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.

  

 

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.

 

Rent too high, pants too low!

 

    It's not often that I miss not having my own TV show, but I'm there right now.

If I had a TV talk show, I'd love to book two guests for a joint appearance: General Larry Platt and New York Gubernatorial Candidate Jimmy McMillan.

Between the two, they cover the current American political spectrum.

You may remember General Platt from American Idol when he performed "Pants on the Ground," a whamit, bamit, cut-it-out damnit song about young men wearing baggy, saggy pants. 

And, of course, Wannabe New York Governor Jimmy McMillan of the Rent is Too Damn High Party is the media story du jour after yesterday's gubernatorial candidate debate.

If I had my show, the three of us could talk politics and culture. We could talk about how the war on drugs and the outsourcing of unskilled jobs have produced a guns and drugs commerce in the nation's inner-cities that has led to a prison culture in America from inner-city to suburb to farmland to the world.

After that, the three of us could discuss how Reaganomics and deregulation has led to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Of course, I'd drop in the fact that the CEO compensation ratio to worker was 24 to 1 in 1965 while today it's 300 to 1, therefore highlighting one reason the rent's definitely too damn high.

Unfortunately, I no longer have a TV show, so I'll just have to have Platt and McMillan as my guests right here, right now.

Poor management takes CTA to the Poorhouse

 
 

    Just days before the 2008 Summer Olympics, Richard M. Daley, Chicago's Mayor-For-Life, was in China taking test rides on Beijing's new state-of-the art subway. 

With dreams of the 2016 Chicago games dancing in his head, Mayor Daley wanted to have a first-hand look-see at the modern marvel of the Beijing subway lines so he could augment his planned plea for help from Washington to rehabilitate his city's century-old creaking and cranky transit system.

As it turned out, the day after I'd watched TV reports about the mayor's magical transit train trip 7,000 miles away from home, I happened to be downtown, descending into the Chicago Avenue station at the early end of the evening rush hour. I had barely cleared the bottom step before I bumped into a mob of CTA passengers lined up as they waited to feed the transit card machines.

"What's going on?" I asked one of the 15 riders ahead of me in my line.

The woman I stood directly behind shrugged. I looked at the machines. Out of the six, four had out-of-order stickers slapped on them in the area where the money should have been going.  I stood there puzzled, slowly shuffling forward, fighting that feeling I get when I'm stuck in traffic on the toll way braking my way towards the booth for those without an I-Pass, when a uniformed CTA employee showed up within earshot.

"Why are so many of the machines broken?" I asked.

"They're not broke," he said, stopping and approaching me with a body language that said he loved taking on customers with a beef.

"They're not." I said in a questioning sort of way.

"No. They're full. They can't accept any more cash."

"What?"

"These people they got in charge don't know what they're doing. They come in from out of town thinking they're so smart, ha."
Listening to the rumble of the Red Line train having come and now going while I was still waiting in line left me missing the humor of it all.

"Gas is up to four bucks a gallon. It cost too much to drive so everybody's taking the train," he said. "The geniuses in charge haven't figured that out yet, so they only send a collector once a day. They ought to be sending somebody out here twice a day to get the money."

"I see," I said. 

So that was it. The always broke and begging Chicago Transit Authority was so incompetently managed that it wasn't bothering to collect the money it needed so that it could be sure it collected more of the money it needed. On Friday, I was reminded of my up close and personal observation of the CTA management's business acumen when Mayor Daley made a failing attempt to broker an agreement between his CTA officials and labor union leaders.

Obviously, the CTA's union leader knows the same thing the Chicago station CTA employee knew. After the mayor's futile effort, this is what Darrell Jefferson, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union, local 241 had to say about CTA bosses: "Outside of Enron, they probably have mismanaged themselves more than any corporation in America." 

To the casual observer like myself, Jefferson's pronouncement applies to small things such as the rehab of the Armitage Avenue L station where the track platform was extended to allow longer trains while the outdoor heater was left some distance away from the new boarding area. But it also applies to much more important things such as the 13 L derailments in the past five years. That grand sum amounts to more accidents than the New York City subway and Washington Metro combined during the same time period. 

