Monroe Anderson

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.

Who arrested religion in Indiana?

 

    Indiana's Religious Freedom law has triggered a spirited debate throughout the nation and may be the next right wing attack on civil rights. Here's my Chicago Defender Column on the controversy.

 

What’s bad for the gays will be bad for the Blacks

 

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

 

If you haven’t been paying attention to the firestorm over Indiana’s “freedom of religion” law, it’s time that you do. Our neighboring state’s new legislation reflects Black America’s past and could easily come to mirror our future.

The bill is rightly being described as a license to discriminate. It allows anyone with a business to not do business with anyone they choose by claiming they believe it violates their religious values.

We’ve seen this play before.

God and religion have been used as the guiding principle in overt discrimination against Blacks throughout virtually all of our nation’s history. The KKK burned crosses before lynching Black men.  Bigoted Christians cited the curse of Ham, the father of Canaan in Genesis, to justify slavery. “Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.”

Ham is believed to have been a Black man.

Unequal public schools for Blacks were the will of the Almighty opined Georgia Gov. Allen Candler in 1901, “God made them negroes and we cannot by education make them white folks.”

Nor did God cotton to miscegenation.  Richard Loving, a white man, was sentenced to one year in prison for marrying Mildred Jeter, a Black woman. The couple had broken Virginia's law, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, by going to Washington, D.C. to get married then naively returning to home.

Apparently the Lovings had broken the Holy Father’s law as well. “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents,” wrote Judge Leon M. Bazile in his 1959 ruling. “The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act does not mention same-sex mixing but it’s arguably aimed at those with a certain sexual orientation. Last year, the same-sex marriage ban was overturned by a federal court. Some pouting proponents, who wanted the ban to stand, headed straight for the governor and the Indiana General Assembly to make sure there would be a freedom of religion law on guard to protect bigotry, as they knew it.

The state’s RFRA is yet another Republican head-fake where conservatives pretend that they’re not doing anything wrong while they’re definitely doing something wrong. Just like the GOP’s scheme to suppress Black participation at the ballot box through voter I.D. laws, the religious freedom law would allow business owners the right to use their faith as an excuse not to serve lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transsexuals, aka LGBTs--or hire or rent to them.

Black Americans know all too well how that game is played and if the new rules remain legalized then it won’t be long before it’s played on us. Again.

The legislation Gov. Pence signed last week prohibits state laws that “substantially burden” a religious institution, businesses and associations from following religious beliefs. The new law in effect serves as a legal shield for people, associations and businesses big and small from being sued for discrimination if they claim their religion made them do it.

    The uproar that followed caught Indiana’s governor off guard. He reflectively characterized it as a battle between religious freedom and gay rights, assuming he knew who’d win that fight.

Gov. Pence, and his overly weighted Republican General Assembly, quickly discovered that they were wrong. Besides the sign-carrying LGBT protesters, Indiana’s state lawmakers heard disapproval from other states, businesses, sports organizations, future conventioneers and social media.   

The CEOs from Eli Lilly and Co., Anthem and Indiana University Health were among nine of Indiana’s largest employers pointing out that discriminatory legislation was bad for business. Seattle’s mayor and Connecticut’s governor banned their employees from traveling to Indiana to do business. Indianapolis-based Angie’s List CEO announced that his company was going to halt plans for a $40 million expansion in the state’s capital. The president of NCAA, whose Final Four competition takes place in Indianapolis this weekend, said yesterday  that Indiana's new "religious freedom" law goes against what higher education and America is all about. And there is, of course, a social media response: On Twitter the hashtag is #boycottindiana.

All that outrage has focused Gov. Pence’s mind like a hanging. He was claiming that Indiana’s RFRA law was no different from the one in Illinois and the other 18 states that passed one. Pence left out the part about those other states having a separate law that specifically protected LGBTs from discrimination, while his state does not. You can be fired in Indiana for being gay.

Over the weekend, he was asserting that the law wouldn’t be changed. Yesterday he held a press conference to announce that maybe it would. He’s having his legislature revamp the onerous law.

“Clearly. Clearly, there’s been misunderstanding and confusion and mischaracterization of this law,” Gov. Pence said. “I abhor discrimination.”

Right. Don’t stop paying attention yet. Arkansas passed its own religious freedom law yesterday.

