CPS and Further De-stabilization

"We're stabilizing our district so we can build the academic performance" 

- Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennet on the closing of 52 schools in one year

We've recently discussed how a mayor who is quickly undermining the public sector and removing funding from anti-violence measures in the city has also blamed residents for the gang-centric violence in their own neighborhoods.

And now he closes down more than 50 schools in these same high-poverty, high-crime, underresourced, segregated neighborhoods. In one shot. In one year. Without adequate research, cost-analysis. Just decides it needs to be done. Tells us it needs to be done. Holds some hearings, wherein parents come out in droves to voice, loudly, their disapproval. Where parents protest, where parents and students testify that shutting down their schools is dangerous and destabilizing, where parents hold mic-checks to send signals to CPS that CPS needs to listen to us.

And CPS ignores us. They send out proxies, but the proxies are bored. Rahm is nowhere to be seen. No, wait, he's riding the slopes when this announcement is made. On his behalf.

What effect will all this have? There are some things we can guess. But for the most part, we've already seen the effects of closing down several schools simultaneously. It's violence. Kids having to choose between gangs. In a highly-segregated city replete with racialized violence against young people, do you really believe that something horrible won't happen? Just as the shooting numbers are decreasing, children and care-givers will begin the new year at the tail end of a lethal summer running from gangs? Thanks, Rahm and Barbara.

In the meantime, hundreds of Chicago residents have been summarily fired. So much for stabilization, Byrd-Bennett!

The Infantization of Chicago (Schools in Crisis II)

As a new parent with some of my upbringing stuck deep inside me, I found the idea of an incredulous toddler maddening. I had to learn to break the habit of spanks and taps – all of which hurt my daughter incredibly more than any other act of hurting. She trusted her parents, I learned, and I was given the gift of her trust. So I learned in the process that I couldn’t just pick her up and do my will. She would have to make up her mind of her own volition. This would take a lot of patience on my part, a patience that I didn’t always want to sacrifice.

But, she was worth it. The trust she endeared in me was worth it. Her dignity and humanity was worth it. And the chance to retain a leadership status into the future is worth it.

Contrast that to this skeezbag of a pastor, who claims to pick his wife up everyday just to show her who's boss.

The amount of abuse that happens in that household and within his congregation is unfathomable, for sure. But what happens when a mayor and his staff does that to an entire metropolis? Is this not systemic abuse?

Let's look at Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Public Schools Chief Executive Officer Barbara Byrd-Bennett.

Emanuel and Byrd-Bennett are positive that the best things for Chicagoans are what Emanuel and Byrd-Bennett insist are the best things for us. And then they tell us that we will thank them for it in the future, but that their austerity plans are the best for us now. They may even try to convince us that we like their plans right now.

Byrd-Bennett, in fact, never once showed at one of the loud, cantankerous school closing hearings held throughout the city. I was involved in one, and heard from several friends and media reports in the majority of others. Parents were irate. Parents were upset. They did not want their children's schools shut down and they overwhelmingly asked for more resources, not less.

But then there's Byrd-Bennet, treating us like confused children

Everybody got it, that we really needed to close schools, that we really needed to consolidate.

Whereas Rahm has previously worked hard to attack teachers and other union workers (including those dreadful, evil librarians and bus drivers) as being shiftless and out of touch - as being enemies of the public rather than members of it, at least Byrd-Bennett had the good sense to stay out of it, at least in public. And now that she's been so far removed from public that she doesn't even show up in public, she decides that we're gonna need a corrective.

So she pictures parents as being pliable, compliant, willing to listen to her suggestion/ultimatum: That we need to close down schools (which we don't; it will not save money in the long or short run). And, according to her account, that's what we all learned. Even as it wasn't.

How does she document this since she wasn't there? She has binders full of parents.*

She who tried to ban the graphic novel Persepolis from the libraries and classrooms of Chicago Public Schools. High Schools like Lane Tech, one of the consistently top-ranked schools in the city. But then she slightly retracted, saying it was too mature for seventh graders. The same graphic novel on coming of age in Revolutionary Iran that is stocked in the YAL section of my local library - without adult supervision?