Of course, for the irregular CTA rider like me, tomorrow's bus route eliminations and schedule cutbacks is no great big deal. But it will be for the 1,100 CTA employees who will be laid off to cover the systems $95 million budget shortfall.

There is, however, more than one sign of hope.  Out of curiosity, I went underground Saturday afternoon at the Chicago Avenue station for a reality check. Only two of the six cash collecting machines had out-of-order stickers slapped on them.

This column was cross-posted on the Huffingtonpost.com and Newsvine websites.

Everlasting memories of a great father

 

I've spent the last 25 Fathers Days without. By now, I thought I'd be over my father's death. I'm not. It's no longer the ever present pain as it was back then but every now and then, his lost haunts me. And always on Fathers Day I remember and wonder what it would be like if he was still here. I've written about him more than once, I posted a Chicago Tribune column last year that I wrote shortly after his death.

  This Fathers Day, I'm posting a Chicago Sun-Times column I wrote three years ago. 

What happens to children without father's example?

Chicago Sun-Times

June 18, 2006

BY MONROE ANDERSON

My earliest memory of my father, Monroe Anderson, dates back to when I was three. On a pre-dawn winter morning, I stood in my flannel pajamas, watching him stoke the coals in our apartment’s pot belly stove until there was a golden glow bathing the room. My last memory of my father, alive, was in1984 at a New Year’s Day family dinner in the Gary house where I grew up. Dishes were being cleared from the table when my father vanished, returning with a vintage shotgun cradled in his arms

      “I want you to have this,” he said, handing it over, barrels up.

      The shotgun meant a lot to him. When he was a boy living down South, his maternal granddaddy used it while teaching him to hunt for supper. Thinking it was a strange gesture, I thanked him, as I took the 12 gauge.

      Eight days later, my father was dead at 61, the victim of a massive heart attack. To this day, those first and last images remain burned into my mind’s eye, capturing the core of what my father meant to me. He was light and warmth and protector and provider.

      He made it all so easy for me, while it hadn’t been easy at all for him.

      My father’s father, yet another Monroe Anderson, was a sharecropper in the Mississippi Delta.  About eight decades ago, a tornado uprooted my father’s family’s tenant shanty. The bodies of his father, his mother and his six-year-old sister were found in the storm-ravaged fields my grandparents had worked. As the rescue and recovery team plowed through the fields, heaping one corpse after the other on its horse-drawn cart, my father, then a one-year-old baby, was found lying face down in a furrow. Just as they were about to stack his tiny body with the others, he shuddered. He was raised by his grandmother and two young aunts, always wanting and always missing the family he never knew.

      By the time he was 16, armed with just an eight-grade education, he was on his own. He migrated North, first to Chicago, then to Gary, to improve his lot. Shortly after he was drafted into the army during World War II, he and my mother, Norma, would elope; their marriage would last for 42 years, ‘til death they did part. The war ended and  I was born a year after my father was honorably discharged.  My sister followed five years later and my brother came six years after her.

      While my father worked in the steel mills for most of his life, his real job was family man. He was the house handyman and the family chauffeur.  He was a man with traditional values who cherished his position as head of household, but also a man ahead of his time. He routinely relieved my homemaker mother from the daily drudgery of cooking and house cleaning. 

      From time to time, I think about my father, wondering how different I’d have been had he not always been there, showing me how to be a man, demonstrating how to be a father. I wonder what his reaction would be to this “my baby’s daddy” era when too many fathers are casual acquaintances to their children when not absent or non-existent.  In our modern times, one third of our children are raised without the biological father present. In African American households, it’s twice as bad because the percentage is twice as high. How much better would life be for these children if they had  fathers present and committed?

      When my father died, I thought of myself as having lost a best friend, mentor and role model but as time has passed and I’ve raised two sons of my own, I’ve come to realize that my loss was theirs as well. My father as their grandfather would have made my sons’ lives that much richer. 

      A great father is hard to forget. So I know how lucky I am that he was there for me to remember this father’s day and every other day. 

The Senate's sorry, just in time for the 144th Juneteeth Day

On this Juneteenth Day, all of America ought to be celebrating like it's 1999. Yesterday, after 144 years of emancipation commemorations by African Americans in Texas, and progressively over time, many other states, the United States Senate finally got around to--Tweet this--apologizing for slavery and racial segregation. The formal sorry say was voted on by the Senate yesterday.

