Never let it be said that the Chicago Teachers Union is meek, mild, or fearful. They speak with courage and stand up to the powerful.
January 7, 2016 312/329-6250 (office)
Chicago’s teachers vote overwhelming to officially call for the resignations of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez
CHICAGO –The Chicago Teachers Union ‘s (CTU) governing body voted overwhelming this past Wednesday evening to support efforts to force Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez to resign from public service. This resounding call for justice came during the House of Delegates (HOD) meeting as growing local and national pressure for the mayor to “step down” intensifies in wake of the Laquan McDonald alleged 400-day cover-up conspiracy. School leaders made their views known through a resolution.
President Karen Lewis will discuss the Union’s position during her remarks at the CTU’s Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Peace Breakfast, on Friday, January 15th at 9 a.m. at 2260 S. Grove Street. The special guest speaker will be outspoken scholar and Ferguson, MO, activist Rev. Osagyefo U. Sekou. The event is free and open to the public.
This week’s official support to remove the mayor from power should come as no surprise. Teachers, paraprofessionals and clinicians have been vocal about Emanuel’s failed leadership of the school district and are petitioning state officials for an elected representative school board. In addition, educators are currently in roller coaster-style contract negotiations with the mayor’s hand-picked Board of Education. The Union also actively campaigned against Emanuel’s re-election which resulted in the embattled politician entering a run-off in the general election. Soon after winning-re-election in April, Rahm’s school chief Barbara Byrd Bennett was convicted of ripping off school students by benefitting from no-bid contracts.
Fed up with the attacks on their profession, CPS educators recently approved its second strike authorization since Emanuel took office in 2010. Teachers have said if the mayor’s handpicked CEO Forest Claypool continues to gut public education, fire veteran teachers and hurt students, they will withhold their labor– like they did in 2012– in order to fight for the school district their students deserve.
The HOD resolution reads:
“WHEREAS, for the past five years Mayor Rahm Emanuel has made a myriad of economic disinvestments and financial mismanagements that have resulted in the infliction of educational, psychological, and physical harm to Chicago’s public schools and working-class neighborhoods; and
“WHEREAS, during his first term in office, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, by means of his hand-picked unelected school board, closed an historic 50 public neighborhood schools in predominately Black and Latino communities; despite strong student, parent, community and CTU opposition; and
“WHEREAS, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has failed to support an education system that provides schools with the necessary resources to deliver robust wrap around services (such as counselors, nurses, social workers, PSRPs, and psychologists); fully-staffed libraries; reduced class sizes; and clean and safe learning conditions; and
“WHEREAS, in April 2012, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, against vehement community opposition, elected to close six of the City’s 12 mental health clinics resulting in 2,798 patients losing critical services; and
“WHEREAS, Mayor Rahm Emanuel continues to mismanage Chicagoans’ tax dollars by diverting public funds meant for blighted communities, that also can be used to fully fund our public neighborhood schools, to wealthy corporations; and
“WHEREAS, these economic disinvestments and financial mismanagements made under the leadership of Rahm Emanuel contributed to the shocking and inexcusable murder of LaQuan McDonald, a 17 year old boy suffering from severe psychological trauma, whose fate may have been altered had his mental health needs been met both in and out of school; and
“WHEREAS, Chicago and the nation continues to learn about police cover-ups, and the deliberate political maneuverings of Mayor Rahm Emanuel surrounding the October 20, 2014 death of 17 year old Laquan McDonald, shot 16 times by uniformed Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke, who has since been indicted of first-degree murder; and
“WHEREAS, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel not only pushed for and approved the Chicago City Council to pass a $5-million-dollar settlement to the family of Laquan McDonald, but also fought for the better part of a year, spending hundreds of thousands on legal fees to block the release of the police dashboard camera video of the fatal shooting, until a Cook County judge ruled on November 19, 2015 that this violated the state’s open records law and ordered the video to be released to the public; and
“WHEREAS, both Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez and Mayor Rahm Emanuel orchestrated and intentionally delayed the release of these videos apparently for their own political gains in order to secure victory in their 2015 re-election bids; and
“WHEREAS, the actions of both Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez impeded the criminal justice system, and in the process has led to the erosion of public trust and confidence in their leadership; and the only way to restore this trust is with their resignations; therefore, be it
RESOLVED, that the CTU support demands that Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez resign immediately from public office for the unconscionable delay of their governmental institutions in addressing Laquan McDonald’s killing and other issues of excessive, unwarranted, unjustified, and lethal police force in the City of Chicago that have surfaced in the aftermath; and be it further
RESOLVED, that the CTU support demands for a public review of the incident’s cover-up by a civilian police accountability council; the creation of policies to prevent such cover-ups from happening in the future; a ban on the training or arming of local police by military institutions; and new training for the Chicago Police Department that emphasizes non-lethal ways for de-escalating the situation at hand; and be it finally
RESOLVED, that the CTU work with Illinois State Representatives La Shawn Ford, Mary Flowers and other state legislators to pass House Bill 4356, which seeks to amend the Revised Cities and Villages Act of 1941 by establishing a procedure for an election recall for the Mayor of the City of Chicago.
