Monroe Anderson

Rahm's second term, second chance

    Mayor Rahm Emanuel reeled in the Black vote, assuring that he'd get a second term. We delivered. This next term this is what I think he should do for us--as I discuss in my Chicago Defender column.

 

The Mayor's to-do list for his second term

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

 

Thanks to Black Chicagoans voting against their our own interests, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, with a double-digit lead, will have four more years to oversee who gets the wheat and who gets the chaff. In his first four years, the mayor put a lot of time and energy into taking care of the Loop and those who either did business or resided there.

Now that he’s got that tied down, I suggest the mayor slip outside the Loop and attend to the rest of Chicago. I’ll even try to give him some of those specifics that Emanuel’s attack ads and debate talking points demanded from challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia.

To be exact, I’d like to talk about Bronzeville.

Back when candidate Rahm Emanuel was one of many hopefuls during the mayoral debate sponsored by the Chicago Defender, I asked him if, as mayor, he would use Tax Increment Financing, or TIFs, as they were intended to be used--as a means to kick start economic development in neighborhoods that could use it the most--or if he’d use them as Mayor Richard M. Daley had used them--as his handy slush fund.

Candidate Emanuel gave the right answer, promising he’d use them for the good of all Chicago. Mayor Emanuel, like the mayor before him, uses TIFs to take care of those communities and businesses that hardly need a helping hand.

There’s the $500,000 TIF that’s been set aside to rescue that economically distressed neighborhood surrounding McCormick Place. Using funds that could have travelled a mile or so further south along the lakefront, the mayor could have spurred development Black businesses that would not only have provided Bronzeville with much-needed good and services but would have seeded Black entrepreneurship in the process.

That didn’t happen. Instead, the money is going to the economically-disadvantage Marriott Corporation so that it can build a 1,200-room hotel right next door to a DePaul University basketball stadium. This plan was hatched even as the mayor was closing down 50 public schools in Black and brown neighborhoods because, he assured us, the city couldn’t afford to keep them up. The scheme was so outrageous that even students on DePaul’s Lincoln Park canvas protested to no avail.

Other dollars directed by the mayor has been better targeted to Black communities where they can make a difference. Mount Sinai Hospital on the city’s West Side is getting $31 million in TIF money. Whole Foods, the grocery chain frequently referred to as Whole Paycheck because it costs more to have organic foods, is getting $10.7 million in TIFs to build a new store in Englewood. A. Finkl & Sons, a specialty metal producer which was formerly in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood before moving to a 44-acre site on 93rd street, received $22.5 million in TIFs to help finance the move.

In all three of these deals, Mayor Emanuel’s use of TIFs undoubtedly will result in more jobs for some in the Black community. But all three business enterprises are white-owned and operated, guaranteeing that when it comes to commerce in Chicago, while folks will still remain ahead.

There are ways that the mayor can pay back all the Black Chicagoans who so slavishly gave him their votes: Invest in the Bronzeville, assuring that Black entrepreneurs are seeded so that they can grow thriving Black businesses. Rather than spoon feed the Black community with penny-ante social services and welfare deals, Mayor Emanuel can use TIF funds and his one percent pals to develop business partnerships where Black businessmen can eventually take over.

Here’s one specific example for the mayor. Since he took office, Rahm has pushed tourism as a major source of business development for the city. Right at 35th Street, in the landmark Supreme Liberty Life Building that was the longtime headquarters of the first African-American owned and operated insurance company in the northern United States, sits The Black Metropolis Convention & Tourism Council.

For $500,000, a mere fraction of what he’s given to Whole Foods to move into Englewood, Mayor Emanuel can help fund an organization, which doesn’t need to move anywhere, in taking visitors on tours that teach them about the history of Bronzeville.

There are other investments I’ll pull the mayor’s coattails to in the future. Four years from now, should he decide he’d like to another term, he should know and Chicago’s Black voters should know, what he’s done for them and what he’s been doing to them.

 

Rahm takes a licking and keeps on ticking

 

 

    This is my commentary on the second Chicago mayoral debate which took place a week ago. This ran on The Root website Tuesday morning. The third and last mayoral debate took place that night.

 

Chicago Mayor’s Race: Rahm Emanuel Takes a

Few Jabs, but He’s Still Standing

By Monroe Anderson

 

Incumbent Mayor Rahm Emanuel sat through the second of Chicago’s three runoff debates looking as if he needed to pinch himself while trying not to look as if he wanted to punch his opponent’s lights out.

