Rahm’s priorities. Public schools? No. A billion dollar tunnel.

This morning we are home from a short vacation to L.A. to see friends and enjoy perfect Santa Monica weather.

An old friend lent his apartment to us for a few days.

The big transportation news from Santa Monica and Venice is motorized scooters that can be rented through an app.

The app tells you where they are (they are everywhere) and you can leave them where you are when you are done (they are left everywhere). The streets are full of young and old folks scooting around. If they were in Chicago they would be road kill.

Our flight came in at midnight and we caught a ride share home.

This morning I see in the paper that Rahm wants billionaire Elon Musk to build a tunnel from the Loop to O’Hare that would get people to the airport in 12 minutes.

One moment please.

I am currently reading Rus Bradburd’s All the Dreams We Dreamed: A Story of Hoops and Handguns on Chicago’s West Side.

Rus and Shawn Harrington, the real life protagonist of the book, will be our guests on Hitting Left with the Klonsky Brothers next June 22nd. Friday at 11am. 105.5fm Chicago. Streaming live at http://www.lumpenradio.com and podcast.

The book is riveting.

A sub-text of the story of Shawn Harrington, a coach at Chicago’s historic Marshall High School who was shot and paralyzed protecting his daughter and saving her life, is the neglect – the attempted destruction – of Chicago’s public schools by our mayor and mayor before him.

A non-fiction story that brought tears to my eyes.

Real tears on an airplane.

So when I read this morning about the agreement between Rahm and Elon Musk to build a billion dollar tunnel from the Loop to O’Hare I just can’t imagine.

What are the man’s priorities?

Who is this for?

 

Random thoughts. WikiLeaks and the Democrats’ Rahm problem.

In 2014 we got the chance to look inside the Clinton White House with the release of a memo from Rahm Emanuel to the President. The memo shows Rahm telling Bill Clinton to increase deportations and mimic Richard Nixon as a law and order politician.

Donald Trump has picked up on the same Nixonian law and order theme for his anti-immigrant election campaign.

Rahm’s law and order memo.

“The GOP Congress wants to fight the immigration issue out on government benefits. You want to take it to them on the workplace. The INS should be directed to expand the VIS to key industries, beyond meat-packers and poultry. Halfway through your term you want to claim a number of industries free of illegal immigrants,” wrote Rahm.

“This is great!,” responded Bill Clinton.

One of the emails released by WikiLeaks this week shows that Rahm’s immigrant problem came up in the early days of the Obama administration.

Obama was considering Rahm as Chief of Staff.

White House Domestic Policy Director Cecilia Munoz criticized Emanuel as a potential pick.

“So I hate to bug you with anything else knowing how much must be going on, but the Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff rumor is circulating like wildfire,” Munoz wrote in an email to President Barack Obama’s campaign that was forwarded to Podesta. “Folks know how explosive that would be in my part of the world, no?”

 

Obama ignored the advice and selected Rahm as his first Chief of Staff.

It turned out to be a bad choice. Rahm was said to be a divisive element among Obama’s White House staff. It has been widely reported that many among Obama’s people were happy to see him leave and run for Mayor. None more than Michelle Obama.

The Sun-Times reports that the Clinton campaign appears confident of victory enough to bring Rahm out in public. It appears part of the plan to rehabilitate the Mayor in preparation for a possible third term.

With this guy, I think that may be premature.

Rahm has handed Trump a dog whistle.

The tragedy of Chicago gun violence and systematic police misconduct is one felt by Chicago citizens every day.

Every decent person in this city wants to find a way to end it and is disgusted watching Donald Trump use our city’s name as a dog whistle to his racist base of voters.

He can thank Rahm, and we can blame Rahm, for that.

And now Rahm has handed Trump another gift.

Rahm’s refusal to bargain a pay raise for the teachers in our public schools has provoked a strike deadline for October 11th.

Less than four weeks before the general election thirty thousand striking teachers in their red shirts, marching down La Salle Street will make every evening news show and hourly on cable.

Trump has no chance of taking Illinois.

But Chicago, run by a Clinton Democrat, has become a Trump racist dog whistle. Chicago is the message Trump whispers behind closed doors and at his pep rallies.

He snuck into Chicago yesterday without announcing his schedule to speak to a pro-Trump gathering of Polish Americans and then ran to the safety of the Chicago suburbs.

It was the first time he stepped foot in this city since we ran him out forcing him to cancel an appearance months ago.

His message:

Hillary Democrats can’t govern. 

Hillary can’t be pleased. And Senate Democrat Tammy Duckworth, locked in a close race with Mark Kirk and key to a Democratic majority in the Senate, must be pulling her hair out.

The vote to strike on October 11th is not irreversible.

