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Are you curious about the “S” word? You’re not alone. A number of recent polls show that young people (18-30) are more positive about socialism than they are about capitalism. And, of course, voters under the age of 30 turned out in droves to back Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist, a few months ago. But what exactly is socialism? How do we get from here to there? And what role can student activists play?

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by Orlando Sepúlveda (via SocialistWorker.org) 

THE U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is retaliating against an outspoken undocumented immigrant activist–and she is fighting back.

In May, Nadia Sol Ireri Unzueta Carrasco was denied renewal of her status under the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program because, according to the USCIS ombudsman, she “was arrested on May 29, 2013, after her initial DACA grant…She was charged with civil disobedience, resisting arrest, obstruction of traffic and reckless conduct…Ms. Unzueta’s case raised public safety concerns.”

The irony of Ireri’s case is that without her “civil disobedience, resisting arrest, obstruction of traffic and reckless conduct”–along with those of countless immigrant youth in the years leading up to the Obama administration finally acting in June 2012–there would be no DACA program in the first place. Unzueta Carrasco is now suing.

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THE 29-year-old Unzueta Carrasco had been fighting for years, together with millions of other immigrants, for the legalization of all undocumented workers and their families. At age 18, she was an organizing member of an ad-hoc group of individuals and organizations that called for rallies against the draconian anti-immigrant Sensenbrenner bill in July 2005 and March 2006.

The massive March “mega-march” in Chicago was repeated in cities around the country, culminating in a massive national mobilization on May Day 2006 all over the U.S. The right-wing Sensenbrenner bill was defeated.

The movement for immigrant justice unleashed in the spring of 2006 utilized all types of political action–from massive protests to civil disobedience–with the aim of winning amnesty for more than 11 million immigrant workers. Obama was a beneficiary of this activism–he won a huge majority of votes from immigrants who believed his election would lead to immigration reform, especially with Democrats winning a majority in both houses of Congress.

But as the Democrats showed themselves unwilling to use their political power to push for immigration reform–and as Obama took his first steps toward earning his current title of Deporter-in-Chief–a section of the immigrant rights movement, particularly the undocumented youth in the country not by their choice, but brought in by their parents–began to grow impatient.

In 2009, a group of undocumented youth came together in Chicago to address the Obama administration’s stalling. They formed the Immigrant Youth Justice League (IYJL). In March 2010, the group staged a Coming Out of the Shadows rally to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the mega-marches, but also to provide a new direction for the movement–one led from the bottom up by undocumented immigrants who were putting themselves in the spotlight.

Ireri was one of the youths who came out of the shadows that day.

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EVENTUALLY, THE IYJL, and other emerging youth groups around the country inspired by it, became leading proponents of the DREAM Act [the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act]–but not without opposition from Democrats and mainstream liberals who thought that the youth’s independent direction and action could upset attempts to pass Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR). On the left, some also abstained from supporting the bill because it included a provision offering legal status in exchange for military service.

In July 2010, as part of a national coordinated action to try to win passage of the DREAM Act, a group of over 20 young undocumented immigrants, wearing their graduation caps and gowns, organized a sit-in at the Washington offices of various senators, Republican and Democrats alike.

Unzueta Carrasco, holding a banner that read “Undocumented and Unafraid, DREAM Act Now” was one of them. She was arrested but not prosecuted.

Young undocumented immigrants organized similar in many cities. Every protest exposed more and more the absurd federal system of immigration that deemed unlawful the presence of millions of young people who came to the U.S. with their families when they were young children.

In 2012, a presidential election was looming, and Obama and the Democrats had broken all their promises to the immigrant rights movement. Congressional Democrats had dismissed the Dream Act in favor of the more elusive CIR. But growing pressure from undocumented youth put pressure on the White House to deliver some action.

In mid-June 2012, President Obama announced that undocumented youth could apply for DACA, giving them a temporary relieve from deportation and work permits, but they would have to comply with a long list of requirements.

They had to be under 31 years old, have entered the U.S. before their 16th birthday, reside in the country continuously from 2007 to the present, be enrolled in school or have graduated or obtained a certificate of completion from high school, and not have a felony conviction, to name a few.

Sol Ireri’s other instances of civil disobedience cited by the USCIS include in 2011, when she was part of a group protesting the use of local police in immigration matters in Chicago; in September 2012, when a group of undocumented youth engaged in a sit-in outside the Democratic National Convention in North Carolina; and in May 2013, during a protest of Obama in Chicago.

In her complaint before the court, Ireri’s lawyers to this last arrest:

Ms. Unzueta Carrasco had volunteered for [Obama’s] senatorial campaign while in high school, and was disappointed at the high number of deportations under his administration, including many people whom she knew. Ms. Unzueta Carrasco and a group of individuals blocked Michigan Avenue, connected to each other and sitting in a circle.

Her case is becoming a rallying point for all those who support both the right of all immigrants to reside in the country without fear and the right to political action in the face of injustice. Now that she is suing, more than 130 organizations are supporting her case and have signed onto a letter that concludes:

Civil disobedience actions, a tactic of nonviolent protest, are viewed as acts of conscience and remain a cornerstone of American social reforms and democracy. It is deeply troubling that in the decision over Ms. Unzueta Carrasco’s DACA renewal DHS views civil disobedience as a public safety concern, and not as protected First Amendment activity.

Nadia Sol Ireri Unzueta Carrasco has demonstrated to the people she met in this country that she is a hero, not a “threat to public safety.” She came to the U.S. in 1994, when she was 6 years old, and has lived in the U.S. for the last 22 years of her life. She graduated from high school and college. She enrolled at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), studying at the UIC Honors College, from where she graduated with the highest distinctions in her department.

She isn’t only an activist for justice, but also works for the extracurricular After School Matters program in Chicago. Thousands of educators are signing a letter in support of her not only because they want to see justice done, but because Sol Ireri is the type of person who should be recognized for helping to bring change for millions of people–not retaliated against by a vindictive administration shamed by her actions.

Police in riot gear watch protesters in Ferguson, Mo. on Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2014. On Saturday, Aug. 9, 2014, a white police officer fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in the St. Louis suburb. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)

by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (via www.socialistworker.org)

WHY THE issue of police brutality?

Police violence against Black people is not new. In 1951, a multiracial contingent of activists in the Civil Rights Congress raised the slogan “We charge genocide” to characterize the depth and consequences of police murder and the silent complicity of the state. The preamble of their petition read, in part:

There was a time when racist violence had its center in the South…Once most of the violence against Negroes occurred in the countryside, but that was before the Negro emigrations of the twenties and thirties. Now there is not a great American city from New York to Cleveland or Detroit, from Washington, the nation’s capital, to Chicago, from Memphis to Atlanta or Birmingham, from New Orleans to Los Angeles, that is not disgraced by the wanton killing of innocent Negroes.

It is no longer a sectional phenomenon. Once the classic method of lynching was the rope. Now it is the policeman’s bullet. To many an American the police are the government, certainly its most visible representative. We submit that the evidence suggests that the killing of Negroes has become police policy in the United States and that police policy is the most practical expression of government policy.

Today, there is no shortage of issues that Black people in this country could mobilize around. But police brutality remains the catalyst for Black protest because it is the clearest example of the compromised citizenship of Black people. When the police can approach you, search you, arrest you and even kill you with impunity, it means you don’t have first-class citizenship–you have second-class citizenship.

This second-class citizenship, and its sharp conflict with what the United States says about itself, is what drives the radicalization of young Black people and others who know it to be true. In other words, we as a nation are always told that this is the greatest country on earth. We believe in “American exceptionalism” and the promises of unfettered opportunity for anyone willing to work for it. We believe in the American Dream.

Just a few weeks ago Obama traveled to Cuba, where he said, “I believe that every person should be equal under the law…Every child deserves the dignity that comes with education, and health care and food on the table and a roof over their heads…American democracy has given our people the opportunity to pursue their dreams and enjoy a high standard of living.”

Obama likes to tout his own story and rise as a product of America’s greatness, but what on earth do these words mean to the family of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old boy who was shot and killed by police within 1.6 seconds arriving on the scene. What does it mean when the cops who killed him will not face charges?

What does it mean to Aiyana Jones, a 7-year-old girl sleeping on the couch in a house in Detroit, who was killed by police in a botched raid? What does it mean that those officers will not be punished?

What does it mean to Laquan McDonald’s family? To Rekia Boyd’s family?

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BUT THE movement has exposed what the vast majority of Black people in America know to be true–in inner cities across this country, there exists a police state, where the police are governed by a completely different set of rules; where they can kill, often with impunity; where they are empowered to do what they want, when they want, all with the intention of maintaining discipline and control over the country’s Black population.

