Monroe Anderson

Mayor 1% takes on a community organizer

 

 The first of three Chicago runoff mayoral election debates took place Monday night. Rahm Emanuel outperformed his challenger, Jesus "Chuy" Garcia. But there are two debates in a little over two weeks before we'll know who's the last man standing. Here's my Chicago Defender column.

 

Chuy win over Rahm still debatable

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

 

Jesus “Chuy” Garcia had to do just one thing during Monday night’s first mayoral debate: Channel his inner Harold Washington to show Rahm Emanuel and the rest of Chicago who was the boss.

       Mission unaccomplished.

       Garcia came off as the man who would be mayor. Emanuel came off as the mayor.

      In a testy verbal battle between Commissioner Congeniality and Mayor Meany, both men made valiant efforts to go against type. It was obvious that Emanuel was working hard at being more likeable. It was just as apparent that Garcia was attempting to be No Mas Mr. Nice Guy.  At the same time, each man was out to typecast the other.

Without name calling, Garcia, the community organizer, reminded voters why there is a book out there entitled, Mayor 1%.

“Chicagoans need to know that this mayor has provided corporate welfare to his cronies, millionaires and billionaires, in Illinois in terms of tax increment financing and that he promised four years ago to put Chicago’s fiscal house in order,” Garcia said.  “We’re in a financial free fall. The city has been downgraded, three of its agencies over the past two weeks, to near junk bond status.”

Cook County Commissioner Garcia charged that while “trying to talk in a sophisticated way,” the mayor wasn’t saying anything that would help any Chicagoan who wasn’t physically or professionally in the Loop.

Mayor Emanuel, chum to the corporations, was far smoother than Garcia but just as combative while sticking to the story in his TV attack ads charging that his runoff challenger is all Windy City planner with no specifics on how he intended to get things done.          

The mayor even threw in a short lecture. “The difference between being a legislator,” said Rahm, once a Congressman, to Chuy, once a state senator, is “you pass a bill. When you’re the mayor, you have to pay the bills.”

Throughout the hour-long debate the mayor stuck it to Garcia for not being specific while glued to talking points that sounded more specific than they actually were.  Neither candidate has presented a scenario that would hoist Chicago out of the deep financial hole that 20 plus years of Mayor Richard M. Daley dug for the city. Garcia wouldn’t say whether he will or will not raise property taxes. Emanuel who once said that property taxes were the last resort, now says they’re off the table.

The mayor has let his $15 million war chest do the talking. A constant barrage of TV ads telling Chicagoans that Garcia hasn’t a clue and others, with the mayor in a Mr. Rogers sweater explaining that while he may be a jerk, he’s our jerk appear to be working. An Ogden and Fry poll Saturday showed Emanuel at 47.1 percent, compared to Garcia’s 37.6 percent. A Chicago Tribune poll released the day before reported Emanuel at 51 percent and Garcia at 37 percent with 11 percent undecided.

In order for the mayor to win another term all that may be required for the next 20 days is for him to keep up the attack ads while playing nice. Saturday’s endorsement by the powerful Service Employees International Union should deliver Garcia more money and an army of campaign workers but he’ll still have to throw more elbows.

The mayoral challenger needs to rally the old Harold Washington coalition of Blacks, Hispanics and progressive whites. But more than anything else, Garcia will need to get out the Black vote.

To do that, he needs to hold news conferences in front of one or two of the 50 closed neighborhood schools. While at one of them he needs to point out that Emanuel’s closing of the six mental health clinics was just one more blow to the same low-income neighborhoods impacted by the school closings. He needs to talk about how, as with the parking meters under Daley, Emanuel has privatize the CTA fare system, thus killing another of the city’s geese that should lay the taxpayers golden eggs.

Garcia needs to emphasize and re-emphasize that unlike Mayor Washington, Mayor Emanuel has not been not fairer than fair while waving the Chicago Sun-Times report that whites continue to dominate the city’s highest paying jobs at City Hall and throughout city government. Among Chicago’s 32,500 city employees, 46 percent are white, 31.8 percent are Black, 18 percent Hispanic and fewer than three percent Asian.

      These are the specifics Garcia should be addressing, not suggesting improbable fixes to what is nearly an impossible problem--pulling a $9 billion rabbit out of the hat.     He’ll get a second chance next Thursday at the second mayoral runoff debate.