He wasn’t supposed to be there. All bets were on Emanuel brushing aside his four much lesser-known challengers in one fell swoop during the Feb. 24 general election.

Why wouldn’t he?

Emanuel had promise that turned into a portfolio. He was the finance director for mayoral candidate Richard M. Daley in 1989 and presidential candidate Bill Clinton in 1992. He became a multimillionaire Wall Street investment banker before returning to Chicago to win Rod Blagojevich’s U.S. House seat. In 2009 he resigned his congressional post to become President Barack Obama’s first chief of staff.

Five days before last month’s general election, Obama returned the favor by cutting a radio ad endorsing Emanuel and flying into Chicago to stump for his former badass buffer while designating the city’s Pullman Historic District a national monument. Mayoral candidate Emanuel also had a campaign war chest that was in the double-digit millions.

None of that was quite enough. Emanuel was too much the unlikable mayor, so the city’s voters didn’t like him back. He fell 4.4 points short of the 50 percent-plus-one votes needed to avoid a runoff.

So there Emanuel sat at Thursday night’s debate, side by side with challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, taking incoming flak from the man he’d bested in the first match 10 days earlier. There he sat, in this second debate, watching Garcia make a comeback by interrupting him, deriding his first four years as the city’s chief executive and even laughing at his carefully crafted mayoral message.

Garcia’s credentials were not nearly as impressive as Emanuel’s. Garcia was not even a millionaire and had no prospect of becoming one. He was a mere Cook County commissioner, a former Illinois state senator and city alderman. He was basically a community organizer daring to challenge the up-and-comer who had definitely become ... da mayor.

In the run up to last month’s general election, the Emanuel campaign spent nearly $7 million on 4,600 TV attack ads defining Garcia as the not-ready-for-the-big-time candidate. The heavy barrage has continued with TV spots attacking Garcia’s nonspecific solutions to Chicago’s $20 billion in unfunded pension debt. The mayor’s positive TV ads presented Emanuel all dressed down, wearing a Mr. Rogers sweater while admitting that sometimes he’s been a jerk but that he’s been a jerk for the good of Chicago.

The TV ads were worth every million. Polls indicate that Emanuel has shifted from a too-close-to-call status to a double-digit lead.

And yet the mayor still had to debate this interloper. Garcia, who comes off like the guy you give a big hug to right before he asks you to all hold hands and sway as you sing “Kumbaya,” was being annoyingly on the offense. The commissioner stuck with his populist rallying points, insisting that he would be a mayor who listened to the people, while Emanuel hadn’t a clue what the voters wanted or needed. Garcia charged that Emanuel wasn’t nearly as good a financial manager as his campaign claimed: If so, why was Chicago’s bond rating downgraded last month to two notches above junk status?

Emanuel still possesses all the no-nonsense, show-me-the-money charm of the Wall Street banker he once was; therefore, he is nothing if not disciplined. So he sat there, attentively listening as Garcia charged that his allowing movie mogul George Lucas to build an interactive museum on 17 valuable acres of free lakefront land was a “monument to Darth Vader.”

It had to bug Emanuel, framing a smile and acting civil throughout much of the debate, that like Garcia, the progressives in his political party were characterizing him as a mayor who could not care less for the little people, simply because he quid-pro-quoed his corporate contributors big privatization contracts. Too many in Chicago were beginning to refer to him as Mayor 1%, just like the book with the same title.

Rahm sat during the hour long debate, methodically sticking to his script. Sure, he closed 50 schools in poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods, but “our kids have a full school day of kindergarten,” he said. Sure, he closed half the city’s mental clinics, but “we added more spaces through federally qualified entities.”

Between the school and health-clinic closings, Chicago’s black voters aren’t as crazy about Emanuel as they were four years ago. The Rev. Jesse Jackson and many of the city’s other black leaders are going with Garcia. Fortunately, Emanuel invested wisely in some key black ministers, politicians and businessmen. They may well balance out the decisive black vote that will determine the winner.

When the debate ended, it was two down and one to go. The last one is tomorrow. The election is April 7. After that, the mayor can wave goodbye and become himself again.

 

Cybercolumnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

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.