As Kenzo Shibato put it:

Persepolis is the story of a young girl growing up during the Islamic revolution in Iran. She is an inquisitive girl who speaks truth to power and refuses to believe the lies of a tyrannical government. She suffers censorship and austerity at the hands of powerful ideological bureaucrats.
Maybe it hits a little too close to home for CPS.

And he has the audacity to pretend that he knows perfectly well about raising children in poverty and the temerity to blame parents - when he's not blaming teachers - for the failure of kids in the classroom? 

“The real problem is not just the education of our children,” he said. “We have parents that can’t be parents.
“We have too many kids, literally, from a broken home.”
The mayor said the city is making headway in connecting parents to their kids’ academic success, pointing to an initiative sponsored by Walgreens that rewards parents with $25 gift cards for picking up their child’s report card.

Tell me in what ways he doesn't sound like Mitt Romney here?* Oh yeah, he's willing to "give free stuff" to parents who pick up report cards (despite the fact that many just can't get out of work in time to pick up report cards regardless of a gift card). 

Sure Rahm, some parents of school children need to be dressed down for not taking responsibility for their children's well-being. But by people who know what they're going through. Not by some silverspoonin', North Shore, Austerity-promoting, anti-working poor mayor closing schools in our neighborhoods. Not only do you and can you not know what those parents are honestly going through that they can't or choose not to be at every meeting, you don't even listen to the ones who do involve themselves to the breaking point, who show up, who put in the time and volunteer, who know very well the cost of shutting down their children's schools or their neighboring schools. Who vigorously and pointedly protested and yet were dismissed like cantankerous children. What would make the already-beyond-taxed think that you'd be ready to do anything for them anyway, that things will go great for them if those who have been applying by all the rules can't even catch a break in your system?

This is not the first time Rahm's been to this rodeo, though. Shortly before, while visiting the West Side to introduce some new plan of reshuffling police officers in high-crime areas, he offered that it wasn't as much the job of the police to shut down crime as it was the job of community members. Rather than encouraging partnership, though, he is actually shutting down one of the only resources that has effectively connected community members and their beat cops, CAPS. Which means that the resources that we have to fight the effects of poverty and crime (in the form of working community schools or programs that connect police officers with the neighborhoods that they are often estranged from), as little as they are, are actually being taken away from us during the times when we most need them.

And you have the audacity to tell us your plans for us are for our own good? The obnoxiousness to carry us over your shoulders until we stop our temper tantrums? That's how you treat us?

And we're supposed to accept that, Chicagoans, as being better for us. But we know better than that. We're smart and aware. And grown-ass folks to boot.

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*There are several other ways that Rahm and his administration remind me of Romney. Romney said in that meeting in a West Philadelphia school that classroom size doesn't affect performance, hinting that more students per class should be all right in an overly-crowded system. Guess what other non-educators with children in small classes have been saying such terrible nonsense?

Proudly Union Free and Immoral

From Michael Lind's article, Southern poverty pimps, at Salon:

The essence of the Southern economic model is not low taxation, but a lack of bargaining power by Southern workers of all races. Bargaining power at the bottom of the income scale is created by tight labor markets; unions; minimum wage laws combined with unemployment insurance; and social insurance, such as Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. 

Naturally, the 21st-century descendants of Jefferson Davis and John C. Calhoun want to weaken everything that strengthens the ability of a Southern worker to say to a Southern employer:  “Take this job and shove it!” 

Tight labor markets are anathema to Southern employers.  They want loose labor markets that create a buyer’s market in wage labor.  That is why, at a time of mass unemployment among low-skilled workers in the U.S., most of the calls for expanding unskilled immigration in the form of “guest worker” programs are coming from Southern and Southwestern politicians.  Guest workers — that is, indentured servants bound to a single employer and unable to quit — are the ideal workers, from a neo-Confederate perspective.  They are cheap and unfree.

