Rahm Emanuel's Cruel New Graduation Requirements Could Be the Beginning of a National Trend

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's new plan to keep teens off the street has been a subject of controversy since it was announced in April. Beginning in 2020, public school students will be forced to present their post-graduation plans in order to receiver their diploma.

“We are going to help kids have a plan, because they’re going to need it to succeed,” he said. “You cannot have kids think [they're done after] 12th grade.”

Chicago Mayor Holds On For Dear Life In The Face Of Chicago’s Continuing Police Corruption

It’s been six months since the video of Laquan McDonald’s fatal shooting put a national spotlight on police brutality and corruption in Chicago, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel is still grappling with how to restore trust of the city’s officers.

After replacing the head of the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) to review and overhaul the agency, which has long colluded with Chicago officers instead of holding them accountable, Emanuel wants to scrap the police oversight body altogether.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel Ignores Police Board, Picks His Own Top Cop

CHICAGO — In a surprise move, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has rejected the city police board’s three picks for a new police superintendent and selected his own candidate from within the force to replace the current interim top cop.

The Chicago Sun-Times and NBC Chicago, citing unnamed sources, reported that Emanuel will appoint Eddie Johnson, a well-regarded veteran cop who currently serves as CPD’s head of patrol, to the role of interim superintendent.

Time for These Two Democrats to Go

There are two Democrats whose resignation from office right now would do their party and country a service.

Their disappearance might also help Hillary Clinton convince skeptical Democrats that her nomination, if it happens, is about the future, and not about resurrecting and ratifying the worst aspects of the first Clinton reign when she and her husband rarely met a donor to whom they wouldn't try to auction a sleepover in the Lincoln Bedroom.

People Hate Rahm Emanuel So Much It Might Cost Hillary Clinton Illinois

The race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders has tightened in Illinois' Democratic primary as Sanders' campaign works relentlessly to tie Clinton to Rahm Emanuel, Chicago's deeply unpopular mayor.

The wealth of votes in the Chicago metropolitan area could be key to victory in the state's Tuesday primary. Early voting has already begun, and turnout is reportedly high in the city and surrounding Cook County.

Top Emanuel aides aware of key Laquan McDonald details months before mayor says he knew

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has said he didn't understand the gravity of Laquan McDonald's shooting death at the hands of a Chicago police officer until just before the city settled with the teen's family last spring, and that he wasn't aware other officers may have falsified reports about the shooting until just after the video was released to the public.

But interviews, official city calendars and emails show in both cases the mayor's closest aides and City Hall attorneys knew much earlier than that.

Rahm Emanuel Denies Laquan McDonald Cover-Up In Op-Ed

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel strongly denied accusations that he covered up the police shooting death of Laquan McDonald and reiterated his commitment to reforming police practices in an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune on Friday.

Emanuel rebutted charges that he suppressed the police dashcam video from October 2014 showing a white officer firing 16 rounds into McDonald, a 17-year-old African American, so as not to harm his chances in a tough re-election a few months later.

Rahm Emanuel Is Andrew Cuomo: Hillary Are You Listening?

Rahm Emanuel is in trouble. His re-election as Mayor of Chicago is no longer a lock. His challenger has come out of nowhere, parlayed unease with his right-wingish economic policies, and a big controversy, to gain real traction in the April 7 run-off. Her name is Zephyr Teachout.

Wait, that's wrong. His name is Jesus Garcia. But if you're looking for explanations, it's the right mistake to make. Teachout rode the same wave, organized similar political forces in New York, and got almost 40 percent of the Democratic gubernatorial primary vote in New York, against the previously formidable Andrew Cuomo.

Chicago Credit Downgrade Pushes City Closer To Fiscal Free Fall

CHICAGO, Feb 27 (Reuters) - Chicago drew closer to a fiscal free fall on Friday with a rating downgrade from Moody's Investors Service that could trigger the immediate termination of four interest-rate swap agreements, costing the city about $58 million and raising the prospect of more broken swaps contracts.