And Rahm has the money to settle it.

I’m betting Hillary wants it settled.

WBEZ’s Sarah Karp and Becky Vevea report this morning:

The teachers union presented a clear path for Mayor Rahm Emanuel that could avert a strike: Release more Tax Increment Finance funds to Chicago Public Schools. TIFs are special taxing districts that are used for economic development.

CTU Vice President Jesse Sharkey called the TIF fund a “slush fund for the mayor that supports wealthy developers.” The union has argued that some of that money could be used for teacher salaries and also to restore some positions closed due to budget cuts.

Rahm miraculously came up with the money to hire a thousand cops.

Without an across the board salary increase, up to 8,000 veteran teachers, members of the union, will receive no step and lane increase at all and no raise.

The morning news is good for Hillary.

The New York Times election forecast has her as a 71% favorite.

For the first time in weeks, Nate Silver has her as a better than 60% favorite.

But that all may change October 11th.

Rahm has gone from the F word to the B word.

Ben Joravsky is right, of course.

My guess is that somewhere in the back of their minds Rahm and Rauner and Walker have concluded it’s easier to fight a union of women than it is to take on a union of men.

You could say that Rahm started out as mayor screaming the F word at CTU President Karen Lewis. This time in these negotiations he is adding the B word. Teacher pension threats and underfunding at both the city and state level have always have their greatest impact on women. In the city, a huge percentage of retired teachers are African American women.

Teacher contracts and teacher pensions are women’s issues.

Teacher pension rights are women’s rights.

Not only women. But a significant number.

Before I retired I worked as a K-5 art teacher in Park Ridge District 64. The high school district that included Maine South was a separate district with a separate union local, separate school board, separate collective bargaining agreement with a separate salary schedule.

When we sat down to bargain with our board the first thing we would do is draw up a list of comparable districts to compare salaries.

The board always fought us on including the high school districts.

Maine South’s salary schedule was much higher than ours.

Same town. Same tax base.

More male employees in the high school district.

Rahm’s response to the Chicago Teachers Union’s  one year CBA offer is “F*#k you B#*%H.”

Same as its ever been.

Republicans and Democrats combine to destroy my city and state.

I fly to Orlando tomorrow for the annual meeting of the National Education Association.

God only knows what I will return to when I come back on July 7th.

The Democratic Party Mayor of Chicago and the Republican Governor of Illinois are playing tag-team destroyers of the city and the state respectively.

Yesterday negotiators for the Chicago Teachers Union left the bargaining session with Rahm’s hand-picked board of education and said they had nothing.

“We are clear that CPS is broke on purpose and their fiscal crisis, though of their own making, is real,” said CTU President Karen Lewis at a press conference standing with her large team of negotiators.

“That is why we are negotiating for meaningful solutions to the corporate-sponsored policies that make our jobs difficult. This isn’t about money, this is about standing up for what is right in pedagogy and for what is right for our students and their families.

“We want the autonomy to properly grade and an end to countless, unnecessary testing; more counselors, nurses, social workers and other clinicians in our school buildings to help students deal with environmental stresses (such as poverty, homelessness and violence that hinder learning); and we want the cuts to special education to end. The Board refuses to even discuss progressive revenue options that are available to provide long-term solutions to their self-created fiscal crisis. Why? If they are cash strapped, then why won’t they look into these options at all?”

The Mayor’s board will not even consider non-salary proposals that improve the learning conditions of Chicago’s public school students who are mostly poor and children of color.

Lewis said the CTU would return to the bargaining table.

But with without a change in the bargaining position of the Mayoral controlled school board, the future looks bleak and a strike seems inevitable.

Meanwhile Governor Private Equity has vetoed the legislature’s budget bills, moving the state closer to a total shut-down.

And a lock-out of public employees.

Tens of thousands of the state’s neediest will face a ton of hurt. Many already have as funding to state-funded social service agencies and organizations have seen their state support disappear.

The Governor is holding a gun to the head of the legislature to pass law that is aimed squarely at the rights of unionized public workers.

Without agreeing to his anti-union agenda, no budget will get passed him.

City of Chicago employees and retirees: Rahm’s budget will cost you plenty.

You may have missed it on Friday when Rahm released his budget promises because an alderman went off message and said property taxes would go up no matter what. That made the headlines.

But Rahm’s real message is that city employees and retirees will carry the burden of budget mismanagement.

The five core principals (sic) to reform include:

• Slow the growth of pension costs by reforming the cost of living formula. In the agreements for three pensions funds reached last year, we worked with organized labor to shift cost of living adjustments from a formula based on compound interest to a simple interest approach. This means that retirees will continue to see an increase in their pension payments each year, but at a somewhat slower growth rate tied to inflation. Our pension reform agreements have also included a series of one-year freezes of cost of living adjustments that allow the funds to catch their breath.

