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.

  

 

GOP's stingy stance is not a cure-all at all for swine flu

    In the movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, as far as the father of the bride was concerned, Windex was the miracle cure for anything from "psoriasis to poison ivy."

    In real life, among the dwindling membership of the Party of No, lower taxes is their Windex. 

    No matter what political, economic or social challenge confronting our nation, the GOP mantra calls for lowering taxes, cutting taxes or flatlining taxes. As individual American citizens, the Republicans tell us, we can spend our money much better than the bureaucrats in Washington. 

    So, right now, right here, we have a threatening crisis that could further cripple our sick economy and, btw, who knows kill how many of us along the way: the swine flu outbreak.

    At this moment, more than 100 have died in Mexico from the influenza virus, but so far there has been no fatalities in the United State. Should this public health emergency take a turn for the worst by developing into a pandemic that leaves tens of thousands or millions of Americans dead in its wake, the only measure that will outpace finger-pointing will be vaccination shots.

    Hopefully, we'll only need vaccination shots in limited regions throughout the states. In the meantime, allow me to be one of the first to point a finger: The Know-Nothing party thwarted one preventative measure, fearing it might lead to more taxes.

    In a post entitled, GOP Know-Nothings Fought Pandemic Preparedness on the website of The Nation, John Nichols reports:

    When House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who has long championed investment in pandemic preparation, included roughly $900 million for that purpose in this year's emergency stimulus bill, he was ridiculed by conservative operatives and congressional Republicans.

Obey and other advocates for the spending argued, correctly, that a pandemic hitting in the midst of an economic downturn could turn a recession into something far worse -- with workers ordered to remain in their homes, workplaces shuttered to avoid the spread of disease, transportation systems grinding to a halt and demand for emergency services and public health interventions skyrocketing. Indeed, they suggested, pandemic preparation was essential to any responsible plan for renewing the U.S. economy.

But former White House political czar Karl Rove and key congressional Republicans -- led by Maine Senator Susan Collins -- aggressively attacked the notion that there was a connection between pandemic preparation and economic recovery.

    We don't know where this swine flu outbreak is going or how soon it will end. But the World Health Organization has been extremely concerned and vigilant since the outbreak has already crossed international borders.     

    In a special report to the GlobalPost, Christine Gorman writes: 

    Although no fatalities have been reported in the U.S., the latest reports from Mexico suggest that more than 100 people have died and at least 1,400 may have been infected with the never-before-seen flu.

 

On Sunday, Canadian health officials confirmed six cases of human swine flu — four in Nova Scotia  and two in British Columbia — while public health officials in New Zealand, Israel, France and Spain began testing several patients with flu-like illnesses who had recently traveled to Mexico to determine whether or not they also had swine flu.

 

Part of what concerns health officials is that most of the fatalities in Mexico have involved adults under the age of 60, which does not fit the usual profile of a seasonal flu outbreak. That pattern is, however, reminiscent of the flu pandemic of 1918-1919, in which the very young and the very old tended to be spared while most of the fatalities occurred in adults in their 20s to 50s.

    We've got to hope for the best here; hope that this flu virus does not mutate into something as virulent, Infectious and deadly as the 1918 flu pandemic, which resulted in more than 100 million dead worldwide, before it is over. But we've also got to hope that the mantra of the Johnny-one-note conservatives continue to ring false for more and more Americans.         

    I, like most of the rest of us, don't like paying taxes. But, besides paying for wars of aggression that I personally oppose, taxes pay for police and firemen, roads and bridges, and they help fund safety nets for those who may not be as fortunate as we are.        

    And, from time-to-time, money that we send to Washington comes back to us in a preventive measure that may be life saving for millions and therefore worth its weight in gold.

(This post was also published on the AgoraVox and the African American Opinion.com websites.) 

For News Corp, there's no business for monkey business

 

      When I was a freshman at Indiana University eons ago, I was a resident in Wright Quad, an all men’s dormitory.  

I'd grown up in a segregated neighborhood in Gary, Indiana.  I’d only had two white teachers during my entire k-12 public school education. I knew no whites socially; for me, they were only characters on TV.

      When I arrived on the idyllic Bloomington campus, where only 600 of the school’s 33,000 students were Black, I had some adjusting to do—as did many of the whites who had grown up in rural Indiana communities where the Ku Klux Klan had thrived a couple of generations earlier and continued to maintain a presence in the mid-60s.

