Chicago Rising! A resurgent protest culture fights back against Rahm Emanuel’s austerity agenda

[xchrom]

http://www.thenation.com/article/175085/chicago-rising#axzz2YGu3cLFZ


Karen Lewis, center, president of the CTU is joined by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, left, and United States Representative Bobby Rush, right, during a demonstration and march over the a plan to close fifty-four Chicago Public Schools through Chicago's downtown Wednesday, March 27, 2013. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)


On a sunny saturday this past May, far down on the city’s black South Side where corner stores house their cashiers behind bulletproof plexiglass, about 150 activists assembled at Jesse Owens Community Academy. In just a few days, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s appointed Board of Education would vote on the largest simultaneous school closing in recent history. Owens, along with fifty-three other public schools, was on the chopping block. A recent Chicago Tribune/WGN poll found that more than 60 percent of Chicago citizens opposed the closings, and a healthy cross section of them had turned out for the first of three straight days of marches in protest.

Women in red Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) T-shirts registered participants; a vanload of purple-shirted SEIU marchers lingered in excited anticipation; an activist from the city’s Anti-Eviction Campaign, which breaks into and takes over foreclosed houses, donned a parade marshal’s orange vest; two street medics from the Occupy-associated Chicago Action Medical checked on some elderly marchers who arrived in a church bus. The music teacher at Owens, a former minister, asked rhetorically, “Will I have a job on Monday?” She answers her own question: “That’s OK.” A white, middle-class mother with two kids in the system, who traveled almost 100 blocks to be here, told me that she is a Republican but that “people on the right don’t like being pushed around by overbearing government.”

There were signs representing Jobs With Justice and the community-labor umbrella group Grassroots Collaborative. Another sign snarked: if rahm and his unelected school board ever set foot in a CPS school perhaps their math wouldn’t be so bad. The president of Michigan’s American Federation of Teachers spoke. Then a parent mocked public schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett’s recent invocation of Martin Luther King at a City Club of Chicago speech: “How can you call this a civil rights movement when you resegregate our schools, decimate our teacher corps and destabilize our neighborhoods?”

The march stepped off, passing boarded-up houses and auction signs; a CTU staffer called cadence (“I don’t know but it’s been said/ Billionaires on the Board of Ed”). Supporters shouted out in solidarity from front porches. When we passed the first of five closing schools along our seven-mile route, a clutch of 10-year-olds bearing handmade signs joined in and got turns at the bullhorn. I noticed something striking: again and again, when the CTU yell-leader barked out the first half of a new chant (“We need teachers, we need books”), everybody already knew the second line: “We need the money that Rahhhhhhm took!”



Read more: Chicago Rising! | The Nation http://www.thenation.com/article/175085/chicago-rising#ixzz2YGvxJOOZ
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[marmar]

1. K&R ....... You can only prod people with a stick for so long before there's a reaction......

........ even here in the Land of Sheeple.

[xchrom]

2. if...and i say if... north carolina, chicago, texas, etc...

if the different locales can some how begin to cooperate with each other -- coordinate with other -- we might really begin to see a swelling wave.

[marmar]

3. Yep. ..... There's definitely something in the air.

nt

[rhett o rick]

5. Frederick Douglass: “Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the

exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.”

The revolution is waiting for the spark.

The centrists will have to choose a side. “There is a special place reserved in hell for those that do nothing in a time of crisis.” Dante.

[Duckwraps]

7. Seems like I have heard something similar before.

"...and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

[rhett o rick]

8. I guess we will have to wait to learn how sufferable our evils are. nm

[Duckwraps]

11. For a while anyway.

[Duckwraps]

6. Detroit? nt

[socialist_n_TN]

9. Yep X, I agree. And not just here either...

I'd love to see some coordination world-wide against austerity.

[nashville_brook]

4. the prodigal shock doctrine returns to Chicago.

wouldn't it be great if 'The Chicago School' was de-funded!

[byeya]

10. The best source I've found on the success of the rejuvenated Chicago Teachers Union was

the June, 2013, issue of the Monthly Review. It shows how the new leadership of the CTU transformed the union from a business and service model to a social model which involved both the community and the teachers.

[socialist_n_TN]

12. I believe part of that new leadership was ISO...

Not the best of the Trotskyist orgs, but an improvement over the business union model.

[byeya]

16. The Caucus of Rank and File Educators(CORE) thegrouping which won control of the CTU

in an election, used a Trotskyite model of the union as an integral part of the community and, although the CTU was forbidden by law against bargaining for lower numbers of students per class; libraries in all schools; and other issues valued by parents and students, the strikers made it clear that they were striking for these things and took great pains - such as lowering the amount of money they spent on servicing the contract vs community and member outreach - to involve interested parties in the strike by educating them that this was a social justice action.
That this successful strike took place at ground zero of the neoliberal assault on universal free public education shows that a social movement union can be a success.

[rhett o rick]

13. I wonder if this will help wake up those that are convinced that the war is between D's and R's. nm

[RainDog]

14. there are differences

just not enough difference on very important issues.

the culture wars are what bring people to the voting booth for one party vs. another.

If people vote for Democrats, however, and Republicans are marginalized, then Democrats will have to either put up or shut up.

It's offensive to women to say there are no differences when we see Republicans closing down health service providers for women because those services also include abortion.

The is the biggest attack on women's health care in my lifetime.

You are really going to claim this doesn't matter?

[rhett o rick]

18. You are totally misrepresenting me. I never had, nor never will say that the Dem's are the same as

the Repub's. That is a strawman. I say that our war isnt between D's and R's. To break it down like that is a distraction from the real war which is between the 1% and the 99%. Many Democrats carry water for the 1%. I think this OP attests to that. To justify that it is ok, (for Democrats to carry water for the 1%) using the "best of evils" theory is poppycock and has gotten us where we are today.

This is a war between the open-minded liberals and the authoritarian conservatives. The centrists will have to choose a side. "“There is a special place reserved in hell for those that do nothing in a time of crisis.” Dante

[Starry Messenger]

15. k&r

[malaise]

17. Saw a little boy on Ed Shultz discussing the closing of schools

He was really good