• Maintain the current retirement age for public employees. Though retirement age is a common reform pushed by governments across the country, Rahm believes that our hard-working public servants have planned on retiring and are entitled to the security that they have depended upon for years.

• Gradually increase employee contributions. While we will ask taxpayers to pay more, we also ask current employees to pay a little extra towards their retirements. In the reforms we worked with labor to pass last year, active employees contribute an average of roughly $300 a year more towards their retirements. This same commitment from the employees of the remaining three funds will make a significant contribution toward the solvency of their funds.

• Protect retirees with lower pension income. To ensure we protect those struggling to make ends meet, we exempted retirees with annuities of $22,000 a year or less from certain cost of living formulas. We must continue to protect this segment of retirees in future agreements.

• Phase in funding increases. We must restructure pension payments in a way that allows the City’s taxpayers to ease into making the required payments. Just as we’re asking employees to increase their contribution slowly and steadily over time, we would ask the same of taxpayers. After decades of politicians kicking the can down the road and underfunding public employee pensions, we cannot ask taxpayers to bear the burden of a massive balloon payment all in one year. This shock would decimate the city’s budget and the Chicago economy.

If you read it and miss anything about taxing Rahm’s wealthy friends, it is not a reading problem.

It isn’t there.

Rahm screams at mental health activists, “YOU’RE GONNA RESPECT ME!”

Photo montage of Rahm at Wicker Park incident: Kenzo Shibata.

– By Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle as posted on the Mental Health Movement’s Facebook page.

Mental Health Movement members Debbie Delgado and Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle just confronted Rahm face-to-face about his mental health clinic closures. Rahm was about to address a small room of developers and residents at the Wicker Park field-house. 3 years after he closed half of Chicago’s public mental health clinics, he may have thought the issue had gone away. But then Debbie, sitting in the front row, a few feet from the mayor, stood up to tell her story. She told of losing her son to gun violence.

She told him how her other son was holding him as he died. She told about how the city’s Northwest Mental Health Clinic in Logan Square saved their lives, helped her and her son deal with the PTSD and depression.

Then she asked why he took that clinic away from her. Why he closed a clinic and now a bar sits in that space. Why he closed five other mental health clinics. Why he thought she would be able to travel an extra hour past three cemeteries to get to the clinic she was supposed to be transferred to without having an anxiety attack on the way. Why he has left her with no options. Why he has left her with her son closed in, barely leaving the house anymore, refusing to see a new therapist since Rahm Emanuel took away their clinic.

After trying to keep his cool, he told us that he would speak to us after the event in a separate room. There, we saw the Real Rahm.

Now off camera, Rahm’s voice raised, his demeanor changed, in no time he was shouting in Matt’s face, nose-to-nose “YOU’RE GONNA RESPECT ME!”

He corrected Rahm’s faulty statistics, saying that no, psychiatric services were not expanded, that in fact the city cut $2.3 million by closing 6 clinics and only redistributed $500,000 of that to private clinics and that those clinics have only seen a couple hundred additional people, whereas 3,000 people are unaccounted for since he announced the closure of those mental health clinics.

The Real Rahm accused Debbie and Matt of “creating a circus in there,” to which we responded that two close friends – Mental Health Movement heros Jeannette Hanson and Helen Morley – had lost their lives because of his decision to close their clinics, that there is nothing humorous to us about what we did in there, that we had tried since months before the clinic closures to meet with him, that Helen (who was looking at Rahm from Debbie’s t-shirt) had shouted to him “If you close my clinic I will die” only to die a month after he ignored those shouts.

When Rahm told Debbie he is going to have the new Commissioner of Public Health personally find her a new mental health clinic to go to, she said “this isn’t about me, this is about all of us, about the movement, about the south and west sides of the city that don’t have mental health now. Don’t try to just fix my situation, re-open all of our clinics.”

He had his PR guy take our number and left, unable to respond. This is the Real Rahm. Calm and collected in public, raging angry and self-defensive behind closed doors.

The only people in the room were two PR staff, two body guards, us and the man that closed half of Chicago’s public mental health clinics – Rahm Emanuel.

During his White House days Rahm got no endorsement from Michelle Obama.

It is no secret she didn’t like him much.

With $30 million in his campaign’s bank account but polling well shy of his needed 50% plus one to avoid a run-off, Rahm Emanuel has turned to his old boss, President Obama for a radio ad.

It will be surprising if First Lady Michelle Obama will be in it.

It is well documented that she doesn’t like The Mayor.

From a 2012 Tribune article:

Washington politics tends to require meticulous planning, but Emanuel appeared to be winging it — focusing on day-to-day concerns at the expense of the long-term, according to the book by New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor.

