Street writes: "Beneath a carefully constructed pretense of concern for
racial justice, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel has long been a dedicated
corporatist 'law and order' enemy of Black America."
Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy stands with mayor of Chicago
Rahm Emanuel during a recruitment graduation ceremony in Chicago, Illinois.
(photo: Jim Young/RT)
Rahm Emmanuel, Laquan McDonald and Black Rebellion in Chicago
By Paul Street, CounterPunch
05 December 15
Beneath a carefully constructed pretense of concern for racial justice,
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel has long been a dedicated corporatist "law and
order" enemy of Black America. During his time as a top political operative
in the arch-neoliberal Bill Clinton White House, the notorious bully
Emmanuel (later to be nicknamed "Rahmbo") was a driving force behind the
1994 federal "three strikes" Clinton crime bill.
That draconian measure helped make Bill Clinton "the incarceration
president" and contributed to a significant increase in the monumental
hyper-imprisonment and criminal marking of Black Americans. Among other
terrible things, the law put 100,000 more officers on the streets, allocated
$10 billion for new prison construction, and eliminated Pell Grant funding
for inmates pursuing college degrees while in prison.
Prior to that outrage, Emmanuel joined up with Bill Daley to lead Clinton's
passage of the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) - a critical investor
rights measure that helped capital drain millions of jobs away from
industrial regions where impoverished Black populations desperately needed
paid employment.
NAFTA-encouraged deindustrialization notwithstanding, Emmanuel was a leading
force behind Clinton's vicious 1996 "welfare reform." The "Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act's" elimination of
poor families' former entitlement to basic family cash assistance has
wreaked havoc on Black families stuck in jobless ghettoes ever since.
As Barack Obama's original White House chief of staff, Emmanuel consistently
steered policy rightward, towards the interests of the nation's
predominantly white 1% and contrary to those of America's disproportionately
nonwhite lower and working class.
As Mayor of Chicago, Emmanuel moved quickly to shutter 54 public schools in
low-income Black and Latino neighborhoods in the largest deliberate mass
school closure in history. Emmanuel's schools chief provided principals with
a guide on "how to handle civil disobedience and to report the names of any
teachers and students involved in protests." The schools closure program has
always been a big taxpayer money grab for wealthy Emmanuel allies seeking to
build private charter schools in the wreckage left by public school
closings.
Emmanuel has stonewalled on numerous abusive and criminal practices on the
part of his city's police force. He flatly denied the Chicago Police
Department's operation of an illegal "black site" detention facility (Homan
Square) where thousands of mostly Black and Latino suspects have been
"disappeared" and forced into false confessions. The Black Site hellhole was
exposed by The Guardian earlier this year. Its existence was well known
across Black and Latino Chicago.
Sadly enough, Emanuel has won solid majorities of the Black Chicago vote in
both of his Chicago mayoral election victories to date (in April 2011 and
April 2015). As the left Black commentator Bruce Dixon noted last spring,
"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..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."
The facts of the Laquan McDonald case are well understood by now. Anyone who
follows the national news closely knows that:
* White Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke executed a Black male teenager
in cold blood on a busy street on the city's South Side on October 20th,
2014. Van Dyke shot McDonald 16 times, riddling Laquan's body with bullets
while the victim lay in the pavement.
* The Chicago Police lied about and covered up the murder, going so far as
to threaten eyewitnesses with arrest and delete more than an hour of
videotape from a fast food restaurant near the murder site.
* The City of Chicago rushed to offer McDonald's mother $5 million on the
condition that she stay silent.
* The city buried a dash cam video that clearly displayed the savage killing
for thirteen months because Emmanuel feared its release would spark civil
unrest (this during the ongoing protests over racist police murders in
Ferguson, Missouri and elsewhere around the nation) that might endanger his
re-election chances the following April.
* The video might have never surfaced if lawyers and journalists had not
been tipped off to its existence and but for the order of a county judge
last week.
* Emanuel, running for re-election at the time of the shooting, fought to
keep the video from going public. He claimed that releasing it might taint a
federal investigation even though the U.S. Justice Department did not ask
the city to hold off.
* Emmanuel demonstrated a complete lack of comprehension of the public's
outrage over the killing and its cover-up when he claimed this week that he
decided to fire city police chief Garry McCarthy because he had become "a
distraction" - not because McCarthy has for years overseen a police
department notorious for racist abuse and corruption.
