Blues Brothers as a pot product? No one’s going to Joliet (prison) for it

Maybe it sort of makes sense – John Belushi portrayed amongst his various characters a blues musician and singer (with his brother on harmonica).

It may well play off the idea of bluesmen as notorious reefer addicts. It may also have taken the sensation of marijuana to enable the “Jake Blues” character to endure his stint at the Joliet Correctional Center (for holding up a liquor store to get the money to pay off a motel debt his Blues Brothers Band incurred).

OR IT COULD just be that actor Jim Belushi is truly trying to play off the persona his late brother, John, left during his just over three decades of life (actually, at 37 years, he’s been dead longer than he was alive).

But somehow, there’s just something about the idea of Jim Belushi wanting to get into the marijuana-distribution business (now that it’s gaining the overtones of a legal business opportunity) that seems a little strange.

And not just because most people would have figured the comedic personas of Cheech and Chong would have tried to be the first people to become legal drug dealers.

Crain’s Chicago Business reported this week about how Belushi now operates the Belushi Farms in Oregon, where marijuana production has been legal the past few years. Now that Illinois has passed laws allowing for recreational use of the drug (as in you won’t need a medical prescription to avoid getting pinched by police), Belushi says he wants to gear up to begin sales here.

PRODUCING HIS PRODUCTS under the Blues Brothers brand name. As in it would be the only kind of marijuana product that a discerning customer would choose to use for those moments when he feels he has a “mission for God” to complete.

He talks about wanting to promote his business venture by literally driving the Bluesmobile (which according to the 1980s film was a one-time Mount Prospect police squad car) along Lake Street, with a marijuana “joint” mounted on the car roof rather than the big bullhorn that Jake and Elwood used to promote their big show at the Palace Hotel Ballroom.

I’m sure he’s going for the imagery of driving around under the ‘el’ tracks. But as anyone who remembers the Blues Brothers film, Elwood actually lived in a flophouse on the other end of the Loop – down around Van Buren Street, with the elevated trains roaring right past his window on a near-constant basis.

That is, until Jake’s former fiancé (remember Carrie Fisher) used her explosives stash to blow the building to smithereens.

OR, UNTIL IN reality, a downtown fire managed to destroy the real life building. Yes, I remember that as one of the first news stories I actually covered during my days as a reporter-type person with the now-defunct City News Bureau of Chicago.

It will be intriguing to see just how all this plays out. Illinois may be the 11^th state to offer up legal versions of marijuana, but that means there are 49 states where it remains illegal.

And it likely will be that some of those states will be absolute holdouts, refusing to even contemplate any notion that marijuana could serve some medical benefits – let alone be something that people ought to be allowed to use if they so choose.

Which is why Belushi is trying to piece together a network that would be ready on that date in the future when marijuana use really can be a national product without any sort of stigma attached to it.

IT COULD BE intriguing if Jim Belushi – whose acting career pretty much peaked with the “According to Jim” television series (where he was partnered up with a pair of women – Courtney Thorne-Smith and Kimberly Williams – most definitely out of his league) ultimately wound up doing something that got him out of the shadow of being nothing more than “John’s Little Brother.”

And kind of humorous if the Blues Brothers image were to live on in ways no one would have dreamed possible back when John Belushi was a living, breathing entertainer.

Remember Bluto Blutarsky? Animal House?

And let’s not forget actress Kathleen Freeman’s “Sister Mary Stigmata” character, who to this day is probably rapping “Jake Blues” across his knuckles every time his behavior gets a touch out of line with none other than The Lord himself.

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We’re back to ‘baseball’ time, but not everybody’s satisfied about change

I happened to wake up in the middle of the night early Sunday, and when I looked over at my clock, it was 1:59 a.m. Just one minute before the time we’re supposed to re-set our clocks to take into account the change to daylight savings time.

So I literally got to see the instant that my digital clock skipped over the 2 a.m. hour and it officially became 3 a.m.

WE ‘LOST’ AN hour of time (which we’ll get back come November 3 when we go back to standard time). Everybody’s body clock felt a little bit funky Sunday morning because they got one less hour of sleep. Unless, by chance, they were totally lazy slugs and decided to sleep until about the noon hour to make up for the loss.