If you think this is an exaggeration then consider this: Since January 2015, American police have killed 1,405 people. According to the findings of a study conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics on police homicides, in the years 2003-09 and 2011, American police killed 7,427 people.

That’s an average of 928 people a year. If we include the last four years, American police will have been responsible for killing more than 11,000 people. In 2015, when theGuardian newspaper began to keep track of police killings, it found that young Black men aged 15 to 34 were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by the police.

Consider that 22 American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan last year. Or that 25 people were killed by law enforcement in Canada in 2015. In the last 24 years, police in England and Wales have killed 55 people. By January 31 of this year, American police had killed 89 people. In Germany police killed no one in 2013 and 2014. China, with a population four and half times the size of the United States, recorded 12 police killings in 2014.

And this is only a fraction of what we know in the U.S. There are 18,000 police departments in this country, and only 1,000 of them bother to report to the federal government how many people they kill each year.

The New York City Police Department, for example, has not reported on how many civilians it has killed since 2007. The state of Florida does not report at all. So we have a very limited view of the extent of police homicide in the United States, and because of the lack of consistent tracking, we have no idea what proportion of these deaths are incurred by African-Americans or Latinos.

The police in the United States have always been an oppressive institution, but these practices have become worse and more widespread recently. The increasing brutality of police has coincided with the attrition of the already weak American welfare state. The political establishment in its Republican and Democratic clothing is gutting our neighborhoods.

When you close public schools and mental health clinics, cut funding for public hospitals and public libraries; when you cut welfare, housing assistance and food stamps in the midst of a jobs crisis when there are already 50 million poor people in the United States; when you do these things, you are creating the conditions for crime. Policing has become the public policy of last resort, intended to contain crime to certain neighborhoods, not actually stop it.

For example, the section of Baltimore where Freddie Gray–whose death ignited the Baltimore Rebellion–lived, 21 percent of residents are unemployed; 25 percent of the buildings are abandoned and in a state of disrepair; life expectancy is six years shorter than in the rest of the city; 55 percent of families live on less than $25,000 a year; and 30 percent officially live in poverty.

Three weeks before Gray was killed, police were instructed to increase their presence and arrests on the corner Gray was picked up on. The police have been inserted where the rest of the state has failed its citizens.

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THIS KEY role played by the police in governing our cities today means they are a protected class governed by a separate set of rules and regulations. This is why mayors and city council members regularly turn a blind eye to brutal policing. Brutal policing is simply the cost of doing business.

And the cost of doing business is quite high. In the city of Chicago alone, the city alone has spent $500 million over the last 10 years in settlements or payouts for lawsuits against the city for police brutality and wrongful death suits. The NYPD has averaged $100 million settlements for police brutality and wrongful death lawsuits each year, over the last decade adding up to $1 billion.

The 10 cities with the largest police departments paid out $248 million last year in settlements and court judgments in police misconduct cases, up 48 percent from $163 million in 2010. In the last five years, those same 10 cities have paid out $1.2 billion.

Any other public institution that incurred this kind of deficit would have its budgets and services shrunk or the institution is shut down. When the Chicago Board of Education claimed it was running a billion dollar deficit, it simply closed 52 public schools and never looked back.

Policing in the United States has nothing to do with crime. As activists and radicals, we don’t deny that crime is an issue in the lives of working-class and poor people. But crime is a product of poverty and economic inequality.

We live in the richest country in the history of the world. If the United States wanted to end poverty in this country tomorrow, it could. Since the economy crashed in 2008, the federal government has spent close to $4 trillion in a bailout of the nation’s financial sector. The federal government spent $438 billion to bail out Citigroup alone.

That $4 trillion could transform every school in the country, provide health care for all, provide housing for millions, end food insecurity and upend the kind of economic inequality that produces crime. But while it was determined that the banks were too big to fail, our public schools, hospitals and other vital institutions were and continue to be too insignificant to save.

Instead of money, wealth and other resources being dedicated to eradicating poverty, we get policing and more policing. And the logic of policing only begets more policing as elected officials create political value out of rising arrest rates and falling crime rates by aggressively tracking policing statistics and turning them into campaign fodder. Police are rewarded not for stopping crime, but for making arrests.

Finally, as revenue streams have tightened in American cities, as no American politician will take responsibility for raising taxes, law enforcement has become a de facto way for municipalities to raise funds on the backs of the politically weak and vulnerable. In Chicago, there are red light cameras, endless tickets, fines and fees. New York City profited $10 million a week from parking tickets. The city also made almost $1 billion a year in court and administrative fines.

These, of course, create incentives for the police to target people and entire neighborhoods as sources of income for the city. And encounters with the police of this nature, of course, drag people into the criminal justice system, thereby making it even harder to get a job or maintain any level of economic stability.

In other words, ending police terrorism also means recognizing it as the logical outcome of a brutal society that willfully turns a blind eye to inequality and injustice. It means that police brutality and murder are not the products of “bad police,” but they are built into a system that actually has no solution to poverty, racism and inequality. Instead, the system and its representatives manage the products of inequality.

It is for this reason that there has never been a golden age of policing that any of us can point to as a place to get back to when the police were not violent and abusive. Such a period does not exist.

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WHAT THEN can we do? The systemic violence of the police does not mean that the movement is helpless. Our movement should fight for the resources and programs that would minimize the pretext for police in our neighborhoods–good-paying jobs with benefits, fully funded public institutions. Instead of paying for police, we should be paying to rebuild the public and civic infrastructure of our cities.

We should also be fighting to decriminalize the growing list of so-called offenses that serve no other purpose than to put people under the control of the criminal justice system: from the possession of marijuana, to feeding the homeless, to sleeping in your car, to begging for money. We have to end the American obsession with criminalization as a form of social control.

But, perhaps, most importantly we must continue to build the movement.

What does this mean in this era? At the end of the 1960s, it was almost a common sense that the Black movement should and would be all Black. But the most significant transformation in Black life in the last 40 years has been the emergence of intense class differences among African-Americans, which in turn have given way to deep political differences.

As we come upon the one-year anniversary of the Baltimore Rebellion, there is not a better example of how these differences express themselves. Not only does Baltimore have a Black mayor, police chief and state’s attorney, but this amassing of local Black power, is happening within the context of the greatest concentration of Black political power in the nation’s history.

Today, there is a Black president, Black attorney general, not to mention the thousands of Black elected officials in cities and states around the country. There are 43 Black members of Congress–the highest number in American history.

It is clear that a layer of Blacks have been fully absorbed and integrated into American capitalism and they, like the president, can be the most vociferous when denouncing poor and working-class African-Americans.

African-American Mayor Stephanie-Rawlings Blake, prior to the rebellion in Baltimore, said, “Too many of us in the Black community have become complacent about Black-on-Black crime…While many of us are willing to march and protest and become active in the face of police misconduct, many of us turn a blind eye when it’s us killing us.”

Of course, she and Obama both referred to young Blacks in the rebellion as “thugs” and “criminals”–two words that were never used by the white officials of Ferguson. In other words, often, Black elected officials, help to narrate that experience of African Americans in ways that white elected officials could never get away with–by blaming Blacks through rhetoric that emphasizes culture and morality and irresponsibility as the source of Black inequality as opposed to racism and economic inequality.

This deepening chasm between the Black elite and the Black working class has made the question of class solidarity in the movement an important one. Historically, the Black movement has always been across class lines because of the all-encompassing nature of American racism. But as more Black elected officials are governing the cities and suburbs where Black workers live, it has created a deeper antagonism that frays the notion of solidarity between all Blacks.

When the Black mayor of Baltimore mobilizes the military to occupy the Black neighborhoods, while allowing whites to come and go freely ignore an imposed martial law for Blacks, the idea that we are all on the same side and in the same struggle is blown up.

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BUILDING A broader movement, then, means trying to bring together the many different groups who are impacted by police violence and who are often already involved in activist projects, like the undocumented and immigrant rights movement; and Arabs and Muslims who are actively fighting against Islamophobia and other forms of state-sanctioned violence.

There is even a basis for drawing working-class and poor whites into this movement as well. Compared to the rest of the world, white people are arrested at unprecedented rates in the United States. We know that police are many more times predisposed to killing Black and Latinos in the U.S., but the police have literally killed thousands of white people in the last 10 years. Moreover, the physical repression and crushing of the Occupy Wall Street movement in the winter of 2012 shows that the state is willing to do anything to maintain control in this society.

