Rahm "Concerned"

Maybe that should read "terrified"?

• Mayor Rahm Emanuel today said he's concerned by the Car Care World Expo's decision not to come to McCormick Place and pledged to be aggressive in trying to keep costs down at the lakefront convention center.
  
  Emanuel said the trade show's decision is not necessarily an indication the McCormick Place reforms passed by the General Assembly last year have to be reworked, but more that a federal court case over that piece of legislation has to be settled so that trade shows have certainty about what their costs will be if they come to Chicago.

McCormick Place, like the airports, is an "economic engine." And if the engine isn't running on all cylinders, neither is the city or anything else for that matter. McCormick Place is one cylinder. Air travel is another. Tourism is a third. All three of those are in serious trouble and who knows how many others haven't been maintained or tuned up in years.

This is also an article to read:

• Motorola Solutions will add 400 jobs in Chicago by end of 2012, Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced today.
  
  The jobs will be new positions in service, sales support and other areas, Motorola President and CEO Greg Brown said at a downtown news conference with the mayor.
  
  [...] Motorola received no tax incentives as part of the deal, Emanuel said.

  Spokesman Nicholas Sweers said the company has not yet determined how many of the 400 positions will be new and how many will involve relocating workers from elsewhere. But he said the relocated workers will come "primarily from outside the greater Chicago area."

"No tax incentives from Chicago" they mean because we're pretty sure they got a few dozen millions from Quinn a little while ago.

So an unknown portion of workers will be "relocated" from other parts of the country, meaning it isn't truly 400 jobs unless you're using the new "Rahm-math" method of accounting. And the jobs are in the "service, sales support and other areas," which means they can be outsourced in a matter of minutes once the cost of doing business here exceeds the amount of cash that can be gotten from taxpayers.