Skokie's New Aeronautic and Space Administration (SASA)

I was recently riding down the MSWRD canal bikepath in Skokie and began chatting with one of the innumerable Skokie Village employees who was cleaning up the trash there. I asked him about the damage that the beavers had been doing to the trees there and he told me to call the new head of the Skokie Division of Forestry.

Huh?!!

I am not making this up.

Landlocked Skokie -- which abuts no forest land whatever -- which is perhaps renowned as being the most overdeveloped aesthetic disaster of a suburb -- actually pays someone more than $50k a year to be its "Forestry Director."

Skokie is perhaps best known for its absurdly laughable 2 flats which even today still are built with ghastly turquoise tile and stone. Someone's idea of class back in 1962 -- but those ugly monstrosities are still being erected on Church St. to this day.

What a silly excuse for a suburb!

Skokie, under the leadership of its pasty-faced, Village Administrator for life, Alphonse Rigoni, has been effectively the fastest growing municipal bureaucracy on the face of the earth.

It now, not only has a Bureau of Forestry, but also shelled out taxpayer money to buy a radio station to which absolutely no one ever listens.

But pasty-faced Al gets to add radio bureaucrats to his Mussolini-like panoply of government funded lackeys.

Any day now I expect Skokie to start bilking its taxpayers for the new Skokie Department of Mining and Land Reclamation.

And the new Skokie Aeronautic and Space Administration.

Why not?

Alphonse and his pals in the Chicago Democrat machine-controlled Skokie Caucus Party need an ever bigger and ever more useless bureaucracy.

And you Skokie suckers can just keep voting for it and paying for it.

Evanston's Jorgensen Steel Corp. Being Replaced by Dunkin' Donuts, Car Wash

Jorgensen Steel, with its big stately-looking office and massive production/distribution factory has left Evanston.

Its grand 50's vintage edifice on Oakton St., just east of the MSWRD canal has been demolished.

In its place is emerging three cookie-cutter buildings that will house a car wash, a self-storage operation and a Dunkin' Donuts.

Jorgensen Steel was a grand old building with a red brick and chrome facade on its front office building and a massive, hangar-like industrial operations building in back.

It seemed the kind of place to which Ward Cleaver might go off with his brief case in the morning after kissing June good-bye and admonishing Beaver and Wally to be good. It seemed the kind of place to which Chester A. Riley would dash off in the morning with his lunch bucket.

It was also the kind of industrial facility that provided millions upon millions in tax revenue to Evanston and the State of Illinois over the years.

Under its new ownership, it has moved operations to low-tax, right-to-work (non-union) Texas.

The grand old building has been razed now. While still a perfectly usable, architectural gem, no industrial operator silly enough to move to high-tax, high-regulation Evanston, Illinois could be located, even though the Evanston economic development team scoured the nation's lunatic asylums.

So overwhelmingly Obamaite, Evanston's, last large industrial operation will be replaced by a Dunkin' Donuts.

This is the face of the new American service economy.

Instead of producing steel and aluminium -- the very rock core of hard industrial production -- we will now have jobs serving each other donuts and washing each others cars.

Steel workers could provide a home and education for their families. Dunkin' Donut's workers can make enough to buy new i-pods at Best Buy.

And yet the donut servers and car washers will still show up on Federal statistics as being among the ranks of the employed.

"You ain't seen nothin' yet, " Obama squawked at his gala fundraiser in Los Angeles last week.

That is precisely what I'm afraid of.

With China now producing the world's hard industrial goods -- the true bases of real economic wealth -- how long can the US sustain this economic house of cards, which is increasingly based on paper shuffling and hamburger flipping (and massive amounts of consumer debt)? Can we export car washes? How many Dunkin' Donut's chocolate creme filled bismark's can possibly be exported to satisfy the US balance of trade?

This situation is precisely that about which Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan warned in the mid-90s during the NAFTA-GATT debate.

But no one listened.

So, Good bye Jorgensen Steel, with your well-paid factory and white collar jobs, employee health care and solid contribution to US economic economic preeminence.