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
They shouldn’t have said that, he’ll stay on just to spite them now.
It doesn’t matter what they say – he’ll stay on because he thinks he deserves it. He thinks he’s been making the “tough” decisions – it’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it. The fact that so many people oppose him is just proof of his righteousness. He’s Chicago’s own “liberal” (cough, cough) version of Kim Davis.
Recall Rahm now!
Didn’t he make some list of promises to public school kids in return for their schools? Gardens and air conditioning and after school programs is what I remember. Did he come thru on any of that? One of my sons lives in Chicago. He owns property there and he told me Rahm raised property taxes. He and his wife don’t seem to mind that he raised taxes- they both voted for him.
How did he go from closing 50 schools to cut costs along with increasing tax revenue to bankruptcy and impending collapse of the whole school system?
It doesn’t seem like an elected board could do a WORSE job. Maybe they should give it a shot.
Today’s the start of the big anti-labor case ed reformers are backing. It’s funny how often “ed reform” morphs into “anti union activists”.
Isn’t cheap labor an “adult interest”? How does it benefit school children to pay their parents less?
Here’s the new super-hip work model for the lower classes:
“So Uber gets $2.25 for the ride, and the driver gets $2.40,” Billington says. “When you consider gas and other things I pay for, Uber is making more than me off the ride.” He scoffs at Uber’s assertion that its drivers are independent contractors, calling it “a load of nonsense.”
“They treat us like employees, but we get none of the benefits,” says Billington
“They treat us like employees, but we get none of the benefits,” says Billington, who has joined a lawsuit seeking to have Uber drivers declared employees. “They’re telling us what rides we have to pick up. They dictate fares. We don’t get a say in what the fares will be. They keep close track on your ratings, and they threaten to deactivate you over various things.”
Billington, 47, isn’t covered by workers’ compensation or unemployment insurance and doesn’t receive paid vacation days or holidays. Nor does he have health insurance or paid sick days. “Hopefully I just don’t get sick,” he says.”
Working people don’t even have bare-bones legal protections, let alone a right to organize. We’re racing to the bottom. Now people won’t even have “employee” status. It’s VERY hip and “disruptive”. All the coolest politicians rave about it.
http://prospect.org/article/road-nowhere-3
Isn’t Uber “the sharing economy”?
Thanks for this. This “sharing” economy is something we need to be keeping a close eye on – it’s all related to what’s happening in education, healthcare, government, etc. If the neoliberals get their way, we will all be “contractors” with no benefits, scraping for the pennies our overlords deign to give us.
Credo activism, a progressive political organization, with a high traffic website, posted a page with a script and phone number to call, for people who want Rahm and Alvarez to resign.
Rahm has balls and he will stay put as long as he can. This guy is a wicked scary person to have in office as a “public servant”. The problem these days with politicians like Rahm is that they actually believe they are important people and that they are privileged to do as they please and not want the people want. Clearly, the people of Chicago want this goon out but he has big time balls and will fight till the fat lady sings. As a New Yorker I can tell you that I have not made up my mind as to who is worse for people having Rahm in office as mayor or like we had here in NYC with MIkey Bloomberg. Bloomberg was so bad it became quite hysterical. Bloomberg destroyed the public schools system in NYC. I can prove it to anyone because you can ask any teacher in NYC if they thought Bloomberg was good for the schools or not and I am telling you that you cannot find ONE, nadda ONE teacher who says that they thought Bloomberg was good for NYC and for the schools. Good luck Chicago, I miss the ole days of chi town and the windy city.
