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How to make the bankers scream: Robert Pollin, world's best obituarist of Clintonomics, explains it all for you. Do police states make people feel safer? Vicente Navarro on Franco's Spain, Cockburn on Ireland in the Fifties under the Catholic Hierarchy, Alevtina Rea on growing up in Brezhnev-time. Capitalism's true utopia? St Clair on the Pentagon's no-bid arms contracts. How's the press doing in Iraq? Patrick Cockburn tells all to Omar Waraich. Get the answers you're looking for in the latest subscriber-only edition of CounterPunch... CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558 |
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Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison by KATHY KELLY  Today's Stories April 30 / May 1, 2005 Alexander
Cockburn Gabriel
Kolko Jennifer
Loewenstein Doug
Giebel Steven
Erlanger
April 29, 2005 W.
John Green Luke
Brothers Norman
Solomon M.
Junaid Alam Jackie
Corr Hunter
Greer Sharon
Smith Website
of the Day
April 28, 2005 Omar
Waraich Kevin
Zeese Dave
Lindorff Greg
Moses Toni
Solo Niranjan
Ramakrishnan Werther
April 27, 2005 John
Ross Joshua
Frank Ray
McGovern Mark
Donham Dan
Smith
April 26, 2005 Dave
Lindorff Alevtina
Rea Greg
Moses Joshua
Frank Diana
Johnstone
April 25, 2005 Uri
Avnery Alison
Weir Lee
Sustar Leonardo
Boff Gary
Leupp
April 23 / 24, 2005 Alexander
Cockburn Gary
Leupp James
Petras Harry
Browne Fred
Gardner Ron
Jacobs Elizabeth
Schulte Chris
Floyd
April 22, 2005 Saul
Landau Kevin
Zeese Joshua
Frank Mike
Whitney Michael
Flynn Lee
Sustar Website
of the Day
April 21, 2005 Bill
Quigley Dave
Lindorff Jason
Leopold Kathleen
Christison
April 20, 2005 John Ross Kevin Zeese Uri Avnery Website of the Day
April 19, 2005 Jean-Guy Allard Dave Lindorff Neve Gordon Brian Concannon, Jr Murray Hudson Frank B. Ford Monty Python Michael Dickinson Paul Craig
Roberts Website of the Day
Linda Schade
/ Kevin Zeese John Ross Brian McKenna Mike Whitney Patrick Cockburn Dave Zirin Eli Stephens Harry Browne Website of
the Day
April 16 / 17, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Mark Dow Omar Waraich Robert Buzzanco Sherry Wolf Fred Gardner Ron Jacobs Mark Weisbrot John Pardon Yoshie Furuhashi Mike Roselle Ralph Nader Ramzy Baroud Jackson Thoreau Michael Dickinson Richard Neville Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
April 15, 2005 Brian Cloughley Bill Glahn Mickey Z. Stephanie McMillan Josh Mahan David Russitano Jorge Mariscal Rodolfo "Corky"
Gonzales Tom Reeves
April 14, 2005 Karyn Strickler Pat Williams Jessica Pupovac Joshua Frank Jerzy Mankowski Talli Naumann Antony Loewenstein Virginia Rodino Saul Landau
/ Farrah Hassen Website of the Day
April 13, 2005 Maria Carrión Mike Whitney Terry Jones Dave Lindorff Nathaniel Livingston, Jr. Kurt Nimmo Don Fitz Tom Crumpacker JG Jack McCarthy Kevin Zeese Jeffrey St.
Clair
April 12, 2005 John Wheat
Gibson Kevin Zeese Alan Farago Dave Lindorff Ron Jacobs Nelson P. Valdes Dave Zirin Website of the Day
April 11, 2005 Tom Barry Saul Landau Monique Dols Phil Gasper Mike Whitney Edwin Krales Paul de Rooij Website of the Day
April 9 / 10, 2005 Jeffrey St.
Clair William A. Cook Gary Leupp Alan Maass Laura Carlsen Joe DeRaymond Nikolas Kozloff Dave Lindorff Greg Moses Fred Gardner Justin Smith Ron Jacobs M. Junaid Alam Ira Kay Elizabeth Schulte Jackie Corr Christopher
Brauchli Leslie A. Fiedler Ben Tripp Poets Basement Website of
the Weekend
April 8, 2005 Rob Eshelman Hom Raj Acharya
/ Sally Acharya Felice Pace Neve Gordon Mike Whitney Don Monkerud Adam Engel Vicente Navarro Website of the Day
April 7, 2005 Joshua Frank Yitzhak Laor Alan Maass Steven Sherman Dave Lindorff Gerry Adams John Chuckman Michael Dickinson John Ross Website of the Day
April 6, 2005 Peter Camejo Kevin Wehr Matt Vidal Robert Creeley
/ Bruce Jackson Nikolas Kozloff Sea Shepherd Crew Brenda Child Terry Eagleton David Swanson Cindy Ellen
Hill Website of
the Day
April 5, 2005 Jim Connolly Paul Craig
Roberts Gary Leupp Dave Lindorff Ron Jacobs Dan Smith Mark Engler Richard Oxman Greg Moses Website of the Day
April 4, 2005 Kevin Zeese Paul Craig Roberts Larry Birns
/ Sarah Schaffer Karyn Strickler Joshua Frank Michael Dickinson Surendra R.
