Illinois governor’s race the most expensive in US history
By Alexander Fangmann
5 November 2018
As the 2018 midterm elections in the United States come to a close, it is becoming clear that it will break records as the most expensive non-presidential election on record. Total campaign spending is estimated to reach $5.2 billion, only $1.3 billion less than the 2016 elections, which featured a presidential race, and around $1.5 billion more than the 2014 midterm elections.
Even measured against this mountain of campaign spending, the money being spent on the race for Illinois governor stands out, with more than $284 million spent so far between the general election and primaries. This is outpacing what has until this point been the most expensive gubernatorial election campaign in US history, California’s 2010 race between Democrat Jerry Brown and billionaire Republican Meg Whitman, later the CEO of HP.
J.B Pritzker, the Democratic candidate for governor of Illinois, has spent $161.5 million of his vast fortune on his own campaign, more than any other candidate in US history has ever spent in an attempt to win an office. He is outspending Governor Bruce Rauner, the Republican incumbent, by a nearly two-to-one margin. Rauner has spent $50 million of his own money, as well as $22.5 million he received from the state’s wealthiest resident, hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin, the founder of Citadel.
The most expensive governor's race in American history
Pritzker, with a wealth of $3.4 billion, is an heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune and one of at least 11 billionaires in his family. The Pritzkers are one of the richest families on the planet, and many of its members are deeply connected to the highest echelons of American business and government.
His sister, Penny Pritzker, was commerce secretary in the Obama administration from 2013 to 2017. His brother Anthony Pritzker is, aside from being an investor and managing partner of the Pritzker Group, an advisor on Asia-Pacific policy at the RAND Corporation.
Thomas Pritzker, his first cousin, is executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels and chairman of the board for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a major think tank for US imperialism. He is also chairman of North American Western Asia Holdings (Nawah), an investment firm with port and logistics operations in Iraq that he co-founded with Paul Brinkley, deputy undersecretary of defense under both George W. Bush and Obama.
Bruce Rauner is also likely a billionaire, or close to it, from the wealth generated by the private equity firm GTCR, in which he was a partner for many years. Though he has adamantly refused to divulge his actual net worth, a spokesman once described his wealth as “in the mid-nine figures,” and his 2015 state tax return indicated $188 million in taxable income.
The fact that nearly 82 percent of the spending has come from just three members of the financial aristocracy, two of them the candidates themselves, underscores the complete lack of popular support for the Democrats and Republicans among the overwhelming majority of the working class population. Moreover, it provides a guarantee, even more than usual, that whoever ends up as governor will be defending the interests of their own extremely narrow social milieu.
While Pritzker is heavily favored to win on November 6, concern about a low turnout in Illinois affecting candidates further down the ballot, due to the lack of popular enthusiasm for the billionaire candidate, likely accounts for the last-minute campaign visit to Chicago by former President Barack Obama on Sunday. The event, held at the UIC Pavilion, is intended to drum up votes in close congressional elections in the Chicago suburbs, as well as in the Illinois attorney general race.
The main effect of all this campaign funding has been a nearly complete saturation of the media with campaign ads meant to conceal the shared commitment of both parties, regardless of which candidate wins on Tuesday, to continue and deepen the assault on the living standards and social conditions of the working class, particularly in regard to pensions and education spending.
Instead, the campaign ads have largely traded accusations of corruption and incompetence, accurate in themselves. Republicans denounced Pritzker for a scheme to avoid paying taxes on a mansion in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood by removing the toilets (so the value of the house could be downgraded). Democrats charged that Rauner attempted to cover up deaths from Legionnaire’s disease that occurred at the state veterans’ home in Quincy.
Despite Pritzker’s refusal to state any concrete post-election plans and his lack of a popular base of support, he is expected to win comfortably, with polls predicting a two-digit margin of victory over Rauner. This is largely due to the widespread antipathy Rauner generated during his first term through his attempt to force through his “Turnaround Agenda,” a collection of attacks on pensions, workers compensation and other social spending, which resulted in a budget impasse lasting over two years. The impasse caused layoffs and program cuts in social service and higher education throughout the state. In a recent campaign speech Rauner was unapologetic about the impasse and even described it as “a fight for reform.”
Rauner also faced a challenge from the far right of the Republican Party, which attacked him over his signing of HB40, a bill that expanded coverage of abortions by the state’s Medicaid program. Barely squeaking by a primary challenge from Jeanne Ives, a state legislator, who criticized him for supporting bills expanding rights for transgender individuals and immigrants, Rauner emerged from the primary badly damaged politically.