* Emanuel's arrogant response to the McDonald scandal has been to "do as
little as possible - until the furor caused by the release of the video
forced his hand." (New York Times editorial board).
The part of the emerging story that blows me away the most, however, is less
well known. It concerns a meeting that Emmanuel held with Chicago's leading
Black ministers and pastors right before he finally released the Van Dyke
murder video last week. As local reporter Mike Fourcher determined, the
alleged purpose of this gathering and other meetings held with Black
constituents was to assuage Black fears and anger about how City Hall had
dealt with the case. When speaking to the ministers, however, Rahmbo had a
different and more iron-fisted message for the city's Black religious
leaders. He warned them that they'd pay if protests went too far. Da mare
wanted the pastors to know that he would withhold money for jobs programs in
the city's Black ghettoes if violence ensued. By Fourcher's account:
"The Mayor.asked the group to stress peaceful protest through the
Thanksgiving weekend and to avoid violence. 'He encouraged us to encourage
the community to exercise their first amendment rights, but to do so
peacefully,' said Rev. Barrett. 'The point of the meeting was how to
encourage that peaceful protest.' According to attendees, the Mayor then
told the group that if there was violence over the weekend, he would not be
able to find resources to bring jobs into their community. 'He said, if
things go bad then don't come looking to me for jobs,' said Rev. Brooks.
'There was something about how if you don't encourage peace, don't look to
me for resources,' said Young Leaders Alliance head Jedidiah Brown, who was
also present."
It doesn't get much more offensive than that. It takes real sociopathic
chutzpah to bully normally obedient Black pastors like that after you have
just been caught with your racist police-state pants down in hideous
fashion. Curiously enough, Emmanuel seems to have at least momentarily lost
the outward loyalties of the city's Black bourgeois elite. As Glen Ford
notes on Black Agenda Report, reflecting on mass, Black youth-led protests
that took place last Friday in Chicago's tony Michigan Avenue shopping
district:
"It seemed as if the protective shield of Black Misleadership Class
collaboration that has for the last 30 years insulated white mayors from the
wrath of Chicago's outraged Black rank and file, had suddenly been stripped
away. Black ministers joined militant youth in marching down the city's
'Magic Mile' Michigan Avenue shopping district, demanding that heads roll
for hiding video evidence in the death of 17 year-old Laquan McDonald, shot
16 times by Officer Jason Van Dyke. For 400 days, Cook County States
Attorney Anita Alvarez refused to indict the cop, or release the police
dashboard video of the shooting, or to explain why another critical video
had apparently been destroyed. Alvarez finally bowed to pressure - and a
court order - indicting the cop for first degree murder and releasing the
death video..But the community's rage could not be contained. The Black
Caucus of Chicago's Board of Aldermen demanded that Police Superintendent
McCarthy resign. So did Rev. Jesse Jackson and even Bobby Rush, the sell-out
Black Congressman who has been a dependable servant of the Emanuel
administration. The strength of the movement in Chicago can be measured by
the fact that so many elements of the Black collaborationist political class
have been forced to take a stance in opposition to Mayor Emanuel and the
white corporate forces that he represents, and ultimately to compel the
mayor to fire his favorite cop."
Soon, however, the misleaders can be expected to resume their normal role of
collaboration with the city's predominantly white and corporate masters. As
Ford notes:
"The young people that are soldiers of this struggle understand that
movements are defined by their demands. In a joint statement by the Black
Youth Project 100, We Charge Genocide, Assata's Daughters, the #LetUsBreathe
collective, and a Black Lives Matter chapter, they declared that 'Indicting
cops does not change the policies that promote the violence and trauma
inherent in the Chicago Police Department.' They want Rahm Emanuel's
resignation, too. The Black Youth Project also demands defunding of the
Chicago police, and investment of those dollars in the Black community. They
call for reparations for slavery, Jim Crow and mass Black incarceration; an
end to all profit in the criminal justice system; a guaranteed income for
all; a federal jobs program, and freedom from discrimination for all
workers; and an end to displacement of Black people through gentrification..
These are demands for social transformation - demands that will put the
young activists on a collision course with the Black Misleadership Class who
are the first line of defense for the white ruling class, and who will soon
close ranks in Chicago and elsewhere to try to stop this movement."
The fight for racial justice in Chicago, as across the nation, requires rank
and file class struggle within the Black community itself. The white,
Latino, and Asian working class could learn from that.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy stands with mayor of Chicago
Rahm Emanuel during a recruitment graduation ceremony in Chicago, Illinois.
