"The mayor’s tenure was beset by the crises his party’s policies have provoked, primarily due to the massive increase in social inequality they created, including through corporate tax giveaways and the destruction of public schools and social services."
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel announces he will not seek reelection
By Kristina Betinis
7 September 2018
On September 4, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced that he would not seek a third term in office. Emanuel was first elected in February 2011, having left the White House Chief of Staff position under President Barack Obama.
A former investment banker and leading figure in the Democratic Party nationally, Emanuel, who is now in his late 50s, has been in and out of official politics for the last three decades, working as a fundraiser for Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley before raising funds for the Clintons’ campaigns.
Emanuel cited the pressures of the job and the wishes of his family as reasons for his retirement. He made it clear in an interview with the Chicago Tribunethat in his view none of the thirteen candidates currently declared for the February, 2019 mayoral election are capable of filling the position.
The social crisis in Chicago created
problems for Emanuel. There are really
two Chicagos: the plush upper-middle-
class and wealthy areas, and the large
swaths of economic and social
devastation in working-class and poor
neighborhoods.
problems for Emanuel. There are really
two Chicagos: the plush upper-middle-
class and wealthy areas, and the large
swaths of economic and social
devastation in working-class and poor
neighborhoods.
Ten days ago, a house burned down, killing ten children aged 3 months to 16 years in the immigrant neighborhood of Little Village, a ward led by George Cardenas, one of Emanuel’s campaign fundraisers. Since Emanuel’s announcement, the tragedy in Little Village and the conditions that produced it have all but disappeared from media reports. Former President Barack Obama was recently in the city to visit the site of his “presidential center” and said nothing about the fire.
Emanuel’s announcement came just one day before the start
of the trial of Jason Van Dyke, the Chicago police officer who
killed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014, shooting him 16
times at close range. Working with the Cook County state’s
attorney, the Chicago Police Department and the City
Council, Emanuel oversaw a cover-up of the teen’s murder
that included the suppression of video evidence of the killing
and the payment of $5 million to the victim’s family. When
video of the killing was finally released in November 2015,
the city erupted in protest and demands were made for
Emanuel’s resignation, as well as that of top police and
state’s attorney officials.
of the trial of Jason Van Dyke, the Chicago police officer who
killed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014, shooting him 16
times at close range. Working with the Cook County state’s
attorney, the Chicago Police Department and the City
Council, Emanuel oversaw a cover-up of the teen’s murder
that included the suppression of video evidence of the killing
and the payment of $5 million to the victim’s family. When
video of the killing was finally released in November 2015,
the city erupted in protest and demands were made for
Emanuel’s resignation, as well as that of top police and
state’s attorney officials.
Emanuel would eventually go on to fire his appointed police superintendent, Garry McCarthy, who is himself running a law-and-order campaign in the 2019 mayoral race. Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez lost her recent bid for reelection. But Emanuel and the members of the City Council, who voted to pay the family, remained in office.
In making his announcement just before the trial, Emanuel is aiming to protect his political future. His decision not to pursue a third term was a virtual acknowledgement of the contempt and hatred for him felt by the vast majority of workers and young people in Chicago.
The mayor was polling in the range of 35 percent of the vote—not enough to avoid another runoff election. In 2015, he was forced into a runoff against Cook County Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, a Democratic machine figure (currently running for US Congress) who was backed by the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) in the wake of the political crisis created by the cover-up of McDonald’s murder.
Police violence has been a defining feature of his tenure. In the fall of 2015, shortly before the release of the video of McDonald’s murder, the Chicago Police Department was revealed to be operating an unofficial detention center, or “black site,” in Homan Square, in which thousands of citizens have been held illegally without arrest. Detailed reports emerged of abuse and torture. At least one man died as a result of his injuries. Well over half of the roughly 7,000 detained there were held during Emanuel’s time in office.
Under Emanuel, Chicago police began maintaining a secret “watch list” with 400,000 names. He also oversaw the police repression of the 2012 anti-NATO protests in Chicago, which involved the police entrapment of three protesters and their conviction and imprisonment on federal charges.
