PREQUEL: REASONS FOR HOPE | BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
This is part one of this baleful tale, how things looked back in February (2015) in Chicago. In Part 2, below, we see what the outcome was of this critical contest.
The People of Chicago Stun Obama’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Now It’s Round 2
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n a stunning Chicago mayoral upset, challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia with the help of 3 minor candidates held President Obama’s favorite mayor Rahm Emanuel to only 45% of total votes cast. With 34% of the vote Garcia will face Emanuel in a round two runoff election for what Chicagoans call “the fifth floor” the first Tuesday in April.
A former chief of staff at the Obama White House, Rahm Emanuel is estimated to have spent eight times the amount raised by Garcia, and more than four times what all the other candidates did together.
“Turnout was near an all time low, but it didn’t matter,” one campaign associate told Black Agenda Report. “The voters who did come out were really motivated,.they know Rahm is an absolute pig.”
“There were also two advisory referenda our forces helped place on the ballot, which brought out the anti-Rahm vote. The first was a citywide vote on taking the big money out of elections, which carried 80%. The second referendum was for Chicago getting an elected school board instead of the mayoral dictatorship the President, privatizers and corporations love so much, that we’ve had since the Daley era. The mayor’s people would not allow a school board vote on the ballot citywide, so the Chicago Teachers Union and their allies in the communities across the city hit the streets and did a ward by ward petition drive, which got it on the ballot in 37 of the city’s 50 wards. This measure got 270,000 to 34,000, almost 9 to 1.”
Former Chicago Public Schools chief and current Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been a ferocious advocate of charter schools, teacher firings, high stakes testing and privatization, all of which were carried out in Chicago first. Duncan pledged in 2010, with the president at his side, to “turn around” (a euphemism that means privatize), at least 5,000 public schools nationally. Like big city mayors in Philly, New York and elsewhere, Rahm Emanuel did his part to implement the policy, closing over 50 Chicago Public Schools in 2014, down from his original proposal of over 100. He did it in the face of overwhelming opposition, and naturally just about all the closed schools were in the black and Latino parts of town.
Given that corporate media are big cheerleaders for charters and school privatization, you probably won’t hear them discuss Chicago’s 9 to 1 vote against school closures, teacher firings, charters and privatizations, lest activists in other cities get any ideas. But it did happen. Check the stats yourself.
Rahm Emanuel, called by some “Mayor One Percent” had every conceivable advantage. President Obama cut multiple campaign commercials for him, and made well publicized visits to his campaign offices. Besides millions in cash to spend, he had most of the city’s black and Latino political leaders, including congressmen Bobby Rush and Luis Gutierrez in his kennel. His Hollywood pals did an 8 part CNN mini-series for him by the same folks who did the “Brick City” series to boost the political fortunes of Newark’s Corey Booker. The CNN series broadcast fake stats about Rahm and his top cop bringing down the city’s murder rate, debunked almost immediately by news reports while the series was still being broadcast. And under Rahm and the Daleys, Chicago has expelled roughly as many poor and black residents in the last 20 years as New Orleans after Katrina. The city that elected Harold Washington in 1983 was over 40% black. Today’s Chicago is about 27% African American.
The established neoliberal candidate playbook on winning big city elections is to discourage poorer and left leaning voters from coming out, while spending heavily on media. Thanks to the long term mobilization of the teachers union and many forces across the city, it didn’t work this time.
Rahm Emanuel is also vulnerable for the many, many privatizations, sweetheart deals, and grand thefts he’s helped perpetrate while on the fifth floor. He pretended to “reform” the Daley era deal which gave all the city’s parking spaces to a consortium that appears to include J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley and the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi for the next 75 years. If a parking meter breaks or the city decides there’s no need for meters on a particular street, the contract obligates Chicago taxpayers to pay the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi and the other shadowy investors what those meters would have produced for the remainder of the 75-year contract. Rahm secretly had the yellow light interval shortened a couple tenths of a second to produce more revenue for the city and the contractors who manage its red light cameras.
Chicago residents can rest assured their city’s mayor, unlike those in unlucky cities like Detroit, will be never, ever overruled by an unelected board of one-percenters. Rahm Emanuel has created something called the “Infrastructure Trust Board” a private body appointed solely by the mayor with power to overrule any local law or city council decision.
His opponent Jesus Garcia is a local Democrat politician, and former head of a nonprofit neighborhood organization. Garcia was born in Durango, Mexico, and played a prominent role in marshaling Latino support for the election of Chicago’s only progressive mayor Harold Washington in 1983 and 1987. Garcia got into the race late, having been tapped by Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis, who dropped out of the mayoral race when she was diagnosed with brain cancer last year.