  

 

Post post-racial America

 

Half a century after the Selma March, race still matters in America as events in Selma, Alabama, Madison, Wisconsin and Norman, Oklahoma demonstrated. Here's my take in my Chicago Defender column

 

From Selma to Madison to Norman

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

 

The march, a shooting and a song summed up this past weekend just how far this nation has gone and just how far it has yet to go.

 

The nation’s first African American president stood near the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to mark the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” one of the most important feats of the Civil Rights Movement. Out of the epic confrontation between forces of peace and progress and the agents of brute force, Blacks won the right to vote in the South.

 

“We just need to open our eyes and our ears and our hearts to know that this nation’s racial history still cast it’s long shadow upon us,” President Barack Obama told the integrated crowd of thousands who had gathered to commemorate, along with him, the Selma to Montgomery March. “We know the march is not yet over. We know the race is not yet won.”

 

As if to underscore the president’s point, some 898 miles north from Selma, in Madison, Wisconsin, another white cop shot and killed another unarmed black teenager and some 783 miles northwest of Selma, in Norman, Oklahoma, a YouTube video went viral exposing tuxedo-clad white frat boys chanting a bus-trip song about racial exclusion and lynching.

 

The lyrics to the song were not exactly surprising, considering that Sigma Alpha Epsilon is 159 years old and is the only national fraternity founded in the Antebellum South. The fraternity boasts on its website that during the Civil War 92 percent of SAE members fought for the Confederate states.

 

In case you missed the video or didn’t catch the lyrics, here they are in all of their good ol’ boy, old-fashioned, garden-variety racist glory:

"There will never be a ni**** in SAE.

There will never be a ni**** in SAE.

You can hang him from a tree, but he can never sign with me

There will never be a ni**** in SAE."

 

I find this alarming because this isn’t a bunch of curmudgeonly, bitter old white men hating on hope and change but young guys who are white America’s future. After these frat boys graduate from college, they’ll move on into the corporate pipeline where some day some of them will have the power to hire and fire with “there will never be a ni**** “ playing like the soundtrack to their lives in their heads.

 

The SAE chanters may represent a throwback to mid-century American racism, but times have changed. Rather than stonewall the Unheard, a group of Black student activists at OU who had learned of the video and posted it online, or buy time with a three-month investigation, David Boren, the university president, immediately shut the fraternity down.

 

The national headquarters of SAE, which prides itself in having a membership of “gentlemen and leaders.” followed Boren’s lead and immediately suspended the OU chapter.

 

With no blood thirsty state troopers or Selma police waiting to do battle, what was supposed to be a march was so well attended by so many movers and shakers that it turned into an extravaganza. Not only was America’s current president there but also former President George W. Bush, along with Capitol Hill lawmakers galore.

 

It was plainly easier to take photo-ops  than it has been to pass a new voter’s rights law that would repair the damage the five right wing activists on the Supreme Court did two years ago to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. By a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that southern states that had historically suppressed the Black vote no longer had to prove they were no longer suppressing the Black vote. Since then, southern states like Texas has come up with all sorts of creative, new-fangled ways to diminish the number of Blacks and Browns casting their votes at the ballot box.

 

We can vote now but we can’t stop the unjustifiable killings of black men and boys by frightened or ferocious cops.

 

Even with the “Black Lives Matter” and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” protests becoming this generation’s civil rights movement, policemen across the nation continue to create more martyrs.

 

Friday night a Madison policeman shot Tony Robinson, an unarmed biracial teen, five times in the chest. The 19-year-old Robinson had a file on his with a conviction last year for armed robbery and a diagnosis that he suffered from attention-deficit disorder and anxiety and depression.

 

Officer Matt Kenny, a 12-year veteran, has been put on paid administrative leave while the Wisconsin Department of Justice investigates the Robinson’s death. Kenny was involved in another fatal shooting in 2007, that was found justified; a so-called suicide by cop case.

 

So while Selma was throwing a grand party, 2,000 protesters, mainly Wisconsin students, have been peacefully marching in Madison while chanting, “Black lives matter.”

 

Some students’ chants are far better than others.