Black Lives Matter should look to deepen in some places and develop in other places relationships to the movement for educational justice and the movement to increase the minimum wage, as just two examples. Not only is this about drawing a more specific connection between the attacks on the public infrastructure, poverty and economic inequality as directly connected to abusive policing, but it also puts the movement in relationship with those who have the social power to shut down key aspect of the economy in ways that disproportionately threaten the economic health of the system.

One need look no further than the action called by the Chicago Teachers Union on April 1 to see the power of the organized working class. We can imagine a future of workplace stoppages in response to police brutality or police murder.

The need to build a larger movement is not something to suggest so that we can all get along or feel good about ourselves. It is really about coming to terms with the enormity of our task when we talk about ending police terrorism in our communities. For as much as the movement has accomplished in exposing the issue of police violence, we are right now witnessing the resilience and determination of the political establishment to protect criminal, killer cops:

— The refusal to indict Tamir Rice’s killers;
— The decision to grant bail to the cop who killed Walter Scott;
— The embattled Rahm Emanuel putting in his personal puppet as police chief, who had the audacity to say that in his 27 years as a cop in Chicago he has never seen police misconduct;
— A recent decision to of a San Francisco judge to reinstate police officers who exchanged texts that declared “white power” and, among other things, “All niggers must hang” and “Niggers should be spayed…I just saw one with four kids”;
— Granting bail to Jason Van Dyke, who killed Laquan McDonald;
— The Justice Department reinstating asset seizure as a practice;
— Thirteen months have passed and the 59 recommendations from Obama’s police commission have yet to be implemented;
— The Chicago Police Department will not even fire Dante Servin;
— And American police have killed approximately 80 people a month since January.

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THE POLITICAL establishment, led by Barack Obama, is always willing to throw together a commission, invite activists to a roundtable, and unveil countless studies with the objective of creating the illusion that something is happening. And they try and convince the rest of us that “something” is progress.

But what we are confronting is the systemic, rooted and institutional feature of racism and oppression in this society and it requires a political strategy that can challenge it–but also look beyond it.

These are the things we can do now, but our goals of Black liberation cannot be measured only in units of reform and that which is possible today. The fight for real freedom requires the fundamental transformation of a society founded on genocide; that flourished because of slavery, and simply thrives on economic inequality.

Last year was the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War and, with it, the first declaration of civil rights for African-Americans. This year, we continue to celebrate the 50th anniversaries of the civil rights movement from the decade of the 1960s. But as long as the question of Black freedom is only ever asked within the context of this existing society, as long as it is posed as a question to today’s existing political institutions, it will never be answered.

Simply put: We cannot vote or even protest our way into ending racism in a society where racial inequality and racial injustice is so tightly wound into the marrow of its bones. There is literally no period of time in its existence where Black oppression was not a key feature.

This is not a reason for despair, but a sober reminder of what exactly we are fighting for. What are the social forces that can lead a struggle for a new society based on freedom and justice? What are the politics necessary to shape the struggle for a new society? These are not new questions, but they are debates that have animated the struggle for Black liberation for as long as Black people have been struggling for freedom in the United States.

In 1967, King posed the question, “Where do we go from here?” After civil rights, how do we achieve Black and human liberation? He said:

We honestly face the fact that the Movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are 40 million poor people here. And one day we must ask the question, “Why are there 40 million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. You see, my friends, when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question, “Who owns the oil?” You begin to ask the question, “Who owns the iron ore?” You begin to ask the question, “Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two-thirds water?…Your whole structure must be changed. A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will “thingify” them–make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally, economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together. What I am saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, “America, you must be born again!

by Mario Cardenas (via SocialistWorker.org)

by Lee Sustar (via SocialistWorker.org)

THREE YEARS after their strike defeated an attempt to gut their contract and further entrench the corporate education deform agenda in city schools, Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) members could soon be walking the picket lines again.

Like last time, a Democratic mayor, Rahm Emanuel, is poised to cut jobs and pay and gut classroom resources. But now they face a Republican governor, Bruce Rauner, who is seeking to crush the union outright.

CTU members–who in December voted by an overwhelming 88 percent margin to authorize a strike–vowed to walk out as early as April 1 if Chicago Public Schools (CPS) unilaterally pushed more pension costs onto teachers.

CPS backed off its threat–for now–after the union began preparing for an unfair labor practices strike. But the school board claims that unless the CTU makes major concessions, it will be compelled to take this step as a result of a budget deadlock in the state legislature, a squeeze on Chicago city finances and a long-running fiscal crisis at CPS itself.

The CTU–which is still planning protests for a day of action on April 1–counters that CPS is “broke on purpose.” The union points out that the district began the current school year with a $1 billion deficit as a result of the decades-long tax dodge by big business; a push for expensive, nonunion charter schools; and high-interest loans to CPS that benefit the big banks at the expense of kids. If CPS unilaterally imposes higher pension costs on workers, the CTU has stated that it will invoke its right to strike against an unfair labor practice.

A strike over a new contract could still come this spring or in the fall if no agreement is reached. The CTU has been working under an extension of the old contract, which expired in June 2015.

Emanuel and Rauner–whatever their own differences–are both targeting the CTU, presenting the union with one of the greatest challenges in the organization’s 79-year history.

Even so, the CTU can still prevail if it builds on the public support it won in the 2012 strike to lead a wider labor-community fight against sweeping budget cuts in education and across the public sector–this time making the fight against racism and inequality even more prominent. A solidarity meeting for the CTU, set for March 9, will focus on many of those themes.

With Emanuel still reeling from the disclosure of a video showing the 2014 police murder of Laquan McDonald and Rauner saddled with popularity ratings that show a majority of Illinois voters disapprove of him, the CTU can rally popular support behind a program of challenging austerity and taxing the wealthy to pay for schools and social services. 

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THE NUMBERS tell the story of the CPS financial crisis: a $500 million payment due to teachers’ pensions this year, the result of systematic underpayments by CPS for decades; borrowing, most recently some $725 million, at extortionate interest rates that will cost the system hundreds of millions of dollars; and a long-term drain of tax dollars away from schools to fund development schemes for businesses that don’t need the money.

In the past, the hard-charging Emanuel would have used the crisis to simply try to ram through cuts. But with his approval ratings dropping to 27 percent–the lowest of any Chicago mayor in the modern era–he has tried to reach a deal by giving considerable ground on issues important to the CTU, including a ban on economic layoffs and a freeze on the creation of charter schools.

But the CTU’s bargaining committee didn’t buy it when they voted on the city’s offer. Teachers on the committee rejected the deal unanimously, pointing out that retirement incentives would have resulted in a net loss of 1,500 CTU jobs, and the proposal that teachers pick up pension payments would have amounted to a cut in compensation once inflation is taken into account.

Chicago schools CEO Forrest Claypool, a veteran Democratic operative, has set an April 1 deadline for rescinding a portion of the pension cost that it has paid for decades and cutting $85 million from school budgets. This will involve the layoff of some 1,000 teachers and paraprofessionals. The union has responded by stepping up the action, including “walk-in” protests at some 200 schools.

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THE BATTLE is reminiscent of union struggles in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the CTU went on strike against payless paydays and the Illinois state legislature created the School Finance Authority to oversee spending, amid political turmoil in the Chicago Democratic machine following the death of Mayor Richard J. Daley. Of the CTU’s nine strikes between 1969 and 1987, most took place during that era–including three against Mayor Harold Washington, the city’s first African American mayor.

But the threat to the CTU goes deeper than the budget squeeze or attacks by Emanuel and Rauner. Chicago teachers find themselves at the center of multiple, converging crises: the failure of pro-business neoliberal policies to revive the city’s economy after the Great Recession; growing resistance to racist police violence; cracks in the two main political parties, as evidenced by the Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump phenomena; and the struggle by organized labor for continued relevance after decades of decline.

Perhaps the closest analog for today’s struggles is the Great Depression of the 1930s, when Chicago teachers–then organized in several unions–embarked on series of battles that would lead to the founding of a unified Chicago Teachers Union in 1937. Then, as now, the corporate establishment and the politicians sought to force teachers to bear the brunt of conditions in schools crippled by budget cuts.

For his part, Bruce Rauner, a hedge fund boss worth nearly $1 billion who bought himself the governor’s office in the 2014 election, wants to turn back the clock to the days when public-sector unions had no right to collective bargaining.

Although he has been in office for 14 months, Rauner has refused to reach any budget deal with the Democratic legislature unless lawmakers capitulate to his demand to include anti-union measures. The result is huge cuts in spending in vital social programs and state institutions. One consequence: layoff notices were sent to all faculty, staff and administrators at Chicago State University, where the student body is heavily African American.