In the general election, he will also face another far-right challenger, former Republican Sam McCann, who is running under the Conservative Party banner. McCann, who represents an area around Springfield with many government workers, voted with Democrats to override a Rauner veto, which ultimately ended the impasse. He has accused Rauner of being “the most liberal, progressive governor the state of Illinois has ever had.”
Rauner supported the Illinois-based Janus case that was successful in the US Supreme Court in order to weaken the Democratic Party by attacking their funding source in public sector unions. By contrast, Pritzker has pledged his support to the union leadership. In fact, his family has long had a working relationship with the unions, through Unite Here, which has been working furiously throughout this campaign season to prevent a struggle by hotel workers from breaking free of their stranglehold and making serious demands on the hotel chains, including Hyatt.
In large measure, the real question in this election between the two main parties of the ruling class is whether the they believe that the unions are needed to carry out the budget cuts and regressive tax increases on the agenda. The support for the Democratic Party by the unions, 30 of which backed the Pritzker campaign, including AFSCME and the Illinois Federation of Teachers, indicates they are ready and willing to help carry out the bipartisan agenda being worked out behind the scenes to continue the program of austerity.
THE
BANKSTER FUNDED DEMOCRAT PARTY: SERVANTS OF THE LA RAZA MEXICAN WELFARE STATE
ON THE AMERICAN WORKERS’ BACKS!
THEY
DESTROYED THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS, AMERICA’S BORDERS AND ENDLESSLY ASSAULTED
THE AMERICAN WORKER IN THEIR EFFORTS TO FINISH OFF THE GOP… And they got filthy
rich doing it!
“The Democrats had abandoned their working
class base to chase what they pretended was a racial group when what they were
actually chasing was the momentum of unlimited migration”. DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE
*
"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
*
THE LA RAZA SUPREMACY DEMOCRAT PARTY:
The
Democratic Party used to be the
party of blue-collar America- supporting laws and policies that benefited that
segment of the U.S. population. Their leaders may still claim to be
advocates for American working families, however their duplicitous actions that
betray American workers and their families, while undermining national security
and public safety, provide clear and incontrovertible evidence of their lies….
MICHAEL CUTLER …FRONTPAGE mag
Mexican Invasion By Invitation of the Democrat Party
By Tom Barrett
At the current rate of invasion (mostly through Mexico, but also
through Canada) the United States will be completely over run with illegal
aliens by the year 2025. I’m not talking about legal immigrants who follow US
law to become citizens. In less than 20 years, if we do not stop the invasion,
ILLEGAL aliens and their offspring will be the dominant population in the
United States.
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!
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
By Kristina Betinis
Chicago charter school teachers vote overwhelmingly to authorize strike
By Kristina Betinis
5 November 2018
Last week, teachers at four charter school operators in Chicago voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike. Teachers at Acero (formerly UNO Schools), which operates 15 schools, and Chicago International Charter Schools, which operates four schools, approved a strike with 98 percent and 96 percent support of voting teachers, respectively. Civitas Education Partners and Quest Management approved a walkout later in the week.
The teachers seek better pay, smaller class sizes, special education resources, increased wages for the paraprofessionals and longer parental leave. Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff (ChiACTS), which merged this yearwith the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), covers teachers in 34 Chicago charters, but each school is under a separate contract.
Nineteen charter schools in all may hold votes to authorize a strike. No strike date has been announced.
The strike authorizations come amid a growing wave of struggles in the US and internationally. In a year where teachers in the US have struck against the decades of bipartisan attacks on public education, which have been aided and abetted by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the National Education Association (NEA) and their state and local affiliates, the conflict between educators, the two corporate controlled political parties, and the unions that falsely claim to represent teachers has reached a new stage.
Rank-and-file teachers walked out earlier this year in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona and other states to oppose low pay, decades of funding cuts and unacceptable teaching and learning conditions. The statewide walkouts initially erupted outside of the control of the unions and generated popular support. In the end, however, the NEA and AFT, with the critical backing of a host of ostensibly “socialist” organizations whose members have gained prominent positions inside the teacher unions, were able to corral the strikes and smother them. None of the issues teachers courageously fought for have been resolved.
In the past, the CTU had postured as an opponent of the expansion of charter schools. This changed after the CTU betrayed the 2012 walkout of nearly 30,000 educators and agreed to a deal with Mayor Rahm Emanuel, which accelerated the closing of 49 public schools and the layoff of thousands of educators, and led to a lengthened school day and eroded teacher tenure. This sellout of the strike also paved the way for another wave of expansion of charter schools.
