Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, offered a pointed lesson in urban economics at the Hill and Valley Forum this week, noting that his firm’s Manhattan headcount has fallen from 35,000 to 26,000 since he took the job while its Texas workforce has grown from 11,000 to 33,000 over the same period. He attributed the shift directly to New York’s highest-in-the-nation individual taxes, estate taxes, corporate taxes, and anti-business environment, and said mayors should focus on police, hospitals, subways, sanitation, and schools rather than ideology.
Mark Glennon, founder of Wirepoints, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to apply that framework to Chicago and discuss a range of stories he said the local press has been actively suppressing.
The immediate occasion was a series of weekend street takeovers in Chicago that generated widespread social media coverage Saturday evening but produced almost no newspaper coverage by Sunday. Glennon said he searched for a press report on the incidents to post on Wirepoints and found exactly one. Mayor Brandon Johnson’s public response to the episodes was not a commitment of police resources or a vow of prosecution but rather a semantic intervention, insisting that reporters and commentators refrain from calling the events mob actions or street takeovers and instead use the phrase large gatherings, a framing Glennon said the local press appears to have willingly adopted. Dimon’s point about competition, Glennon said, applies directly here. Cities compete for residents and businesses, and the willingness to minimize and euphemize public safety failures is itself a competitive disadvantage that the migration data has been documenting for two decades.
Glennon raised a story he said has received almost no mainstream Illinois coverage despite its significant public health implications. HIV and AIDS infections in Chicago’s Latino population have surged twenty-nine percent over a period that perfectly coincides with the Biden administration’s open border policies and the arrival of an estimated fifty thousand migrants bused from Texas among the broader population of roughly five hundred and fifty thousand undocumented immigrants now residing in Illinois. WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times covered the story but framed it primarily as a consequence of Governor Abbott’s busing policy rather than as a public health consequence of the welcoming policies that brought those individuals here. Glennon also noted a measles outbreak in Chicago and the revelation that the suspect in the Sheridan Gorman murder has tuberculosis, producing what he described as a sanctuary city twofer in terms of public safety and public health consequences arriving simultaneously. He pointed out that the HIV surge occurred during the COVID period when social separation should theoretically have suppressed communicable disease transmission, making the coincidence with the migration surge even harder to explain away.
On the fiscal situation, Glennon addressed a City Journal piece from the Manhattan Institute making the case that Chicago is in worse fiscal shape than Detroit was before its bankruptcy, and comparing the city’s trajectory more to New York City in the 1970s or Puerto Rico in 2015 when it defaulted on its bonds. Chicago’s credit rating has been downgraded to triple-B-plus, while Illinois as a whole, despite six credit upgrades Pritzker regularly cites, remains the worst-rated state in the country. Glennon said those upgrades were driven almost entirely by the temporary infusion of federal COVID funds that have now expired, meaning the underlying structural problems were never addressed. He said he cannot identify a single material policy initiative the city or state is currently pursuing to address the fiscal crisis, and that civic and political leaders who could be demanding action are largely silent.
He said the closest viable model for outside intervention would be an oversight board similar to the one that helped stabilize New York City in the 1970s, but acknowledged that whoever appointed such a board in Illinois would almost certainly install the same political figures who created the crisis, and that federal appointment authority would face both legal challenges and political resistance. He expressed no optimism about a near-term solution but said the most basic available corrective measure would cost nothing and require only a database query: cross-referencing the city payroll with its list of employees who owe outstanding fines, fees, and water bills. More than twelve thousand city employees and employees of associated agencies owe a combined nineteen and a half million dollars to the city. The agency with the most delinquent employees is Chicago Public Schools. Glennon noted specific cases including a substitute teacher who owes the city two hundred thousand dollars in building code violations and traffic tickets accumulated over twenty-five years, a convicted bank robber hired through the CTA’s second chance program despite owing over one hundred and thirty-six thousand dollars in fines, and a West Side religious store operator who owes more than twenty-eight thousand dollars in unpaid water bills and nonetheless obtained a staff position with a city council member currently pushing the mayor to crack down on exactly this kind of deadbeat behavior. Glennon said the pattern represents not individual failures of enforcement but a systematic culture of non-accountability that is tolerated and in some respects welcomed by the city’s political establishment.