school-closing process itself: "This act seems violent to me. Without warning. It is a violent act." He gets a large measure of applause: "The question is, have you all taken into consideration the violence of this act itself?" A charter school guidance counselor speaks up and gives his name, first and last—despite the fact, he says, "I could lose my job for being here." He says he has to be here: it's about community. A nervous student ("I'm shaking") says, "I'm from East Africa, and I'm from a community where it takes a village to raise a child. And when I got to Canter—"

She stops. Yes, she starts crying. Mr. Fishbein moves to comfort her.

She continues: "When I came here I lost the sense of a village raising me, but when I got to Canter I got the feeling of every teacher...replacing that spot.... I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Canter." She then tells the story of a fellow student, who had never been interested in art, being guided to find a gift for it within herself. "And that's all thanks to Canter.... And I can't believe they're closing this school that made me what I am today."

Now the student council vice president comforts her, and leads her back to her seat. It all would have made for dramatic video. City Hall apparently knows this all too well. Before the meeting, when a man in front of me begins setting his camera atop a tripod, a large fellow rushes forth to inform him no video recording is allowed. The man with the camera agrees to comply. I ask the security man the reason for the rule. He says it's a policy of the school board. The man with the camera continues setting it up—and the security guard dashes his way again. The cameraman assures the security man that he's setting the devise on its still-camera setting. Unsatisfied, the security guard asks him to prove it—and peers closely at the machine to make sure.

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The arrogance is the most grating part. The big public meeting at school headquarters on the closings is Wednesday. That, one speaker, a social worker at Canter, thunders, is a report card pickup day. "CPS is making us choose: going to the hearing to keep our schools open, or attending report-card pickup and conversing with the parents about our children's progress. Or maybe, just maybe, you don't want community input. Why else did you double-schedule these?" She addresses her last remark at the three bureaucrats before her: "People, tell me how you've allowed this to happen." They sit, stony, unresponsive. As they told the very first speaker, when she asked how they were going to prevent the abandoned Canter building from becoming a neighborhood eyesore, driving down property values, "We're not here to answer questions, we're only here to listen to your questions and take them back to [schools CEO] Barbara Byrd-Bennett."

There are murmurs; the scene is so bizarre as to almost be Kafkaesque. "So what's the purpose?" someone asks. But they can't answer that either; once more they implacably sit, Sphinx-like. And sit, and sit, and sit—as the tenor of the meeting gets angrier and angrier ("People coming in front of you crying ... greeted with silence?"). People begin feeling more and more helpless, and citizens start murmuring about how this all will change how they plan to vote. One parent suggests of the ESL interpreter, "It seems like she should turn around and do sign language to you guys." A graduate student says he will address the note-taker instead. Though he actually addresses them—with the school system officials: "If I were in your position I would actually be worried" about the system's "inveterate failure to live up to promises"—such as the promise that another neighborhood school, Kozminski Community Academy, which is on the system's "Track E" schedule, which means it is in session in summer, would get air conditioning and never did.

"Please conclude your remarks," the bureaucrat serving as master of ceremonies, CPS deputy chief of operations Tom Terrell, intones.

He's said that over and over at each speaker's two-minute point, and seems to do so with an especially robotic flatness—an almost ostentatious flatness—precisely during the testimonies that are most impassioned. (It sounds especially unmannerly when he does so to Evan Canter, the son of the community activist after which the school is named.) The only time one of the figures on the stage, CPS "Chief of Networks" Denise Little, showed signs of life was when a witness addressed our little mayor's imperious decision-making style: "What is he, an emperor?" She giggled. It must have been be tough, carrying out this farkakta assignment; I felt for those poor bureaucrats then—felt for them having to follow the dictates of this awful, awful man. (The other figures sitting at the table were Eric Pruitt, deputy chief of elementary schools—and the area's police commander, I guess in case a distraught twelve-year old rushed the stage.)

Rahm Emanuel is supposed to be some sort of political genius. The only thing he seems good at now is manufacturing enemies. ("This is not for the children ... you think we're dumb, Emanuel?": sustained applause.) Every week new stories come out completely undermining the system's claims that the school-closing plan will make students better off. Perhaps the most stunning was an investigation by the schools watchdog publication Catalyst Chicago demonstrating that eleven percent of the students whose schools closed between 2001 and 2006 simply disappeared from the system: no one knows where or whether they continued in school at all. Then came this: Chicago Public Radio's Linda Lutton noted that the city is borrowing $329 million to upgrade the receiving schools (despite announcing last year the system was too broke to approve more than a bare-bones capital budget). "A district spokesperson confirmed CPS did not factor in debt service costs when calculating savings to be achieved by closing schools."

This bad faith (the spokesman, noted Lutton, was "authorized to speak to media but not to have reporters print his name") has been politically galvanizing. At a table at the cafe where I write this six mothers busily plot their role in the campaign to save Canter. "You don't really know how a school is until you go to it," I overheard one. Later, an employee at a charter school who hears me talking about the hearing on the phone turns around and tells me about her own work fighting for the neighborhood schools. Meanwhile, through it all, amidst the obvious political collapse in Emanuel's position in the face of all this consternation, well-informed City Hall watchers I know scratch their heads. No one can figure out what the play is. Turn the buildings over to charter schools? But CPS promised that no charters would occupy closed schools. (The system abandons its promises all the time, but this one would be particularly embarrassing to break.) One particularly shrewd Rahm-watcher I know suggests they're doing it to get more federal money; but he's not sure, precisely, how that would work.

Then there is that nagging suspicion of a meta-explanation, one that feels almost too awful to contemplate. Destroying the village in order to save it, all in order to rebuild it on a more overclass-friendly foundation, Republican-style: Since the other ones simply don't add up, you're almost left with no choice but to entertain the idea. That would be, after all, how Rahm Emanuel rolls. Consider Bruce Rauner, the local leveraged-buyout titan who mentored Rahm's move into investment banking after he left the Clinton White House and before he ran for Congress. Since 2006, he's had a charter school named after himself, "Rauner College Prep." Rauner loves charter schools, and hates the Chicago Teachers Union. Rauner recently announced an exploratory committee to run for governor of Illinois as a Republican. The morning of the Canter hearing I noticed a tweet from him: "Thrilled to have FreedomWorks President & CEO Matt Kibbe join my exploratory committee." You know, Matt Kibbe: co-author of Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto. You know FreedomWorks: the right-wing front group that traces its lineage to David Koch, the one that produced the fake Hillary Clinton sex tape, the one in which the Secretary of State had oral sex performed on her by a person in a panda suit.

These are the types Rahm pals around with. Kids like Shane: well, I guess they can just go to hell.

In his previous post, Rick Perlstein looks at another infuriating policy with no apparent logic: The idea that tax cuts "pay for themselves," now debunked by none other than the National Review.