The downgrade to Baa2, just two steps above junk, and a warning the rating could fall further still, means the third-biggest U.S. city could face even higher costs in the future if banks choose to terminate other interest-rate hedges against fluctuations in interest rates. All told, Chicago holds swaps contracts covering $2.67 billion in debt, according to a disclosure late last year.

"Mayor 1%" Rahm Emanuel of Chicago Faces Progressive Challenge in Heated Bid for Re-election

The battle between Rahm Emanuel — a Democrat known as "Mayor 1 Percent" — and a host of challengers has reached a fever pitch in Chicago. Emanuel is struggling to keep his seat when voters head to the polls on Tuesday. Opponents say he has failed to improve the city’s schools and address gun violence. Emanuel’s re-election campaign has the endorsement of his former boss, President Obama, and a war chest of more than $15 million — about four times the amount raised by his four opponents. Most of his funds come from about 100 donors. Emanuel’s closest rival is Jesús "Chuy" García, a county commissioner who has support from the Chicago Teachers Union and other labor and progressive groups. We speak with Rick Perlstein, a Chicago-based reporter and author of several books, including "The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan" and the bestseller, "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America."

Video
Source: democracynow.org/
Author: --

Will Rahm Emanuel Buy Another Term as Mayor of Chicago?

In Chicago, the democracy equation is “50-plus-1.”

If Rahm Emanuel wins the majority of the vote in a five-way mayoral contest on February 24, the Democrat who always seems to be at odds with his party’s base will secure a second term as mayor of the nation’s third-most-populous city. That, in turn, would position the corporate-friendly Emanuel—“Mayor 1%”—an even more influential figure in the “Not Elizabeth Warren Wing of the Democratic Party.”

To avoid an April 7 general election race with the second-place finisher in the multi-candidate field, Emanuel needs his “50-plus-one”: a total vote that is at least one above the 50 percent line. The same goes for city council races, where labor unions and progressive groups are challenging Emanuel’s allies.

Rahm Emanuel's Minority-Bashing School Closings Go Forward

Today was the first day of school in Chicago—and a profound setback for Chicago’s forces of decency. Fifty fewer schools will be in operation this term, with 2,113 fewer staffers, a colossal injustice I’ve written about here and here and here and here. The school closings are going forward because ten days ago Federal District Judge John Z. Lee denied the attempt to get a preliminary injunction to prevent it. A week before that ruling, I spoke with one of the lawyers who brought the suit, Thomas Geoghegan, for my monthly interview series at Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Hyde Park—where I and my audience deepened our sense of just how mad and malign Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s schools agenda truly is.

You might know Geoghegan for his classic public-policy memoirs like Which Side Are You On? and his most recent, Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life; or his quixotic run to win the congressional seat vacated when Rahm Emanuel became Barack Obama’s chief of staff, which The Nation endorsed. Our conversation at the Co-op—a public version of dialogues we’ve been having regularly over dinner and drinks for over a decade now—was, like so much of Tom’s discourse, heartbreaking and inspiring in equal measure.

We spoke on August 10, the day after Judge Lee declined to certify Geoghegan’s plaintiffs as a class, a harbinger of the preliminary-injunction denial to come—heartbreaking, because his arguments sounded damned well open-and-shut to my audience and me. The Americans with Disability Act specifies quite clearly that school systems, when moving disabled children, have to proactively provide opportunities for the kids and their parents to meet with “Individual Education Plan” teams to devise specific measures to ease the transition. The Chicago school board didn’t even try—it just called up befuddled parents to ask, as Geoghegan put it, “Anything you want?” And when these parents—overwhelmingly poor and harried, understandably inexpert in the intricacies of special-education best-practices—didn’t have anything specific to offer, the board considered its work done. One of Geoghegan’s expert witnesses, the woman in charge of special education of the Indianapolis school system, said the whole thing was pretty much totally nuts.

The suit also tried another angle. In 2003 Governor Rod Blagojavich (who actually did some good things) signed a state civil rights statute that allowed private plaintiffs to bring claims of disparate racial impact against entities like boards of education without having to prove discriminatory intent—a provision that used to be in federal law until the Supreme Court struck it down in the 1990s. Explained Geoghegan, 88 percent of the affected kids in the receiving schools are African-American, but African-American kids make up only 40.5 percent of students in the system. Pretty damned disparate.