The governor is doing his utmost to provoke a confrontation with the CTU by pushing a plan for bankruptcy that would void union contracts and seeking to block CPS from selling bonds to finance school operations.

The Democrats control the Illinois legislature and the state constitution limits his authority, so Rauner is trying to create a crisis in which he can assert executive power to impose a contract settlement on the CTU, directly or through a judge’s order–and/or create the political conditions for a legislative settlement in his favor.

In this context, the CTU’s fight cannot be won through conventional trade union bargaining–at least as it has evolved since the CTU won formal collective bargaining rights in the late 1960s. Rauner has already proposed that the Illinois National Guard do state workers’ jobs in the event of a public employees strike–a throwback to the 19th century, when governors regularly used the state militia, the Guard’s predecessor, to put down strikes by railroad workers and coal miners.

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THE CTU enters this fight with a reservoir of popular support. According to an opinion poll, three times more Chicagoans trust the union on education issues than Rahm Emanuel.

Moreover, the union has forged links with numerous community, issue-oriented and faith-based organizations, many of them grouped into the Grassroots Education Movement (GEM).

Labor support for the CTU is much more uneven, however.

The teachers do have solid relationships with several different unions, including the liberal Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Healthcare Illinois-Indiana, the home health care workers union that Rauner is out to destroy. Another ally is the reform leadership of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 308, which represents city transit workers who were hammered by Claypool a few years back when he was their boss. The National Nurses Organizing Committee, the activist union representing workers at Cook County Hospital, was a prominent backer of the CTU strike in 2012 and remains an ally today.

The list of the CTU’s labor supporters is notable by who isn’t on it, however. The Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL), which groups together the city’s main unions, is missing in action, as are most of its affiliates. The CFL and the state AFL-CIO did mobilize against Rauner’s attempts to push through local anti-union “right to work” laws, but they have been mostly quiet since then. In Chicago, several big unions, including the Teamsters Joint Council and most of the building trades, back Emanuel.

The CTU’s most natural ally in its fight is American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Council 31, which is trying to negotiate a contract with Rauner that covers some 100,000 state workers.

Rauner’s contract demands are intolerable and would gut the union. But it is Rauner, not AFSCME, that is pushing for a strike. The union, by contrast, is backing legislation that would eliminate its own right to strike, but bar Rauner from locking them out–leaving the final contract decision to an arbitrator.

Certainly, AFSCME’s opposition to Rauner’s austerity drive puts it on the same page as the CTU. But AFSCME’s abandonment of the strike, labor’s most powerful weapon, is in sharp contrast to the CTU’s strategy.

Instead, AFSCME has looked to the legislature for relief. Since a handful of Rauner’s Democratic allies in the legislature have refused to support the no-strike, no-lockout bill, labor spent heavily in the Democratic primaries set for March 15, even as Rauner’s wealthy backers pour their own money into the race.

The result is that rather than mobilize AFSCME members for an inevitable confrontation with Rauner and present themselves as proud defenders of public services, the top AFSCME leadership has urged members to appear moderate and merely paint Rauner as a villain who should be ousted from office.

The problem is that the next election for Illinois governor isn’t until 2018–and the struggle will come to a head long before that. In any case, Rauner, who was already wealthy and powerful before taking office, doesn’t care if he is re-elected. He was installed in office by his superrich circle of allies in order to demolish the state’s welfare system and stomp on unions.

If Rauner succeeds but gets tossed out of office as a result, he’ll count it as a win, go back to asset-stripping companies and relax at one of his seven homes around the world.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

THE RELUCTANCE of the big unions to fight alongside the CTU may reflect the opportunism or caution of their leaderships–but it doesn’t mean that there is a lack of support for teachers.

The union has the potential to tap widespread solidarity by appealing directly to members of other public-sector unions in the city–after all, their children attend CPS schools.

Just as importantly, the union can draw on the widespread anger at Emanuel over his complicity in the epidemic of racist police violence against African Americans. That anger erupted late last year when the video of Laquan McDonald being executed by cops emerged, and Emanuel’s once-undisputed power was shaken by the worst crisis in Chicago politics since the 1980s.

CTU support for the Black Lives Matter movement wasn’t automatic, however. Some CTU members are married to police officers, and a vocal minority criticized union President Karen Lewis and CTU officials after a November union rally where a young African American activist was given a chance to speak and decried police racism and violence. Since then, the union supported and mobilized for anti-police protests.

Still, the exposure of a widespread cover-up of the McDonald video since then has shattered Emanuel’s aura of political invincibility. The mayor’s African American allies on the City Council, who were key to helping Emanuel win an unprecedented runoff vote to stay in office, are now far more worried about their angry constituents than appeasing the notorious bully of City Hall.

Tapping into this rebellious mood will require building on the political arguments that the CTU has made since Lewis and other Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) activists took office in 2010: that CPS has been systematically underfunded for years by pro-business tax policies; that it became a nest for corruption and political patronage by funneling resources to clout-heavy charter schools; that bankers have been feasting on CPS by locking in the schools at high interest rates; and that Emanuel and the city have made Black and Latino communities pay the price.

The anti-banker mood, given voice by the Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, can be brought into this fight. It’s the banks and bondholders, after all, who dictate austerity policies to politicians. And in the case of Rauner, a banker is directly responsible for laying waste to state and city finances.

The struggle will be harder than it was in 2012, when Emanuel badly underestimated teachers’ resolve and the widespread sympathy for their union. This time, the CTU is up against both Rauner and Emanuel, and they are preparing for a showdown.

Nevertheless, by once again drawing on public sympathy–and this time, turning it into more active support, with protests, sit-ins and the like–the CTU can win. By linking its fight to broader working-class issues of fully funded public education and racial and economic equality, the CTU can defend good union jobs and build a wider movement for social justice.

by Danny Katch (via Socialist Worker)

THE BIG winners of the dozen Super Tuesday primary contests on March 1 were the two frontrunners for the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations–but for the Democrats, that meant the status quo triumphed, while for the Republicans, it was more the status what-the-f%$k.

On the Republican side, billionaire reality TV star Donald Trump won most of the primaries and continued to build his early lead in the delegate count for the GOP convention. But his main challengers, Tea Partyier Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, increasingly the anybody-but-Trump consensus candidate for party leaders, both took a state or two to keep their hopes alive.

For the Democrats, Hillary Clinton, the anointed candidate of the party establishment, swept to big victories in the Southern-centric Super Tuesday voting, though her democratic socialist challenger Bernie Sanders did well to win four state contests, based once again on support among young voters.

Nevertheless, with victories in Nevada and South Carolina before Super Tuesday, Clinton has regained her status as prohibitive frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. On the Republican side, though, there’s much less certainty. Here are some observations on the meaning of the biggest day of elections on the primary calendar.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Observation No. 1: Donald F@*#ing Trump

You think they’re so dumb
You think they’re so funny
Wait until they got you running
to the night rally

Those lyrics are from an old Elvis Costello song about fascism, and while Trump is less a fascist than a classic American right-wing demagogue, you can’t help but sense an ominous orange shadow drawing down across the country as you watch him blaze through the wreckage of the GOP–formerly the proud first party of American capitalism.

When Marco Rubio–the Florida senator with an incredibly conservative voting record in Congress, who nevertheless can pose as a moderate when compared to Trump and Cruz–freezes up for a moment during a debate, he sinks like a stone in the New Hampshire primary that followed.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump refuses to reject the support of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke on live television–and later lamely claims that his earpiece wasn’t working–and days later, he takes a majority of the contests held on Super Tuesday.

Trump’s confident bigotry against Mexicans and Muslims is giving a boost to racists across the spectrum, from from white supremacist organizations to high school kids chanting “Trump” at basketball games against rival schools with large Latino populations.

But Trump’s appeal clearly goes beyond racism. While many working class and middle class people facing declining living standards are rallying to Bernie Sanders’ call for a “political revolution” against the domination of the 1 Percent, others seem to be in thrall to Trump’s claim that, with him, they can have their very own member of the 1 Percent to dominate on their behalf.

Like Sanders, Trump’s message is that the system is rigged. But he appeals not to the idealistic hope of making a “political revolution”, but to selfishness and cynicism. He’s running to be the con-artist-in-chief, the operator who knows his way around a crooked game. The more Trump lies, the more it feels to his supporters–and to all of us, in a way–that he’s revealing a deeper truth about the whole system.

