The People of Chicago Stun Obama's Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Now It's Round 2

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

In a stunning Chicago mayoral upset, challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia with the help of 3 minor candidates held President Obama's favorite mayor Rahm Emanuel to only 45% of total votes cast. With 34% of the vote Garcia will face Emanuel in a round two runoff election for what Chicagoans call “the fifth floor” the first Tuesday in April.

A former chief of staff at the Obama White House, Rahm Emanuel is estimated to have spent eight times the amount raised by Garcia, and more than four times what all the other candidates did together.

“Turnout was near an all time low, but it didn't matter,” one campaign associate told Black Agenda Report. “The voters who did come out were really motivated,.they know Rahm is an absolute pig.”
“There were also two advisory referenda our forces helped place on the ballot, which brought out the anti-Rahm vote. The first was a citywide vote on taking the big money out of elections, which carried 80%. The second referendum was for Chicago getting an elected school board instead of the mayoral dictatorship the President, privatizers and corporations love so much, that we've had since the Daley era. The mayor's people would not allow a school board vote on the ballot citywide, so the Chicago Teachers Union and their allies in the communities across the city hit the streets and did a ward by ward petition drive, which got it on the ballot in 37 of the city's 50 wards. This measure got 270,000 to 34,000, almost 9 to 1.”

Former Chicago Public Schools chief and current Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been a ferocious advocate of charter schools, teacher firings, high stakes testing and privatization, all of which were carried out in Chicago first. Duncan pledged in 2010, with the president at his side, to “turn around” a euphemism that means privatize, at least 5,000 public schools nationally. Like big city mayors in Philly, New York and elsewhere, Rahm Emanuel did his part to implement the policy, closing over 50 Chicago Public Schools in 2014, down from his original proposal of over 100. He did it in the face of overwhelming opposition, and naturally just about all the closed schools were in the black and Latino parts of town.

Given that corporate media are big cheerleaders for charters and school privatization, you probably won't hear them discuss Chicago's 9 to 1 vote against school closures, teacher firings, charters and privatizations, lest activists in other cities get any ideas. But it did happen. Check the stats yourself.

Rahm Emanuel, called by some “Mayor One Percent” had every conceivable advantage. President Obama cut multiple campaign commercials for him, and made well publicized visits to his campaign offices. Besides millions in cash to spend, he had most of the city's black and Latino political leaders, including congressmen Bobby Rush and Luis Gutierrez in his kennel. His Hollywood pals did an 8 part CNN mini-series for him by the same folks who did the “Brick City” series to boost the political fortunes of Newark's Corey Booker. The CNN series broadcast fake stats about Rahm and his top cop bringing down the city's murder rate, debunked almost immediately by news reports while the series was still being broadcast. And under Rahm and the Daleys, Chicago has expelled roughly as many poor and black residents in the last 20 years as New Orleans after Katrina. The city that elected Harold Washington in 1983 was over 40% black. Today's Chicago is about 27% African American.

The established neoliberal candidate playbook on winning big city elections is to discourage poorer and left leaning voters from coming out, while spending heavily on media. Thanks to the long term mobilization of the teachers union and many forces across the city, it didn't work this time.

Rahm Emanuel is also vulnerable for the many, many privatizations, sweetheart deals, and grand thefts he's helped perpetrate while on the fifth floor. He pretended to “reform” the Daley era deal which gave all the city's parking spaces to a consortium that appears to include J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley and the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi for the next 75 years. If a parking meter breaks or the city decides there's no need for meters on a particular street, the contract obligates Chicago taxpayers to pay the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi and the other shadowy investors what those meters would have produced for the remainder of the 75year contract. Rahm secretly had the yellow light interval shortened a couple tenths of a second to produce more revenue for the city and the contractors who manage its red light cameras.

Chicago residents can rest assured their city's mayor, unlike those in unlucky cities like Detroit, will be never, ever overruled by an unelected board of one-percenters. Rahm Emanuel has created something called the “Infrastructure Trust Board” a private body appointed solely by the mayor with power to overrule any local law or city council decision.

His opponent Jesus Garcia is a local Democrat politician, and former head of a nonprofit neighborhood organization. Garcia was born in Durango Mexico, and played a prominent role in marshaling Latino support for the election of Chicago's only progressive mayor Harold Washington in 1983 and 1987. Garcia got into the race late, having been tapped by Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis, who dropped out of the mayoral race when she was diagnosed with brain cancer last year.

Garcia supports a city ordinance that would grant reparations in the form of cash settlements, housing assistance, free tuition at city area colleges and free medical care for the falsely convicted. Chicago seems to uncover a new such case almost every week or two.

While Emanuel's deep pockets, media endorsements and powerful friends would seem to give him a built in advantage in the April runoff election, it could be anybody's race. If Emanuel's foes can sustain Chicago's grassroots mobilization against austerity, privatization and kleptocracy and dial it up a notch or three over the next month, a former member of Harold Washington's old team could occup the fifth floor of Chicago's City Hall.

What happens after that is anybody's guess. Banksters are probably making their overtures to the Garcia camp even now. The example of New York City's diBlasio, who turned out after election to be just another neoliberal Democrat, is not far from the minds of many. But that's round 3 if they get that far. Most of Chicago's activist energy, and the eyes of the nation, are now focused on round 2. And the bell has already rung.

Bruce Dixon is a Chicagoan living in exile in suburban Atlanta since the beginning of the new century. He's an information technologist and co-chair of the GA Green Party. Reach him at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

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