We make the change in time that, as a child, I was taught in school was meant to give farmers extra time periods with sunlight so they could tend to crops.

Of course, the current trend is to tell stories totally debunking the idea that farmers care in the least. Just this morning, I saw a broadcast report that attributed the idea of Daylight Savings Time to Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany during the First World War effort.

Something about needing to burn less coal for fuel if there was more time during the daylight. Who knows what kind of tales future generations of schoolchildren will be taught?

PERSONALLY, I ALWAYS think of the time change as further evidence that we’re awfully close to the return of baseball. Because if you look at the dates for Daylight Savings Time, Opening Day will soon take place.

And the World Series will just have ended right about the time we switch back to Standard Time. I still remember reading a magazine feature about baseball during the off-season – with the writer pointing out that the scoreboard clock of old Comiskey Park was never re-set for the winter.

They’d leave it to Daylight Savings Time year round – figuring that baseball fans would never know the difference because nobody would be sitting in the seats some December or January!

Of course, some people like to play their own ideological games. I remember in college one of my fellow students (who happened to be a Hoosier native) would talk it up as a major selling point the fact that he never changed time.

IN HIS PART of the state, it remained on Standard Time year round – which put a large swath of the state out of sync with the rest of the country. And even with the rest of Indiana – as the far northwest corner sets its clocks in conjunction with the time here in Chicago.

Clock never needed resetting. And the Cubs were losing -- what else is new!

Perhaps that’s part of what gives Indiana a split personality that leaves so much of the Hoosier State out-of-touch with the rest of the world (particularly the civilized part that calls itself “Chicago”). Either that, or maybe it’s from the “shame” of having to think of oneself as a “Hoosier.”

Who’s to say?

It does intrigue me that several states are trying to pass measures that would make Daylight Savings Time the official standard for time year-round.

AS IN THOSE people would have changed their clocks Sunday, and would never do so again. They’d get an extra hour or so of daylight – although we should realize that the winter months will naturally have shorter days because of the tilt of Planet Earth and the way it rotates around its axis.

It will be interesting to see how (or if) these legislative maneuvers succeed. Because I’ve also heard from people who try to claim that Standard Time is “natural” time – and that any effort to alter the clock is somehow unseemly.

Almost as though we’re risking the “Wrath of God” himself by tinkering with the time clock. Even though if you want to be downright honest, things such as clocks and calendars themselves are man-made creations.

All I know about the issue at large is two things – we’re even closer to the return of baseball AND we’re a few steps farther away from the most dreadful time of year. As in that mid-December period when we get sundown by about 4:30 p.m!

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Business interests still come to Chicago despite Trump trash talk. Maybe he doesn't know of what he speaks?

I remember during the times of my life I lived in downstate Illinois (Bloomington, while in college, and Springfield for a stint working at the Statehouse), the locals would always refute my Chicagoness by pointing out the major corporate entities that considered central Illinois to be home.

Could this road symbolically lead to Chicago for Caterpillar?

There was Archer Daniels-Midland in Decatur. Then, the big gun, Caterpillar, in Peoria, the manufacturer of farm machinery and vehicles used by agriculture interests the world over.

ANYBODY INTERESTED IN farming or food or eating ought to know of Caterpillar. Or ADM, which processes grains and soybeans into products that can be turned into food.

I don’t deny those are significant corporate entities in their own right. But I can’t help but note that ADM left Decatur a couple of years ago; following the lead of the central Illinois city’s one-time National Football League team, which came to Chicago and became the Bears many decades ago.

Now, Caterpillar seems to be following their lead.

Corporate officials said this week that their top executives are moving from their offices at the main plant in Peoria to a yet-to-be-determined site in Chicago. They want access to life in a large city like Chicago, rather than small-city life of Peoria. They also like the idea of being a short drive away from O’Hare International Airport, from which they can go anywhere in the world!

