(On Dan's suggestion. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley announced yesterday that he is stepping down after 21 years in power. He's been the mayor of a large American city for such a long time that inevitably he'll be blamed and credited for stuff American mayors have little control over. That he has done a poor job for most of the city's people was, of course, to be expected, as they are poor and poorly represented. That Chicago's yuppies secretly and not so secretly love him is also not unexpected. The city that they know has changed in ways they like, and the city they don't know or ever go to is not their Chicago, it doesn't exist for them.
Does this all sound familiar? Well, yeah, it's America, a violent country in its second guilded age, acted out in one city's economic demography. Here then is Daley's finest achievement, a low-crime and 'nice' zone, from downtown ('the loop') north about 8 miles. A huge and mostly 'economically cleansed' district of gentrification, sports bars, police presence, stylish restaurants and fashionable 'alternative' lifestyles:
CHICAGO poverty and the 'yuppie zone' built during Daley's reign.
The "DREAM Now Series: Letters to Barack Obama" is a social media campaign that launched Monday, July 19, to underscore the urgent need to pass the DREAM Act. The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, S. 729, would help tens of thousands of young people, American in all but paperwork, to earn legal status, provided they graduate from U.S. high schools, have good moral character, and complete either two years of college or military service. With broader comprehensive immigration reform stuck in partisan gridlock, the time is now for the White House and Congress to step up and pass the DREAM Act!
President Barack H. Obama The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
My name is Tania Unzueta and I'm undocumented.
I have lived in Chicago since I was 10 years old. I came with my mother to join my father, who had found a stable job and a promise to legalize his status. Eventually our tourist visas ran out, and my family became undocumented.
All people should have the opportunity to succeed in life, regardless of their race. But a recent Illinois district court decision jeopardizes that possibility.
In U.S. v. Board of Educ. of City of Chicago, an Illinois district court ended a twenty-three year old consent decree, which was intended to ameliorate segregation in Chicago public schools. Viewing the Chicago public school system through the lens of the particular constitutional violations that had warranted the initiation of the decree in 1980, the court determined that the consent decree was no longer necessary, because those "vestiges of discrimination" identified in 1980 were "no longer."
With an eye towards racial progress and expanded opportunity in the United States, this narrow view of segregation in public schools is deeply problematic. Although we might hope that race does not matter, too often it does. Even though over fifty years have passed since Brown v. Board of Education, according to a 2005 report by the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, almost 2.4 million students—including about one in six of both black and Latino students—attend schools in which the student population is 99-100% minority. Nearly 40% of both black and Latino students attend schools in which the student population is 90-100% minority; conversely, only 1% of white students attend such schools. Additionally, 72% of black and 77% of Latino students attend schools in which minorities constitute a majority of the students.
More than 5,000 people are packing the streets of downtown Chicago this morning, chanting, marching and rallying against Big Bankers and financial institutions that have taken taxpayer money and are using it to give big bonuses to CEOs and to lobby against financial reforms that would ensure they don't go back on the public dole.
The crowd is marching to the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers, site of the American Bankers Association meeting, to protest the banking industry's greed and irresponsibility that crippled our economy, leaving millions of workers behind.
After the house of cards they built collapsed, bankers and the financial industry took $700 billion in taxpayer funds for a bailout. But rather than reform their failed practices, they want to go back to business as usual-with the chance of again precipitating another financial collapse and need for taxpayer bailout in coming years.
Have you seen the latest stories about the profits and bonuses of the biggest banks on Wall Street? Are they going out of their way to try to piss everyone off? Are they intentionally thumbing their nose at democracy to make it clear that they can and will get away with anything they want?
If you want to do something about it, I'd recommend going to Chicago next week. The American Bankers Association- which as far as I can tell is a wholly owned subsidiary of Goldman Sachs opposed to all those small independent banks that are still trying to lend to customers and are getting badly hurt in the real economy- is doing their big convention in Chicago next week. And you know what? Thousands of regular folks are showing up to crash their party. Planners of these protests, which is called the Showdown in Chicago, have all kinds of things planned- marches, rallies, direct actions, and some really cool stuff I've been sworn to secrecy on. It will be fun and deadly serious all at the same time. Check out their website at showdowninchicago.org. They have all kinds of people coming- workers, farmers, students, retirees, religious leaders. Busloads from all over the country of people coming to raise hell.
These big bankers need to understand that they are in for a fight, that we are not going to let them wreck our economy and our democracy without an all out, no holds barred battle. Show up for the Showdown in Chicago. You will be glad you did.
Knowingly or cluelessly, Chicago Tribune's 'blame scary black males' image from its free rag yesterday.
The problems facing the police in Chicago and our military in Afghanistan are similar. Of course, the result of police failure in Chicago is unacceptable, our children beating hell out of and shooting each other. In Afghanistan, of course, we can just leave, which is what we should do.
The starting point in both Afghanistan and the south side is the hostility or at least the absence of goodwill toward the occupying forces. And goodwill (and the 'snitching' and neighborhood watching it generates) is essential to peace; the only alternative way to make peace is economically/politically impossible, flooding the conflict zone with five or six times as many troops/cops as are there now.
The first step toward remedying the goodwill deficit is for the occupying forces to have goodwill toward the local peoples. Which is not easy. Middle class cop bosses and America's careerist generals, and the cop and occupying army cultures, are not natural sources of goodwill toward local impoverished populations.