The mayor’s tenure was beset by the crises
his party’s policies have provoked, primarily
due to the massive increase in social
inequality they created, including through
corporate tax giveaways and the destruction
of public schools and social services. His first term, from 2010 to 2015, was defined by the fight he picked with Chicago Public Schools teachers and the working families of Chicago in making an aggressive attack on public education. This was part of the Obama administration’s “reform” plan, titled “Race to the Top,” itself a continuation of the Bush government’s “No Child Left Behind” attack on public schools.
his party’s policies have provoked, primarily
due to the massive increase in social
inequality they created, including through
corporate tax giveaways and the destruction
of public schools and social services. His first term, from 2010 to 2015, was defined by the fight he picked with Chicago Public Schools teachers and the working families of Chicago in making an aggressive attack on public education. This was part of the Obama administration’s “reform” plan, titled “Race to the Top,” itself a continuation of the Bush government’s “No Child Left Behind” attack on public schools.
After the powerful 2012 strike by Chicago teachers was shut down and betrayed by the Chicago Teachers Union, Emanuel closed an unprecedented 50 elementary schools in 2013. This inaugurated a period of mass layoffs of teachers, as the attack on public education and social services was advanced under the cover of a budget crisis, again with the help of the CTU, which claimed the budget crisis necessitated cuts and givebacks. The union’s vice president (now president), Jesse Sharkey, is a member of the pseudo-left International Socialist Organization.
Emanuel’s second term was dominated by the cover-up of the McDonald murder. The release of the suppressed video of the teen’s death came amid a protracted state and municipal budget crisis and the height of a bipartisan effort to cut state costs, including public-sector wages, health care, pensions, staff and essential services. The CTU worked to stabilize the city administration, suppressing the struggles of teachers for better pay, health coverage and teaching conditions
The Illinois Democratic Party is the pro-
austerity, pro-war apparatus that produced
Emanuel and Barack Obama. It is running a
billionaire, JB Pritzker, for governor against the Republican
incumbent, former hedge fund head Bruce Rauner. Sharkey and
the CTU have steadfastly worked to channel the anger of
teachers, parents and students behind this big-business party.
austerity, pro-war apparatus that produced
Emanuel and Barack Obama. It is running a
billionaire, JB Pritzker, for governor against the Republican
incumbent, former hedge fund head Bruce Rauner. Sharkey and
the CTU have steadfastly worked to channel the anger of
teachers, parents and students behind this big-business party.
They are now declaring Emanuel’s decision not to run again a victory for the working class. This is a fraud. Insofar as he will be replaced by some other Democratic Party politician, his resignation will mark no advance for the working class.
The critical lesson to be learned from the Emanuel experience is the necessity for a political break from the Democratic Party and its trade union appendages and the building of an independent socialist movement of the working class to fight for full funding of schools and social services, through the expropriation of the financial elite and public ownership of the corporations and banks.
CHICAGO: THE
FACE OF A NATION IN SHAMBLES
CHICAGO’S
BLACK GANG LAND…. Is what
happens when bankster Rahm Emanuel
and his corrupt Obama party turned the city under!
CHICAGO: THE FACE OF A NATION IN SHAMBLES
CHICAGO’S BLACK GANG LAND…. Is what happens when
bankster Rahm Emanuel and his corrupt Obama party turned the city under!
BARACK OBAMA FIDDLES WITH HIS CRONY BANSTERS WHILE
CHICAGO BURNS!
"Responsibility for this tragedy lies
squarely with the ruling class and its political representatives.
Chicago is controlled by the Democrats. It is the political home of
Barack Obama and has been run for years by Mayor Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff and a
multi-millionaire former investment banker."
