As a State Rep, Blago boosted his image as a populist reformer inflaming the public against shipping nuclear waste by rail. He’d be all over the CN for diverting trains over the EJ&E beginning March 4.
It wasn’t nuclear waste, it was Napalm. And Blago was a congressman announcing for governor when he made it a false issue to get media attention.
The DoD had some Napalm left over from Vietnam stored in California. A company in E. Chicago, IN was to reprocess the Napalm into fuel for use in the manufacture of cement. Blago made a big issue of the rail movemet basically screaming “NAPALM, NAPALM, NAPALM”.
The media went right along with him. The Chicago Sun-Times gave him the front page with a photo of him yacking with Chicago Union Station in the background. (Chicago Sun-Times stock proce was $0.08/share last I saw. No, I don’t own any of it.) This, despite the fact that the shipments would have gone no where near Union Station.
He was creating (falsely) a sensational story for the media. They were giving him the publicity he wanted. The fact that factory workers in E. Chicago would be laid off as the result of this publicity stunt didn’t matter to either of them.
We all know Napalm will burn. But so will ethanol. But if he yelled: “ETHANOL, ETHANOL, ETHANOL” it wouldn’t have had the same effect.
In the end, the factory in E. Chicago gave in to the histaria and cancelled the work. So much for those jobs.
As to Blago’s involvement with the CN/EJ&E deal, absolutely no one in Illinois wanted him on their side regarding anything. He is poison. But he is poison that knows a lot of things about a lot of people. His only “good” option now is to spill his guts to the Feds. Seeing how far up this goes will be interesting.
Okay, you seem pretty confident. I remember the laid-off worker aspect. I could have sworn it was for moving radio-active waste from Zion to Nevada; but probably got the stories crossed in my memory.
Having been in public transportation planning and involved in disaster response planning; I know there’s even worse stuff out there than napalm.
I’m still a little surprised someone didn’t stoop to enlist the former governor.
Well, he might have done the Zion thing too, but I don’t remember it. I do vividly remember his announcement for governor with the “Napalm Train” thing. I remember how much I despised him and the media (Sun-Times in particular) for it. Oh well, he’s dead meat and the Sun-Times isn’t doing so well itself.
While he was a congressman, he tried to prevent UPS from handling firearms via surface shipment. Which would have taken that admitidly small amuont of freight off the rails. It’s like he was saying no one could steal a firearms shipment from an airfreight terminal. He’d just make up problems and sensationalize them. He once argued for a ban on a weapon by hypothisizing Cubs right fielder Sammy Sosa being shot from downtown Chicago during a game at Wrigley Field.
Which is a bit rich on Blago’s part as the largest component of napalm is gasolene - and I haven’t heard anything about him wanting to restrict gasolene transport in Chicago - particularly in respect to the collision between a tanker truck and a CSL streetcar in the 1950’s.