The
current police and political crisis enveloping Chicago Mayor Rahm
Emanuel is emblematic of the power of the Cartel syndicate of
America’s conservative corporations, foundations, and wealthy
elite. Having selected Chicago as one of its primary targets for
educational reform (i.e., making public education a profit center),
it has fostered an aggressive form of privatization that has upended
the city’s social and educational infrastructure. Starting
with Mayor Richard M. Daley in 1989, the Cartel, with the Mayors’
full cooperation, has privatized freeways and traffic ticketing (red
light cameras) which have devastated lower- and working-class people
of color (similar to Ferguson, MO). But the privatization of public
schools has been at the point of the spear of the city’s
dismantling of the public schools.
After
election to office, Mayor Daley gained total control of the schools
and appointed Paul Vallas, who had served as his budget director, as
his first CEO of CPS in 1995. Vallas, who served until 2001,
proceeded to turn schools over to the private sector to manage and to
expand the number of charter schools under direct orders from Mayor
Daley. (He would go on to wreak similar havoc in Philadelphia
(2002-2006), where he presided over the nation’s largest
experiment in privatized management of public schools; New Orleans
(2007-2012), turning it into the nation’s first voucher and
charter school district; and Bridgeport, CT (2012-2014) where he was
fired, after a court ruling that declared he lacked the proper
credentials to serve as superintendent.). Daley’s second CEO,
Arne Duncan, his chief of staff, served from 2001-2009, where he
escalated the transfer of schools to the Cartel (and continued doing
so as U.S. Education Secretary from 2009-present). His successors,
Jean Claude Brizzard and Barbara Byrd-Bennett, continued this march
toward privatizing CPS: closing schools and handing out exorbitant
contracts for the privatization of school services and the purchase
of technology products. Barbara Byrd-Bennett, who is currently
serving jail time, after pleading guilty to theft (felony kickbacks),
lined her own pockets while also filling those of the Cartel.
Byrd-Bennett stated in an email to her co-conspirators that she
needed the money because she “…had tuitions to pay
and casinos to visit.”
Unimagined
at the time and likely they were unaware or did not care, these CPS
CEOs, in their zest for privatization, collectively worsened gang
violence and student-to-student homicides via school closings. They
chose schools in low-income neighborhoods of color, chiefly African
American and Hispanic, ignoring gang turfs that sparked intra- and
inter-school conflicts. While these fights and killings were
occurring, the CPS administration unwisely laid off hundreds of
social workers, counselors, and mental health professionals while the
violence and murders exponentially increased. The administration
also reduced funding for classrooms, dramatically raising
student-to-teacher ratios, which seriously undermined opportunities
to achieve successful educational outcomes. Meanwhile, CPS teachers
and staff have been blamed for the state of affairs in the school
system and have been dismissed by the thousands, further positioning
the school system for takeover.
The
Chicago model of dismantlement has been refined and replicated in
Newark and Camden, New Jersey; New York City; Los Angeles, CA;
Denver, CO; Memphis, TN; Houston, TX; Baltimore, MD; Rochester, NY;
Cleveland, OH; Washington, D.C.; and the aforementioned districts
among numerous others. Current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has pushed
privatization to the limits while launching a full-scale assault on
the budget of the Chicago public schools as a way to plug holes in
the city budget, pay the Cartel, and to provide raises for the city’s
police officers while they are wantonly killing males of color in the
streets. Laquan McDonald (who was shot sixteen times) and Ron
Johnson (who was shot in the back) are the most prominent casualties
of this redirection of public funding. Both males were students in
CPS while its resource base was deliberately eroded, programs for
at-risk youth were under-funded, and the environments in which they
lived were devastated by the precipitous drop in employment in
Chicago’s largest employment anchor, the Chicago Public
Schools.
After
a failed thirteen month cover-up of the McDonald murder and an
unsolicited $5 million payment to his family, Emanuel fired his
police superintendent, Gary McCarthy, who was U. S. Senator Cory
Booker’s (D-NJ) director of public safety; Booker, whose
political career has been fully-funded by the Cartel, privatized
Newark’s public schools when he was mayor of the city.
(McCarthy is a member of the Cartel’s stable of sub-surrogates
who move from city to city to facilitate its agenda for its key
surrogate.) Emanuel, while serving as President Obama’s chief
of staff, formed a close bond with Adrian Fenty, former mayor of
Washington, D.C., another Cartel surrogate, who carried out its
privatization agenda until he was defeated after one-term in office,
along with Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, another Cartel surrogate
and husband of former D.C. schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, who is
currently under investigation for spending public money for personal
use and charter school promotion. This has led Johnson not to seek
an unprecedented third term.
Emanuel,
in an effort to push back against calls for his resignation after the
discovery of the cover up of the Laquan McDonald murder, fired
Superintendent McCarthy and appointed a blue-ribbon committee to
investigate the Chicago police department. Through his close
relationship with President Obama, he was able to secure one of the
President’s best friends, a black Chicago native and former
Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, to serve as an advisor to the
committee. However, as protests led by Black Lives Matter and the
Rev. Jesse Jackson have intensified, Gov. Patrick has remained
largely silent so as not to damage his own reputation and his quest
for future office (It remains to be seen whether the decision behind
the delay in the release of the pending federal indictment of former
CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett until a month after Emanuel was
reelected in a close election, which heavily depended on the black
vote, will reach the Oval Office.)
In addition, Emanuel
has spent tens of millions of dollars paying off families of other
Chicago African American police victims to compensate them for their
lost loved ones. What has been revealed is that Emanuel’s
starving and privatization of Chicago’s public sector has had
rippling effects across the city’s social and economic
infrastructure. Random school closings, massive layoffs of
public-sector workers, where a disproportionate number of people of
color are employed, and the economic raping of rank-and-file citizens
has brought Chicago to the brink of community and financial chaos.
The police shootings only highlight a metropolis in rapid decay. And
the major beneficiaries are the Cartel and its allies, nearly all of
whom are not residents of the city or state of Illinois. They have
turned Chicago and its counterparts into public-sector profit centers
as they continue to make systematic inroads into the national public
education $1 trillion annual budget.
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