In return, an AFT affiliate—ChiACTs—was allowed to organize at the city’s largest charter school operation, and the CTU colluded with the mayor in the “orderly” closing of the 49 elementary schools. Once the AFT got the franchise to take dues from miserably paid charter school teachers, the CTU dropped any pretense of struggle against the expansion of charters.
Former president Karen Lewis and then-vice president Jesse Sharkey, a leading member of the International Socialist Organization, played the leading role in the sellout of the nine-day strike in 2012, blocking the emerging movement of educators not only against Emanuel but the Obama administration, which spearheaded the attack on teachers and public education.
In September, Sharkey quietly took over the CTU presidency from Lewis, who has brain cancer. This will mean a substantial increase in income for Sharkey. As union president, he will make around $155,000 in salary (what Lewis made) in addition to the $20,000 he receives as a trustee of the CTU Foundation, a non-profit used to funnel money to “community organizations.” Sharkey will also get a check as vice president of the Illinois Federation of Teachers, which paid Lewis $67,622 for the position, according to the union’s 2017 filing with the US Labor Department. In other words, Sharkey will have an income in the top 2 percent of the American population, nearly five times the salary of a public-school teacher.
Charter school teachers are significantly lower paid on average than other public school teachers, with pay often $10,000-15,000 per year less and sometimes as much as $20,000 less than a district teacher. While collaborating with both parties to dismantle public education, the unions are eyeing millions in potential dues from charter school teachers.
As of 2017, more than 65,000 students attend charters in Chicago, up from around 35,000 in 2010. The number of unionized charters in Illinois, which are heavily concentrated in the city of Chicago, has also increased from nine to 32 over the same seven years.
“We deserve the same pay and benefits for doing the equal work that’s done across the rest of the school system in the city of Chicago,” Sharkey said after the Acero schools vote was announced. These words should be taken as a warning by public school teachers who could very well see starting wages and conditions “equalized” downward with the help of the CTU.
As Wall Street’s own education model, charter schools allow investor corporations to buy up distressed public property for cheap and operate their own schools within the public school districts, using public funds to educate students along their own plan, drawing students and funding away from the public district schools.
Charter schools have been central to the bipartisan attack on the starved national public education system, cynically termed “school reform” under Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama. Despite an official cap on the number of charter schools allowed by law in Chicago, the number of charters in the city exploded under the leadership of Arne Duncan (later to become President Obama’s Secretary of Education), and Mayor Richard Daley.
After Emanuel’s re-election in 2015, CTU moved its alliance with the Democratic mayor out into the open, while working out plans behind the scenes for even deeper cuts. Immediately after Emanuel’s reelection, Sharkey told the New York Times, “Rahm in 2011 is not Rahm in 2015. He really had to get off his high horse to win.”
That year, anger over the mayor’s austerity measures came together with popular outrage over Emanuel’s cover-up of the police murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, and CTU tried to chloroform teachers with the slogan of "One Chicago" and promotion of the Democratic Party, as teachers were being threatened with 5,000 layoffs and a major pay cut.
Then, in early 2016, CTU leaders were caught red-handed trying to push through a contract offer that would have slashed teacher pay and pensions, reduced staffing levels and increased for-profit charter schools in the nation’s third largest school district. That effort failed only because rank-and-file teachers—who had been working without a contract since June 2015—learned the details of the secret agreement, and the CTU’s 40-member bargaining committee, fearing a rebellion and defeat of the sellout, unanimously voted to reject the deal on February 1, 2016. Making clear that the CTU was still preparing to push through an agreement, Jesse Sharkey said about cuts to teacher pensions, “Everything is on the table.”
The CTU called a bogus one-day strike on April 1, 2016 to let teachers blow off steam and then proceeded to push through another concessions deal, which increased out-of-pocket health care and pension costs, particularly for new teachers.
To fight the district, the city government and the powerful corporate and financial forces behind them, charter school teachers certainly need to be organized, but they cannot take a step forward through the CTU and its affiliated unions. Instead, both charter and public school teachers should elect rank-and-file committees in every school and community, independent of the unions, to organize a real fight to defend teachers and the right to high quality public education.
The egalitarian and democratic principles of public education are incompatible with the enormous levels of social inequality in capitalist America. A powerful political movement of the working class must be built to break the grip of the plutocracy and carry out the socialist transformation of economic life, including the redistribution of wealth to address social needs.
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