Of course, the Chicago Public Schools had an explanation for that, of a sort: they argued that black kids were being helped by being moved. Actually, they made several arguments—changing them around each time the last was debunked. First it was that they needed to close schools to help with the system’s budget deficit, freeing up resources for instruction. But most of the money they claim to be saving (savings disputed in themselves) is being spent on moving kids, not instruction. And, Geoghegan points out, “After a year, that money goes into the general pot to aid kids in the system.” Look at the system’s plans, and it turns out “the board is going to use some of this money to build schools on the North Side”—the white North Side, in other words. It basically amounts to stealing from poor black kids to give to more affluent white ones.

The system’s second argument is that the schools that kids are being moved into are academically superior to the ones they’re leaving. Well, there is a word in legal jargon for what that claim represents in this case. That word is: bullshit. In their pleadings, Geoghegan’s team pointed out that only seven of the schools are arguably better academically than the ones kids are coming from; some are worse. In fact, the very act of moving kids under such circumstance basically cannot improve their educations. “What’s extraordinary about this is that the study of the Consortium of School Research at the University of Chicago stated that these school closings don’t do students any good but in the long term don’t do any harm,” Geoghegan told my bookstore audience. “The RAND study, which came out in 2012…says that they do do long-term harm, unless the children go to academically superior schools.”

You see the problem, even if a federal judge did not.

CPS’s third argument is yet more dubious. Between 2001 and 2012, leading up to this year’s closing, they closed some seventy-four schools. Back then, they said they were closing “failing schools.” But “now they’ve backed off from that notion of failing schools, which was always a little bit bogus to begin with because, Why are those failing more than any others? It was [empirically] indefensible.” (For instance, at one of the closed schools, Guggenheim, which I wrote about here, one-third of the students were homeless. Geoghegan relayed his suspicion to Chicago homelessness experts: maybe some kids counted as “homeless” were, say, doubling up at the home of an aunt. He heard back, “No! No! Those kids who are doubling up with the aunt aren’t counted as homeless. They’re, like, homeless homeless. Like, they don’t know where they’re going to be every night.” What does it mean to say a school serving a population like that, because of its poor test scores, is “failing”?)

So it was they settled upon the argument that the closing schools were “underutilized.”

Which argument one of Tom’s heroic plaintiffs, a woman named Sharise McDaniel, had already demolished on its face. McDaniel is the parent of a child at a school called George Manierre Elementary, which is by the former Carbini-Green housing projects. The advantages of Manierre for its black, impoverished population—it’s across the street from the Marshall Field Homes, where hundreds of the school’s kids live, making the commute rather safe indeed; also, the building is grand and gorgeous—and the disadvantages of moving them—the receiving school is a mile away, across a treacherous gang boundary—were brilliantly reported by the education reporter Linda Lutton for Chicago’s public radio station WBEZ. Manierre, however, with its gorgeous building, happens to be quite close to a bevy of luxurious condominiums where affluent white families live, and whose children go to overcrowded Lincoln Elementary.

McDaniel and her cadre of parents presented a solution at a community meeting. They learned that the supposedly strapped school board was paying hefty money to rent space for the Lincoln kids at DePaul University. The mothers proposed that, if Manierre was indeed underutilized, Lincoln kids could move into their second floor; Manierre kids could stay on the first floor, and—Geoghegan got a mixture of laughs and groans when he reported this one—“they would have separate entrances so they wouldn’t have to see each other!”

A win-win solution—if the point really was filling underutilized schools, and not, say, emptying out a desirable building of undesirable Chicagoans, the better for Rahm Emanuel to serve his affluent constituency.

So at the trial, Geoghegan asked the system’s number-two administrator, a mountebank named Tim Cawley, “‘Why not move the children from Lincoln Elementary into Manierre?’ I’m not going to quote his answer…but the effect of it was, ‘You don’t know how disruptive that is!’ ”

He earned a roar of laughter from our audience at that. Laughing to keep from crying.