Mayor 1% takes on a community organizer

 

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

 

Chuy win over Rahm still debatable

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

 

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

       Mission unaccomplished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

 

Post post-racial America

 

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

 

From Selma to Madison to Norman

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Some students’ chants are far better than others.

 

From jail cell to ballot box

 

 

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

 

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

 

Monroe Anderson

DEFENDER COLUMNIST

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's must-be TV for Blacks in Hollywood

For the past Century, Hollywood and African Americans have had a star-crossed relationship with the movie industry waging an image war against Blacks. Here's my Chicago Defender column on this sad situation.

Selma boycotted but Hollywood still got Glory

 

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

 

 

    Hollywood’s snub of the very important Black film, Selma, about the extremely important march to demand voting rights for African Americans 50 years ago, was so absurd, so ironic, that it was joke worthy.

    On cue, Host Neil Patrick Harris literally opened Sunday night’s 87th Academy Awards show with this pale one-liner: “The best and the whitest...sorry brightest.”

    It was a feeble attempt to sugar coat the bitter truth. Although the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, is a Black woman, the actors nominated for best performances this year were all white.

    The Blacks-are not-worthy judgement was determined by the Academy voters who are 94 percent white. Last month’s Golden Globe Awards paid a little homage at least. David Oyelowo’s brilliant performance as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ava DuVernay inspired direction at least garnered two nominations.

    “Why are we still begging white people for approval?” asks Sergio Mims, who writes for a Black film website, Shadow and Act, and is a co-founder of Chicago’s Black Harvest Film Festival, before shrugging off the Oscars brush off as no big deal.

    Mims might be right. There are the obvious bragging rights, but there is no guarantee that an Oscar will get an actor more work or a higher salary.

    And long after all the sound and the fury over this year’s Oscars have come and gone, the real action will remain where it already is: at home on our big flat-screen TV sets.

    Going out to see a movie, with servings of popcorn, soda and candy, can cost a family of four as much as $80 so we’re staying away in droves. According to a CBS News Poll, 84 percent of Americans see movies at home, four percent at the theater and 10 percent pretty much divided between home and the theaters.

    Television is also giving the theatrical movies a run for the fame and fortune as far as actors and producers are concerned.

    More than two and a half viewers watched Laurence Fishburne’s Hannibal every week as the veteran Black actor pulled down $175,000 per episode. Fishburne is also a co-star along with Anthony Anderson on the TV sitcom, Black-ish. He and Anderson are also producers..

    Producer Lee Daniel’s new drama, Empire, starring Terrence Howard and Taraji P. Henson, has been building its viewership from week to next. The Hip-Hop mogul show, which MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry summed up as a combination of Breaking Bad, Glee, House of Cards and The Real Housewives,  is the new “it” show for Black viewers.

    Since she created Grey’s Anatomy, Writer and Producer Shonda Rhimes has her own cottage industry on network TV with Private Practice and Scandal. She is also an executive producer on How to Get Away with Murder, the new TV drama that last month earned the show’s star, Viola Davis, a Screen Actors Guild Award.

    More than nine and a half million viewers watch Kerry Washington’s Scandal religiously. She reportedly earns $150,000 per show which means no one’s going to be throwing a rent party for her anytime soon. But, this is where the money gets really funny.  While the audience for ratings champion, The Big Bang theory, is twice that of Scandal, all three of the white stars, Jim Parsons, Kaley Cuoco, Johnny Galecki are paid  $1 million each per episode.

    That’s entertainment. Hollywood won’t be winning many awards for treating African Americans fairly over the past century. America’s movie industry has been waging an image war on Blacks since D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation first hit movie theaters 100 years ago. Griffith’s movie, originally named The Clansmen, espoused white supremacy while  glorifying the KKK. One scene features white actors in blackface who are supposed to be newly elected Black legislators during Reconstruction, sitting around, barefoot, eating chicken, drinking whiskey and recklessly eyeballing white women.

     Donald Bogle’s, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, pretty much sums up much of Hollywood’s presentation of Blacks well into the 1980s.

    It’s that history and what took place on the Pettus Bridge that brought tears to some in the audience as they watched John Stephens and Lonnie Lynn-- aka John Legend and Common--perform, and later accept Oscar for Best Original song, Glory.  

    “We know that right now the struggle for freedom and justice is real. We live in the most incarcerated country in the world,” Legend said during their acceptance speech. “There are more black men under correctional control today than were under slavery in 1850. When people are marching with our song, we want to tell you that we are with you, we see you, we love you, and march on.”