this article is from 2013 but it places the Chicago union into the broader perspective and it illustrates what the middle class struggle is about…. at that time the union had a strike — it was when I first started noticing the nasty comments about Chicago on the Fordham Institute website and teachers were becoming more vocal in commenting at Fordham I. site. ARTICLE: monthlyreview.org http://monthlyreview.org/2013/06/01/mr-065-02-2013-06
Notes from the Editors for June 2013 (vol. 65 no. 2) :: Monthly
Review
The Editors more on Education , Labor , Social Movements
» Notes from the Editors
The U.S. working class was slow to respond to the hard times it faced during and after the Great Recession. Finally, however, in February 2011, workers in Wisconsin began the famous uprising that electrified the country, revolting in large numbers against Governor Scott Walker’s efforts to destroy the state’s public employee labor unions. A few months later, the Occupy Wall Street movement spread from New York City to the rest of the nation and the world. Then, in September 2012, Chicago’s public school teachers struck, in defiance of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s attempt to destroy the teachers’ union and put the city’s schools firmly on the path of neoliberal austerity and privatization.
One thing that these three rebellions had in common is the growing awareness that economic and political power in the United States is firmly in the hands of a tiny minority of fantastically wealthy individuals whose avarice knows no bounds. These titans of finance want to eviscerate working men and women, making them as insecure as possible and totally dependent on the dog-eat-dog logic of the marketplace, while at the same time converting any and all aspects of life into opportunities for capital accumulation.” (more at their site)
Chiara, did you read the story in today’s NY Daily News ( I mean ny daily crap news) but any how, read the explanation from this teacher Friedrichs. The crap coming from this idiots mouth is astounding but any decent person with any kind of an IQ knows that this friedrich goon is just that, a goon who was paid off some how to play the role of the teacher who does not want a union. This jerk off is concerned about paying $1000 a year in union dues and yet the best part is friedrich has been teaching for 30 years. Here is an ole washed up, cruddy ole bitch worried about paying dues now after she has been paying for 30 years!!!! Only money can be the culprit for unexplained behavior like this. It just does not make any sense, think about it. This woman is part of a scheme and was paid off no doubt and anyone who thinks not needs to have their head examined. I only hope the supreme court is smart enough to realize this smoke and mirrors tactic.
Reblogged this on Politicians Are Poody Heads and commented:
Resign, Rahm. And take Anita Alvarez with you.
tangential to the topic — I know there doesn’t appear to be a way with current rules to impeach Rahm. The Governor of Maine is being discussed as “impeachable”… Rachel Maddow covered him last night on his latest racist diatribes. This reminds me of one of my all time favorite articles — Colin Woodard, prize-winning journalist in Maine — developed this report that closed off the “virtual” schools being promulgated by ALEC. If you have seen it before, I apologize but we need more people like this Jonathan Pelto, Bob Braun’s Ledger, Colin Woodard etc….. so that is why I am repeating myself.http://www.pressherald.com/2012/09/01/virtual-schools-in-maine_2012-09-02/
Jean Haverhill, I have posted that article from Maine at least twice. It is one of the best investigative articles about the fraud behind “reform.”
“Accountability”
Accountability is for students
For janitors and teachers
For those who flip the burgers
For those who clean the bleachers
For those who wash the dishes
For those who build the roads
For those who catch the fishes
And do the laundry loads
For those who do the weeding
For those who walk the dogs
For those who clock the speeding
For those who slop the hogs
For those who build the school
For those who fix the pipe
For those who truck the fuel
And pick the fruit when ripe
It isn’t for the wealthy
Or those that they install
In Chi Town and in DC
It’s not for them at all
Rahm once told Karen Lewis in private that he was going to spend less on educating poor inner city kids because, let’s face it, 25% of them will never amount to anything no matter how much is spent … so let’s not waste that money.
After Karen told a reporter this, the story blew up:
http://www.chicagonow.com/district-299-chicago-public-schools-blog/2012/03/another-round-of-lewis-emanuel-bickering/#image/1
Rahm denied it, of course, calling Lewis a liar. Lewis stood by her account.
However, this comment was a major catalyst that propelled the union towards the successful (or semi-successful, depending on your point of view) 2012 Chicago Teacher Union strike… and helped win over the public as well, as 75% of Chicago citizens backed the teachers during the strike.
