The meteoric rise of Barack Obama will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.  And Obama’s growing relationship with Chicago’s Mayor Daley, as well as his endorsements of Democrats who champion the kind of patronage politics Obama used to denounce as the worst of the “old politics” (a charge Obama now answers by saying, “Sometimes you pay your debts”), has people trying to better understand The Chicago Way.

This week, Chuck Goudie reported for Chicago’s ABC affiliate on the state of safety inspections in the Windy City:

In Chicago, following a nationwide rash of crane collapses, deaths and injuries, the I-Team’s investigation has found questionable training and licensing requirements and slack city inspection reports.

It takes more schooling to be a hairdresser than to be certified as a crane operator or crane inspector in Chicago.

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[Accredited OSHA inspector Thomas] Barth is critical of how Chicago city inspectors keep records, like one entry in one official Chicago report that notes work on the “389th floor.”

Goudie is assured there is plenty of self-inspection, quoting a rep from Kenny Cranes.  Chicagoans know the Kenny name.  Kenny Industrial filed for bankruptcy in 2003; at the time, it had been doing sewer inspections that could not be done by the City’s other contractor — Brunt Brothers Transfer Inc. , which was one of the largest black-owned companies in the scandal-plagued Hired Truck Program.  Indeed, one of the Brunts was pretty blunt with the Chicago Sun-Times as that scandal was being uncovered:

Trucking firm owners say it’s easy money. Typically, they’re paid $40 an hour or more for drivers and trucks, often splotched with rust. Recently, the city was hiring a dump truck built in 1955.

“You put in your eight hours a day, but you just sit on the job,” said Jesse Brunt of Brunt Brothers Transfer. “There’s no fuel cost, no wear and tear on the trucks.”

At most, said Brunt, a 25-year veteran of the program, “you might have to haul a load or two.”

Regardless of whether the Kenny-Brunt teaming on sewer inspections looks like a manipulation of the City’s affirmative action contracting policies, Kenny Industrial’s bankruptcy paved the way for the sewer inspections contracts to go to a company started by a former Kenny employee — with undisclosed investments from Mayor Daley’s son Patrick Daley and nephew Robert Vanecko.  The bankruptcy seems unusual, given that Kenny Construction is run by a friend of Mayor Daley and is connected to no-bid contracting, Teamster politics and other forms of patronage.

The Chicago Way of inspection does not stop there.  Following multiple fatality incidents — including a porch collapse and trampling deaths in a nightclub fire – the local press took a look at building inspections. 

For example, Christopher Kozicki — a managing deputy in the Buildings Department who got his original city post through the mayor’s brother– rigged test scores to ensure that 19-year-old Andy Ryan got a job as a city building inspector paying $50,000 a year.  Ryan’s father was a big wheel in the Carpenters Union, a major campaign contributor to the mayor. 

Daley refused to fire Kozicki — even after Kozicki admitted the charge in a federal corruption trial.  Kozicki left his cushy gig voluntarily in early April 2008.  Meanwhile, City Hall has quietly scaled back the policing efforts launched after the 2003 porch collapse that killed 13 young partygoers.

Welcome to Chicago. This town stinks like a whorehouse at low tide. — Jim Malone.

That might be due to the lack of sewer inspections — both below and above street level.