Where Are Flags On The Play
As Greer Gets Face Masked?
Welcome back sports fans to Tuesday Night Political Football. At least it seems like a football game when people are piling on you at the end of a tackle.
Have you ever wondered why professional football players can’t seem to remember its illegal to grab another player by his face mask? Here’s a hint. It isn’t because they are that forgetful. “Gee coach, I know you’ve told me every game not to do that, but as an overpaid professional athlete in the NFL, you can’t expect me to remember every little rule (wink).”
No, they do it because they think they can get away with it.
Tuesday night, Councilwoman Dottie Greer got face masked. The good news is, a lot of people saw it.
The other team calls themselves the “Citizen Empowerment Committee.” I think that’s because the name “Front Group For Rich Special Interests” was already taken.
This is the committee that has raised and spent the ungodly sum of $32,000 so far trying to recall two members of the Council. The group that had to pay workers $5 per signature to go door to door collecting signatures on the recall petition. The group who used workers from Belleville and Cahokia, Illinois, Berkeley, St. Louis, Ferguson, Florissant, St. Peters, Rolla and Wright City because they had no grassroots organization in Dottie Greer’s ward willing to get out and collect the signatures themselves.
Their paid lawyer was the only person to address the Council. He doesn’t live in the 7th Ward. Neither do the two co-chairs of the committee which loaned the Citizen Empowerment Committee $7,500. Nor does millionaire home builder Tom Hughes, who was the single largest contributor to their effort.
It is hard to find anyone associated with this effort who can even vote in the 7th Ward. But the millionaires and their paid mercenaries all piled on one lone Councilwoman to try to drag her down.
You can watch it when they replay the Council meeting on Channel 20. You can even tape it and play it back in slow motion. As local television personalty Uncle Leonard would say hawking his big screen tv, “It’s like having your own fifty yard line right there in your own home there.”
Word went out on their official website for everyone to show up in mass to press for the recall. The City Administrator even left me a message he was going to make sure there was extra security because he had been told they were going to “pack the Council chambers”.
It turned out to be more hype than Disney is giving the new Chicken little movie. Only about eight people showed up sporting green “Recall Dottie Greer” stickers. Sitting among them was Tom Hayden, Councilman Mike Weller’s campaign manager.
Hayden doesn’t live in Ward 7 either.
Of course he might have been there to support Councilman Weller who was helping the recall group by “fast tracking” the introduction of an ordinance to set the recall election in February. He called the City Clerk to sponsor the bill before she had even certified the results to the Council.
If the ordinance hadn’t been introduced that night the election would most likely be in April, not February. Why should Councilman Weller care so much when the election is held? Because they don’t want a lot of Ward 7 voters going to the polls. A February election draws about 10% to 15% turnout. Snow and ice tends to dampen turnout that time of year. April elections get 25% to 30% turnout on average when there is more to vote on than a single issue.
Again, why should Councilman Weller want to go out of his way to try to insure a low turnout election? Why was his hand stuck in Dottie Greer’s face mask?
The obvious answer is that the Dottie Greer recall doesn’t have a lot of popular support among people who actually live in the 7th Ward. They can’t risk a higher turnout of those voters.
A judge may ultimately decide when this election will be held. Other questions I’ve raised about possible violations of State Laws are in the hands of the proper authorities. But the fate of representative democracy, as always, is in the hands of the people. Will big money special interests succeed in overturning the will of the people? Will officials who work hard and have committed no crime be kicked out of office for offending people with money?
Or as one exasperated 7th Ward woman wrote me, will we start recalling officials for wearing the wrong color tie? Guess I better check my closet.
These are important issues. The famed Roman author Virgil once penned these immortal words:
Facilis descensus Averno; sed ad auras evadere est labor. (Aeneid, VI,126)
For those whose Latin is as rusty as mine the translation is roughly:
Going to Hell is easy; it’s coming back that’s hard.
Likewise, undermining our democracy is easy...it’s putting it back together that’s hard.