    Common and Legend are right on. The struggle continues. But every now and then, we do get to witness some glory.

 

Jackie Robinson West's Map-gate is a little bush league

 

Can JRW's Map-gate lead to better rules?

By Monroe Anderson

DEFENDER COLUMNIST

 

          Compared to other corruption and lying offenses in the Land of Lincoln, the Jackie Robinson West team scandal seems downright bush league.

          The Little League team was officially disqualified last week for falsifying residency documents. Their national championship was yanked because teammates didn’t live where they were supposed to live. Their transgression was that the South Siders were mostly South Suburbanites.

          There was no argument that this Cinderfella team could slug some balls; they were better than the teams they beat. All 13 of these Black boys trained as hard as they played. They didn’t play dirty. They didn’t cheat. They proved to be good sports when they won and good sports in their eventual loss at the World championship to South Korea. They could have served as role models for those perennial losers, the Cubs, and those champion cheaters, the Patriots.

           They were just in the wrong places at the wrong time.

           In this world where you live matters. The 12-year-old Little Leaguers who played for JRW live in a nation where white conservatives claim concern about the number of Black fetuses aborted every year but could care less about the welfare of Black babies once they are born. The JRW players live in a state where four of its last seven governors and three of its U.S. Representatives have gone to prison for corruption. The JRW players live around a city where, since 1972, a third of the aldermen have been convicted of corruption. The adults did something wrong, but the boys were expected to learn a lesson about doing the right thing.

           The main lesson they could learn from Map-gate is getting away with cheating is a coin toss and that there is enough blame to go around.

           Blame could flow to Darold Butler, the JRW Little League manager, Bill Haley, the league president, Michael Kelly, the Illinois District 4 administrator and the parents of the players. The map be damned, JRW is Chicago’s go-to Black Little League team because it has longevity and the potential to win. As a parent, if you want your talented kid to play on a team where he may get noticed, one that will be here today and not gone tomorrow, it’s JRW.

It’s hard to imagine that any of the three men didn’t know they were circumventing the rules. DNAinfo.com reported that five of the JRW players facing questions about their residency were also on the 2014 Chicago White Sox ACE 12-year-old All-Star travel team. Only one of those ACE players had Chicago listed as his hometown on that roster.

Blame could go to Stephen Keener whose due diligence went undone. The Little League International president and CEO only got around to discovering, months after the South Side boys won the national championship, that the grown-ups running the program here may have tried to put the fix in by rigging the maps.

When confronted with no choice but action, Keener lawyered up and released this statement after stripping JRW of its title: “Little League International stands by the difficult decision that was announced on February 11. As Jackie Robinson West Little League has retained counsel, we will not be granting any additional media interviews or issuing additional public statements for the time being. Little League International will be working with its counsel to ensure Jackie Robinson West Little League officials and their attorney are fully educated regarding the factual basis of the decision.”

            Blame could also go Chris Janes, vice president of the Evergreen Park Athletic Association, whose Little League team lost to JRW 43-2 in the second round.  Depending on your perspective, Janes is either a sore loser who was hell-bent on snitching or a well-intentioned whistleblower who exposed the fact that Butler had constructed a super team by breaking the rules.

It’s understandable. Seeing the team that beat your team like it owned it at White House for a photo op with President Barack Obama, then going on an all expenses-paid trip to Disney World to hang out with Mickey and Minnie and then parading through Millennium Park with Mayor Rahm Emanuel in step is enough to make you see red.

             There can be enough absolution to go around as well. If he’s the concerned citizen he says he is, Janes should vigorously push Little League International to examine the rosters of all the teams that played in the championship so that all can be assured that JRW’s misconduct was in a league of its own.

              If he insists on maintaining the geographical restrictions CEO Keener should make it a requirement that every team publicize boundaries so that everyone knows who’s eligible to play where. If everyone was supposed to keep it a secret that some of the JRW players were ineligible, it was not very well guarded. Politicians and principals were all bragging in local and social media about JRW players being residents of their towns and students at their schools.

              And the three men who got JRW into this mess ought to lobby to get the residency rules changed from a one-size-fits-all to one where you can recruit the best players without suffering the worst consequences.

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.

A Black mayor for Chicago is not in the air

 

 

 

 

 

 This column on the Chicago mayor's race is my second of the weekly columns I'm writing for the Chicago Defender.