Not that any of this can be neatly separated from Trump’s racism and scapegoating. The reality TV blowhard is proudly projecting some of the darkest elements of American culture–crude sexism, conspiracy theories, Internet trolling and flat-out cyber-bullying–that have been subtext in Republican politics for years but until now have scurried away from the harsh glare of daylight.

And this billionaire is selling all this filth as righteous anti-establishment anger. Could there be any more telling evidence of the bankruptcy of the two-party system?

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Observation No. 2: Is Trump Actually Going to Win?

Republican Party leaders are aghast at Trump’s rise. Not because they can’t stomach his racism–just two years ago, House Speaker Paul Ryan blamed Black unemployment on a “tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular…generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work”–but because they fear he can’t be controlled and will destroy the image of the party they run.

Even now, it’s hard to see how the Republican Party establishment could allow such a crackpot and fanatic to win the nomination. It’s hard…but it’s even harder to see how they’re going to stop him, at least based on what we know now.

On the eve of Super Tuesday, Ryan and other Republicans tried to use the David Duke incident to draw a line in the sand to rally the party against Trump. But after years of peddling coded racism–like, for example, phrases such as “a tailspin of culture in our inner cities”–the GOP honchoes are in trouble if they’re counting on principled anti-racism to take down the reality show demagogue.

Republican leaders face a bigger problem, too: They can denounce Trump all they want, but they don’t have a unified candidate to put up against him. Trump has never had the majority support of Republican primary voters–though some polls show him creeping toward 50 percent–but the party has been helplessly split among his rivals.

Ted Cruz won two states on Tuesday–his home state of Texas, no surprise, but also neighboring Oklahoma, which was a minor upset. But Cruz is just as much a self-promoting saboteur as Trump–and possibly even more unpopular than Trump among his colleagues in Congress.

Meanwhile, Marco Rubio managed just one win, his first of the campaign. He’s fought other conventional Republicans like Jeb Bush to become the seeming consensus candidate of Republican Party establishment. Only it seems that the “establishment” has lost its ability to control the right-wing base it let off the leash during the Obama years to obstruct any and all proposals from Democrats, even those that Republicans would have celebrated as their own a few years before.

Trump is still a long way away from locking up enough delegates to claim the nomination. And if the race has been this wild so far, there’s certainly more un-looked-for madness to come.

But it can be said that Trump has overcome each challenge so far from various sections of the political and media establishment, including the latest attempts to maintain a united front against him among Republicans. In the week before Super Tuesday, he picked up endorsements from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Maine Gov. Paul LePage, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions and Reps. Duncan Hunter and Chris Collins, among others. They figure they’re siding with a winner.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Observation No. 3: Hillary Clinton Takes Control

Bernie Sanders has roughly the same amount of support among Democratic voters as Donald Trump has among Republicans. The difference is that Sanders is running for the presidential nomination in a party whose establishment is united behind his opponent.

While Republicans like Christie and Sessions are defying party leaders to hop aboard the Trump bandwagon, it’s striking that Sanders has been able to attract huge crowds andraise astonishing amounts of money from small donations–while getting virtually no support from any notable Democrats.

Just four members of Congress have endorsed Sanders. None of his fellow senators have, nor any nationally prominent liberals like New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio or Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

In recent weeks, the Sanders campaign made a big deal about getting the support of former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a diehard Islamophobe. The Clinton campaign calmly responded with the endorsement of the 26-member Hispanic Caucus.

Not only is there more unity within the Democratic Party for its preferred candidate–there’s more unity between that candidate and her leading rival. While Trump has systematically bullied Republican rivals like Jeb Bush and Ben Carson into irrelevance,Sanders has failed to really go after Clinton–not just because he’s averse to running a negative campaign, but because he is committed, as he frequently tells his audiences, to keeping the party united to prepare for the coming general election.

Of course, one big reason why Sanders has done well is the discontent with Clinton among Democrats, but the vast majority of those same supporters are likely to transfer their support to Clinton–especially if Trump does end up winning on the GOP side. But the months and years to come will only exaggerate the doubts and questions.

Sanders is far from done as a primary candidate. He has states that are much more favorable to him coming up, both in the next few weeks, and later on. But the long odds he has faced since coming into the primaries with the entire party establishment against him have only gotten longer.

In any case, it’s striking that in an election year when both parties have been rocked by class anger and anti-establishment campaigns, the Democrats look much more likely to come out the other side intact, if not strengthened.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Observation No. 4: Why Is Clinton Doing So Well with Black Voters?

To many people of all races, it doesn’t seem right: Hillary Clinton is deeply implicated–through her husband Bill’s presidency, and in her own right–in the construction of the mass incarceration system that Michelle Alexander famously calls The New Jim Crow.

Yet Clinton is getting support from African Americans in the primaries at levels that approach Barack Obama’s margins in 2008–with well over 70 percent support from African Americans in many states, and ranging as high as 90 percent.

The most common explanations in the media range from illogical (African Americans are turned off by Bernie Sanders’ campaign theme of promoting economic equality) to painfully condescending (Black people just love the Clintons!)

It also doesn’t seem likely that most Black voters have been blown off their feet by Clinton’s discovery of the radical term “intersectionality”–though many are likely more impressed with her many recent public appearances with the mothers of police murder victims Sandra Bland and Eric Garner.

There has been no shortage of speculative opinion pieces about why Sanders’ populist themes don’t connect with Black voters. But journalists who have actually talked to Black voters found that many like Sanders’ message, but feel that Clinton is the safer choice–both as a known quantity and as a candidate against the hostile Republicans.

It’s worth noting how far to the left Clinton has shifted–rhetorically–to win this level of Black support. Contrast Hillary Clinton campaigning with family members of police violence to her husband Bill leaving the primary campaign trail in 1992 to travel to Arkansas to witness the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a developmentally disabled Black man.

We should also keep in mind that Sanders won 43 percent of the vote among African American voters under 30 in South Carolina–and that he is supported by prominent left-wing Black leaders like Cornel West, Ben Jealous and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

And, of course, there is the continued dynamic of Black activists challenging Clinton–most recently, when Ashley Williams unfurled a banner during a South Carolina fundraiser that brought national attention to an infamous 1996 speech in favor of her husband’s crime bill, in which Clinton talked about “super-predators” who have to be “brought to heel.”

Sanders hasn’t helped his cause by failing to make the fight against racism a central campaign theme the way he talks about taking on Wall Street. That’s a point that Coates noted when contrasting Sanders’ claim that it was “unrealistic” and “divisive” to fight for reparations for slavery–as if the same couldn’t be said about his calls for a “political revolution.”

But even if Sanders were stronger in focusing on anti-racism, the African American vote in predominantly Southern Super Tuesday states probably still would have gone for Clinton. That’s a sign of the distance a candidate like Sanders will need to go to win the trust of Blacks–and of the enduring hold of the Democratic Party machine, especially its African American leaders, in delivering the vote for a candidate who has no justifiable claim to their support.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Observation No. 5: Take a Deep Breath, There’s More to Come

The nomination battles aren’t over in either party. Clinton may have returned to the status of prohibitive frontrunner, but Sanders has continued to gain ground in national opinion polls–and on the other side, who knows what Republicans are going to do about Trump?

More importantly, it’s a good time for the left to remind itself that history isn’t ultimately made by who wins elections, even the ones for the White House, but by the level of popular struggle in society. As the people’s historian Howard Zinn famously put it, “What matters most is not who is sitting in the White House, but who is ‘sitting in.'”

We can learn something from the details of Election 2016, but there’s a bigger forest that shouldn’t be forgotten for the trees. It is a polarized picture: a dramatic increase in right-wing populism, strongly tinged by racism, Islamophobia and anti-immigrant hatred, on the one hand–alongside the rise of left-wing populism that Bernie Sanders has done us the favor of labeling as socialism.

The task of revolutionaries during this election season, but also beyond, is to help the rising left fight the rising right, but also fight within the new left to sharpen its ideas and create a strong socialist pole.

by Eric Kerl and Todd St. Hill 

Rats fleeing a sinking ship.

That’s how a lot of people in Chicago are describing the wave of pink slips, resignations, and unexpected “retirements” of high-ranking Chicago cops and politicians. These days, it isn’t just longtime opponents but former supporters who are demanding the resignations of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez for their roles in the cover-up of Laquan McDonald’s execution by Chicago cop Jason Van Dyke.

According to a recent opinion poll, Emanuel’s job approval rating has dropped to 18 percent, just slightly ahead of congressional Republicans, and more than half of those surveyed say he should resign.

