The UK *Guardian* newspaper has been conducting investigations into
American prisons and police, based on documents they obtain through
lawsuits. Their current investigation is into "Homan Square," which is a
"black site" run by the Chicago Police Department and analogous to Abu
Graib in Iraq or the CIA's "Salt Pit" in Afghanistan.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/oct/19/homan-square-chicago-police-detainees
The Guardian has discovered that the number of poor and mainly black people
"disappeared" by the Chicago police has skyrocketed since Rahm Emanuel took
office as mayor in 2011. Emanuel had been part of the Obama team that was
supported by the "Yes We Can" politics of the International Socialist
Organization in 2008. Emanuel resigned to run for mayor. He is the son of a
member of the Irgun, a Zionist terrorist organization that carried out many
massacres of Palestinian villages in the 1940s. Emanuel himself served
with the Israeli Defense Forces during the first invasion of the Middle
East by US imperialism, under Bush I in 1991 (the war called "Desert Storm).
Like Obama, Rahm Emanuel is known for his especial hatred of teachers and
of public education. Obama's former secretary of Education, Arne Duncan,
had first led the attack on public education as Chicago's schools chief.
The aim of Obama-Duncan-Emanuel is to turn over the money collected in
taxes for public education to private fly-by-night companies called
"charter schools" run by hedge funds and rich CEOs (in 2013 the NY *Daily
News* reported that Village Academies Network CEO Deborah Kenny, earned
*$499,146* in the 2011-12 school year; David Levin of KIPP NY, earned
$395,350; and Eva Moskowitz of the "Success Academy" reported earning
*$475,244*). When the charter schools fail, these creeps just move on,
taking their money with them.
Emanuel's schools chief in Chicago was Barbara Byrd-Bennett until she was
arrested the other day, charged with funneling millions to her former
employer, a shady operation that supposedly provides therapy sessions for
principals. Price tag for one contract? $20 million. And memos have
surfaced showing this private charter-school-boosting company, "SUPES,"
offering her massive kickbacks. In other words, just a day at the office
for the charter school movement. At Emanuel's behest, Byrd-Bennet wreaked
havoc for years, firing hundreds of teachers and closing scores of schools
in black neighborhoods.
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18232/barbara-byrd-bennett-chicago-public-schools-history-supes
Of course we in the Internationalist Group and the Class Struggle Education
Workers have fought the massive attacks on public education from the first,
and have published the best literature on this subject, which we should all
read:
http://edworkersunite.blogspot.com/
Meanwhile, as the *Guardian *reveals today, black people in their thousands
are being snatched from the streets, shackled and blindfolded, thrown into
vans, and taken to Emanuel's black site for "questioning." There they are
chained to the walls for hours and sometimes days, given no food, drink or
bathroom breaks. No one knows where they are--not their families, not
lawyers, no one. When loved ones check at the local police station they are
stonewalled.
Emanuel is an inheritor of the police state of Mayor Richard Daley, who ran
Chicago like Frank Rizzo ran Philadelphia--and the Rizzo administration was
not too far away from the Goebbels administration in Berlin. That black
site of Democrat Emanuel is part of the same bourgeois program today as the
charter schools movement: to atomize and keep down poor and working people
in the cities, and lock them up and torture them as needed. It is the
domestic program of the Democratic Party, to go with their foreign policy
of bombing poor nations into absolute destitution.