      Our men’s room in our men's dorm was wide open. There was no place to hide. The toilet stalls had no doors. The showerheads were side by side with no petitions between them.      

I hadn’t been in my new home away from home for a week before I picked up on something. The farm boys were stealing peeks at me as I stood under the shower facing the wall.  I casually mentioned this curious behavior to one of the white students who’d befriended me. He explained that the stolen glances were the product of rural legends. Their elders had told the farm boys that Negroes had tails.  They were straining to spot mine.

      I am reminded of this early experience in my college education by the current resurgence on a variation of that theme—Blacks as simians—occurring now.   

      Since the New York Post ran the unfunny, tasteless, racist cartoon—you saw it, the one with a white cop holding a smoking gun as he and his partner stand next to the dead body of a bullet-hole ridden, bloody monkey--the Black man as primate once again has been spoon fed to the public's psyche.

      The NAACP has been fighting this sort of ugly, vicious stereotyping for the past 100 years, and the image assault on Blacks in America was being waged 100 years and more before the venerable civil organization was founded to fight it.

      Rupert Murdock offered an unprecedented personal apology for his newspaper’s offensive cartoon in what amounted to a too little, too late gesture. The NAACP began a full-blown counter offensive today on the media baron’s empire, highlighting how token diversity is throughout News Corp. Benjamin Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, and Julian Bond, the chairman, have made a strong argument that the cartoon, captioned, “They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill,” which ran in juxtaposition to a photograph of Barack Obama signing the legislation, was encouraging the assassination of the POTUS.     

      I’m not convinced inciting murder was the intent of cartoonist Sam Delonas or the New York Post editor who green-lighted the tasteless cartoon. But it’s been eight years since New York’s rightwing rag has had a Black editor in the chain of command that could have red-flagged the chimp cartoon.     

Unfortunately, it’s not the first time Obama has magically morphed into a monkey. Last May, a Georgia barkeeper sold T-shirts with a picture of Curious George and Obama 08 printed on them. But simple-minded stereotypes of Blacks aren’t confined to U.S. borders. There’s the chimp-like cartoon character Memin Pinguin so beloved by Mexicans.

Even in the Middle East, they can’t resist the temptation to monkey around with the African American image. Today, I saw an email complaining of yet another primate visual. This one featured Condoleezza Rice pregnant, carrying a baby simian inside her stomach.

      What can I say? From the American South to south of the border, from the Middle East to the East Coast, racist ignorance abounds when it comes to symbolism and iconology. 

Is Obama's Mexican-American challenge his and his alone?

     An African American-Hispanic racial controversy has risen its ugly head this Leap Day deep in the heart of Texas.
    “Obama simply has a problem that he happens to be black,” said Adelfa Callejo,  a lawyer and civil rights activist who supports Hillary Clinton.
     In an interview Wednesday night with The Dallas Morning News, Mrs. Callejo said many Hispanics have told her that they have reservations about voting for a black politician because of fights over funding in the Dallas school district. "What I hear is that they do not trust that Obama will do something for Hispanics," Mrs. Callejo said.    
    In response to the statement, Camp Clinton spit out an echo from Tuesday's Democratic debate in Ohio, announcing that the former First Lady “denounces and rejects” Mrs. Callejo’s assertions about Obama.
    As it turns out, Mrs. Callejo is 84 years old. Her anti-black expression may be more generational than typical. Younger Hispanics have been supporting Obama while older ones have been with Clinton. Other Hispanics may want to go with a winner.
    There is another division between African Americans and Mexican Americans which Mrs. Callejo didn’t address: Second and third generation Hispanics are much more accepting of blacks than the newly-arrived and the undocumented.
    Here’s my op-ed page column I wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times nearly a year and a half ago.