The mayor appeared before the City Council he usually presides over like the dictator of a one-party state to issue a teary apology, but it did nothing to quiet the daily protests and widespread outrage. As one demonstrator’s sign summarized: “Crocodile tears won’t fix this. #ResignRahm.”

The mayor’s handpicked Police Chief Garry McCarthy was the first to go within days after the horrifying video of McDonald’s execution was finally released. But with more revelations of the Chicago Police Department’s racism and brutality continuing to emerge, more heads will undoubtedly roll–and as unlikely as it might have seemed just weeks ago, Emanuel’s might be among them.

For years, opponents of racist police violence have called out for justice for Rekia Boyd,Ronald Johnson, Dominique Franklin and the many other victims killed by Chicago cops. But police and politicians, backed up by the discredited Independent Police Review Authority, refused to do anything meaningful to address the city’s epidemic of police violence.

Instead, they defended every last police murder and conspired to cover up crimes, while paying out more than half a billion dollars between 2004 and 2014 to families of the victims and survivors of police torture and other brutality, but on the condition that the CPD not have to admit guilt.

Now, the video–released only because of a judge’s order–showing the cold-blooded execution of LaQuan McDonald has exposed the terrorism that the CPD inflicts on Black and Brown neighborhoods around the city on a daily basis.

The McDonald murder has revealed more than just police racism, though. It has also exposed layers of corruption, incompetence and inaction, ranging from the Fraternal Order of Police, to City Hall and the mayor’s office, to even the federal Department of Justice (DoJ).

The Department of Justice has begun a civil rights investigation of the CPD that is expected to take at least a year. But for Chicagoans familiar with the pattern of racist police violence, a year is a long time–a time span when the Chicago cops will add to the body count.

And if DoJ consent decrees with police departments in other cities are any indication, no one should expect much from the Feds beyond a confirmation of what we already know: the cops are racist and the city’s priorities are upside down.

Thus, the attempts to “rebuild trust” between Rahm Emanuel and the CPD and the people affected by police terrorism in Chicago’s neighborhoods are a non-starter.

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A History of Abuse and Corruption

The unfolding political crisis threatening Emanuel is the city’s deepest in at least 30 years. But the Chicago police’s record of criminal corruption and racist violence goes back far longer. Not a decade has passed since its formation in the 1830s when the CPD wasn’t guilty of serial crimes against justice and civil rights.

One of the original big-city police forces, the CPD has always been an unaccountable militia, whether targeting labor organizers, assassinating Black radicals or enforcing the apartheid system that has maintained Chicago’s status as one of the most segregated cities in the country.

The first targets of the CPD were working-class immigrants. Six months after the department’s formation, Irish immigrants–then the city’s poorest ethnic group–accounted for two-thirds of the department’s 3,716 arrests. In 1855, Irish immigrants and refugees from political unrest in Germany were brutally attacked by the police during the Lager Beer Riot.

As the city’s immigrant working class organized in neighborhoods and workplaces, a radical labor movement led by socialists and anarchists demanded workers’ rights and an eight-hour day. The CPD responded to the new movement with armed attacks on picket lines during the May Day protests of 1886, while cheering the executions of some of the city’s most popular working-class leaders: the Haymarket martyrs.

Since then, wave after wave of corruption and scandal has erupted in the Chicago Police Department. The Palmer Raids of 1920 reached their apex in Chicago, with cops raiding union halls, bookstores and left-wing meetings. The “Red Squads” of the CPD continued to operate for the next six decades, with an elaborate system of spying, torture, disappearances–culminating in the executions of Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in 1969.

For two decades, Lt. (later Commander) Jon Burge and his gang at Area Two and Three police headquarters tortured young Black men on the city’s South and West Sides–coerced confessions sent their victims to Illinois prisons and death row. Meanwhile, “the pride of the Chicago Police Department,” the Special Operations Section (SOS), was only disbanded in 2007 after engaging in routine armed violence, home invasions and kidnapping.

Not only is the Chicago Police Department a scourge on the people of the city, especially Black and Brown people, but like a pig at the trough, the CPD gorges itself on 40 percent of the city government budget.

All in all, a proven track record of racism, brutality and corruption.

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The Department of Justice Investigation

The eruption of protests since the release of the video of the execution of Laquan McDonald is averaging two a day, a testament to anger and bitterness in Chicago at the cops and the years of cover-ups by Rahm Emanuel, Anita Alvarez and others.

Some in the movement against police violence–and, notably, some not part of the movement–are looking to the Department of Justice investigation to make a difference in the CPD.

The Feds’ probe is a profound embarrassment to Emanuel, who used to boss around the DoJ as former White House chief of staff for Barack Obama–and that can only be celebrated. The announcement that it was underway confirmed the depth of the scandal facing the city establishment.

But how much will a DoJ investigation do to change the police department? Would a consent decree imposed on the CPD be a step forward in the fight against police racism and brutality?

Currently, police departments in 20 cities around the country operate under consent decrees agreed on by the federal and local governments. The agreements are essentially programs for self-reform, with the potential threat of a federal monitor to impose changes. Unsurprisingly, police violence has continued in the cities operating under these decrees.

One of the “groundbreaking” agreements held up as a model for future consent decrees is Cincinnati’s “collaborative agreement” of 2002. Federal intervention was the result of the April 2001 murder of 19-year-old Timothy Thomas by a Cincinnati cop, which sparked days of rebellion.

After filing a federal lawsuit against the Cincinnati Police Department, which had killed 14 other young Black men in the previous five years, the Cincinnati Black United Front, along with the ACLU, joined a “collaborative agreement” with the city and DoJ. The agreement promised “community-oriented policing,” reforms to the cops’ use-of-force guidelines, and an independent citizen’s complaint process.

Again unsurprisingly, the city, under pressure from the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP),refused to hold up its end of the bargain. Activists had to file another lawsuit to compel the city and cops to comply.

More than a decade later, following the police murder of Mike Brown in August 2014, the Department of Justice investigation into the Ferguson, Missouri, police departmentuncovered irrefutable evidence of police racism.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder was only stating the obvious when he said, “Our investigation showed that Ferguson police officers routinely violate the Fourth Amendment in stopping people without reasonable suspicion, arresting them without probable cause and using unreasonable force against them.” Yet the Feds refused to file federal charges against Mike Brown’s murderer, Darren Wilson.

The situation is little different in other cities. The Oakland Police Department has refused to comply with a federal consent decree for more than a decade, while continuing a spree of violence. Activists in New Orleans report that a consent decree there has yielded few results.

So consent decrees are no magic bullet for fighting police brutality and corruption. They can be a tool for opponents of police violence–the more rules and regulations that we can force on police departments, the better–if that translates into fewer traffic stops, fewer stop-and-frisks and less police violence. But history shows that they produce far fewer results than most people hope for.

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Fraternal Order of Police–A Criminal Syndicate

In every instance of federal consent decrees and oversight agreements, the overwhelming obstacle to police reform has been the police themselves–with the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) playing the most reactionary role in resisting change and accountability.

For example, in response to Cincinnati’s collaborative agreement, the racist windbag FOP President Kenneth Fangman tried to pull out of the arrangement and encouraged officers to not do their jobs.

In Chicago, the FOP has significant power. According to a recent Mother Jones article, “The contract that the organization has with the city, which was approved by City Council, shapes how the city handles police misconduct allegations, disciplines rank-and-file officers, as well as when the city pays legal costs for police officers accused of wrongdoing.”

Not only do contracts like these blatantly favor police over the people, but they put the burden of paying for this protection racket onto taxpayers. Jason Van Dyke, who had numerous complaints against him prior to the murder of Laquan McDonald, has personally cost the city $500,000 in settlements and legal fees. All told, the city paid $521 million in settlements and legal fees between 2004 and 2014.

It’s no accident that the bar for getting police arrested, much less prosecuting them, remains so high. The FOP contract, known as the “Police Bill of Rights,” allows for cops to get information about investigations into their wrongdoing. In addition, cops who shoot civilians can delay making an official statement.

In a justice system that operates disproportionately against poor and working people, particularly Black and Brown people, it’s especially hypocritical CPD officers, like those of any other police department, get an additional layer of due process that ordinary people don’t enjoy.

All this creates an inherent barrier to accountability. This would be an elementary reform that would do more good than the consent decrees do: Police officers should not be allowed to wait before making a statement in the case of a shooting or any kind of assault. The FOP and law enforcement should not be above the law.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
What Are We Fighting For?

The excuse for the special status of police is that officers do a dangerous job. But according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, being a cop doesn’t even rank among the 10 most dangerous jobs in the U.S., and even then, only a fraction of police fatalities on the job occur from homicide.