Garcia supports a city ordinance that would grant reparations in the form of cash settlements, housing assistance, free tuition at city area colleges and free medical care for the falsely convicted. Chicago seems to uncover a new such case almost every week or two.
While Emanuel’s deep pockets, media endorsements and powerful friends would seem to give him a built in advantage in the April runoff election, it could be anybody’s race. If Emanuel’s foes can sustain Chicago’s grassroots mobilization against austerity, privatization and kleptocracy and dial it up a notch or three over the next month, a former member of Harold Washington’s old team could occup the fifth floor of Chicago’s City Hall.
What happens after that is anybody’s guess. Banksters are probably making their overtures to the Garcia camp even now. The example of New York City’s diBlasio, who turned out after election to be just another neoliberal Democrat, is not far from the minds of many. But that’s round 3 if they get that far. Most of Chicago’s activist energy, and the eyes of the nation, are now focused on round 2. And the bell has already rung.
Bruce Dixon is a Chicagoan living in exile in suburban Atlanta since the beginning of the new century. He’s an information technologist and co-chair of the GA Green Party. Reach him at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com
Blame the Black Political Class For Re-Electing Obama’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel in Chicago
NOTE: The original version of this article quoted a claim that no voter registration drive was conducted. Since we did not take the time to fact-check this claim before publication, it seemed proper to amend the article to omit the claim.
The results are in, and the truth hurts. Rahm Emanuel will sit in the mayor’s office on the fifth floor of Chicago’s City Hall four more years. Despite fudging police stats to make murders disappear, despite stonewalling on police torture and atrocities, despite deliberately shortening red light camera intervals to raise revenue for his buddies, despite closing and privatizing more than 50 public schools, almost exclusively in black and brown neighborhoods, than anywhere in the country, and despite his facing a solid progressive Democrat challenger, Rahm Emanuel carried every single ward in black Chicago, not by big margins, but by enough.
It’s true that Chuy Garcia was outspent at least six to one in the April runoff and twelve to one in the February election. It’s true that Emanuel used that cash to buy an unanswerable deluge of radio and TV commercials. Big money and media are important, but these are advantages the candidates of capital will always possess. Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel had something else in his pocket.
Rahm Emanuel’s biggest asset was the overwhelming support of Chicago’s well-established black political class of preachers, business types, “community leaders” and public officials. President Barack Obama himself came home to Chicago this year and in 2011 to campaign for Rahm and cut commercials for him. Nearly every prominent black elected official in town, Democrats all, came out for Rahm, for privatization, for gentrification, for austerity, for more of the same. This is the state of black politics in 2015, and the reason that Rahm Emanuel carried every single one of Chicago’s majority black wards.
A career Democrat politician himself, Chuy Garcia could talk about the injustice of high stakes testing and privatizing public schools. What Garcia simply could not do was explain to black audiences why almost every black politician in town including the black Chicago Democrat in the White House was riding with Rahm. To do so would have been to directly criticize the regime of black urban politics and the policies of the president himself, something even the most “progressive” career Democrat politicians don’t do.
Soon after taking office in 2011, Rahm Emanuel had dinner with Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union. Rahm told the CTU president that a quarter of Chicago’s public school children would never amount to anything and that he refused to “throw money” at it. Lewis promptly took the mayor’s remarks public. That’s not the kind of thing career Democrats pols do to each other.
Before being diagnosed with brain cancer last fall, Karen Lewis was the presumptive mayoral candidate and actually leading Rahm Emanuel. As a black woman and not a career Democrat, Lewis might have felt freer than Garcia did to question the extent to which urban black politicians, not just in Chicago but in Atlanta, New York, Philly, and a hundred other cities, and the president himself were in bed with gentrifiers, school privatizers, warmongers and pension cutters. Lewis might have pointed out the close personal and political relationships between Illinois Republican governor Bruce Rauner, who aims to make Illinois a right-to-work state one county at a time, and Mayor Emanuel. She might have seized upon the widespread civic outrage in black Chicago against police immunity and impunity in a way that Chuy was not prepared to do.
Unlike Garcia, Karen Lewis was on record saying that Rahm Emanuel’s policies of privatizing public education were nothing more or less than carrying out President Obama’s national policy on public education. But Lewis wasn’t the candidate. Garcia was.
“To win, Chuy needed to carry black wards against Emanuel, to make discouraged voters in those neighborhoods come out,” a campaign staffer told Black Agenda Report.