ILLINOIS FALLS TO LA RAZA MAYHEM…. Apparently Illinois
did not benefit from 8 years of Barack Obama’s sabotage of Homeland security to
build his LA RAZA base of Mexicans
“Illinois is
a state full of illegal aliens. One in seven Illinoisans are
immigrants, with 450,000 official
illegals. One point two million jobs are taken by illegals in
Illinois. This is one of the most heavily
invaded states in the Union.” --- Timothy Birdnow
OBAMA: FUNDED BY HIS CRONY CRIMINAL BANKSTERS and ELECTED
BY MEXICO – THE FIRST BLACK MAN OR THE FIRST SPY ELECTED TO THE
PRESIDENCY???
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/05/matthew-vadum-spies-like-obama.html
Now the outlines
of a Watergate-like conspiracy are emerging in which a sitting Democrat
president apparently used the apparatus of the state to spy on a Republican presidential
candidate. Watergate differed in that President Nixon didn’t get involved in
the plot against the Democratic National Committee until later as an accomplice
after the fact. Here Obama likely masterminded or oversaw someone like the
diabolical Benghazi cover-up artist Ben Rhodes, masterminding the whole thing.
"Cold War historian Paul Kengor
goes deeply into Obama's communist background
in an article in American Spectator, "Our First Red Diaper Baby
President," and in an excellent Mark Levin interview.
Another Kengor article describes the
Chicago communists whose younger generation include David Axelrod, Valerie
Jarrett, and Barack Hussein Obama. Add the openly Marxist,
pro-communist Ayers,
and you have many of the key players who put Obama into power." Karin McQuillan
OPEN
BORDERS:
IT'S ALL
ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED AND PASSING ALONG
THE
ILLEGALS' WELFARE AND CRIME COSTS TO THE AMERICAN
MIDDLE
CLASS!
“That Washington-imposed policy of
mass-immigration floods the market with foreign labor, spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by
blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million
marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling
with opioid addictions.” ---- NEIL MUNRO
No, You Can't Get an 'Amen'
Last Friday, entertainers, activists, and politicians gathered in a Detroit church to remember Aretha Franklin at a funeral lasting more than eight hours. Bill Clinton was there along with Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, and Maxine Waters, lots of others, and the media. The media knew they had all the ingredients for a #Resistance meeting (which is exactly what The New Yorker called the next day's memorial service for Senator John McCain) – that is, they had leftists, microphones, and TV cameras. They couldn't wait for the scathing attacks on Donald Trump.
None of the reported insults was noteworthy. Take this silly example from Michael Eric Dyson, possibly plagiarized from Daffy Duck: "You lugubrious leech, you dopey doppelgänger of deceit and deviance, you lethal liar, you dimwitted dictator, you foolish fascist." No one would allow Maxine Waters anywhere near a microphone, so the best she could manage was a "Wakanda" salute. Ho-hum.
But then Reverend Jasper Williams, Jr. gave his eulogy (worth seeing in its entirety, at 8:39 in this video of the entire service). That's when the headline became "Dog Bites Man." In 1984, Williams had delivered the eulogy for Ms. Franklin's father, Reverend C.L. Franklin, and she recently asked Williams to deliver hers. After a tribute to Aretha Franklin's title as "Queen of Soul," Williams went on to explain what the Bible means by "soul" and then asked the crowd, "Have you lost your soul? If we're truthful, honest, and fair, we have to say black America has lost its soul. ... As I look in your house, there are no fathers in the home no more."
He went on to say that "as proud, beautiful and fine as our black women are, one thing a black woman cannot do, a black woman cannot raise a black boy to be a man. She can't do that. She can't do that." Citing statistics on black-on-black murders, Williams spurned the Black Lives Matter movement:
It amazes me how it is when the police kills one of us we're ready to protest, march, destroy innocent property. We're ready to loot, steal whatever we want, but when we kill 100 of us, nobody says anything, nobody does anything.
He implored Black America to "come home to God." Simply put, his message was the direct opposite of what's preached by so many black clergy Sunday after Sunday: that all problems in the black community are the result of social forces and systemic racism, that the answer is faith in the secular promises of race-hustlers and the Democratic Party and in what jazz poet Gil Scott-Heron sarcastically referred to as "the train from Washington."