 

From jail cell to ballot box

 

 

Chicago's mayoral run-off election on April 7 looks like it may be too close to call. VOTE--Voice of the Ex-Offenders--plans to make its presence felt in the election. Whether the organization pulls it off or not is worth watching. Here's my March 4, 2015 Chicago Defender column on the election and VOTE.

 

Will ex-offenders be on offensive for April’s Run-off?

 

Monroe Anderson

DEFENDER COLUMNIST

 

 

If community activist Ziff Sistrunk’s plan is well laid, Chicagoans who did time for breaking the law may be the decisive players in determining who makes some of the city’s laws in the future.

Along with mayoral candidates, Rahm Emanuel and Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, a record number of aldermen—more than a third—are in next month’s run-off election. As of now, all bets are off regarding who will be the winners and losers after the votes are counted.

By the time the tallying is done, and all the talking points about law and order and budget balancing are delivered, Sistrunk says he wants to make sure that both mayoral candidates and the 19 aldermanic candidates have addressed one other subject: What to do about Chicago’s neglected population of ex-offenders.

That’s what to do with them, not to them. This ambitious plan is not one of those “keep an eye on them so we can catch them before they violate again.” It’s one that recognizes that ex-offenders paid their debt to society and ought to be given a fair shake and full participation in what those of us who have walked the straight and narrow take for granted.

Sistrunk says his organization, VOTE—Voice of the Ex-Offenders, has already launched what it’s calling the “X-Offenders 6:45 A.M. Movement.” Forty-five minutes after the polls open at 6 a.m. on April 7, the mission is to have 50,000 ex-cons standing first in line just itching to vote for the candidate who has pledged to look out for them.  

To pull this off, Sistrunk says he has recruited 50 ex-offenders to round up 1000 voters in each of Chicago’s 50 wards. The end result is to have 50,000 voters across the city making a political point.

Voter turnout could even be greater since an ex-con exercising his civic duty presumably would bring his family and friends along, reversing the poor participation the city experienced during last week’s election.

Since he was released from Pontiac prison nearly four decades ago after doing two and a half years for armed robbery, Sistrunk, who is the director of the South Side’s Kirby Puckett Youth Center, has taken on his fair share of quixotic challenges. For example, along with perennial candidate William “Dock” Walls, in 2007, Sistrunk was briefly a mayoral challenger to Mayor Richard M. Daley until he failed to get the 12,500 signatures he needed to get on the ballot. Three years ago, Sistrunk was one of the supporters outside Rod Blagojevich’s house protesting the stiff sentencing on the last day of the governor’s freedom.

In five short weeks, we’ll know if the community activist is better at organizing than he is at pipe dreaming. I’m hoping that Sistrunk’s for real and has real skills to galvanize and mobilize ex-offenders that get them out to vote. There’s a real need. Ex-offenders remain second-class citizens in America. In Illinois, they can’t live in public housing, can’t coach your kid in Little League and can’t work for the city or state.

Nationally, it’s worse. If you did the crime, then do the time, you still can’t vote.

An estimated 5.8 million Americans are prohibited from casting a ballot by state law because of current or previous felony convictions. “That’s more than the individual populations of 31 U.S. states,” U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said last month in a speech to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights at Georgetown University Law Center. “And although well over a century has passed since post-Reconstruction states used these measures to strip African Americans of their most fundamental rights, the impact of felony disenfranchisement on modern communities of color remains both disproportionate and unacceptable.”

The war on drugs and the creation of the Prison Industrial Complex has compounded this discriminatory development. Under the Obama Administration, federal life sentences have fallen dramatically from 280 in fiscal year 2009 to 153 in 2013 and according to a report released Monday, but three-fourths of federal life sentences are given to minorities and the bulk are for non-violent drug offenses. Although the report didn’t say why there are fewer life sentences now than before Obama was sworn in, it’s more than likely because five years ago the president signed a bill narrowing the crack and powder cocaine sentencing disparity from 100:1 to 18:1 and for the first time eliminates the mandatory minimum sentence for simple possession of crack cocaine.

More work needs to be done. Since Illinois is one of only 16 states where ex-offenders can vote, it makes sense to make that vote count here.   

Sistrunk says he wants to make sure that opportunities abound for ex-offenders. Come April 7, he will have a chance to prove that he can deliver. If he doesn’t, it will be an opportunity missed.