“You do that by conducting an intense voter registration drive in those areas, and giving those people compelling reasons to come out. It could have been done. Chuy’s campaign was dealt a good hand, but they didn’t play it. They failed to emphasize the issues that could have set black Chicago on fire.”
“This was the winter and spring when Ferguson was on everybody’s lips. Chuy could have won wider and deeper support in black Chicago by focusing early and sustained attention on the corrupt and brutal practices of CPD, Chicago’s Police Department. He didn’t do that. It took weeks to get the Garcia campaign to endorse the drive for reparations for survivors of Chicago police torture. It took weeks more to briefly draw Garcia’s attention to CPD’s black site at Homan Square, another controversy he declined to make a big sustained stink about. The campaign pissed away these key opportunities to mobilize black support. And the only jobs program they announced with actual numbers was Chuy’s proposal to hire a thousand extra cops.”
There’s a nonsense story going around that Chicago’s mayoral election was “a fight for the future of liberalism” or “a fight for the soul of the Democratic party.” Both these are pretty much nonsense. Mayor Emanuel and President Obama along with the their supporting constellation of black elected officials, preachers, business types and community leaders are almost all liberals and Democrats. Emanuel’s closing of 50 plus public schools, and his drive to privatize education is the national policy of a liberal Democrat president, implemented by liberal Democrat mayors and black elected officials in Philly, Sacramento, Atlanta and hundreds of US cities.
Sure, big money and big media were important, as were strategic blunders by the Garcia campaign, like not seizing upon issues that could have won them energetic, fired up followers. But the biggest single factor in Rahm Emanuel’s win this week was the overwhelming support of the black political class from the president on down.
Rahm Emanuel is Obama’s mayor. This is President Obama’s victory, and his legacy to Chicago. It’s Bobby Rush’s victory and Emanuel’s atrocities are on his tab as well. It’s the victory of the black misleadership class over the people they ostensibly represent, and we’ll all be paying for it in the days and the years to come.
There’s the usual lot of talk about this being the beginning of a long term mobilization, of a permanent movement. We’ll see. If the mobilizing energies are poured back into more Democrat candidates, who by habit, nature, and professional courtesy don’t disagree too strenuously with other Democrats, it’s hard to imagine any different result.
Here’s a link to the NY Times exit polling on the election, and to the ward by ward totals posted at the Chicago Board of Elections.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bruce A. Dixon is an exiled Chicagoan now living in suburban Atlanta, where he’s managing editor at Black Agenda Report and a member of the state committee of the Georgia Green Party.
Remember: All captions and pullquotes are furnished by the editors, NOT the author(s).
5 Comments
Despite the pathetic missteps
Submitted by beverly on
Despite the pathetic missteps of the Garcia campaign and the whore-assed endorsements of the black misleadershippers, this race shouldn’t have been close. Black voters in Chicago have seen and experienced the havoc wrought by Zionist devil Emmanuel and they re-elect him anyway. Karen Lewis goes public with Emmanuel’s comment about public school students are not going to amount to much . . . and even this can’t wake up the bleeple to fact Emmanuel doesn’t give a shit about them. Maybe if he had said the “N” word or some other politically incorrect utterance this would have wrecked his chances but I doubt it; Dronebama would have spoken up for Emmanuel’s faux pas and all would be well in black folk world. Sometimes one gets what one deserves. If they are too stupid to see the forest for the trees, don’t come crying when Chicago becomes another Detroit.
Karen Lewis’ brain cancer. Sad coincidence? Or courtesy of Emmanuel and the Dems? See: Hugo Chavez; it’s a good bet his cancer was aided and abetted by our govt. It’s not a stretch that the tactics used to oust foreign leaders who fail to kowtow to U.S. wanton whims are now being used stateside.
As for Garcia, get off the Democratic Party plantation or STFU. No “change” is gonna come from inside the two-party mafia.
BREAKING: In Chicago, Reports of Voters Receiving Ballots Already Marked for Emanuel
After a Facebook post suggested voting irregularities blew up, similar reports are emerging.
BY Rick Perlstein
Around 10:30 this morning, Sam Dreessen, a 26-year-old unemployed DePaul University graduate (and former In These Times intern) who’s been voting in Chicago since 2006, walked into his polling place at Kozminski Community Academy on 54th and Drexel, a mostly black neighborhood in the city’s 5th Ward. He approached the election judge at the table and, like thousands of Chicagoans on this mayoral election day, received a paper ballot and a felt-tip pen. But, he says, one of the two blanks—the one you fill in to vote for Mayor Rahm Emanuel—was already filled in. Dreessen, a volunteer for Emanuel’s opponent, Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, smelled a rat.