 

African Americans are caught between a union and a Republican Place

 

Rauner’s union battle in black and white

By Monroe Anderson

DEFENDER COLUMNIST

   

If anything can that raise a Republican’s ire almost as much as a Black man in the White House, it’s labor unions.

 

So few should have been surprised when the new Republican governor of Illinois, Bruce Rauner, came up with an ingenious initiative to further weaken the state’s labor unions.

 

During last week’s State of the State address, Rauner said he would like to see “empowerment zones” in counties across the state where voters would decide whether unions could exist and workers should be obligated to pay associated dues. Given the governor’s party affiliation and the fact that he’s a one percenter, it’s easy to guess who he is zeroing in on empowering and who he’s zoning out.

 

Making the standard-issue, corporation-coddling Republican argument that the smaller the union presence, the greater the number of jobs, on Monday, Rauner signed Executive Order 15-13, which denies labor the right to deduct dues from state employees who benefit from union activities but don’t want to pay to support them.

 

As our newly constituted Congress is reaffirming, Republicans may be lousy at governing but they are masters of code wording, dog whistling and name-calling.

 

When the GOP set out to do some serious union busting by stripping organized labor of its funding, power and influence, for example, the words destruction and dismemberment were spoken mainly in quiet rooms while those southern states and Midwestern ones where Republicans ruled went about their dirty deeds. Instead, Republicans insisted these would be “right-to-work” states.

 

Rauner is just the latest of Republican governors, who after immediately taking office, has made it his mission to kneecap the unions. Republican Gov. Rick Snyder was not halfway through his first term when he signed a bill making Michigan the 24th right to work state in the nation. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has forged his anti-union alchemy into gold by cutting the collective bargaining rights of most of his state’s public unions and transforming himself into one of the current shiny objects among the potential 2016 Republican presidential nominee contenders.

 

Like Rauner, both Walker and Snyder asserted that their union body slams would mean more jobs for their states. So far, the reasons for Michigan’s modest job increases are debatable and Wisconsin’s job growth has been so slow that Walker grasped at one of the right wing’s threadbare straws blaming it on Obamacare.

 

Union jobs have always been considered “good jobs.” They have also been good for America. Whether it’s the 40-week, paid vacation, pensions, health insurance or higher wages, over the decades labor unions are directly and indirectly responsible for raising the standard of living for millions but cutting into the precious bottom lines of corporations as people and the people who over-reward themselves for running them. Labor unions also fail to endear themselves with Republicans by being important campaign contributors for the Democrats.

 

Unfortunately, for Black Americans, we find ourselves between the labor unions and a Republican place.  

 

One out of every five working Blacks are government employees, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, When the Republican’s national obsession with austerity was running at fever pitch six years ago, governors across America reduced their state’s payroll through mass layoffs of state employees. African Americans, who are overwhelmingly Democrat, took a disproportionate hit, becoming the most fired and at risk of being the least rehired.

 

From the beginning of the Great Migration until now, it’s been a continuous struggle for African Americans in Chicago to get either contractors or the labor unions to cut them in on the action. When black skilled craftsmen, who had come from generations of bricklayers from the south, moved north, by edit, union bosses blocked them from working on the best jobs.

 

History has stubbornly repeated itself. Lilly-white trade unions have been as much a part of the wink and nod society as the boardrooms they take on. Both have been almost exclusively populated with white men. Both have been perfectly satisfied with that chummy arrangement for far too long.

 

Even now, too often when you see construction companies at work on big projects throughout Chicago, you don’t see a crew that looks like the residents of the city. Even with the implementation of set-aside programs, you don’t see big black construction firms getting their fair share of the jobs.

 

Of course all unions are not alike but the battle between the governor and the unions may not be an easy one for Blacks in Illinois to join. It may simply be a case of going with the devil we knew or the devil we’re getting to know.

 

Is Obama's budget a GOP buster?

            

       

President Obama's Budget

 

By Monroe Anderson

DEFENDER COLUMNIST    

 

        So just when America’s richest of the rich was uncorking the champagne and gorging themselves on imported caviar, it looks like the Commander-in-Chief has declared that the Class War is on again.

The opening volley was fired 35 years ago with what George H.W. Bush accurately described as “voodoo economics.” Since then, this nation’s super wealthy have  been getting super wealthier, much of the middle class has been getting poor and the poor have been getting super poor.