Talk about too little, too late. 

The Emancipation Proclamation was issued on September 22, 1862. And although it went into effect on January 1, 1883, more than 618,000 Americans had to die in the Civil War before the slaves were freed. 

Back then, good news traveled slow, so it wasn't until June 19, 1865 that word got around to the state of Texas that slavery had been abolished. And even after everyone knew that slavery was the great American evil, there were those in the South who chose not to know. Slavery By Another Name, a book published last year, revealed that the enslavement of African Americans continued in the deep South until the dawn of World War II. This nation's free black labor habit finally ended eight decades after Emancipation when President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered that it stop immediately. FDR was fearful that the Japanese propaganda machine would put the fact that neoslavery was still going on in the U.S. to great use against America's war effort.

Up until then, it was the practice below the Mason-Dixon line for sheriffs to arrest black men on trumped up charges, jail them, then sell them to plantations, mines, railroads, mills, lumber camps and factories in the deep South. In other cases, southern blacks were kidnapped by southern landowners and  forced into involuntary labor. This happened to thousands of African Americans from one generation to the next to the one after that.

And I won't even mention the thousands who were murdered by lynchings.

But to quote Shakespeare, "All's well that ends well." The senate has apologized for slavery and segregation. The U.S. House is expected to follow suit. There's a black family living in White House.

African American no longer have to worry about forced labor. Unfortunately, black unemployment rates, at 11.5, are higher than those of any of group in the nation. About a third of the descendants of America's enslaved still live below the poverty line.

It doesn't matter. The Senate is sorry. I wonder if any of them are sorry that we never got our 40 acres and a mule. It's not too late to make it up. Congress could declare reparations a stimulus program and pass it just in time for next year's Juneteeth Day.

Now that would be a cause for celebration.

(This post was also published on Newsvine.)

AIG: Insuring that the rich get richer

Everybody's angry about AIG. The people are seething. The politicians are demanding a payback. Even Edward Liddy, AIG's chairman and CEO, says the bonuses are "distasteful."

Well, while you and me and most of the rest of America are mad as hell and not wanting to give it anymore, the bonusees are scowling all the way to the bank, proving once again that if you want to rob somebody the pen is mightier than the sword--or the gun for that matter. Bernie Madoff didn't even say "stick 'em up" as he hauled off a cool $50 billion. Nor did the AIG muckety mucks wield any weapons as they stuck us up for 173 billion in bail out bucks before slipping $165 million of our money to their executives for a job disastrously done.

This is a classic example of how the rich get richer and the rest of us get screwed.

Let's roll away from Wall Street and head to Motown. A tenth of the bailout money AIG got went to the folks that actually make something. In return for the $17 billion GM and Chrysler got, the auto worker's union and its members are being strong-armed into chucking their contractual agreements with the Big Two while chinning and grinning to show their gratitude that they will still had lower paying jobs.

Mind you, the UAW and its members had done nothing wrong. They built the cars that the car corporations designed. The GM and Chrysler CEO's, who had been stuck on stupid when they first came to the nation's capitol in their private jets, wised up, making commercial airlines their transportation of choice and choosing to pay themselves a buck a year. 

Meanwhile at AIG, there was the $440,000 conference last October at the St. Regis resort at Monarch Beach. That little extravagance turned out to be a pittance compared to the latest revelation that at least 73 employees from AIG's London-based Financial Products unit--the division that sold the derivatives that are responsible for the insurance giant's threatening collapse--got bonuses of $1 million or better each. Eleven of those London employees were received the so-called retention bonuses have already flown the coop.

Big time pay for a big time F-up. How would you like to have a job like that?

As the argument goes, we have to pay the bonuses because they have a contract and there's this magical, mysterious obligation to honor that legal agreement. Why there was no reason to honor the United Auto Workers contract remains a greater mystery--or maybe not.

We know how it works: white collar crime pays. Blue collar labor gets paid not so much.

(This post was also published on my cyber column at Newsvine.com, UK/EU Progressive and Agoravox.)