“I just said to one of them, the one who gave me the ballot, ‘This has already been filled out. I want one that’s blank.’ And he acted surprised. He said, ‘I don’t know how that happened.’ And he even said there had been other ballots with similar problems.’ He gave me one that was blank, and I told him more than once that they should look at all the ballots, the ones that hadn’t been handed out yet, to see if this happened.”
Dreessen says he was too shocked to even take a picture. “And I thought, ‘I don’t know, this must be happening to other people.’ It just seemed to be so crude.”
He reported it next to the Garcia campaign office in nearby Woodlawn, where they said they had already received similar complaints. Then he took to Facebook, where he posts under the name “Barry Lyndon.” As of 6:08, 52 minutes before the polls close at 7, his post had been shared 538 times. He also texted what happened to a neighbor of his who is a city election commissioner, Marisel Hernandez, who said she was sending investigators “right away.”
I learned all this after tracking “Barry Lyndon” down and speaking to him late this afternoon. I was especially interested to confirm his story because on Facebook some Chicagoans, ever wary, feared the reports were a dirty trick from the Emanuel campaign to discourage people from voting. But no, Sam Dreessen is real and stands by his story. And similar accounts are circulating. The Garcia campaign says it has received several accounts of ballots pre-marked for Emanuel and was able to confirm one. DelMarie Cobb, spokesperson for 5th Ward Alderman Leslie Hairston, told me she personally talked with one voter who ran into the same problem voting at O’Keeffe Elementary School at 69th and Merrill—an even more heavily minority area. And she had heard similar reports from her boss this morning. (Alderman Hairston, meanwhile, a critic of the mayor, warned about the same ballot irregularity on her own Facebook page this afternoon.) Cobb also fielded a report from a person voting on an electronic machine that tried to register a vote for Emanuel every time she punched in a vote for Garcia.
I have’t been yet been able to turn up any reports of irregularities favoring Chuy Garcia.
Reached by the website DNAInfo, a Chicago Board of Elections spokesman did not deny the story, but did try to wave it away: “If someone is suggesting that the judges somewhere are trying to slip one past our voters, I think you’re insulting the intelligence of our voters,” Jim Allen said. “If it were a conspiracy, it would probably be the least effective conspiracy in the history of conspiracies.”
This post will be updated if press representatives from the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office and Board of Elections are able to return my calls. As for young Sam Dreessen, he’s had a busy day. “People have been contacting me from ABC, NBC, etc. It’s just kind of crazy. And honestly I feel like they should go to the people who’ve picked up other complaints. I’m just one person. Others have been saying the same thing.”
This has been Done in Chicago Since Rich Daley Sr was ‘Boss’
Submitted by Nixakliel on
Of course many say that ‘Boss’ Daley in combo w Sam Giancana’s Mafia crew & Cardinal Cody’s Catholic ‘Mafia’- helped ‘Steal the Deal‘ for Daley’s fellow Irish Catholic politician JFK back in 1960.
Rahmbo knew he’d given Chicago’s Blacks plenty of reasons NOT to vote for him [despite Obama’s & other Dim Black Chicago politicians’ endorsements], & Garcia came up thru the ranks of Harold Washington & was endorsed by Karen Lewis- after she had to drop-out due to brain-cancer. As a born & raised Chi-Town guy, IMO this sounds just like something Chicago’s Dim poly-trickal machine might do [especially in Black Wards] to ‘Seal the Deal’ = ‘Steal the Deal‘ for Rahmbo- who likely faced a real chance of getting his arrogant ass kicked to the curb.
PS: The fact that most well known Black Chicago Dim politicians [IE: ex BPP member Bobby Hush] still backed Rahmbo, even after all the things he did clearly showing his disrespect for Black [& Brown] voters who put his arrogant-ass in Chicago’s Mayor’s Chair- Clearly shows that Black Dims loyalty is to the Dim-o-crap Party, NOT to their Black constituents!!! Now watch Obama & all those Black Dims urge Blacks to vote for [ex-Chicagoan] Billary / Killary {I came, I Saw, He Died. Ha! ha! ha!} Clinton for POTUS in 2016
It is obvious
Submitted by keith1818 on
that voter fraud is rampant. They took away polling voters after they have left the booth so they can fix stuff. There is no way that these fools can get elected. Everyone knows they are crooked. THE VOTE IS FIXED.
ALWAYS!
They could not function otherwise, or, they would have to bring out the military, which is just around the corner.
When Will We Learn…
Submitted by IPTruth on
It’s not who you vote for, it’s who’s counting the votes. After the debacle of 2000, I don’t know why black people even go thru the motions. There are no elections in high profile campaigns in this country; there are only selections.