Mexican immigrants bring negative image of blacks

July 21, 2006
BY MONROE ANDERSON

In Mexico, the n-word is negritos. The word, which refers to dark-skinned Mexicans and non-Mexicans alike, does not carry the virulent, vicious hatred it historically has stateside. Some argue that the word, which loosely translates into little black people, is more like a term of endearment. That’s the same argument the hip-hop set employs to defend the use of the United States’ very own n-word. Last year, President Vicente Fox didn’t use either Mexico’s word or ours when he defended his government’s sale of the minstrel-modeled cartoon character Memin Pinguin on a commemorative stamp. Nor was he reported to have used either word when he said last year that “there is no doubt that Mexicans, filled with dignity, willingness and ability to work, are doing the jobs the not even blacks want to do there in the United States.”
They say it’s the thought that counts, and as it turns out, El Presidente may have been expressing what his fellow countrymen think. At least, that’s what I concluded after reading the results of a new study released in the August issue of the Journal of Politics.

The 2003 survey, conducted in Durham, N.C., found that Mexican immigrants come to the United States with negative stereotypes of black Americans. According to the Duke University study, “Racial Distancing in a Southern City: Latino Immigrants’ Views of Black Americans,” a majority of Latino immigrants, almost all from Mexico, believed that black Americans were lazy liars. A third of the immigrants believed African Americans to be troublesome.

Among those immigrants surveyed, 58.9 percent felt that “few or almost no blacks are hardworking”; 32.5 percent felt that “few or almost no blacks are easy to get along with,” and 56.9 percent felt that “few or almost no blacks could be trusted.”

The study’s findings remind me of that old black folk saying: “If you’re white, you’re right. If you’re brown, stick around. But if you’re black, get back.”

The survey reveals that while more than half of the immigrants feel “they have the least in common with blacks,” more than three-fourths of those same respondents feel “they have the most in common with whites.”

But this is the era of the new South, and the feelings aren’t mutual. The study reports “that while 45.9 percent of white respondents see themselves as having the most in common with blacks, just 22.2 percent of whites see themselves as having the most in common with Latinos.”

To further distort this new paradigm of race relations, half of the blacks surveyed felt close to Latinos and half the blacks felt they had “the most in common with whites.”

Ironically, the white Southerners, whose ancestors authored the old black stereotypes, no longer subscribe to them. Only 9.3 percent of the whites “indicate that few or almost no blacks are hardworking; only 8.4 percent believe that few or almost no blacks are easy to get along with…”

“We were depressed about a lot of our study,” Duke University Professor Paula McClain, who headed the study, told me in a telephone interview, because the Latino immigrants are “not coming into this country with a blank slate on this issue.”

Mexico has a colonial past and all the racial baggage that historically comes with it. That many recent Mexican immigrants bring racist attitudes should come as no surprise. But as our nation moves forward, this backward thinking must be addressed in Durham, Chicago and nationwide. We have too many homegrown racists. We don’t need to import any more.

When the next wave of pro-illegal immigrant demonstrations sweeps our nation, I hope African-American leaders will have talked to Latino leaders about the need to talk to the new arrivals and explain to them that we’re all in this together. Such a bicultural, bilingual dialogue could forge a black-Mexican bond too powerful for words.

On Super Tuesday, Illinois will be Land of Obama

 

  I'm off the campaign trail because, for Tsunami Tuesday, it's criss-crossing the nation, not an individual state. But I'm still covering the election for the Afro American Newspapers. Illinois is one of the 22 states the candidates are competing in this Tuesday so I've made a bunch of phone calls to my contacts here and I've filed another story for the Afro.
    Below is the story I wrote. Click here for the edited version on the Afro.com website.

