Checks and Balance: Chicagoes to the polls
Checks and Balance from The Economist
The Economist
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 31 March 2023
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Voters in Chicago are choosing between two candidates for mayor, and two very different wings of the Democratic Party. One contender is conservative, for a Chicago Democrat, and backed by the police union. The other is a progressive, who once called to defund the police. Why does the Chicago mayoral election matter outside of the city limits?
The Economist’s Daniel Knowles profiles the candidates. We learn about a notoriously powerful Chicago mayor. And former education secretary Arne Duncan explains how the city is failing many of its children, and what the new mayor will need to do to help.
John Prideaux hosts with Idrees Kahloon and Jon Fasman.
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Thanks to the Richard J. Daley Oral History collection, University of Illinois Chicago Library for the use of some of the audio in this episode.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, this is John, I'm in New York at the moment, and here, yesterday news came that a grand |
| 0:12.0 | jury has indicted Donald Trump. |
| 0:15.4 | This is historic to use a word that was rather overused during the Trump administration. |
| 0:19.3 | It makes him the first president or former president ever to have been indicted. |
| 0:25.0 | If you're interested to hear more about that, then I was on the intelligence this morning |
| 0:29.4 | the economist's daily podcast talking about the indictment, the legal case, what it all |
| 0:34.1 | means. |
| 0:35.1 | But this week on checks and balance, we're sticking to our prior plan. |
| 0:39.4 | This is the podcast we recorded before that news broke, and it's about Chicago's Merrill |
| 0:43.4 | election, which happens next week and is, I think, incredibly interesting and worth paying |
| 0:48.3 | attention to anyway. |
| 0:50.2 | We also wanted to read the full indictment before making a checks episode for you. |
| 0:55.5 | We'll go away and do that, and then we'll cover the indictment of Donald Trump in next |
| 0:59.9 | week's checks and balance, right on with the pod. |
| 1:05.0 | In the 19th century, Chicago was booming. |
| 1:08.1 | The city's residents, factories, and slaughterhouses created mountains of human, commercial, |
| 1:13.9 | and animal waste. |
| 1:15.5 | It was all dumped in the Chicago River. |
| 1:18.8 | But this flowed into Lake Michigan, the source of the city's drinking water. |
| 1:23.5 | It was a public health catastrophe, typhoid, dysentery, and cholera put Chicago's future |
| 1:29.0 | at risk. |
| 1:30.0 | So, city leaders found a fix. |
... |
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