There was no set agenda during Emanuel’s 7:30 a.m. meetings for top staffers, according to Kantor, who wrote that, “it often seemed driven by what was in the newspaper that morning.”

“Even Emanuel’s allies admitted his style was scattered: ‘schizophrenia’ as one said. His philosophy was to put a ‘point on the board’ meaning some small advance or victory, each day, to eventually win the match,” Kantor writes.

The book’s portrayal of Emanuel stands in contrast to the controlled and calibrated image he has tried to project in his opening months as mayor.

Emanuel is not the focus of “The Obamas,” a book about the first couple’s first years in the White House, but he plays an significant supporting role.

On paper, everyone in the West Wing reported to Emanuel, who reported to the president. In reality, Kantor writes, there were several power centers competing for access and influence, including Emanuel,Vice President Joe Biden, and senior advisers David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett.

After the midterm elections in 2010, it was clear Obama “needed a more traditional structure, with a streamlined decision-making process flowing through a chief of staff who had true authority,” according to the book.

One of Obama’s first major decisions was tapping Emanuel as chief of staff. Unlike his boss, Emanuel was combative, unafraid to push or even insult, Kantor writes.

“Emanuel was restless, sly, casually abusive, and almost always willing to cut a deal,” according to the book. “He could yell at you and eat a brownie off your plate at the same time.”

Emanuel, however, had learned lessons during his time in President Bill Clinton’s White House: “Avoid symbolic issues and ideological battles.” Hillary Clinton also taught him another one: “Stay out of the first lady’s way.”

Emanuel did not always appear to heed that when it came to Michelle Obama. There were occasions when he’d make a commitment on the first lady’s behalf without consulting her first.

The first lady also had her doubts about Emanuel. The two were philosophical and temperamental contrasts who had almost no bond, Kantor writes, and their relationship was “distant and awkward from the beginning.”

Rahm says “status quo is unacceptable” and brings back the ghosts of Daley and Duncan.

Million dollar board member Deborah Quazzo sits on the mayoral appointed school board.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel gave his campaign education talk to a private group yesterday. The attendance by invite only included invites to Jonah Edelman’s Stand for Children.

Rahm held it at the Cultural Center. The choice of location is ironic because his plans for CPS schools, if re-elected, have very little to do with culture.

I’ll get to that topic in a moment.

Catalyst:

If elected to a second term, Mayor Rahm Emanuel promises that within three years the graduation rate will go up by 15 points to 85 percent, the number of preschool classrooms will triple to 300 and the senior year of high school will be redesigned to include internships and 6,000 students taking City College classes to earn college credit.

Emanuel also plans to bring back Freshman Connection, a program that was designed to help incoming ninth-graders acclimate to high school; and give principals at good schools freedom from some district mandates. Both these ideas were in place under former Mayor Richard M. Daley.

Make that Daley AND Arne Duncan.

Dusting off Daley and Duncan’s school ideas coming from The Man that attacked the Chicago Teachers Union as standing for the status quo?

That’s not status quo. That is raising the dead.

Emanuel told the crowd, which included advocates from organizations such as Stand for Illinois, that closing schools was something he did not want to do, but that he needed to get students out of failing schools. Further, he said the debate should not be between charters and neighborhood schools, but rather between quality and lack of quality in any school. He did not say whether or how many charter schools he will open in the next term, nor did he say whether he will close more schools.

 

Rahm should tell the students this morning as they walk through sub-zero temperatures past their former – but now shuttered or sold – neighborhood schools that he didn’t really want to close their 50 schools.

Raise Your Hand’s Wendy Katten points out that among other things Rahm has done to Chicago schools is failing to fund the arts. Only 47% of CPS students have more than 2 hours of Art a week.

Even for the 47%, the bar for “having art” is set pretty low.

That is the irony of holding his selective admission announcement at the Cultural Center.

It should be no surprise to readers that I get comments from lots of trolls. Most I trash.

Yesterday I received a couple from two different trolls who attacked me for having been an art teacher prior to retirment.

“Gee Freedie, you get a 100,000 pension for K1-3 Art????? No wonder you took the job as union pres,” wrote one.

$100,000 pension? What year?

Another troll accused me of “most likely in your case grading rudimentary stick figure drawings of which you obviously and unbelievably made a career of teaching!”

That those who hate public schools and hate public school teachers also hate and hold the Arts in contempt should not surprise anyone.

If the Arts were nothing more than drawing stick figures – if the Arts had no more value or meaning than that – why would they and Rahm keep it away from schools that serve poor students and away from schools that serve students of color?

You can bet that something has value when only the rich are guaranteed to get it.