The article is worth a read. But it contributes to the malaise of false dichotomies. As if the North and the Rustbelt weren't taking on these same practices. Wisconsin, Indiana and even Michigan have elected pro-big business governors and legislatures who are working hard to dismantle worker's rights to bargain and act as professional organizations to temper corporate malaise affecting both the public and private sectors. Even union-happy Chicago is under attack from our overwhelmingly-elected mayor, a Democrat who was former Chief of Staff for President Barack Obama.

So, yeah, there's that. Meanwhile, capital created by workers continues to climb back to the top - or rather, flow back to the lowest levels- the ultrarich. But it's the working poor who are blamed for being poor and demanding anything of worth for their work. Got it.

Oh, and there is this from Lind's article for my fellow Christians who either hear or peddle the nonsense that charities should take care of the poor, not government (and for whom the words "economic justice" do not ring a bell):

In order to maximize the dependence of Southern workers on Southern employers in the great low-wage labor pool of the former Confederacy, it would be best to have no welfare at all, only local charity (funded and controlled, naturally, by the local wealthy families).

We've dealt with that nonsense here and here and here, though. 

Hand-Maiden to the Fascists?

The Chicago Tribune reported about a multi-million dollar oopsie on Chicago's public transit system that is pulling needed and promised cars from the "L":

"This is not a public process that we are going to air in public," CTA spokeswoman Molly Sullivan said last week in response to repeated questions to repeated questions from the Tribune about the production setback.
The $1.14 billion CTA order for 706 Bombadier cars is taxpayer-funded.

Brilliant piece of editing, CT.

Now, maybe we can set those same journalistic instincts on the mayor's office when they decide to criminalize protests, or bash teachers and librarians. Or privatize schools. Or force teachers to work an extra two hours a day for less money than they were promised to make before the extra hours were tagged on. And then call them lazy and incompetent for refusing to take his crap. Or force libraries to close on Mondays because he can't "find" three million dollars - but he can find patrons to pony up $80 million to fund extra "police" protection during the WTO meetings.

And he can dispatch spokespeople to tell us why we don't need to know information about our transit system and the workings of our tax moneys, and he can hold press conferences to bully teachers and principals into accepting his moral obligations, and he can stock the local news with his staff to inform us why protesters are really evil professional anarchists bent on destroying our way of life for no other purpose than being evil...

And, for the most, our media watchdogs lap it up.

When I was watching the WMAQ news propaganda post with some spokesperson from his administration, nobody questioned the assertions that most of the aldermen trusted the wise and noble Emanuel - who, unlike the rest of these hicks, spent time in the Big City of Warshington and Knows How the Real World Operates (T) - to curtail our freedom and speech and assemblage for Our Own Good (C). The Sun-Times practically labeled him a hero on the front page of its Saturday paper ("Rahm Reinstitutes Mondays at the Libraries!") and waited until the last paragraph to give any word to the opposition. And story after story after story repeats the bold-faced lie that union teachers are lazy, that it's their fault that economically deprived schools continue to "fail" (by the chosen rubrics), and that privatized charter schools (mostly for-profit schools run with public money that can choose who can enroll and can kick poor-performing students out, which regular public schools can not do) are automatically better-performing than public schools - even though tests by their own rubrics show repeatedly that that's not true.

But finally, finally, we can point to one peace of evidence to say that the entire local media is not in the fascists' pockets.

We got a lot more to keep pushing for, though.

Let's Activate!

Mayor McMoneyBoobs

Update below

Rahm Emanuel is an Occupier. I do not mean that in the sense that he is sympathetic to the OWS movement. Quite the contrary, he has arrested hundreds of demonstrators (including nurses staffed for the demonstration) for daring to take back public space in the last two weekends. I mean that the current mayor of Chicago is an occupying force in the traditional sense - ie, he comes into a territory, extracts goods and resources from it for his own benefit, and leaves when he darned well feels like it.