(photo: Jim Young/RT)
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/04/rahm-emmanuel-laquan-mcdonald-and-bla
ck-rebellion-in-chicago/http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/04/rahm-emmanuel
-laquan-mcdonald-and-black-rebellion-in-chicago/
Rahm Emmanuel, Laquan McDonald and Black Rebellion in Chicago
By Paul Street, CounterPunch
05 December 15
eneath a carefully constructed pretense of concern for racial justice,
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel has long been a dedicated corporatist "law and
order" enemy of Black America. During his time as a top political operative
in the arch-neoliberal Bill Clinton White House, the notorious bully
Emmanuel (later to be nicknamed "Rahmbo") was a driving force behind the
1994 federal "three strikes" Clinton crime bill.
That draconian measure helped make Bill Clinton "the incarceration
president" and contributed to a significant increase in the monumental
hyper-imprisonment and criminal marking of Black Americans. Among other
terrible things, the law put 100,000 more officers on the streets, allocated
$10 billion for new prison construction, and eliminated Pell Grant funding
for inmates pursuing college degrees while in prison.
Prior to that outrage, Emmanuel joined up with Bill Daley to lead Clinton's
passage of the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) - a critical investor
rights measure that helped capital drain millions of jobs away from
industrial regions where impoverished Black populations desperately needed
paid employment.
NAFTA-encouraged deindustrialization notwithstanding, Emmanuel was a leading
force behind Clinton's vicious 1996 "welfare reform." The "Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act's" elimination of
poor families' former entitlement to basic family cash assistance has
wreaked havoc on Black families stuck in jobless ghettoes ever since.
As Barack Obama's original White House chief of staff, Emmanuel consistently
steered policy rightward, towards the interests of the nation's
predominantly white 1% and contrary to those of America's disproportionately
nonwhite lower and working class.
As Mayor of Chicago, Emmanuel moved quickly to shutter 54 public schools in
low-income Black and Latino neighborhoods in the largest deliberate mass
school closure in history. Emmanuel's schools chief provided principals with
a guide on "how to handle civil disobedience and to report the names of any
teachers and students involved in protests." The schools closure program has
always been a big taxpayer money grab for wealthy Emmanuel allies seeking to
build private charter schools in the wreckage left by public school
closings.
Emmanuel has stonewalled on numerous abusive and criminal practices on the
part of his city's police force. He flatly denied the Chicago Police
Department's operation of an illegal "black site" detention facility (Homan
Square) where thousands of mostly Black and Latino suspects have been
"disappeared" and forced into false confessions. The Black Site hellhole was
exposed by The Guardian earlier this year. Its existence was well known
across Black and Latino Chicago.
Sadly enough, Emanuel has won solid majorities of the Black Chicago vote in
both of his Chicago mayoral election victories to date (in April 2011 and
April 2015). As the left Black commentator Bruce Dixon noted last spring,
"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..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."
The facts of the Laquan McDonald case are well understood by now. Anyone who
follows the national news closely knows that:
* White Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke executed a Black male teenager
in cold blood on a busy street on the city's South Side on October 20th,
2014. Van Dyke shot McDonald 16 times, riddling Laquan's body with bullets
while the victim lay in the pavement.
* The Chicago Police lied about and covered up the murder, going so far as
to threaten eyewitnesses with arrest and delete more than an hour of
videotape from a fast food restaurant near the murder site.
* The City of Chicago rushed to offer McDonald's mother $5 million on the
condition that she stay silent.
* The city buried a dash cam video that clearly displayed the savage killing
for thirteen months because Emmanuel feared its release would spark civil
unrest (this during the ongoing protests over racist police murders in
Ferguson, Missouri and elsewhere around the nation) that might endanger his
re-election chances the following April.
* The video might have never surfaced if lawyers and journalists had not
been tipped off to its existence and but for the order of a county judge
last week.
* Emanuel, running for re-election at the time of the shooting, fought to
keep the video from going public. He claimed that releasing it might taint a
federal investigation even though the U.S. Justice Department did not ask
the city to hold off.
* Emmanuel demonstrated a complete lack of comprehension of the public's
outrage over the killing and its cover-up when he claimed this week that he
decided to fire city police chief Garry McCarthy because he had become "a
distraction" - not because McCarthy has for years overseen a police
department notorious for racist abuse and corruption.