A study in October by economists, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, reported that the share of the total income earned by America’s top one percent at the end of 2012 was 22 percent. Back in the late ‘70s, before Reaganomics and it’s trickle down theory, the share of earnings by top one percent was less than 10 percent.

Sticking to his “a rising tide lifts all boats” manner of governing, there was little in President Barack Obama’s proposed annual budget that would pointedly give financially strapped Blacks much hope.

There was no direct budgetary lifeline to the 11.4 percent of African Americans nationwide who are still unemployed and nothing straight up for the 25 percent of Black Chicagoans who are also in that same boat, either.

And, once again, there is no targeted help from the man who assiduously stays in character as all the people’s president--so much so, that some might accuse the nation’s first Black head of household at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with periodically doing back flips to assure those Americans who suffer from negrophobia that he is not practicing negrophilia.

But while there was not enough in the president’s $4 trillion budget proposal to trigger right-winger’s whining about preferential treatment for Blacks and other “takers,” there was more than enough fair share tax proposals aimed at the “makers” for Republicans to pronounce it DOA.

Without openly saying that he really wants to spread the wealth, the president said, “I want to work with Congress to replace mindless austerity with smart investments that strengthen America.”

             He also let Republicans know that he wanted to rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure and that he did not want to spend more on financing the military-industrial complex unless conservatives were willing to spend more on domestic programs that repair rungs on the economic ladder and expand the safety networks for those who have fallen on hard times.

President Obama is shooting for a national debate on whether we should be growing our middle class or allowing our fat cats to get fatter.

Monday’s budget was aimed at kick-starting the debate. Items on President Obama’s wish list included calls for laying a tax on the banks too big to fail, raising of the capital gains tax, limiting of corporate tax deductions, imposing  a new tax on inheritances and taxing of overseas profits held abroad.

Although it is ostensibly a budget for 2016, it is also a game plan for next year’s presidential and congressional elections, meant to serve as the playbook for a consistent message for all Democratic candidates. It’s a rerun of Bill Clinton’s successful message that “it’s the economy, stupid.”

As soon as the president released his blueprint, the conservative talking points flew into action fast and furious.

“We’re six years into the Obama economic policies, and he’s proposing more of the same, more tax increases that kill investment and jobs, and policies which are hardly aspirational,” said Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the GOP’s go-to guy on keeping it all for the Superrich.  “I think the President is trying to do here is to, again, exploit envy economics. This top-down redistribution doesn’t work.”

“Like the president’s previous budgets, this plan never balances – ever,” said House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). “It contains no solutions to address the drivers of our debt, and no plan to fix our entire tax code to help foster growth and create jobs.”

             Echoed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell:  “What we saw this morning was another top-down, backward-looking document that caters to powerful political bosses on the Left and never balances — ever.”

             Never ever allowing an opportunity to blame it on Obama, Republicans didn’t miss a beat.

According to a Pew Research Center’s report released in 2012, the average Black household wealth fell by more than half, to $5,677, while white household wealth fell 16 percent to $113, 149 between 2005 and 2009. That was during the Bush years, right before the Obama administration.  

But the actual beginning the decline in Black household wealth meant nothing to Republican Donald Trump, who has not yet concluded that Obama was not born in Kenya.

“People are having a much lower income right now than when he took office. I mean, that to me is a really terrible statistic and if you happen to be African-American, it’s a total disaster. So what has President Obama done for African-Americans?” asked Trump.  “Nothing.”

             Well said by one of those one percenters.

Obama's straight walking, double talking Urban League speech

The Root called me last night to ask if I could do a quick turnaround commentary on the president's speech at the National Urban League. The is what I wrote.

Obama's Careful Urban League Speech

The president kept his message all-inclusive at the civil rights group's annual convention.

By: Monroe Anderson | Posted: July 26, 2012 at 12:06 AM



(The Root) -- President Barack Obama walked a narrow line in his speech to the National Urban League convention in New Orleans Wednesday night, attempting to fire up his most enthusiastic base while giving his most rabid enemies as little ammo as possible to fire back at him.

It was no easy task. There has been some grumbling in the black community that the first African-American president was taking the last-hired and first-fired community for granted. That sentiment grew stronger this summer after Obama sent Vice President Joe Biden to address the National Association of Black Journalists and the NAACP. So Obama arrived in New Orleans for the annual Urban League meetup possibly fearing that African Americans might not show up in large enough numbers at the polling booths in November.