You know, like Rome and Babylon...

It's not really a surprise that Rahm would be so bad for this city in his first year. It's not in the least surprising that he would demonize teachers in order to get an extra two hours each day out of them for free. That he would cut or threaten pensions and benefits for fire and police forces, as well as public transit workers. That he would turn law enforcement against the very people who are struggling for them. That he would further slash library hours and services. And that he would do all this without reaching into the corporate slush funds that are TIFS, in which he could, conceivably at least, use vast sums of money and tax breaks to lure in heavy hitters like Boeing under the auspices that it would bring more jobs to Chicago. Even though the few jobs actually brought by these enormous tax breaks tend to live in the burbs.

None of this wasn't already known. Even the least astute of us political observers, like myself, knew he would do these tactics. He is a forceful pragmatist funded - both personally and in career - by the banks and following in the tradition of the Daley's, after all. It doesn't take a weatherman...

The surprising aspect isn't so much like he's acting like a shrewd Scott Walker, it's that NOBODY in the media said, "We need to cover someone else." Nobody with a real voice said, "I think that we need to get behind and support Miguel del Valle. He has a proven track record, saved the city money, citywide experience, coalition-builder, and he's anti-corporate." Nobody offered an alternative voice.

I'm saddened but not shocked that the state of city journalism has deteriorated so much in such a fine city as Chicago. Neither of the two major dailies raised a dissenting voice against the (Corporate) people's choice - let alone the free commuter rag. This was even amongst those that were heavily critical of Daley. If there were dissenters, they were most often critical of the fact that Rahm is a Democrat and worked for Clinton and Obama, rather than that he leveraged his connections to put him on the overseeing board of Fannie and Freddy - whereupon it's obvious that he oversaw nothing, let alone protected the vulnerable. I'm not absolutely positive about most of the community and alt papers, though, but even the Chicago Reader was deafening by its silence. I went to a forum where Mick Dumke, of all respectable people, offered that Emanuel was the most qualified candidate to run the city. Jarovsky, usually astute on matters of public funding, seemed to cynically hold out on giving his opinion and wishing that Rahm wouldn't "waste the opportunity" to get rid of the all-controlling tool of the mayor's and his burgeoning corporatocracy, the TIF.

HuffPo, TPM, and Salon - all voices for progressivism in the national arena, more or less - were also critically silent when it came to Chicago's future. But not, fortunately for Wisconsin at least, when it came to that bozo just to the north of us.

About the ONLY person investigating the mayoral run and still being critical toward Rahm's mayoral stunt is a long-term activist, Don Washington, who still blogs at MayoralTutorial.

But just as Ben Joravsky has illuminated dialogue about funding in Chicago by his persistent voice and knowledge on the subject of TIFs, just as Mike Royko was able to chink away at the Original Hizzonner, I see Don doing the same toward this mayor given the time an the proper loudspeakers.

Which is too bad. Because when the media doesn't cover the issues, the people have to rely on other sources of information. Besides, what's the main difference between Emanuel and Walker? The people are on to Walker now...

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Update:
And here Don shows us why he's leading the league. In It’s Called a Fact Check, Media People,Mr. Tutorial not only takes down Emanuel (and his cronies') union-bashing - largely focusing on the CTA this time - but the media's tendency to get behind whatever it is that Rahm says as if it's gospel truth.

So what’s happening here is that Mayor Emanuel and Forrest Claypool are asking the unions to sacrifice their wages, pensions, benefits and your safety and... to take the blame for them having to live up to their responsibilities as administrators of the system. Yes, that’s right. You see between just the TIF funds and the possible savings in the M/WBE program we’re talking over a billion dollars that could be used to do any number of things to help the city’s finances but that’s not on the table. What’s on the table are middle class and working class families becoming less secure or being blamed for you and I having to pay a little more for public transit. This is the case because Mayor Emanuel and Forrest are more interested in REDUCING taxes on corporations and going to bat for them downstate to further shift the tax load from them on to you. (Emphases mine)

Fact. Check.