Devkota Derrick O'Keefe Uri Avnery Website of the Day
April 2 / 3, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Stan Goff John Ross Saul Landau Robert Creeley Mike Roselle Joshua Frank Fred Gardner Greg Moses Fran Quigley Kurt Nimmo Nicole Colson Chris Genovali Alan Farago Lawrence Reichard Ben Tripp Avantika Regmi Lee Sustar Ron Jacobs Dave Lindorff Poets' Basement Website of
the Day
April 1, 2005 Tom Barry Rahul Mahajan Charlie Cray
/ Jim Vallette Dave Lindorff Zeynep Toufe Suzan Mazur Michael Dickinson Stan Cox Ra Ravishankar Daniel Wolff
March 31, 2005 Sharon Smith Ron Jacobs Tariq Ali Michael Dickinson Kanak Mani
Dixit Mitchell Zimmerman Xuan-Trang
Ho Dave Zirin Joe Bageant Jeff Halper Website of
the Day
Hot Stories Alexander Cockburn Subcomandante
Marcos Norman Finkelstein Steve Niva Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams Steve
J.B. Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber Wendell
Berry CounterPunch
Wire Cindy
Corrie Gore Vidal Francis Boyle
Subscribe Online
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Weekend Edition Richard Daley's ChicagoCity for SaleBy LEE SUSTAR Chicago, Illinois "He wields near-imperial power, and most of Chicago would have it no other way," Time magazine enthused about Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley in an April 18 article naming him one of the country's five best mayors. Daley, Time declared, has used his power "to steer the Windy City into a period of impressive stability, with declining unemployment and splashy growth." Stability? A nice euphemism for politics in a place where there's less official opposition than in your average Central Asian dictatorship--and about as much corruption. Declining unemployment? Never mind the fact that one in six Chicago families subsists below or near the poverty line, even though one family member is working, according to a recent study--or that a quarter of kids under five are poor, government statistics show. Splashy growth? That's one way to describe the uncounted thousands who've been forced out of impoverished neighborhoods in recent years, thanks to the real estate speculation and skyrocketing rents, spurred on by targeted tax breaks often geared to Daley supporters. Then there's the proposed $55 million "doomsday cuts" in public transportation that would cut service by almost 40 percent and lay off 2,000 workers unless the state legislature--run by Chicagoans--comes up with the money. But none of this bothered the editorial writers at the Chicago Tribune, who recently hailed Daley's "strong sense of fairness" and his efforts to "narrow the racial chasm"--an astonishing description of what still remains one of the country's 10 most segregated cities, some 16 years after the mayor first took office. In fact, a 2003 Harvard University study found that racial concentration in Chicago schools is "only a few percentage points from an experience of total apartheid for Black students." The Wall Street Journal isn't phased either. Earlier this year, it praised Daley as "a fix-it, a problem-solving man"--strange praise for a mayor who did nothing while an estimated 15,000 households went without heat during last year's frigid Christmas week. It was on Daley's watch in 1995 that a heat wave killed 700 people in what one disgusted city official called "murder by public policy." How does Daley get away with it? The mayor has repackaged the ham-fisted methods of his father, who held the office from 1955 until his death in 1977. Daley Senior's crude bossism, so repugnant to 1960s middle-class liberals, has given way to his son's style of a can-do manager who tailors himself to yuppie sensibilities. Where Richard I was caught on national television shouting, "Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker, go home" to a U.S. senator at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Richard II installed rainbow street sculptures for the city's main gay district. Where Richard I engineered "urban renewal" to corral African Americans into the high-rise ghettos of public housing, Richard II ordered those units demolished--for the good of the poor, of course, who are being shunted off to poor, segregated neighborhoods, while high-priced condos are built on the site of their previous homes. And where Richard I relied on the Chicago cops to hound African Americans and Latinos and crack the heads of protesters...well, some things never change. WELCOME TO the Chicago of the 21st century, de facto capital of Blue State America. While California is governed by the Republican's Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the mayor of New York City and governor of New York are also Republicans, Illinois is dominated by the Democrats--the Chicago Democratic machine, whose reach extends from the city's wards to the state legislature and the governor's mansion. This Democratic utopia is devoted to corporate-dominated politics, symbolized by a $16 million tax break to get Boeing to relocate its headquarters to Chicago. Next comes the handover of 100 Chicago public schools to private business, putting kids under corporate control and gutting the teachers' union contract, even as 800 teachers face layoffs next year. The school selloff reflects the way that the old patronage machine of Daley Senior has been restructured for the free-market, neoliberal era. Handouts today go not only to loyal ward heelers, but to transnational corporations with more clout than the old man ever dreamed of. As a recent University of Illinois-Chicago study put it, Daley's "patronage precinct captains are supplemented by candidate-based, synthetic campaigns using large sums of money from the global economy." As a consequence, the elder Daley's backroom deals with unions have given way to his son's in-your-face, take-it-or-leave-it demands for job cuts and concessions. City College teachers had to wage a three-week strike last autumn to hold the line, and Chicago's municipal unions have been without contracts for more than two years as Daley demands $20 million in concessions. But there's one element of today's Chicago politics that the elder Daley