The president's speech to the venerable civil rights organization hit on the three most critical challenges in the black community -- violence, education and jobs -- while deftly managing to broaden the scope enough so that conservatives wouldn't have an easy shot at labeling his remarks as for blacks only.



 

With the exception of announcing that, by executive order, he was establishing "the first ever White House initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans, so that every child has greater access to a complete and competitive education," the president's speech was pretty much all-American for all Americans.

The POTUS ticked off measures his administration has done to help black students, such as increasing Pell Grants and pushing colleges and universities to cut their costs. But imbedded in those boasts was an unspoken truth: This is good for the rest of our fellow citizens, too.

The same tactic was employed for jobs. "We don't believe government should be in the business of helping people that refuse to help themselves, and we recognize that not every government program works," Obama said. "But we do expect hard work to pay off. We do expect responsibility to be rewarded. We do expect that if you put in enough effort you should be able to find a job that pays off."

Obama also deftly merged the Urban League's mission of equal opportunity into values of the middle class, where prosperity should be broad-based. But in speaking about the tragedies brought on by the senseless deaths from gun violence Obama really integrated his message. "Violence plagues the biggest cities but it also plagues the smallest town," he said. "It claims the lives of Americans of different ages and different races, and it's tied together by the fact that these young people had dreams and had futures that were cut tragically short."

The president spoke of praying for the victims of the massacre in Aurora, Colo.: "We also pray for those who succumb to less publicized acts of violence that plague our communities in so many cities across the country every day. We can't forget about that." Obama's sleight of hand was not just a black-and-white narrative. He delicately drilled deeper into the gun-violence plague without once mentioning gun control.

"I also believe, like other Americans, that AK-47s belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities," he said. Then he went on to say he was going to talk to members of the House and Senate to seek "a consensus around violence reduction." That was another hidden message. I read it as this: "We all know all this gun violence is insane, but I can't afford to rile up the gun nuts right now. I've got an election to win."

Cyber columnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

Discouraging Development: Republicans scheme to suppress vote

 

The conservatives are up to their old tricks. I'm calling them out in my latest commentary for The Root.

 

Déjà Vu in Texas Voter-ID Fight

The Lone Star state is among several places where new legislation will hit blacks hard at the polls.

• By: Monroe Anderson | Posted: July 25, 2012 at 12:57 AM

(The Root) -- If you're a strong believer in coincidence, the outbreak of voter-identification laws across the nation just might make sense. If you're a student of American politics and history, on the other hand, you see it slightly differently. In that case, what you see is what we've got: voter suppression.

Thirty-three states, almost all of them Republican-controlled, now require some sort of voter ID. A decade ago, none did. A decade ago, there was no evidence of massive voter fraud. Today, there remains little evidence of voter fraud.

But there is clear evidence that the rash of voter-ID laws could have a profound impact on African-American participation at the polls. As Attorney General Eric Holder pointed out at the NAACP convention earlier this month, recent studies show that 8 percent of white voting-age citizens lack a government-issued ID, while 25 percent of black voting-age citizens lack one. Considering that Barack Obama received 95 percent of the African-American vote in 2008, if you think Republicans might be interested in suppressing that vote, you might be right.

Take the Lone Star state, for example. Since 2002, there have been only two documented cases of a Texan being convicted for voter impersonation fraud. But last year, a voter-ID law was passed as an "emergency item." Under the proposed Texas state law, concealed handgun licenses would be acceptable forms of photo ID while student IDs would not. Some voters would need to travel 100 miles in Texas, particularly Hispanics, to designated government offices just to get their photo IDs; others would be hard-pressed to pay for the documents needed to get the IDs. The currently contested law, if implemented, would make it easier to buy a gun than to cast a ballot in Gov. Rick Perry's state

Texas is one of 16 mostly Southern states with a history of discrimination required by the Voting Rights Act to get pre-approval from the U.S. attorney general or the U.S. District Court in D.C. for changes in voter procedures. Understanding that Holder would be a bad bet, the state is gambling on the District Court in D.C. ruling in its favor. After a weeklong trial, a three-man panel will announce its judgment later this month on whether Texas is up to its old voter-discrimination tricks.