 

 

White, Brown or Black?

                By Monroe Anderson

                     Defender Columnist

 

 

When the last vote is counted after next month’s mayoral election, no one is going to be surprised that, once again, Chicago’s next occupant on City Hall’s fifth floor will not be black.

    President Barack Obama’s radio endorsement of incumbent Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Monday was one serious predictor. But the city’s history during the past quarter century is even better.

         For a few in-vain months, it looked like things might be different this year. Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle was an odds -on favorite to get in the mayoral game and return the throne to Chicago’s largest ethnic bloc. An Illinois Observer poll in March had Preckwinkle leading Mayor Emanuel, by eight percentage points, 40-32.  But just before hopes got too high, President Preckwinkle announced in July that she would stay put right where she was. Days after she dropped out, a Sun-Times poll had Karen Lewis, who was President of the Chicago Teacher’s Union and a queen-size thorn in Emanuel’s side, with a nine- percentage point lead over the mayor, 45 to 36. In October it was announced that Lewis had a cancerous brain tumor and she, too, would not be a candidate.

That leaves those who would like to see a third African American mayor in Chicago with two choices, perennial candidate William Dock Walls or self-made multimillionaire Willie Wilson. Neither of the two black men is The One.

William “Dock” Walls, whose false claim to fame is that he was Mayor Harold Washington’s closest confidant, has run and lost races for city clerk, mayor, Congress and governor for pretty much the same reasons--he has no money, no managerial experience and has never held a political office. Willie Wilson, who is a real pro in the business world, has run campaign ads and taken policy positions--such as pledging to reopen Meigs Field and to save city funds by forcing uniformed police to abandon their squad cars for public transportation when coming to work--that expose him as a pure political rookie.

    Right after Washington won the primary in 1982, the Rev. Jesse Jackson commandeered Harold’s microphone at the victory celebration to inform friend and foe that “now it’s our turn, it’s our turn, it’s our turn.”  

That was then. Now it’s clear that for black Chicago, our turn has come and gone.

History has been repeating itself since Aldermen Tim Evans, Dorothy Tillman and Bobby Rush constructed the mythology following Washington’s sudden death that Evans was the late mayor’s heir apparent. Since then, the list of black wanna-be mayors intent on succeeding Washington and Eugene Sawyer goes from the ridiculous to the sublime--Sheila Jones, a disciple of the political quack, Lyndon LaRouche; the late Joe E. Gardner, who was a commissioner of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District; Congressman Danny Davis; Roland Burris, who was then the former Illinois attorney general who ran as an independent candidate; Jesse Jackson Jr., who was the second congressional district representative, former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun; and the late Appellate Court Judge R. Eugene Pincham.

Then, as now, any talk of having a black mayor is merely magical thinking. Unlike in the short-lived era of the Evans urban legend, there is no pretense of an heir apparent, not even a great black hope in the air.

It all went poof in the spring of 1988 when political allies of Evans, the Coalition to Let the People Decide in 1989, filed a lawsuit to force a special election. Wanting time to heal the schism in our base, Mayor Sawyer approached Evans calling for his support, promising that after two terms, he’d stepped down allowing the 4th Ward alderman to become a real heir apparent.

Evans’ refusal to play nice, and therefore assure that it would be our turn, turned out okay for him. He was awarded a judgeship and has gone on to become the first black judge of the Cook County Circuit Court. It didn’t quite work out as well for Chicago’s African Americans as an ethnic group.

We could have been like Atlanta.

Since Maynard Jackson was first elected in 1974, every one of the city’s succeeding mayors has been African American--Andrew Young, Jackson for a third term, Bill Campbell, Shirley Franklin and now Kasim Reed.

Rather than whining about not being respected and treated fairly while protesting about and begging for an equitable share of city contracts and jobs, we could have had men and women in the mayor’s seat that treated us like we should be treating us. Rather than being upset about our schools being closed and our teachers taking the biggest hit in layoffs, we could have been the masters of our own fate.

Instead, come February 24, we can only hope for a mayoral run-off. If Jesus “Chuy” Garcia wins in the run-off, we can hope that he’ll treat us like he’ll treat the city’s Hispanics. If Ald. Bob Fioretti wins, we can hope that he’ll treat us like he treats Chicago’s Italians. We can hope that either man, like Washington, will be fairer than fair.

And we can continue to recall the good ol’ days when Harold was mayor and it was our turn.

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