In effect, the teachers and parents were saying, “Yeah, well, Rahm, maybe YOU think that spending money to educate those poor inner-city kids is a waste, and that those kids should just be written off, but WE don’t!”
One aspect of this the whole Rahm fiasco that sticks with me was a story of Rahm’s behavior after a TV interview with a female reporter, local NBC’s Mary Ann Ahern. The reporter did the same thing that other reporters had done to other anti-public school politicians around the country. She asked if there was any hypocrisy in his sending his own children to the Chicago Lab School. That school has everything under the sun that a school could have — low class size, state of the art library with 14 staff librarians, a dozen arts teachers, several dedicated P.E. teachers, and on and on.. while public schools were having all those things cut. Again, this kind of questioning has happened before in other cities in states and will happen again.
Here’s how New Jersey governor Chris Christie handled that question from a citizen. He basically exploded:
“(Where I send my kids to school) is none of your business!!!!”
Actually, it is the public’s business, but at least Chubbo had the guts to respond on camera, revealing his true side, and not be a two-face about the whole matter.
On the other hand, here’s how Rahm handled the same situation.
Again, keep in mind that at the time and since, Rahm has been gutting all these things — libraries, arts programs, music programs, while raising class sizes, unilaterally extending the school day without compensating staff, etc. — in the public schools, and in general, starving public schools, and rigging the game in favor of charter school expansion. Meanwhile, he sends his own kids to schools that have all those things. Parents whom Ahern spoke to prior to the interview were adamant and unanimous that Rahm be asked this question… as Ahern states to Rahm in the video BELOW.
During the interview with the female reporter, Mary Ann Ahern, Rahm kept it together, refusing to respond, giving his reasons, but he looks like he’s about to explode while doing so. His eyes are simply blazing. In fact, one of his aides (I’m guessing his press secretary) sees he’s about to lose it, then ends the interview. Rahm concurs, saying, “I’m done, especially after THAT! (i.e. the questions about his kids’ school)”
Watch this part here: (this is riveting stuff, imo)
http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-room/When-Rahms-Temper-Made-a-Comeback-125919838.html#ixzz1nW3BeaIz
Then the cameras were turned off, and that’s when Rahm’s much-talked-about “Mr. Hyde” persona came out. The mask dropped from his face and he began berating the reporter, totally losing his temper, but not before Rahm enlists Ahern’s two college broadcast major interns — two total strangers to Rahm — as “my witnesses” to the a–hole-ian tirade that soon followed.
Huh? His “witnesses” to WHAT? Rahm’s demonstration that he is, indeed, a psycho verbally abusive a–hole, as was and is his reputation? Ahern wrote later that it was a display that was unprecedented in Ahern’s “29 years of reporting,” and no doubt to intimidate and send a message to other “Chicago reporters what was in store for them if they behaved similarly… i.e. the “witnesses” he enlisted.
Here’s Ms. Ahern’s account: (from the same link)
http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-room/When-Rahms-Temper-Made-a-Comeback-125919838.html#ixzz1nW3BeaIz
“In fact Emanuel’s temper can get the best of him. I found out
yesterday when I asked him a question about where his
children would go to school, and he let his famous temper emerge.
” … ”
(after the cameras were turned off)
“As I tried to explain further, Emanuel doubled back. He
looked directly at my two college interns, and said, ‘You are
my witnesses.’
“Then the Mayor of Chicago positioned himself inches
from my face and pointed his finger directly at my head.
He raised his voice and admonished me:
” ‘How dare I ask where his children would go to school?l!
You’ve done this before!’ he said.
“This was the Emanuel we had heard about, and it was
one of the oddest moments in my 29 years of reporting.”
(Later, in a phone call to Rahm, Ahern tried to clear the air, but
“There was no air cleared.”)
“I tried to explain he had a point, but (the Obama children’s) parents too had to answer the question of what school (their children) would attend. No one is trying to have lunch with the first children.
“I also let him know that I felt wronged and bullied during his earlier tirade.
“ ‘You are wrong and a bully,’ Emanuel fired back. ‘I care deeply for my family. I don’t care about you.’
“With that, he hung up the phone.”
END.
I’m not going to shed any tears if and when this guy goes.