Taki's Mag

When G8 leaders convene in Chicago this May to discuss managing the global economy, they’ll be meeting in a city that has botched its own finances so thoroughly, even its morgue is overcrowded.

The Chicago Sun-Times recently reported that backlogged bodies are being stacked like Lincoln Logs in a cooler at the Cook County Medical Center. According to an unnamed source, 500 bodies—including the corpses of an estimated 100 babies—were crammed into a storage unit designed for 300. In some cases, infants’ remains were being placed alongside the cadavers of the “thinnest adults” due to the cramped space. “There are so many bodies in there now, they can’t keep it cool enough. The stench is like nothing I’ve ever seen,” said another source (who apparently suffers from synesthesia), adding that the entire situation is “sacrilegious.”

The excess inventory of adult corpses is being blamed on last summer’s suspension of a program that paid private funeral homes $1,600 per body to bury Chicago’s indigent deceased. Although the program has been reinstated, many funeral homes now refuse to continue accepting such cases.

The overstocked county meat locker’s surplus of infant remains is partially due to an ordinance last year that banned the interment of fetuses and infants in “communal wooden coffins” and instead required individual burial containers. According to one source, the medical examiner’s office has failed to cough up the funds to pay the company that builds the tiny individual baby coffins. But according to Medical Examiner Nancy Jones, these legally mandated mini-caskets have yet to even be designed, much less built—all while an estimated 100 infant corpses are sharing refrigerator space alongside adults.

Although it accounts for less than two percent of the state’s land mass, Cook County, AKA Crook County, is home to two of every five Illinois residents. Its county seat is Chicago, so legendarily corrupt that one suspects even Mrs. O’Leary’s cow was on the take. The city has held corruption trials dating back to 1869. In Chicago, politics and criminality have been entangled since prostitution and gambling scandals of the late 1800s all the way up to the recent guilty plea of a Water Department engineer who managed a heroin-distribution ring. Since 1972, at least 26 Cook County officials—19 of them judges—have been convicted of crimes.

Beyond such ethical turpitude, the county is also severely mismanaged: Chicago’s budget deficit this year is projected to be around $635 million.

Illinois is infamous for imprisoning four former governors, most recently Rod Blagojevich and his irresistibly stylish hair. But although Democrats have held a stranglehold over Chicago for 80 years, Illinois corruption has always been ecumenical. The Chicago Tribune accused the city’s last Republican mayor, “Big” Bill Thompson (1915-23 and 1927-31), of tainting the metropolis with

filth, corruption, obscenity, idiocy, and bankruptcy…moronic buffoonery, triumphant hoodlumism, unchecked graft, and a dejected citizenship.…He made Chicago a byword for the collapse of American civilization.

Much more recently, Illinois Republican Governor George Ryan (1999-2003) was convicted of racketeering and fraud and is currently incarcerated.

But not only is Illinois famously corrupt; it’s virtually bankrupt. The state has the nation’s worst credit rating.

Last year the state jacked up its income tax by a staggering 66 percent. The move was intended to help stave off an immediate shortfall of around $8.5 billion in unpaid bills. (Illinois also suffers unfunded pension liabilities to the tune of $85 billion—around $6,600 per resident.)

Despite what was described as the largest tax increase in the state’s history, furry little Illinois Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka announced on Wednesday that the state remains $8.5 billion in arrears. She added that Illinois is still paying off bills from four and a half months ago.

So while Illinois is still piling up debt, from a purely public-relations standpoint Chicago would be wise to clear out its stacks of dead human bodies from the county morgue before the G8’s highly manicured mavens come to town in May. It’s more than a matter of cosmetic unseemliness. There are also practical matters that need to be considered here. If the bomb-throwing anarchists and the roving late-spring flash mobs show up at the G8, the morgue may actually need the room.