Scott Green

I hope your finances are in order because if you don’t act right now, you’ll miss your chance to purchase historic Illinois.

Think about what you’d be getting:  the place where Abraham Lincoln practiced law; the state from which Abraham Lincoln was elected President; the land where Abraham Lincoln is buried; the home of the ’85 Bears.  Illinois was the state with the can-do spirit to take a skinny black guy with a Muslim name and, in just four short years, get him to move 700 miles away.

So there’s a lot to love, which is why you’ll want to fetch your checkbook.  Of course, the state isn’t up as a single lot.  Even for Illinois that would be suspicious.  You have to buy it piecemeal, and two big chunks are up for bidding right now.

First is the Thomson Correctional Facility, a super-maximum security prison in the western part of the state.  The federal government is considering purchasing the nearly empty building to house the worst, most dangerous criminals of all:  e-mail spammers.

Also they’d send prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, many of whom are suspected Muslims.  This has Republicans up in arms.  “As home to America’s tallest building, we should not invite Al Qaeda to make Illinois its number one target,” said U.S. Representative Mark Kirk, because the truly patriotic thing to do is let some other state get attacked.

But never mind why a Republican is generating a firestorm to save a city where votes for Democrats are regularly cast by the deceased, pets, and deceased pets.  What concerns me is that at this point, if we don’t move these people to Illinois, Al Qaeda will assume we think we’re too good for their type and attack us anyway.

So we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, like the empty space in Mark Kirk’s head.  The only way out is to sell the prison to a third party before the federal government makes up its mind, which means there’s only a window of 20-30 years.

And once you’ve bought your prison, what would go better than all the water in Chicago?  According to the Chicago Tribune, Major Richard “J. or M.” Daley insists he’s not secretly preparing to privatize the city’s H₂O, so you can be certain the paperwork’s already been drawn up.  It’s like last year’s parking meter deal, wherein Daley locked all 50 aldermen in a room and told them that until they approved it, they couldn’t have any bribes.

Other cities have tried this, mostly with disastrous results.  Atlanta agreed to a 20-year deal in the late 1990s but had to get out of its contract by 2003 because of massive problems with citizens getting enough clean drinking water.  And they were even competent enough, as a city, to land the Olympics.  But Daley thinks it might work for Chicago, so it shouldn’t be long before he signs the rights to a Nigerian prince for the promise of riches.

Unless, of course, you buy it first.  I’m not saying it’ll be cheap.  But you will be saving a city from getting fleeced by a private company, in order to fleece it yourself.  And you don’t even have to worry about getting caught.  After all, you own the jail.

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