The system denies that it’s placing such kids under physical risk. And yet it plans to spend $7 million a year on a “safe passage” system to protect them. Geoghegan now turns indignant: “The children are going under guard, though gang territory, another one or two or more miles to their new schools. For a worse education experience on all counts…there’s this trauma, not only of all this displacement, [but of] losing all your teachers because they’re all being laid off…. What’s the payoff for this? There is no payoff for it. And the board has no basis to believe these closings are doing any good for the children.”

And yet the judge ruled there was no proof kids “would suffer substantial harm as a result of the school closures.”

So what’s the inspiring part? The solidarity. Noted Geoghegan in our Q&A, “It’s interesting how many middle class white parents have been radicalized by this. They didn’t start that way. But the more they deal with the board, the more they realize that, with the minority children on the South and West Sides, they’re fighting the same battle against a really dysfunctional bureaucracy which just does not work.”

Original Article
Source: thenation.com
Author: Rick Perlstein 

Chicago Rising!

On a sunny saturday this past May, far down on the city’s black South Side where corner stores house their cashiers behind bulletproof plexiglass, about 150 activists assembled at Jesse Owens Community Academy. In just a few days, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s appointed Board of Education would vote on the largest simultaneous school closing in recent history. Owens, along with fifty-three other public schools, was on the chopping block. A recent Chicago Tribune/WGN poll found that more than 60 percent of Chicago citizens opposed the closings, and a healthy cross section of them had turned out for the first of three straight days of marches in protest.

In the Dead Zone of Capitalism: Lessons on the Violence of Inequality from Chicago

"I consider the survival of [fascism] within democracy to be potentially more menacing that the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy."  Theodor W. Adorno

Americans are confronted daily with the violence of inequality. The rich have longer life spans, better health care, access to better educational opportunities and an abundance of food. [1] Many live in palatial homes in gated communities and wield a disproportionate amount of control and power over the major social, cultural, and political apparatuses that shape everyday life.[2] Unlike most Americans, the extravagantly rich are protected from the massive degree of violence produced by poverty, poor health, joblessness, inadequate social provisions, decrepit housing, unsafe neighborhoods, and even environmental disasters.  While the superrich also live in an age of precarity due to the free-market economic models they support, they largely escape its consequences through the obscene amount of wealth at their disposal that enables them to buy private solutions to public problems.[3] As Naomi Klein points out, such wealth offers more than economic advantages. It also creates a world in which the penthouse and mansion set

    protect themselves from the less savory effects of the economic model that made them so wealthy. In the past six years, we have seen the emergence of private firefighters in the United States, hired by insurance companies to offer a ‘concierge’ service to their wealthier clients, as well as the short-lived ‘HelpJet’—a charter airline in Florida that offered five-star evacuation services from hurricane zones [whose ad shamelessly states]: ‘No standing in lines, no hassle with crowds, just a first class experience that turns a problem into a vacation. [4]

'We Are Not a Failing School!'

I've been watching a lot of adolescents cry these days. First it was twelve-year-old Jasmine Murphy, on a media bus tour led by the Chicago Teachers Union to demonstrate the devastation likely to follow from Mayor Rahm Emanuel's plan to close fifty-four schools. She was relating how she felt when the elementary school she loved and in which she had thrived was shuttered in 2011. Then, this week, all over town, Chicago Public School bureaucrats have sat before hearings to hear public comment on each individual school set to close this coming September. In my neighborhood, Hyde Park, I joined seventy-five or so community members who sat—and, angrily, stood—in an auditorium at Kenwood Academy High School, six blocks directly east of Barack Obama's family home, to address the closing of a middle school next door known as Canter Leadership Academy. The whole thing pretty much went down like this. Picture a tough-looking black teenage boy. His name is Shane Ellis. Shane takes the microphone for his allotted two minutes. He begins listing all the schools he's attended in Chicago. He says, "Of all these schools, Canter is the only one that showed it actually cared." He relates a story about the principal telling him that given all the things he's been through in his life and with his family it's a testament to his depth of character that he can carry on at school all.