Unfortunately, the Lone Star state is not alone in adopting restrictive voter-ID laws as a tactic to discourage African-American and Latino voters from showing up at the polls. As is the case in some of the problems Americans face today, we can blame it on George W. Bush. In the aftermath of the Florida fiasco that led to the Supreme Court declaring Bush president, Americans became desperate for measures that might stem voter fraud. Halfway through his first term, Bush signed the Help America Vote Act into law, which required first-time voters in federal elections to show some form of ID during registration or at the polling place.

Although voter identification had little to do with the problem of hanging chads, Republican-controlled Indiana saw its possibilities, then upped the ante. In 2004, Arizona passed a law requiring voters to bring a state-issued photo ID to the polling place. The next year, Indiana's Republicans pushed through a law requiring that a photo ID be shown before a voter could cast a ballot. Civil rights groups and the state's Democratic party challenged the law, arguing that it unjustly targeted poor and minority voters without any evidence that in-person voter fraud was taking place in the Hoosier state.

The same fab five right-wing activist justices on the Supreme Court who ruled that corporations are people also gave Indiana's ID law a nod. Like dominoes falling, Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have followed with restrictive laws requiring voters to show up with photo IDs in hand -- even though in 2007, five years after the George W. Bush administration launched a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department found virtually no evidence of organized efforts to influence federal elections with ineligible voters.

A study by New York's Brennan Center for Justice last week reported that 1.2 million eligible black voters and 500,000 eligible Hispanic voters in the nation live more than 10 miles from their nearest ID-issuing office open more than two days a week. It also reported that "these voters may be particularly affected by the significant costs of the documentation required to obtain a photo ID. Birth certificates can cost between $8 and $25 ... By comparison, the notorious poll tax -- outlawed during the civil rights era -- cost $10.64 in current dollars."

Just why would Republicans want to make minority voters, who don't have and don't need photo IDs in their day-to-day lives, cough up extra cash or go far out of their way in order to exercise their civic duty?

And why, oh, why are the Republicans hand-wringing over non-existent voter fraud? Let's see. As polls have consistently shown, President Barack Obama and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney are locked in a dead heat. Depending on who's counting, there are 10 to 12 swing states that will determine the outcome of November's election. Among those battleground states, Florida, Colorado, Nevada and North Carolina are heavily populated with either Hispanic or black voters who could make a difference. But that's only if they show up and are allowed to cast their ballots.

And, as we all know, stuff happens. Let's just make sure it doesn't happen to us.

Cyber columnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

 

 

ObamaCare The Game could battle the evil Echo Chamber

While attending the National Association of Black Journalists convention last week in New Orleans, I came up with an idea as to how the Obama Administration could help us understand the historic health care law. I wrote a column about it for The Root website.

'Obamacare,' the Video Game?

This writer says that the repacking of the president's accomplishments would keep his message in play.

By: Monroe Anderson | Posted: June 29, 2012 at 12:48 AM

 

(The Root) -- The Saturday before the 2010 November midterm elections, President Obama's campaign strategist David Axelrod was a call-in guest on a radio show I was co-hosting. Team Obama was already bracing for a shellacking, since for months one Republican after the next had lip-synched right-wing talking points, accusing the POTUS of having accomplished zip.

I knew the Republicans were playing fast and loose with the truth. I knew that, like it or not, in his first two years in office, Barack Obama had scratched more off his to-do list than any other U.S. president since Lyndon Baines Johnson.

So I asked Axelrod why so many voters were so clueless as to how President Obama had spent the first two years of his first term. I dare not try to reconstruct the entire answer from the president's then senior adviser, but I will repeat two words that jumped out at me: "Information gridlock."

That's right. Axelrod's defense for a failure to communicate was that Obama's accomplishments came at such a breakneck pace that the White House press office didn't have the time to make sure that everyone following could keep up with the score. Maybe. Maybe not. But it would seem that the one achievement that is the most momentous since LBJ pushed Medicare and Medicaid through Congress in 1965 might have gotten a little special treatment: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

It hasn't helped that from its conception through passage until now, the right-wing echo chamber has been in superdrive, dogging and demonizing the president's health care law. But I've got an app for that: Obamacare the Game.

Rather than trying to run down all the complicated bennies and perks hidden in the 2,600-page law, a computer game would have players racing through level after level, virtually discovering the rewards or penalties for either being or not being enrolled in the health plan.