And Hello Dunkin' Donuts.

How many creams do you want with your frappe?

Car Dealerships Slashed -- Good Riddance!

So Chrysler is pulling the plug on a quarter of its car dealerships. And GM is doing the same to about one-sixth of its dealers.

The Chicago Tribune yesterday ran a dewy-eyed story on their demise, lamenting the loss of these veritable pillars of their communities.

They sponsor little league teams we are told. They gave opportunities to thousands of returning WWII vets. They hire thousands and pay millions in state and local taxes. Their loss is a sad thing, we are told.

Rubbish!

These are car salesmen we are talking about here.

I say, Good Riddance!

Their passing is no more a cause for sadness than was the slow syphilitic demise of Al Capone.

Scarface sponsored soup kitchens during the Great Depression, too, you know.

The whole rickety dealership franchise system is a dusty marketing vestige of an era when there were 200 American car manufacturers, each eagerly trying to ply their newfangled horseless carriages.

In the 1920s South Michigan Avenue in Chicago was the site of storefront after storefront of hawkers of Reos, Packards, Stutz Bearcats, Mercers, Oldmobiles, Fords and the like.

As the dealership system boiled down, it ended up being a cash cow for the con-men left standing who used their government clout to safeguard their privileged market status. They used government to restrict entry, crowd out competitors and screw consumers.

No wonder organized crime began to move into the auto dealership game in Chicago during the 50s and 60s. Anyone remember Pete Epstein Pontiac on Lincoln Avenue? How exactly was a little provincial Chicago car dealer able to get Frank Sinatra to do his radio jingles?

For decades, the car dealers fought like cougars and barracudas to legislatively keep "unauthorized" replacement parts off the market. They wanted to keep their monopolies on parts and service.

And thereby screw the consumer.

For decades, they tacked on needless, high-priced extras like undercoating and extended warranties to jack up prices and profits on popular models.

And thereby screw the consumer.

The dealers leaned on their wholly owned state legislators to kill state "lemon laws" designed to protect buyers of hopelessly incorrigible Detroit concoctions. (Remeber the Chevy Vega, whose aluminum block engines would spontaneously burst into flame?)

And thereby screw the consumer.

Don't get me wrong. I am sure there are car dealers who are not crooks.

Maybe some day, I'll meet one.

After spending my summer break during high school, slaving away in a little factory that made Weinman furniture polish (this was back before the illegal alien invasion, when American manufacturers would actually hire American students during the summer at good wages,) I had saved up enough to contribute to my prep school tuition and to buy my first car.

I wanted a VW. This was after all, not too long after the summer of love and Woodstock. So I went to a Volkswagen dealer -- Nugent Volkswagen, on Waukegan Rd. in Glenview.

I picked out a clean, shiny, used Beetle, within my price range, excitedly test drove it and plunked down the cash.

A few months later, while working on the car, I discovered an old service tag on the battery, which recorded 129,000 miles on the odometer at the time of service -- not the 29,000 miles on the odometer when I bought it.

I went back and confronted the salesman (who actually had a German accent -- immigrants came here from places other than the 3rd world back then) and he and his manager gave me some lame explanation. I really had no recourse.

The dealership had clearly turned back the odometer.

They had screwed this consumer.

Many years later, over breakfast in Lake Forest, my then girlfriend's father told us how when he had traded in his Cadillac to a dealership owned by one of his country club pals, he was asked to sign a transfer form, verifying the mileage on the odometer. The form misrepresented the mileage by about 100,000 mi.

These car dealer sharpies never miss a trick.

So I am shedding no tears over their demise.

There is no reason why in this technologically advanced era, we should not be able to buy cars direct from the manufacturer, on-line.

There is no reason why the manufacturers can't authorize a large number of independent mechanics to service their cars and honor their warranties.

And as for the displaced car dealers, don't cry for them.

They'll easily be able to find work running rigged games of chance on the travelling carnival circuit.