Teachers Are Bad, M'kay?

There's a new PR battle going on in town (really, across the nation). It involves spoiled teachers and their thuggish unions and how lazy and selfish they are.

Or at least these are the facts as we're presented them via administrators who are in charge of education but don't have to deal with anything actually related to education - classrooms, learning, small wages for incredible amounts of work, students, parents, or first-hand appreciation for the adverse effects of poverty on the charges.

Rather, this group tries to remember what didn't work when they were in school (or really, what worked well for them, specifically, but left others marginalized and labeled 'special' and "stupid") and then amp that to eleven.

Finding out that they could put the onus of the responsibility of failing poor and minority students on the teachers while neglecting fundamental structural cracks and necessary changes, leaders and admins also found that they could score political points by portraying teachers as layabouts who are afraid of accountability. After all, if there's nothing to hide, then there's nothing to fear, amirite?

President Bush gave the best soundbite, of course. "If you're teaching to the test, at least you're teaching something, right?"

It's a shame very few really questioned the intents and inferred meaning of that phrase. While seeming to be helpful and concerned about the state of underserved st's, the teaching-to-the-test rhetoric proves the priority of the standardized test as both a means of production (something to profit from) and as an end- product itself. It further demonstrates how out of touch admins and pols are with how learning actually works.

Finally, it's an incendiary accusation against teachers: Teaching poorly is better than not teaching at all.

Which may not be a true assessment even if it were a true accusation. Teaching poorly has a poor reputation of discouraging further learning. Kids demand education. If they were to learn that it only added up to meaningless bubbles about some worthless and irrelevant questions that were drilled into them through most of the school year, then of course they'd find it all ridiculous and worthless.

Wouldn't you?

And that's exactly what's happening. Rather than find and apply meaningful and relevant curriculum, inner city grade schools are under enormous pressure to succeed according to the rubrics of test-makers and their arbitrary questions. Ironically, the more time spent trying to prepare students for these standardized tests, the less time is left to teach the students critical (and critical-thinking) skills.

Image from Off K Street blog

So, while the proposed idea is "no child (especially poor and minority) left behind", the reality is that the education gap is widening. Instead of equipping young black Americans to succeed in the business world,
we are only preparing them for a life of meaningless and humiliating bubble-filling and questions.

Meanwhile, politicians and their education 'czars' (who usually have no actual experience in education or the classroom) are leveraging the widening gap as a means of reigning in teachers and destroying whatever power they've been able to amass these last few decades.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in Chicago. Mayors Daley and now Emanuel have been gutting the public schools for over a decade now, flying against the face of research and the frontline workers to make some quick bucks for friends while looking good, tough, challenging, and moral in the process.

But, as Ben Joravski notes at the Chicago Reader, it's largely an image battle. And that is one that the teachers - shockingly - are losing. As long as teachers remain shocked at the shift of public opinion against them, however, they'll continue to lose this front.

Wildin' Out Where It Don't Matter

The hip new trend in Chicago the last couple of weeks is what some refer to as "Wilding" and others "Flash Mobs." This is when a few to about 16 or so young people converge upon an area and start mugging people en masse. Because they're such a large group, when they find resistance, they fight back, violently and ruthlessly. And they flee usually before the cops can get them.

photo © 2005 Yo Hibino | more info (via: Wylio)
What's particularly news-worthy about this is that they're doing it downtown. And in the Gold Coast. And on the Magnificent Mile. And at North Avenue Beach. (And we all know that it's Black-on-White violence, amirite?)

This has become our Windy City Nightmare.

Of course, not the fact that teachers' pensions and rights-to-arbitration are on the chopping block. Not the fact that our city is being sold, block-by-block, to the highest or most-connected bidder. Not the fact that there are very few jobs available in much of the West and South side neighborhoods so young adults from those neighborhoods have to go downtown or to the North side in order to find barely minimum wage jobs in the first place. If they're fortunate enough to have a job, that is. Not the fact that mega-conglomerate/uber-rich corporations are getting tremendous tax breaks at the expense of social programs, schools, and homeowners. Those aren't nightmares to the power brokers and gate-keepers that get to define what is and isn't a nightmare.