Let's look at the generals. They carry out a policy of occupation whose purpose is incoherent (has something to do with Al Queda, which ain't in Afghanistan), and whose means explicitly, hell triumphantly, sacrifices many civilian lives in order to make sure the occupier soldiers suffer minimal casualties. Ain't no goodwill in that. Now, can a real purpose be created or re-articulated into something that is worthwhile for Afghans? Nope. We actually tried 'helping Afghanistan become a nice country' and that plays badly with U.S. voters. Can the warfare means be modified so that many fewer Afghan civilians die in exchange for a few more Americans deaths? Realistically, no chance in hell of that.
First, a local nonprofit attempts to address the crime epidemic in Chicago ...
Second, antibiotic resistance is spreading across the world. An answer might lie in Georgia, the former Soviet Republic, where they use phage virus cocktails that only attack bacteria as a treatment for chronic, recurring infections. The catch for anyone who wants to benefit from this treatment in the US is that each of the thousands of bacteriophage strains that have been found to be medically useful would have to individually pass the FDA approval process. (via)
I just got back from my longest trip yet on my book tour promoting The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be. Outside of a quick trip to a Netroots Nation regional meeting in Denver, all of my book travel up until now has been to heavily Democratic cities on the east and west coasts, but this trip was right in the heart of the heartland: Missouri (a swing state leaning red), Kansas and Nebraska (2 thoroughly red states), Iowa (a swing state leaning blue), and the most thoroughly blue Midwestern state there is, Illinois.
Adam took some photos from the trip you can check out on our Flickr set here.
After this all-American, politically diverse, trip, I have certain things I can feel confident in reporting on:
• I continue to be heartened by the great response to the book's message - really good crowds, really responsive people, great questions, incredible passion about changing the country. There really is a movement building everywhere - yes, even in the red states - for big progressive change.
• The populist feelings about the banks are very strong. My biggest applause line every place I spoke was "If you are too big to fail, you are too big to exist." Even though I was speaking to strongly pro-Obama audiences, people were very troubled by his banking policies.
• In spite of the economy, people are still fired up enough to be coming to fundraisers. I was a speaker at three different fundraising events - for the Nebraska Democratic Party in Lincoln, the Iowa Citizen Action Network in Des Moines, and Citizen Action Illinois/USAction in Chicago. All of them were successes, with a combined crowd of over 400 people.
• People very much want to be involved in changing America. There was no sense at all that folks are passively waiting for President Obama to take care of things. Every single event I went to - every single one - someone asked a version of the question "What can we do to help change things?"
It was a great trip, and now I'm back in D.C. for a couple of weeks before heading out again. I look forward to continuing to spread the message about the history, and future, of the progressive cause in America.
Each Laughing Liberally show mixes stand-up with musical numbers and political discussion, plus other entertainments. This weekend, the free event includes appearances by comics Rick Perlstein, James Fritz and Carrie Callahan
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Rick, is the march of right-wing institution-building that realigned our country really that funny?
Two months ago, I entered this race declaring we are in the largest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Every day more and more people lose their jobs, health care, and homes. We are witnessing not the unraveling of a few years of excess, but the insolvency of many of the economic practices and theories that became conventional wisdom over the past 30 years.
Most important of these, and that which has caused the greatest destruction, is the idea that debt is wealth. Over the last 30 years, American wages stagnated and people grew deeper in debt -- their homes, educations, health care, every aspect of life. And at the national level, the story hasn't been much different. We lost manufacturing and borrowed from across the globe. There were only two winners in all this, Wall Street and the banks.
Kathy G., whom I met this morning during Geoghegan-related program activities on the North Side of Chicago, is devoting her blog, The G Spot, to some pretty intensive Geoghegan coverage. Be sure to check it out.
Many of the people that signed my Geoghegan ballot petition sheets today (taking their gloves off in the biting wind and whirling snow to scratch some congealed ink on frosted paper) told me they had voted for Obama in November but weren't convinced that the incoming president would make much of a difference given the culture of Washington. I told them that Tom G. was just the man to send to the House to shake up that sclerotic D.C. establishment.
On the surface, the story of recent labor activism in Chicago sounds like a wonderful moment in progressive advocacy. Workers for Republic Windows and Doors staged a protest after the company shut down without giving them prior notice, as required by state and federal law.
Progressives targeted Bank of America, a major creditor of the company, even though the company, not the bank, infringed the workers' rights. Progressives argued that because Bank of America received funds under the federal "bailout," it should extend additional credit to the company so that the workers could receive wages and benefits to which the law entitles them.
But the story is far more complicated than the simplistic narrative of EVIL BANK versus POOR WORKERS and SUFFERING COMPANY indicates. Here's why!
It's time for Obama to drop the gloves and start swinging. Since he came up through Chicago politics he should take some advice from Sean Connery's character in The Untouchables about The Chicago Way.
cross posted from DailyKos
Chicago OpenLefters, on Thursday, September 20th, we are having a Chicago Meetup at the Blue Agave. The guest of honor is the candidate for the Illinois State House District 17, Daniel Biss!! Daniel is a true people-powered candidate, having reached as high as #2 on the Actblue fundraising list, behind only John Edwards for a week. His campaign kick-off rally several weeks back was attended by over 150 people! Standing room only!
STATE BLOGS
