tammany

The government is so sclerotic and shackled to laws meant to break up the Tammany Hall machine that its impossible to do anything good or fast.

The guys who ran Tammany Hall understood this, more recent corrupt rulers like Detroit's Coleman Young did not.

The whole community turns out and did what the head guy says, just like the old Tammany Hall.

Don't agree - just as an example, the poorest Irish immigrants in NYC were part of Tammany Hall wards.

If you think the MTA's waste is in any way comparable to Tammany Hall, back that up with numbers.

Sort of off-topic but fun fact: Tammany Hall is now a dogfood and kitty litter store!

NY's Sullivan Act comes from 1911, when the Irish NYC Tammany Hall machine wanted to keep newer immigrants in their place.

In the Tammany Hall era, you could buy votes and know that your paid voters actually voted the way you wanted.

The MTA rivals Tammany Hall in terms of waste and fraud, and the talks of budget cuts were political crocodile tears.

But despite its many shortcomings, Tammany Hall and its ilk were much better at ruling than most of our modern city governments.

If I could trade the current Boston government for Tammany Hall, I'd do so in a second.

LaGuardia was a democratic socialist but had to run as a Republican because of Tammany Hall's undemocratic stranglehold on the Democratic party then.

"Sure, Tammany Hall was corrupt, but the corruption was only a tiny amount per capita...and what a nice courthouse!"

Civil service is boring and bureaucratic by design, specifically it was created to combat the "spoils system" that plagued the early American state [1] (though the prize of modern state eclipse what Tammany Hall etc could have imagined).

There's a depth to what you're saying that I don't think you're truly aware of..."flooding the block" -- or the mass importation of immigrants to build a political machine -- has been part of my country's politics since the Tammany Hall days (political machines).

Tammany Hall, the building, still stands.