The fact that few impoverished adolescents of color are afforded the kinds of opportunities that those of us of White heritage take for granted - and that Chicago is geographically segregated by those opportunities - is the long, horrible nightmare to me...

Which isn't to say that Wilding isn't important. Nor that it shouldn't grab headlines (besides, how else are you going to sell newspapers these days? You can only talk about Sarah Palin so much, y'know). But it would've been nice to see those headlines and to hear the desperation in the police superintendent's voice way back when the incidents began and these kids were almost exclusively terrorizing black men, women, and children in the South and West sides.

But then, the local media and the city's halls of power would have to acknowledge that African Americans are real Americans and citizens, right? Not just votes to discard after election season...

Chicago Tuesdays: The 55 promises of Rahm Emanuel

Eric Zorn's crib sheet on our new mayor's promises to Chicago is helpful, I suppose. In that it shortens what Emanuel was releasing to the public as his Chicago pledge to make us such a better city in an abridged version.

But it's still full of lofty pledges. Some good - such as the One Summer Chicago initiative which pledges to work with the County Board President (and best thing to happen in local politics) Toni Preckwinkle "and a broad range of civic, faith, community, and philanthropic leaders" to provide a "wide range of academic, recreational, arts education, jobs, and mentoring programs to a great number of at-risk teens" to reduce summer violence.

There's also this pledge about defeating (ending? I doubt it) food deserts in Chicago.

And then some are... debatable. At best.

Change of Subject: Crib sheet: The 55 promises of Rahm Emanuel

12. Introduce a consolidated, comprehensive capital planning and management process

The best-planned cities develop a 25-year vision and prioritize investments into five-year capital improvement plans using a multitude of investment options, including leveraging private resources and capital. Using this framework, all investments will be maximized and sequenced to reach their full potential and deliver the best value to Chicago. An investment management center will plan, coordinate, and oversee all Chicago infrastructure projects across a multi-year horizon...

Sounds good at first blush, perhaps. Maximizing resources for the best of Chicago. But then you realize that banker Emanuel and his banker pals are talking about further privatizing Chicago's assets for cash-flow purposes.

And then there's the TIF promise:

3. Reform [Tax Increment Financing]

The City will appoint a panel of experts and charge it with developing a policy for how the City invests these funds. The panel will identify return-on-investment performance goals for TIF districts and TIF-funded projects and develop guidelines for TIF transparency, including standards for an annual TIF report and audit, to be made public.

photo © 2010 basic_sounds | more info (via: Wylio)


Anybody who's been in Chicago long enough and has been paying attention (especially to the writing of Ben Jarovsky of the Chicago Reader) will realize that this promise isn't really any sort of actual reform. Whenever a leader who uses TIF funds talks about making the use of TIF funds public, he doesn't actually mean in a way that the public can actually access and grasp that information. Furthermore, this doesn't seem to offer true reform of the Tax Increment Financing districts, funds, or how they're used. In case you're new to this conversation, a TIF fund was originally intended (or so we're told) to help funnel business into blighted areas.

That hasn't happened. And it probably won't happen. And this promise does nothing to ensure that it would happen. Which is what this is about. The promise only promises to evaluate the ROI. In other words, tens of millions of dollars can - and probably will - still be funneled to the Boeings of Chicago, but the important risks, the risks that may give a chance to the south and west sides, may be deemed too risky until they can find just. the. right. person or developer.

In other words, as far as this promise goes, don't expect to see any real changes. Don't expect hope to come from Team Rahm.

For that, we're on our own.

Though it'd be nice if the local government was actually looking out for the best hopes for us...