IT MAY ALSO be that corporate types want to be able to follow the Chicago Cubs themselves, rather than rooting for their local Midwest League ball club and spending their time reminiscing of the days when it was a Cubs’ minor league affiliate (it’s now with the St. Louis Cardinals).

 

No longer dreaming of Cubs' one-time affiliate

One bit of consolation for the Peoria people – corporate officials say it’s just the corporate offices. The actual plant in Peoria where equipment is made will remain there. Few of the 12,000 people employed in Peoria will be out of work because of the move.

Who knows? They may come to like having the top brass located elsewhere. While we in Chicago will love being able to say we’re the corporate offices of yet another business entity. Not bad at a time when President Donald J. Trump, for purely partisan political reasons, seems determined to come up with weekly attacks on Chicago.

As though he wants the world to think that our fair city is as ugly as that 1,389-foot tall building he erected along the Chicago River.

If Chicago Bears could once play a season at Memorial Stadium, why not Fighting Illini games in Chicago?

ALTHOUGH THE MOVE makes me wonder now what business entities rural Illinois types will be able to cite when they tout their region? Perhaps they’ll start boasting of the many state universities located in the rest of Illinois – particularly the University of Illinois.

Though one could argue that all you’d have to do is move the Big Ten athletic programs of the Fighting Illini to the Chicago campus, and the UI-C would take over that school’s niche in the state.

Although I’m sure that to the people of Urbana-Champaign (or should it be Champaign-Urbana), that very notion constitutes “fightin’ words” worse than the notion of Caterpillar sending a piece of itself to Chicago.

Could one-time U.S. Steel plant along the lakefront ...

Yet this isn’t the only outside interest we’re seeing these days. I couldn’t help but notice the talk this week of a company ultimately based in Barcelona, Spain, wanting to take the one-time site of U.S. Steel’s Southworks plant and convert it into homes.

SPECIFICALLY, SOME 12,000 homes, to be built in four phases of 3,000 each – with certain communal amenities meant to try to create a spirit of community.

Not that the area, which is adjacent to the South Chicago and South Shore neighborhoods, couldn’t use some freshening up. South Chicago in particular (the neighborhood I was born in, for what it’s worth) has old housing stock.

... truly become the 8080 Lakeshore housing development.? Image provided by Barcelona Housing

But any chance this project by Barcelona Housing Systems (with offices in San Francisco) and WELink has of succeeding depends on whether they can make the existing surrounding working-class residents feel like they’re not being rejected for potentially upscale newcomers. That is a large part of why a past developer’s talk of turning the 430-acre site along Lake Michigan from 79^th Street to the Calumet River never got off the ground.

Yet still interesting to see that at a time when Trump wants to undermine our city by making it appear too much of a hell hole to want to have anything to do with, interests as diverse as Caterpillar and Barcelona see money to be made in Chicago; which makes me think we ought to be questioning Trump’s own business instincts – instead of taking anything he says all that seriously.

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What exactly is a “pro-business” state?

I’m sure that a segment of society – the part that calls itself “economic conservative” and “pro-business” – is gnashing its teeth and seething with rage at the thought that a major company deliberately chose to locate in Chicago.

Even though state government specifically refused to give the company – Archer Daniels Midland, Co., of downstate Decatur, Ill. – a tax incentive that it claimed was essential to making the move economically viable.

ADM, A PROCESSOR of crops into food and other products such as fuel, has long been the staple of the economy in Decatur. But life in central Illinois isn’t cosmopolitan enough for the corporate executives who run the company.

Which is why, earlier this year, ADM officials let it be known that they want to move their corporate offices elsewhere – under the guise of wanting easier access to airline flights for their executives to travel the world on business.

That made Chicago, with its O’Hare International and Midway airports, a natural.

Except to those who are determined to believe that nobody could possibly want to be associated with Chicago, They were the ones who were pushing the idea that Illinois would lose ADM unless it got with the program, so to speak, and started making concessions to businesses even if they made no practical sense.

IN THE CASE of ADM, they wanted to be given a tax incentive totaling $24 million during the next two decades. Which really is laughable – a tax break over just over $1 million per year for a corporation that does billions of dollars of business per year world-wide.