would recognize: nepotism. The current mayor's brother, John, sits on the Cook County Board--which encompasses Chicago--and sold insurance to crooked trucking firms that did business with the city. Another mayoral brother, William, former architect of NAFTA and secretary of Commerce in the Clinton White House, is president of the telecommunications company SBC, which smoothed the way with Illinois regulators for a takeover of the regional phone company. To be fair, the Daleys aren't the only Illinois Democrats who treat politics as a family business. Gov. Rod Blagojevich moved from the U.S. Congress to the governor's mansion thanks to his father-in-law, Chicago Alderman Richard Mell. Blagojevich, who campaigned against the scandals that imploded the state Republicans, promptly rewarded campaign donors with $24.3 million in state construction contracts. When he's not seeking TV cameras to record his imports of prescription drugs from Canada, the governor is taking a hard line with union negotiators and demanding cuts in public-sector workers' pensions and social spending--even though state poverty has soared 31 percent in the last five years. Of course, there's a legal watchdog overseeing all this: State Attorney General Lisa Madigan, whose father happens to be the Chicago-based speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives. Time Magazine once denounced such practices as an "intricately developed system of crony capitalism, in which personal connections trump the rule of law or markets almost every time." But that was in reference to East Asia in 1997. In today's Chicago, Time praises Daley for having "professionalized the city by hiring skilled managers and burnished its business-friendly image." Chicago certainly is business-friendly--especially to businesses with connections to the Outfit, as the city's mob is known. The current roster of wrongdoing by public officials includes the "hired truck" scandal, in which Outfit-tied companies billed the city for bogus work on construction sites; the towing scandal, in which impounded cars were sold to mob-tied companies that resold them for profit; the road-paving scandal, in which a contractor's father told reporters he bribed Daley administration officials to obtain $40 million in contracts; and the fake-minority business scandal, in which the city funneled $100 million in city contracts to white businessmen in the Outfit-linked Duff family--longtime Daley campaign contributors--working through dummy companies. And that's the short list. WHAT HAPPENED to the "people's movement" that propelled Harold Washington into office as the city's first Black mayor in 1983, seeming to vanquish the old Daley machine for good? The reality is that Washington was never the radical that his racist opponents alleged him to be. When he died suddenly in 1987, his camp fractured. In 1989, Daley won a special election, undercutting the divided Black vote by cultivating alliances with Latino politicians like Luis Gutiérrez, who was rewarded with a promotion from alderman to Congress. An outspoken liberal in Washington, he's a loyal Daley ally at home. Likewise, Daley positioned himself as gay-friendly to court the white "lakefront liberals" who had backed Washington, and he encouraged gentrification to win over younger middle-class voters. This liberal camouflage has led many to forget that Daley built his political base as a race-baiting Cook County state's attorney--on whose watch Police Commander Jon Burge presided over a torture ring that sent innocent men to death row on the basis of coerced confessions. Racist police violence is still endemic in Daley Junior's Chicago--in 1999, Robert Russ and LaTonya Haggerty, two unarmed young African Americans, were killed in separate police shootings in a 24-hour period. Such outrages should be fuel for political opposition, but Daley has bullied and bought off virtually all his would-be rivals. Thus, Alderman Helen Schiller, an old Washington ally and one of the last of the white liberal reformers, supported Daley in his last two reelection campaigns. Dick Simpson, a former alderman turned university professor, studied Chicago City Council voting records and concluded that today's council is even more of a rubber stamp than under Daley Senior. Even the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., based in Chicago, and his son, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., effectively have a non-aggression pact with the mayor. When protesters do take to the streets against the war on Iraq or other issues, they're typically surrounded by cops in riot gear--and often denied the right to march on their chosen route. The First Amendment applies in Chicago only when the mayor says it does. CHICAGO IN the reign of Richard II demonstrates the futility trying to rebuild the left inside the Democratic Party. The liberal independents that do make it outside the machine--Chicago-based Sen. Barack Obama being the latest example--invariably conform to the corporate agenda, while turning a blind eye to the everyday outrages of life in this one-party city-state. Below the radar, however, grassroots activism in Chicago continues on a variety of issues--exposing racist police violence, resisting gentrification, opposing budget cuts in public transportation, organizing labor solidarity, fighting the militarization and privatization of public schools, and more. The second annual Chicago Social Forum, to be held May 1, will highlight this opposition by bringing together more than 60 groups to organize workshops on these and many other issues. As in the rest of the U.S., rebuilding the left in Chicago will take time and patient organizing. But the grievances are mounting, and the potential is there. The more organizing that's done now, the sooner the day will come that Richard II finds a real challenge to his "imperial power." Visit the Chicago Social Forum website for more information on the May 1 conference. Lee Sustar is a regular contributor to CounterPunch
and the Socialist Worker.
He can be reached at: lsustar@ameritech.net
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