As an outsider to the black church, I don't know how many pastors share Reverend Williams's fairly traditional Christian message to return to God, accept His design for family and children, and take responsibility for keeping unambiguous commandments such as "Thou Shalt Not Murder." I do know that the liberal media hate this message, as they hate all authentic Christian messages; that's why they use highly selective reporting to screen out preachers like Williams, preferring to show only those black churches whose religious authority rests on commitment to progressive causes. So it wasn't bad enough that Reverend Williams's message was full of politically disapproved content, but it was also heard by millions of people who are never supposed to hear black pastors talk this way.
When an outlawed message gets out to the masses, the media promptly respond by mashing the "outrage" button, sending forth an army of incensed experts to destroy both the message and the messenger. When Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, for all his faults, recently displayed remarkable courage by calling out the violence in Chicago as a moral and spiritual problem, liberals instantly threw him under the wheels for being tone-deaf and blaming the victims. The CEO of the Chicago Urban League flatly said about any explanation for Chicago's violence other than racism, "I won't accept it."
Emanuel, obviously, is white, and in spite of his association with the Clintons and Obamas, he is no longer a popular enough Democrat to be of any use to the cause. He can be destroyed.
It's not so easy with Reverend Williams. Aretha Franklin chose him, for one, which means slamming him looks like questioning her. Typically outspoken progressive clergy show little enthusiasm to denounce Williams, except a few incoherent non-responses to media goading. Detroit NAACP president Reverend Wendell Anthony, when asked about Williams's hard-hitting eulogy, said, "Part of the issue yesterday was the need to elaborate and to put a holistic approach to certain points he was making." Translation: "I have absolutely no response."
Not to worry: The media were able to find much more direct outrage on social media. The Detroit Free Press reported that "social media, especially the Twittersphere, exploded in criticism over Williams' remarks. They accused him of being sexist and demeaning to other black people." Wrote the Associated Press: "Twitter user A'Ja Lyve, who uses the handle @ajalyve," called Reverend Williams "'a homophobic, sexist, misogynist, ableist, uneducated bigot who is disrespecting Auntie Aretha Franklin at her funeral. She wasn't about nonsense." (That's right: the A'Ja Lyve!) To further amplify the reaction they wanted to report, the Free Press cited headlines from other news outlets as if they were reporting actual facts: "headlines characterized Williams' nearly 50-minute eulogy as 'antiquated,' and 'controversial.' One said he had a 'bleak view' and the message 'provoked fury.'"
Read those articles, and see that they're also sourced back to social media – a neat trick if all you want is to buttress leftist dogma and not report facts. Social media offer a wealth of harsh put-downs, none of it has to make any sense, and the invectives punch up your copy without the need to put reluctant public figures at risk of saying something profoundly stupid.
Yet there had to be outrage among liberal black clergy. Reverend Williams preached a message that revealed all their Democrat talking points for the specious nonsense they are. They're not willing to challenge Williams's points directly, because his message just made so much obvious sense. What can his critics say? That the prevalence of poor single mothers having to raise sons without their fathers is a cause for cultural pride? Are they going to prove Williams wrong with an argument that the murder rate of black men by other black men is less of a threat than police shootings or Klan lynchings? Even Jesse Jackson knew better than that, once upon a time, just as he once knew, and said, that the argument that "the right to privacy is of a higher order than the right of life ... was the premise of slavery."
There was a time when the moral authority of the black church, personified in Reverend Martin Luther King and a band of lesser known clergymen, was able to convict white America of racism and change a country's heart. Now, if a black pastor dares use his pulpit to call lost souls back to God, today's hirelings call it a male-centered "theological insult" or mumble that their colleague just wasn't "at his best." How things have changed since "Respect" hit number one.
T.R. Clancy looks at the world from Dearborn, Michigan. You can email him at trclancy@yahoo.com.
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