Rahm Emanuel: Chicago’s Mayor of Go F*** Yourself
Editor’s Note: At the present moment a small, but passionate group of community members on Chicago’s South Side are well into their third week of a hunger strike aimed at Mayor Rahm Emanuel in an attempt to get him to keep Walter H. Dyett High School in Bronzeville as a public school and reopen it as The Dyett Global Leadership and Green Technology High School. Dyett, which is the last open enrollment high school in the predominantly black neighborhood that was once the landing pad for tens of thousands of African-Americans during The Great Migration, is representative of the disturbing trend of axing public schools in minority neighborhoods on the city’s South and West sides and replacing them with schools run by private contractors that has emerged with particular vigor during Emanuel’s time in office. I thought that this would be a good opportunity to republish a piece I did on Rahm’s draconian rule last year that deals with many of the same issues that are forcing the Dyett High School hunger strikers to take such drastic measures to try and save the community school. Enjoy.
———————
By the time I got to Chase Park, the first tricklings of a crowd had begun to congregate at the corner of Ashland and Leland Avenues. A small group of men clad almost exclusively in black rucked around in their backpacks, pulling out ghoulish Guy Fawkes masks and placing them atop their heads like actors preparing for a show at a Kabuki theater. On the street corner, a middle-aged Hispanic man wearing an old Army desert camouflage uniform and a floppy beige bucket hat waved around a giant wooden flagpole holding up the stars and stripes and—inexplicably—a portrait of George Washington while a few betatted, Anarcho-punkish women turned off of Clark Street and began walking towards the rally’s meeting point, each one holding a sign saying “ONE TERM MAYOR” by their sides. A few parents watching their children play on the park’s jungle gym disinterestedly watched their arrival, making sure to give the side-eye to one woman with a platinum blonde pixie cut who had the temerity to smoke her American Spirits within 500 ft of their offspring.
?w=621&h=605
It was the 4th of July in 2013 and Occupy’s Chicago branch had organized what they dubbed, “A Block Party to Fight Austerity at Rahm’s House,” which was not so much a block party as it is a march and mini-rally. The Rahm in question was former White House Chief of Staff for President Barack Obama and current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a man who once sent a dead fish in a box to pollster who was late sending back polling results and had a sign on his desk at The White House that read, “Undersecretary for Go Fuck Yourself.” Emanuel is the epitome of the establishment New Democrat: a opportunistic centrist with a background in fundraising and high finance who tries to mask his utter disregard for the poor and disenfranchised by being a vocal supporter of special interests like gun control and gay marriage.
Rahm’s CV is really rather impressive. He served as chief fundraiser for the campaigns of President Bill Clinton and Richard M. Daley, the man whom he would later succeed as Mayor of Chicago, and would take a break from politics in the late 90s to make over $16 million with the investment bank Wasserstein Perella. Emanuel has also been intimately linked with Goldman Sachs for most of his political career, a relationship that began in 1992 when he was on a $3,000 a month retainer from the investment banking firm at the same time he was convincing Goldman Sachs employees to contribute over $100,000 to Clinton’s campaign coffers. Over the ensuing two decades, Rahm’s ties to the financial elite would only strengthen, a development evidenced by the fact that he received more money from hedge funds, private equity firms and the larger securities/investment industry during the 2008 election cycle than any other member of the House of Representatives. A man of the people, he is not.
More than anything else, Mayor Emanuel’s abhorrent neglect of the Chicago Public School system during his brief time in office has galvanized the protesters who have affiliated themselves with the Occupy movement. At the march that day, a couple dozen were wearing their red Chicago Teachers Union t-shirts and many more expressed their dissatisfaction with the way the mayor’s office had been starving CPS of resources with words and placards. The blood feud began in earnest in September of 2012, when the Chicago Teachers Union went on strike for the first time in a quarter-century to protest the city’s proposed plan to, among other things, increase the influence of standardized testing in teacher evaluations, while amending the hiring practices regarding teachers who were laid off due to non- performance-based reasons like school closure. Much of the mainstream media focused on the fact that the union was fighting for pay increases for their members when the average salary of a CPS teacher was around $74,000, citing these supposedly exorbitant salaries as proof positive of the unmitigated bloat endemic to our nation’s underperforming public school system, but teacher pay grades weren’t the principle reason why they were striking. At the heart of the matter was job security, something that would prove to be largely illusory for thousands of CPS teachers and staffers in the coming months.
more
http://thepoliticus.com/content/rahm-emanuel-chicagos-mayor-go-f-yourself?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=reddit&utm_source=news
= new reply since forum marked as read
"I think every time he walks around shaking the hands of the people whose lives he is intentionally trying to ruin, he is wondering how soon he can wash the working-class sweat and grease off his hands," he says. "He was probably happy he had one less person's hand to shake."