The job of being a cop would be even less risky if the seemingly endless funds for policing were reallocated to the communities that are both most heavily policed and most dramatically disadvantaged economically.

That is what organizers, activists, and community members in Chicago have long demanded. The slogan #FundBlackFutures is not just another hashtag. It is the entry point to a conversation about creating structural change in communities that have historically suffered disinvestment and lack of resources. It offers a solution to the very real fact that the richest 100 U.S. families own as much wealth as all Black Americans combined.

Instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on legal settlements for brutal cops, much less the vast sums devoted to police militarization and surveillance, the city of Chicago should devote resources to programs that create living-wage, union jobs. It should reopen the neighborhood public schools it has closed, along with mental health clinics and primary care health centers.

In a city where the mayor and his handpicked school board closed a record number of public schools, where neighborhoods struggle without trauma or even basic health care centers, where Black home ownership rate was decimated during the financial crisis, and where unemployment rates are sky-high for the city’s Black youth, it’s unsurprising that gun violence plagues poor neighborhoods.

Yet the city’s political leaders fixate on “gangs” as the source of the problem, while continuing to implement policies that exacerbate poverty and inequality. From status-quo machine politicians to “reformers,” they make the same tired demand to hire more cops–even though among the five biggest cities in the country, Chicago already has more cops per capita than any other.

What will happen when the Department of Justice finishes its investigation? We know it won’t propose to re-open and fully fund public schools in our neighborhoods. It won’t call for quality, accessible health care as a right for every Chicagoan. It won’t prepare plans for a real jobs program, paid for by taxing the city’s major corporations and swollen financial sector. It won’t suggest a drastic cut in the CPD budget to pay reparations for everyone affected by police terror.

These demands–and building a movement that can win them–are up to us.

And in fact, over the past month, masses of people in Chicago’s streets have done more to hold the cops accountable than decades of legal wrangling and support for liberal political leaders. The power of the CPD and the politicians lies in the corporate boardrooms and City Hall. Our power is in the streets, in our schools and in our workplaces.

City officials offered a deal to the hunger strikers at Dyett High School, but that only strengthened their resolve.

by Bob Simpson 

THE WORDS of James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing” echoed down Drexel Avenue on Chicago’s South Side on the mild summer evening of September 8. Down the street from the Chicago home of President Obama, the Dyett hunger strikers and their supporters, holding candles in the deepening darkness, shared this song that is often called the Black National Anthem:

Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
let our rejoicing rise,
high as the listening skies, let it resound loud as the rolling sea
sing a song full of faith that the dark past has taught us,
sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.

It was an opportunity for the hunger strikers and their supporters to reflect on the centuries-old African American struggle for freedom and their role in the struggle–Day 23 of the hunger strike to create the Walter Dyett High School for Global Leadership and Green Technology at the now-closed Dyett High School building in Chicago’s Washington Park.

The hunger strike is now at Day 28 as of this writing, and the Chicago Board of Education has finally opened talks with the strikers. There is a cautious optimism that perhaps the Dyett struggle, which in one form or another has been going on for at least six years, will reach a milestone in its journey toward education justice.

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WHEN DYETT was closed earlier in 2015, there were no more open enrollment neighborhood high schools left in the South Side Bronzeville neighborhood it once served.

The hunger strikers have been willing to put their lives on the line for quality education, an African American tradition that goes back to slavery times.

“Even when we were in slavery black people fought for schools. And our ancestors evacuated the South to come here, to find a better life for their children…The institution that our ancestors fought for and won–we’ve got to reclaim it.”
— Jitu Brown a hunger striker and member of the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO) and the Coalition to Revitalize Dyett

The Kenwood Oakland Community Organization plays a key role in the Coalition to Revitalize Dyett (which I will refer as the Coalition for the rest of this article), the organization that is out to transform the now-closed Dyett High School into a 21st century freedom school. These are their demands for reopening the school:

1. Green Technology in school name and in school curriculum.
2. Global leadership/world studies curriculum.
3. Duane Turner as the school principal, who was selected by Coalition to Revitalize Dyett.
4. Fully elected local school council in year one.
5. Coalition to Revitalize Dyett represented on design/planning team with six members in prominent positions. Those who paid protesters to support closing Dyett cannot be on planning team.
6. The school must retain the name Walter H. Dyett.
7. Vertical curricular alignment with the six feeder schools identified in the Coalition proposal.
8. Community school (open till 8 p.m. daily, with programs and resources for parents, students and the community).

These demands grew out of the struggle to save Dyett High School and the detailed proposal the Coalition wrote to meet the educational needs of an African American community living in what Mayor Rahm Emanuel likes to tout as a global city.

The proposal envisions a rich full curriculum of the humanities, the arts, math, music, world languages, science and physical education as well as green technology and the development of leadership skills. The governance of the school would be based upon a participatory model that includes parents, teachers, students and staff. There would be close collaboration with the community at large.

As Coalition member Pauline Lipman said at a speak-out supporting the hunger strikers, the proposal could serve as a model for working class education throughout the city.

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“School closings are a hate crime.”
–Irene Robinson, Dyett hunger striker

YEARS BEFORE being closed at the end of the 2014-15 school year, Dyett had been a highly regarded neighborhood middle school where parents from around the city also sent their children. Dyett is located in Bronzeville, a historically African American neighborhood that has become contested terrain because of its location between the glittering towers of downtown Chicago and affluent Hyde Park where the University of Chicago is located.

Gentrification efforts were stepped up in Bronzeville in the late 1990s and resulted in a wave of Bronzeville elementary school closings. Bronzeville became a living laboratory for the city elite on how to do school closings, resulting in the infamous 50 school closings of 2013. Most of those affected have been Black and Brown students.

“I live in a city where the only mistake of me and my children is being black. I live in a city where the mayor and alderman don’t respect working families, no matter which way you try to say it.”
–Hunger striker Jeanette Taylor Ramann

According to Jitu Brown, the problems for Dyett began in 1999 when, against the wishes of its local school council, it was changed to a high school, but without the necessary resources. Dyett was to be starved into destruction. In 2011, CPS announced that Dyett would phased out. The last handful of students were reduced to taking courses like art and PE online.

The practice of starving neighborhood schools in Black and Brown working class neighborhoods, labeling them “failing” and then opening up charter, contract and turnaround schools to replace them is part of an overall privatization drive closely linked to a general disinvestment in local businesses and social services necessary for strong and positive social relations.

“We’re not just seeing school closings here, we’ve seen the closings of hospitals and trauma centers, the elimination of grocery stores and more. We’re looking at a systematic disinvestment in our families, our youth, our elders, our communities.”
–Jitu Brown

School closings are designed to destabilize working-class communities. Neighborhood schools are part of a complex set of intergenerational human relationships that help hold communities together that are under siege from outside forces. As people leave the neighborhood in desperation, this opens the way for profitable city-subsidized redevelopment schemes that push out remaining working-class residents (mostly people of color) in favor of mostly white affluent newcomers.

School closings are part of the general disinvestment that fuels violence and social alienation, especially among young people. In an interview with hunger striker Irene Robinson, she said this to me:

Children naturally want to love. But this society has inflicted so much hate on Black and Brown communities that the violence you see stems from that. It’s manufactured…Dyett was our school. It had been there for 30 years. There was so much love and memories there. They didn’t just close a school, they closed the doors on the future of our children. They killed so much memory. They can never pay us back for what they have done to our children.

It is class and ethnic cleansing by economic means–but communities do not go down without a fight. Led by KOCO, community residents came up with a plan to save Dyett. Eve L. Ewing, a Harvard Ph.D. student writing her thesis on South Side Chicago school closings, focusing particularly on Bronzeville, explains:

After CPS’s plan to close Dyett was announced four years ago [2011], a coalition of community members led by KOCO created a proposal for it to reopen as what they have called a “global village academy,” an open-enrollment neighborhood high school where teachers, parents and local school council members would work together with educators from the local elementary schools to share resources to create a continuous educational pipeline for students from preschool to 12th grade. The district ignored the idea.

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BUT FACING more protest, the Board of Education finally agreed to solicit ideas for how to save Dyett, the last open enrollment neighborhood high school in Bronzeville. The Coalition to Save Dyett, in close consultation with parents and community members, wrote an ambitious proposal for a global-leadership/green-technology high school with partners that included the Chicago Botanic Garden, University of Illinois and Chicago Teachers Union. There were proposals from two other groups, neither of which were very inspiring.