The real issue was one of a corporate entity thinking that government somehow exists to serve it exclusively – even if those interests contradict those of other people. Personally, I always thought the point of government was to keep the interests of everyone balanced.

As it turned out, the Illinois Senate took a vote in favor of the ADM request. But the Illinois House of Representatives never got around to it.

They stayed

Other issues always managed to pre-empt it from coming up for a vote – particularly the matter of pension funding reform that the Legislature acted upon earlier this month in special session.

IT SEEMS THE allure of Chicago was too much for the ADM officials to pass on – even if they technically reduced their offer and are now merely moving some executive positions to the Second City, rather than following through on their original thought that they would also develop a technology center where great scientific advances in agriculture would have been developed.

That would have been an interesting piece to have in Chicago; probably moreso than the presence of a few dozen suited executives who will now work in the downtown area and will be lost in the masses of the millions who flood into the Loop each day to earn a living.

Although if the dollar figures work out, it wouldn’t shock me to learn that ADM develops that piece of their corporate puzzle in the future.

But denying us that piece, for now, is probably ADM’s way of “punishing” Chicago for making them otherwise “lose face” in that they demanded financial concessions and wound up getting nothing.

NOTHING, THAT IS, except for the knowledge that they will be located in THE major city of the Midwestern U.S. and have access to the wonders that are Chicago.

So even though there are people who are speculating politically that the winners were Gov. Pat Quinn (who released a statement Wednesday talking of the “continued partnership as this dynamic company invests and grows in Illinois”) and his allies.

I’d argue the real winner is ADM itself for staying. And the people, because we rejected the notions of the ideologues who think we have to give and give and give. That would have been the real loss!

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EXTRA: Beale knows who backs him. Or does he? Will city people care?

Some might think that 9^th Ward Alderman Anthony Beale committed political suicide Thursday night.

BEALE: Will anyone outside of Chi back him?

Personally, I don’t. The people whom he likely managed to offend were never going to vote for him in the first place.

IF ANYTHING, BEALE might have shown us that he comprehends exactly who his political supporters are in the Feb. 26 special primary election for the right to replace Jesse Jackson, Jr., in Congress.

Specifically, Beale used a candidate forum at Governors State University at the far southern tip of the Chicago metro area (you’re literally within sight of rural farm fields) to answer a question about cuts that could be made in the federal budget.

Other candidates talked about cutting military spending, or letting the George W. Bush-era tax cuts lapse, or finding federal programs that are no longer necessary.

Beale? He went after the Agriculture Department’s budget.

SPECIFICALLY, HE SAID he wants to do away with many of the subsidies that are provided to farmers in an attempt to keep the cost of the food we consume at a reasonable level.

But as Beale sees it, there are farmers getting their government checks to NOT grow certain crops.

“It’s a disservice to taxpayers,” Beale said. “We’re paying farmers not to farm.”

Somehow, I suspect that any potential for voter support Beale had in the rural Will or Kankakee county portions of the Congressional district withered away.

WILL CANDIDATE FATIMAH Muhammad manage to outpoll the alderman in those rural areas on Election Day just 19 days away?

Yet it’s not a surprise, since the Beale people are the ones who like to say that the “War of the Women” is focused on the suburban Cook County portion of the Congressional district that has about 60 percent of the potential voters.

If it turns out to be a fairly even split, that’s about 20 percent support for each. With Beale believing he’ll be dominant in the Chicago portion of the district that accounts for about 25 percent of the potential voters.

He thinks the Chicago portion is big enough to win in a 16-way primary.         

ALTHOUGH I KNOW of political operatives in suburban Cook who think Beale’s big drawback is the neighborhoods of the 9^th Ward – places like the Roseland and Pullman neighborhoods that have seen better days, along with the Altgeld Gardens public housing complex located near all those landfills that make much of Chicago treat it like a literal dumping ground for our trash.

It’s not like the quality of life has improved significantly in that part of Chicago during Beale’s more-than-a-decade as a City Council member. He might be shocked to learn just how few urban residents will care enough to turn out to the polling places on Election Day just to satisfy his dream of going to Capitol Hill.

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