Zeke Emanuel Offers Little Hope To Chicago Teachers Union In School Closings Battle

Zeke Emanuel, the oldest brother of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, offered simple advice to the Chicago Teachers Union Wednesday. If you're fighting his brother Rahm, it's better to lose.

The Chicago Teachers Union organized crowds outside the mayor's office Tuesday morning to protest Emanuel's plan to close 54 neighborhood elementary schools. Zeke Emanuel said their labor is for nothing.

Shocking Rahm's Shock Doctrine

One thousand Chicago Public School teachers and their supporters, including this correspondent, packed Daley Plaza in forty-degree temperatures on Wednesday for a rally protesting the city’s announced plans to close 54 kindergarten-through-eighth-grade schools next year. One-tenth of the protesters were detained and ticketed (though police originally said they had been “arrested”) at a sit-in in front of school board headquarters a few blocks to the south. What they are protesting is genuine shock-doctrine stuff—an announcement utterly rewiring a major urban institution via public rationales swaddled in utter bad faith, handed down in a blinding flash, absent any reasonable due process. Though Mayor Emanuel is learning that the forces of grassroots democracy can shock back too. And boy, does he have it coming.

Why the Public Votes for Teachers in the Chicago Strike

Rahm Emanuel has had scant contact with Ravenswood Elementary School as a neighbor, congressman or mayor. But an unpublicized tragedy there helps explain why striking teachers, not the city's famous new boss, elicited such citywide public support during his first major crisis.

The school is just up the block from where he lives; a dilapidated building with austere concrete playground adjacent to a beautiful residential neighborhood with million-dollar homes. Its students are majority low-income, given the wider area it serves, and it lacks the middle-class parent base to spur fancy auctions and other needed fundraising since virtually all the better-off families nearby send their children to private schools, as does the mayor.

Jailed Occupy Chicago Protesters Describe Harsh Treatment By Police, Plan To Picket Rahm Emanuel's Office

Occupy Chicago protesters are angry and plan to make their feelings known to Mayor Rahm Emanuel after many of their supporters spent 24 hours or more in jail over the weekend for refusing to leave Grant Park when it closed Saturday night.

Officers began placing metal barricades around the area of Chicago's Grant Park known as Congress Plaza about 11:10 p.m. Saturday, minutes after the park had closed. Afterward, police then went through the crowd and warned people to leave or risk arrest for remaining in the closed park in violation of a city ordinance.

Protesters were hoping to spend the night in the park, and petitioned Emanuel earlier in the week asking for a place to demonstrate without risking arrest. Apparently, they were not granted that request.

Several of the protesters who stayed inside the barricades in the park sat on the ground. Others locked arms as police circled and then began arresting people.

"One: We are the people! Two: We are united! Three: The occupation is not leaving!" demonstrators shouted. Others joined in from just outside the park.

Emanuel defends secrecy of business group he chairs

Mayor Rahm Emanuel said today a city-funded group of business executives he chairs should be allowed to meet in secret to discuss luring companies to Chicago.

Emanuel defended the private dealings of World Business Chicago after a Tribune story Tuesday detailing concerns about its role in spending city incentives to encourage economic development. Emanuel said he has to balance his promise to make government more transparent with the privacy concerns of businesses he is wooing.
“If I told them all the meetings were going to be public, guess what, we wouldn't have real companies coming here to expand,” Emanuel said at a news conference to announce 500 new private jobs. “They don't want their competitors to know what they're thinking about.”

Emanuel has nearly doubled the size of World Business Chicago, which bills itself as the city’s economic development office, and said he wants to strengthen the group’s ties to City Hall. Its members donated more than $1.2 million to Emanuel’s campaign and inaugural funds.

Chicago’s inspector general in August criticized the group for recommending city subsidies for some of its own members while Richard Daley was mayor. The group refused Tribune requests for its meeting minutes and letters of recommendation for business incentives, and said there are no plans to open its meetings to the public.