The Board promised an answer in August 2015. When it postponed its decision until September, after the start of the school year, the Coalition concluded the fix was in. Drastic action was needed. The hunger strike began with the strikers sitting outside of the Dyett building in a small circle of folding chairs, meeting the media, consulting with their supporters and organizing actions like the nonviolent disruption of a mayoral town hall budget meeting which saw Mayor Emanuel flee out the back door. The strikers have received help from a variety of organizations, including the Chicago Teachers Union.

On September 3, when CPS announced that Dyett would be reopened as an “art and technology” high school, the strikers were not impressed. This so-called “compromise” was engineered with the help of South Side politicians close to the mayor. It was a patched-together public relations scheme with no community involvement–just another hasty backroom deal, Chicago-style. The Coalition was not consulted and told flatly by Chicago school chief Forest Claypool that there would be no negotiations. The group was even locked out of the press conference announcing the “compromise.”

This was not what the community had been fighting for. The strike continued. The strikers went on with their protests, rallies and news conferences. Some of the hunger strikers flew to Washington, D.C., to meet with Education Secretary Arne Duncan. They are thinking about taking their case to the United Nations after Chileans who battled school closings in their country told them of the success they had when the UN became involved. The battle had gone international.

Then, on September 11, the hunger strikers got a call from the Chicago Board of Education saying it was finally ready to talk. The results of the meeting were inconclusive, but the hunger strikers expressed cautious optimism to their supporters at a meeting held that evening at Operation PUSH.

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BUT WHAT is it about the Dyett High School proposal that is so abhorrent to the mayor and the city elite?

“Our model is of a sustainable school deeply rooted in the community. This proposal comes from the people of Bronzeville who speak from the heart about a school that lives in a village of tightly interconnected feeder schools, community institutions, local school councils of dedicated and loving adults, relationships, and the meaning of place…This is a model that nurtures leadership, it teaches perseverance, expects the best and supports solidarity. It is a model based on a broad notion of success for the students, their families, neighborhood, city, country and world.”
— Excerpt from the proposal submitted by the Coalition to Revitalize Dyett

This vision of education runs completely counter to the corporate-driven model favored by the mayor with its rigid top-down curricula; its brutal regimen of high stakes testing; its racist allocation of resources; its sneering contempt for Black and Brown people; and its privatization of public education. The mayor’s vision rips communities apart and divides them. It is designed to blunt the intellect and shrink the imaginations of Black and Brown working-class youth so they will submit to the demands of austerity capitalism.

As hunger striker Irene Robinson put it, “They starve our schools. They hurt our children. And they don’t care if we die.”

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ONE AFTERNOON before we marched to President Obama’s home for the candlelight vigil, I sat down for a conversation with Rico Gutstein. Gutstein, a University of Illinois education professor, helped design and coordinate the writing of the proposal for the Walter Dyett High School for Global Leadership and Green Technology. Gutstein emphasized that the ideas came from a carefully conducted community process.

The idea of a sustainable neighborhood school lies at the very heart of the Dyett proposal. Gutstein outlined some of its basic principles:

Principle 1: The curriculum should be based in the culture, traditions, language of the local community. It should use that as starting point for a critical look at what is really going on there and asking profound questions about power and injustice. By addressing these questions in depth, students can begin to learn the academic disciplines necessary to advance their own lives and the community in which they live.

Principle 2: There needs to be high quality teaching by teachers who are actually allowed to teach, not simply treated as disposable test monitors and collectors of misleading “data” from the deeply flawed corporate-created barrage of high-stakes testing.

Principle 3: The students will have thorough wraparound supports with counselors, social workers and other professionals who can help address their social and emotional needs. But the Coalition wants to go beyond simply the therapeutic model. The Coalition envisions a series of internships, apprenticeships and colloquia that would help students find themselves by giving them actual responsibility as they learn practical skills for navigating human relationships and meeting the challenges of social justice.

These experiences would begin in the 9th grade with a local community organization and change the 10th grade year to an organization dealing with citywide issues, then an organization that deals with national issues at the 11th grade and finally move to one that has a global focus as seniors. As students grow, mature and discover more about themselves, they also gain understanding of their complex relationship to a global society.

Principle 4: One of the contradictions of U.S. public education is that while it is supposed to prepare students to live in a democratic society, the actual organization of most schools is based on a totalitarian model of control and management from above.

A sustainable community school seeks to end the adversarial relationship between teachers and administrators, among teachers themselves and between the adults and the youth. This is done through an intense collaboration that emphasizes how all members of the school are part of the same struggle. Gutstein quoted a teacher friend of his who said, “My students don’t resist me because we are too busy resisting the system together.”

Restorative justice would be an important component in rethinking relationships within the school. Although Gutstein did not elaborate on what restorative justice means, here is one definition from the Chicago youth advocacy group Alternatives [2]:

[P]eer conferences, restorative conversations and circles create non-judgmental spaces for a student who broke a school rule, those affected, and members of the school community to discuss what happened, build accountability, and collaborate to find solutions that will repair the harm caused. This approach empowers students to be leaders in violence prevention, conflict resolution, and school safety.

Principle 5: Although often derided as a liberal cliché, the phrase “It takes a village to raise a child” is taken literally in a sustainable community school. Gutstein emphasized how the experience, knowledge and wisdom of the adults in the school community and in the larger community is the foundation upon which one can build parent committees, the local school council and various advisory groups. Teachers can then learn from parents and people in the community about building the curriculum and shaping the goals of the school. All of this requires parent spaces within the building.

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WHY GREEN technology in Bronzeville?

I asked Rico Gutstein this question directly because I know there are people who wonder about that. His answer was quite direct: “For one thing, it’s a food desert. That’s the starting point.” There are few general supermarkets in working-class communities of color, and when nutritious, organic food is available, it is too expensive for tight working-class budgets.

Organic urban agriculture is at the heart of the Dyett green technology plan. The Windy City Harvest farm is right next to the Dyett Building, and along with three other urban farms is a partner in the Coalition. When Dyett High School was open, students worked in the Windy City farm through the school year, but mainly in the summer where they held a weekly farmers’ market.

The Chicago Botanic Garden, a Coalition partner, would like to create a rooftop garden and also use the atrium spaces to grow food. The Coalition plans to integrate their urban farming concepts into an already existing CPS culinary arts program. Students could not only learn how to work in restaurants and food stores, but could prepare for careers in organic urban agriculture and green urban planning that works with the already existing food distribution infrastructure to transition into creating a new food infrastructure that works for working-class communities.

In 2013, the United Nations issued a report saying that we must phase out the current system of industrialized agriculture with its reliance on fossil fuels, chemical fertilizers and pesticides if humanity wants to feed itself. The Dyett organic urban agriculture plan is right on time.

In addition to the urban agriculture component, The Coalition would like the Dyett building to be certified as LEED platinum, the highest green building rating. This would be a multiyear process, which would involve the students in planning and creating the ecological systems necessary to achieve this. Energy conservation and renewable energy sources are critical for meeting today’s environmental challenges. Once again, the Dyett vision is right on time.

It’s important to understand that the Coalition’s vision goes far beyond preparing students for the option of getting green jobs, as important as that is. There is also an all-encompassing philosophical or spiritual component that will go along with everything they plan to do–that the earth is our mother and human consciousness must be in harmony with that basic reality.

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“Why are they fighting us so hard about such a good plan? Why don’t they want our children to have a high quality school? Why don’t they want our children to succeed, to feel good about what they are doing in school?”
— Irene Robinson

WHY INDEED? Why on a planet undergoing terrifying climate change, and whose human population still suffers from the twin curses of poverty and violence, would the mayor and Board of Education oppose a school based on green technology and global leadership?

The Coalition proposal speaks of young people entering the global stage as actors who have studied social and physical reality in depth, of young people learning academic and artistic disciplines on behalf of environmental sustainability as well as peace and justice.

Does anyone seriously believe we can achieve environmental sustainability, peace and justice within the confines of our present, badly broken racist social system? Either in the community of Bronzeville or in the world at large?

The system may be badly broken for most of us, but it works well enough for the corporate elite, which is who Mayor Emanuel and the Board of Education truly represent.

The Dyett proposal speaks of young people using their education to become global leaders, transforming their world and bettering the planet. This is education for liberation and is implicitly revolutionary in its implications. What if other communities began to demand such an education, an education that challenges a corrupt and brutal system of oppression? What then?

Perhaps this answers Irene Robinson’s question, “Why are they fighting us so hard about such a good plan?”

*THIS ARTICLE RECENTLY APPEARED AT SOCIALISTWORKER.ORG