It wouldn't matter whether it was a strategy, simulation or role-playing game, as long as it was available for a free download on the Obama-campaign website for every system from iPad to Xbox to desktop -- Facebook, too. The gamification of the president's historic accomplishment could quickly and easily be a mind changer, slaying the stream of poison that the right keeps spewing. With the flick of a click, Americans would be able to go from unenlightened and turned off to informed and engaged.

How to beat the right-wing smear-and-fear machine came to me while I was in "The Gamification of News" session at the National Association of Black Journalists' convention last week. Although the panel was focused on a cutting-edge tactic for engaging readers and viewers in complex news stories, my mind quickly leaped from there to politics.

Since then I have interviewed two of the gamification panelists, Manuel "Mani" Saint-Victor and Scott Anderson, to see what they thought. They both agreed that it could be done and suggested how to do it.

"Have people walk through the process of being a different person with a different illness -- [the] Sim [City] approach," said Saint-Victor, who is a former psychiatry resident physician at Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital and a founder of Marveloper Media. "Let them walk through and let them see it with the Obamacare version and without the Obamacare version, not telling them which is and which isn't."

Scott Anderson, who is my firstborn as well as the co-founder and lead programmer at Enemy Airship and one of Game Developer Magazine's top 50 game developers for 2009, had a similar idea. He thinks the game should be "how to survive without health insurance." In his version of Obamacare the Game, "You have all these setbacks, and you have all these crazy things people will have to do to survive," Scott said. "It might not be fun, but it'll be effective. People will say, 'Oh, wow'; if these things happened to me, I'd be screwed."

Although gamification hasn't come to politics in a big way yet, it is already being played out in advertising through reward cards and loyalty systems, Saint-Victor said. Of course, almost everybody is familiar with the SimCity games, and there's even a game called Cut Throat Capitalism, which explores the economics of Somali pirates and why they do what they do. "You basically pick what ships they go after and how you'll treat the hostages," Anderson said.

The Supreme Court may have upheld the individual mandate on Thursday, but hold up on the high fives. Just how badly the Obama administration and campaign need to get beyond the information gridlock is patently obvious.

A majority of Americans -- 54 percent -- still believe that Obamacare should be repealed. Republicans have spent three times more money bad-mouthing the president's health law than Democrats have spent explaining it. Right now there are 3 million small-business people who qualify for a health care tax credit.

A mere 170,000 have applied.

Cyber columnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

Carol Moseley Braun: A mayoral foot race?

 

    The Root asked me to write a piece on Carol Moseley Braun's run in the Chicago mayoral race. I talked to half a dozen Chicagoans who are hip-deep in the city's politics. None had anything glowing to say about the campaign of the woman who was the first black woman elected to the U.S. Senate. I called her press secretary, Renee Ferguson, a good friend whom I've known since college. I'm still awaiting a return call. I called Braun's campaign office. I'm still awaiting a return call. So here's the commentary I wrote for The Root.

Since I didn't have any positive feedback from anyone, I ended up writing a not-so-positive piece.

 

 

Carol Moseley Braun's Quixotic Bid for

Mayor of Chicago

The former Illinois senator wasn't the first choice of the black power elite to take on Rahm Emanuel in the crowded mayoral race. Or the second. 

 

 

 Getting the nod as the black consensus candidate for next month's Chicago mayoral election worked like a charm for Carol Moseley Braun -- the third time around.

The first time the coalition of the Windy City's self-appointed black power elites met to bless one of the half dozen or so African Americans vying to replace the unexpectedly retiring Richard M. Daley, Braun was not the first choice, or the second. Those honors went to the Rev. James Meeks, an Illinois state legislator who boasts ministering a mega-church with 20,000 faithful, and Larry R. Rogers Jr., a prominent personal-injury attorney and commissioner of the Cook County Board of Review (property taxes).

Nor was Braun the first choice the second time around, after Rogers opted out, and when the reality set in that many of Chicago's white and Hispanic voters might just not be that into the anti-gay, pro-school vouchers Meeks. During Round 2, Rep. Danny Davis was crowned the one-who-would-mostly-get-most-of-the-black-votes.

The second decree of the coalition of aldermen, business leaders and community activists worked just fine for Davis -- but Braun, not so much. Mission unaccomplished.