Chicagoans for All Chicagoans

With the Chicago mayoral election out of the way, the last round of the aldermanic elections underway, and more centralizing and king-making decisions on the horizon, I thought it'd be a good time to introduce Chicagoans for All Chicagoans.

So far right now, we are only a Facebook group, but we exist to get Chicagoans engaged in local politics in a way where every community and every member of every neighborhood would be represented and protected.

That would include learning disabled students in the public schools, that would include Muslims, Christians, Jews, atheists, agnostics, polytheists, Buddhists, and pagans throughout the city; that would include residents of food deserts who need affordable and nutritious options; that would include lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgendered youth growing up outside of the LGBT-supportive BoysTown neighborhood; that would include neighborhoods on the Far South and Southwest sides that don't have equitable access to public transit; that would include small business owners trying to catch a break while most of the TIFs are going to big business; that would include working class families trying to stay in areas that they are being constantly priced out of; that would include residents who can't afford decent health care insurance but need options; that would include harassed young black men and targeted homeless women; that would include improving our schools by using actual verifiable research to determine how to improve our schools rather than, say, strong-arming the teacher's union to lengthen their days and year for no other reason than because Houston's doing it.

That may include you. It probably includes your neighbor.

Chicagoans for All Chicagoans. Opt in.

Chicago Tuesdays: Coffee with Miguel and the Rahm Effect

Of course the big news the last day has been the Is-He-Or-Isn't-He of the Emanuel campaign, having been forced off the ballot, then back on again. It's kind of a false hope, to be honest, to oust him on a technicality. It's the part of politics that I detest - the fact that it's a game of loopholes and stats rather than policy that affects millions and millions of people.

Rahm campaigns by throwing money around and shaking people's hands at L stops. There's nothing substantial about him or his candidacy. In fact, I argue that he's Daley 3.0 (and Gery Chico would be Daley 2.5). But since he has name-recognition and naval carriers of money, the press has already lazily anointed him to be our next mayor.

Alas, there's some serious questions about his campaign that nobody in the mainstream press is bothering to ask:

• Who's giving him the money?
  
• What are they asking in return?
  
• What will be felt at the neighborhood level?
  
• Can or will he bring in jobs to the West and South sides?
  
• Will he reform TIFs that siphon off money from the schools and parks to create a control tool for the mayor?
  
• What can he do for the homeless and those ABOUT to be homeless?
• How can we expect him to further the interests of all Chicagoans when much of his funds come from outside sources (such as Hollywood)?
  

None of these important issues are being addressed. Instead, we're worried about technicalities. It does seem ironic, though. These technicalities tend to be the stock & trade of the Machine candidates.

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In related news, I got a chance to go to a coffee with Miguel del Valle and I ended up tweeting much of it. (Take THAT, 20th Century!) It follows, in reverse order:
.

jasdye jasdye

"Homeless veterans... Those are two words that should never go together, huh?" #delValle

22 Jan Favorite Reply Delete

jasdye jasdye

CLC's topics would include computer, parenting, budgeting skills, etc. They would be in tandem with community organizations -#delValle

22 Jan

jasdye jasdye

CommunityLearningCenters (CLC) would use local school facilities in the evening to teach valuable skills 2 parents in community#delValle

22 Jan

jasdye jasdye

#delValle advos 4 CommunityLearningCenter, where comm orgs can partner w/ neighborhood schools to teach valuable skills to parents when ...

22 Jan

jasdye jasdye

#delValle defines Progressive as Wanting progress for ALL

22 Jan

jasdye jasdye

#delValle wants to bring more mass transit 2 city. We'll need to get rid of prking FAIL deal

22 Jan

jasdye jasdye

#delValle Courts are allowing corporations to run gov't and silencing ordinary citizens

22 Jan

jasdye jasdye

I will not allow anyone to buy and influence city gov't. #delValle

22 Jan

jasdye jasdye

Our democracy is not served well if the only ones to b elected hv 2 spnd millions 2 do it #delValle

22 Jan

This is what politics should be about...