* Emanuel's arrogant response to the McDonald scandal has been to "do as
little as possible - until the furor caused by the release of the video
forced his hand." (New York Times editorial board).
The part of the emerging story that blows me away the most, however, is less
well known. It concerns a meeting that Emmanuel held with Chicago's leading
Black ministers and pastors right before he finally released the Van Dyke
murder video last week. As local reporter Mike Fourcher determined, the
alleged purpose of this gathering and other meetings held with Black
constituents was to assuage Black fears and anger about how City Hall had
dealt with the case. When speaking to the ministers, however, Rahmbo had a
different and more iron-fisted message for the city's Black religious
leaders. He warned them that they'd pay if protests went too far. Da mare
wanted the pastors to know that he would withhold money for jobs programs in
the city's Black ghettoes if violence ensued. By Fourcher's account:
"The Mayor.asked the group to stress peaceful protest through the
Thanksgiving weekend and to avoid violence. 'He encouraged us to encourage
the community to exercise their first amendment rights, but to do so
peacefully,' said Rev. Barrett. 'The point of the meeting was how to
encourage that peaceful protest.' According to attendees, the Mayor then
told the group that if there was violence over the weekend, he would not be
able to find resources to bring jobs into their community. 'He said, if
things go bad then don't come looking to me for jobs,' said Rev. Brooks.
'There was something about how if you don't encourage peace, don't look to
me for resources,' said Young Leaders Alliance head Jedidiah Brown, who was
also present."
It doesn't get much more offensive than that. It takes real sociopathic
chutzpah to bully normally obedient Black pastors like that after you have
just been caught with your racist police-state pants down in hideous
fashion. Curiously enough, Emmanuel seems to have at least momentarily lost
the outward loyalties of the city's Black bourgeois elite. As Glen Ford
notes on Black Agenda Report, reflecting on mass, Black youth-led protests
that took place last Friday in Chicago's tony Michigan Avenue shopping
district:
"It seemed as if the protective shield of Black Misleadership Class
collaboration that has for the last 30 years insulated white mayors from the
wrath of Chicago's outraged Black rank and file, had suddenly been stripped
away. Black ministers joined militant youth in marching down the city's
'Magic Mile' Michigan Avenue shopping district, demanding that heads roll
for hiding video evidence in the death of 17 year-old Laquan McDonald, shot
16 times by Officer Jason Van Dyke. For 400 days, Cook County States
Attorney Anita Alvarez refused to indict the cop, or release the police
dashboard video of the shooting, or to explain why another critical video
had apparently been destroyed. Alvarez finally bowed to pressure - and a
court order - indicting the cop for first degree murder and releasing the
death video..But the community's rage could not be contained. The Black
Caucus of Chicago's Board of Aldermen demanded that Police Superintendent
McCarthy resign. So did Rev. Jesse Jackson and even Bobby Rush, the sell-out
Black Congressman who has been a dependable servant of the Emanuel
administration. The strength of the movement in Chicago can be measured by
the fact that so many elements of the Black collaborationist political class
have been forced to take a stance in opposition to Mayor Emanuel and the
white corporate forces that he represents, and ultimately to compel the
mayor to fire his favorite cop."
Soon, however, the misleaders can be expected to resume their normal role of
collaboration with the city's predominantly white and corporate masters. As
Ford notes:
"The young people that are soldiers of this struggle understand that
movements are defined by their demands. In a joint statement by the Black
Youth Project 100, We Charge Genocide, Assata's Daughters, the #LetUsBreathe
collective, and a Black Lives Matter chapter, they declared that 'Indicting
cops does not change the policies that promote the violence and trauma
inherent in the Chicago Police Department.' They want Rahm Emanuel's
resignation, too. The Black Youth Project also demands defunding of the
Chicago police, and investment of those dollars in the Black community. They
call for reparations for slavery, Jim Crow and mass Black incarceration; an
end to all profit in the criminal justice system; a guaranteed income for
all; a federal jobs program, and freedom from discrimination for all
workers; and an end to displacement of Black people through gentrification..
These are demands for social transformation - demands that will put the
young activists on a collision course with the Black Misleadership Class who
are the first line of defense for the white ruling class, and who will soon
close ranks in Chicago and elsewhere to try to stop this movement."
The fight for racial justice in Chicago, as across the nation, requires rank
and file class struggle within the Black community itself. The white,
Latino, and Asian working class could learn from that.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