Finally, after a year's-end intervention, with the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson summoning both candidates to a late-night meeting at Rainbow PUSH, Davis stood down on New Year's Eve. That left Braun, who had the support of two of Chicago's most prominent business titans -- John W. Rogers Jr., chairman, CEO and chief investment officer of Ariel Investments, and real estate mogul Elzie Higginbottom -- as the last viable black candidate standing.

The notion that Braun, the first and only black woman to serve as a U.S. senator and a former U.S. ambassador to New Zealand, was a viable contender, and the belief that a black consensus candidate was a viable strategy, both lasted for about 3½ days -- and since then, it's been one "oops" moment after the next.

As a harbinger of missteps to come, on Dec. 29, just two days before Week 1 of her "The One" campaign began, Braun got into the first of her two pissing matches with folks who buy their ink by the barrel.

In response to a critical column by Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times, Braun lashed out at the columnist during a news conference to outline her public-safety platform, stating that, "He is a drunk and a wife beater, and that's a matter of record. I didn't make that up. It's the truth."

Steinberg, in his column headlined, "Carol, I Miss You Already," had facetiously claimed, "part of me wishes she had a snowball's chance in hell of becoming Chicago's next mayor," because he'd have so many things to ridicule in a hypothetical Braun administration. 

On Jan. 5, when asked to discuss her problematic personal finances as she appeared at the scene of a South Side shooting to decry city violence, Braun took on the mainstream media again, flippantly responding, "Some of you may work for the Tribune or the Sun-Times, and last time I looked, the Tribune was in bankruptcy."

This miscue followed a bad answer two days earlier, when she was asked why she was refusing to release her tax returns, as the other candidates had done. Her response: "Because I don't want to."

Not 24 hours later, Braun flip-flopped, releasing some of her tax returns. It's understandable why she didn't want to.

Her tax returns and personal financial statements did not speak well for a candidate seeking to manage the $6 billion annual budget of the nation's third-largest city. In 2009, Braun claimed a net income of $15,954, all of which seems to come from her public pensions as a former U.S. senator, Cook County recorder of deeds and Illinois state legislator.

Her 2008 federal income-tax return showed that she lost more than $225,000 that year -- $200,000 of it in what she called a "net operating loss" that she did not bother to identify on the form. She would, though, indicate to reporters that her financial troubles stemmed from Ambassador Organics, her spice-and-tea company.

The next day, Braun released new pages from her tax return, showing that she had a loss of $120,000 from her public-speaking business, CBM One Corp. Just days after Braun's pointing out that the Tribune is in bankruptcy, the newspaper reported that she was late in paying property taxes on her Hyde Park home -- which she has on the market for $1.9 million -- five of the last six times her bill was due, and that she had paid more than $3,400 in late penalties.

Unfortunately for the 63-year-old Braun, this is not the first time she has found herself mired in misdeeds and money problems. Her one term as a U.S. senator was tainted with controversies concerning campaign finances and a visit to Nigeria to meet with military dictator Gen. Sani Abacha.

And while none of Chicago's other black mayoral wannabes come close to matching Braun's résumé, it's understandable why she wasn't the coalition's first choice. In a Tribune-WGN poll conducted last month, former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was backed by 32 percent of voters, followed by 30 percent undecided. Gery Chico, a Hispanic who is former schools chief, and Rep. Davis each had 9 percent, while Meeks had 7 percent. Braun polled at 6 percent.

Even Braun's support among the city's black power elites mirrors her recent polling. Mellody Hobson, the president of John Rogers' Ariel Investments, has signed on as the co-chair of Emanuel's mayoral campaign. And former White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers, John Rogers' ex-wife and the mother of his daughter, hosted a sellout fundraiser Tuesday night for Emanuel, featuring Jennifer Hudson, at Chicago's House of Blues.

With six weeks left until the nonpartisan election, it's still possible that the coalition's default candidate could become a contender. If Emanuel falls short of the 50 percent-plus-one vote threshold -- as it now looks like he will -- and Braun garners the second-largest number of votes, she could conceivably rack up all the "anybody but Rahm" votes during the April runoff.

But in order to do that, Emanuel, who is running a Rose Garden campaign, would have to falter big time. And Braun would have to move her campaign from stumblebum to fleet of foot -- while making sure it stays out of her mouth.

 

Cyber columnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times, executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show, and was the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him at http://twitter.com/#!/MonroeAnderson. 

This commentary was also reposted on the websites of NPR and WBUR.