Obama expected to sweep Clinton in Illinois

By Monroe Anderson

    Chicago, Il--Tsunami Tuesday is matter-of-factly believed to be the day Barack Obama will sweep away his opponent, Hillary Clinton, on Tuesday’s primary election in Illinois.  The latest poll predicts that the Illinois senator will beat his New York challenger by 2 to 1—almost to no one's surprise in his home state.
    While the latest Gallup poll has Clinton leading Obama nationally 48 to 41 percent, a Chicago Tribune/WGN-TV poll found that Obama had the support of 55 percent of likely Democratic voters in Illinois, Clinton had only 24 percent.
    That projected margin of victory matches the actual vote in the South Carolina primary eight days ago.
    “Obama’s got the momentum and the wind at his back after South Carolina,” said Dick Simpson, professor of political science at the University of Illinois Chicago and a former independent Chicago alderman.
    Illinois' favorite son is in the enviable position of commanding the support of a wide spectrum of his party's voters from independent to traditional Democrats, from young to old and from black to brown to white.
    Simpson was predicting that Obama would garner 10-20 percent of the state's popular votes on Super Tuesday even before Saturday's Chicago Tribune WGN-TV poll was released.
    Although Clinton was born and raised in a Chicago suburb but has not lived in the state for more than three decades, “Illinois is in love with Obama from the top to the bottom,” said Robert T. Starks, professor of political science at Northeastern Illinois University and chairman of the Task Force for Black Political Empowerment.
    “All the Democrats in the state of Illinois are supporting Barack Obama,” Starks said.
    He said that pre-primary votes have been coming in at a record number and that about 60 percent of those votes are between the ages of 18 and 40, which is the age-group where Obama is strongest. Starks said that the Obama campaign has a volunteer unit in almost every college campus in the city and several colleges downstate.
    “I’ve been impressed with the enthusiasm of young people which seems to grow greater after each debate,” Starks said.
     "Obama has the unusual circumstance of having the support of the Daley machine and the reformers," explained Simpson, while Clinton “is just fighting for a handful of delegates here in Illinois. There are 153 Democratic delegates at stake in the state.
      As a state senator, Obama earned a good reputation among independents in Illinois when he successfully carried through reform legislation while working with the late U.S. senator from Illinois, Paul Simon, Simpson said.  As a candidate for the U.S. Senate, Obama got the backing of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, Simpson said, noting that both men also share David Axelrod as their political consultant.
    Obama is so popular in the Land of Lincoln that “everybody running has Barack on their palm cards,” Simpson said. “They’re hoping that everyone voting for Obama will drop down and vote for them for Congress or water commissioner. Whatever they’re running for.”
    His political strength in his home state, particularly in the metropolitan Chicago area, even extends to two groups where polls say Clinton has either wrapped up or splits with the Illinois senator in other states–Hispanics and black women.
    “He’ll do well with the Latino vote here,” said Miguel del Valle, Chicago City Clerk and a former Illinois state senator.
    Obama got the lion’s share of the Latino votes when he ran for the U.S. Senate four years ago, del Valle said, pointing out that he outpaced a strong Hispanic contender, Gerry Chico, in the primary contest for the party’s U.S. Senate nomination.
    He said that Obama is popular among Illinois Hispanics because of his support for immigration reform and that the main distinction between the Illinois senator and the senator from New York is that “we felt that Barack is committed to taking that issue on early in his administration.”
    Although Hillary Clinton is admired in Illinois, Obama’s popularity is strong among women in the state, said Sandra Finley, president/CEO of the League of Black Women, a Chicago-based national organization that fosters the leadership potential of African American women.
    She predicts that he’ll do well in Illinois because Super Tuesday is occurring after other state primaries. “He’s had the advantage of time to answer the questions,” Finley said.
    Before the other primary contests, women wondered whether Obama was true presidential timber, she said. “They now know that he is.”
    They also wondered if the Obama, who could become the first African American Democratic party nominee for president, would address their interests on health care, the economy and education. “He answers that,” she said.
    Tim Wright, a Chicago attorney who is a former Clinton White House appointee and former chief of staff to Congressman Bobby Rush, argued that the New York senator is going to do better in Illinois than the polls and pundits predict.
    “She’s not a stranger here. She’s from here. She’s a native daughter,” he said.
    And because Clinton is from the state, Illinois is no different from the rest of the nation with family members are split in their support between Obama and the former First Lady.
    One of the nation’s wealthiest families, the Hyatt Hotel’s Pritzkers, is split between Obama and Clinton. Penny Pritzker is Obama’s national finance chair. Her brother, J.B. Pritzker is national co-chair for the Clinton campaign. The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson and his son, Congressman Jesse L. Jackson, Jr. have endorsed Obama, while the civil right’s leader’s wife, Jackie and their son, businessman Yusef Jackson, are Clinton supporters.
    “I’m caught in the middle. It’s like a family feud,” said Wright, who is on the Clinton steering committee but has acted as an Obama mentor in the past. “It’s a toss-up for a brother.”
    Contributing to her performance here will be a greater share of the black vote than is expected, because Obama has avoided talking about hard core black issues. “Hillary talks about them more than he does,” Wright said.
    Professor Starks disagreed. “The Clinton people will be lucky if they get 20 percent of the black vote,” he said.