It's been quite a day for former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The Atlantic announced that Emanuel is coming aboard as a contributing editor to the venerable magazine's "ideas" section. Meanwhile, ABC News announced it has hired Emanuel as a contributor. All within 48 hours of his leaving office.
The former Obama White House chief of staff has almost seamlessly transitioned to the next phase of his career: a sage political observer with his finger on the pulse of what 2020 Democrats need to do to defeat Trump. It's completely predictable but still inexcusable for media outlets to hire him.
Besides the fact that Emanuel has been a mercenary politician his entire adult life, which should be disqualifying on its face, he should at the very least be blackballed from media gigs for his unrepentant and habitual violations of Illinois' Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Under Emanuel's leadership, the city government was notorious for stonewalling public records requests from news outlets and activists, most notably in the case of the 2014 fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by Chicago police.
Police dash cam video clearly contradicted the police narrative that McDonald "lunged" at an officer with a knife, but the Emanuel administration sat on the footage for more than a year—an election year, it so happens—citing an ongoing investigation. The city settled with McDonald's family for $5 million, but part of the agreement forbid the family from releasing the tape until the "investigation" was complete. Chicago only released the video after it lost a FOIA lawsuit brought by an independent journalist, who was later barred from the press conference where the video was first shown.
"Rahm Emanuel's administration was a FOIA disgrace, and he was no friend to the Chicago media," says Matt Topic, a government transparency attorney at Loevy & Loevy who litigated the lawsuit over the McDonald video. "He represents everything that is wrong in government when it comes to transparency and accountability, and he was a shameless self-promoter with little regard for actual facts."
The fight over the McDonald tape was only the most high-profile instance of Chicago dragging its feet or wrongly denying public records requests. In 2015, an Illinois judge ruled, in response to a Chicago Tribune lawsuit, that Emanuel's office illegally withheld emails and texts from Emanuel's private devices regarding the city's controversial red light camera program. In 2016, Chicago paid out $670,000 in public records lawsuits. In 2019, another judge ruled that the Emanuel administration owed the Tribune $387,000 in attorney's fees over the lawsuit for his private communications. The total cost to taxpayers exceeded $1 million. Those communications, by the way, showed a number of people illegally lobbying Emanuel.
It's no wonder that one of new Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot's priorities is improving compliance with FOIA requests—"a marked reversal from outgoing Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting FOIs during his two terms," The Washington Post notes.
Not content with shielding police records from public scrutiny, Emanuel also resisted, slow-walked, and tried to negotiate his way out of forcing the Chicago Police Department, and its politically powerful unions, to clean up its act in response to a damning Justice Department report. He's now trying his hand at revisionist history, claiming in a New York Times op-ed that he successfully reformed the Chicago Police Department.
But as the Chicago Tribune editorial board wrote in a sharp-tongued rebuttal, "Wherever there was an escape hatch allowing him to avoid court oversight, Emanuel was lifting the lid."
If national news outlets want to hire and promote a man who abetted lies about the fatal police shooting of a teenager, and who continues to spin that record, I suppose that's their business, and their reputation.
The post Reminder To All the News Outlets Hiring Rahm Emanuel: He's Awful appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced today that he will not be running for a third term next year—a surprising statement, given that he had already raised millions for another run.
In a news conference, he declared: "This has been a job of a lifetime, but it is not a job for a lifetime."
Certainly not for Emanuel. Over the past few years Chicago has seen a significant jump in violent crime, though that has finally begun to decline. Meanwhile, Chicago's reputation for police misconduct has continued under his administration.
Many Chicagoans will remember Emanuel for City Hall's attempt to block the release of dashcam footage showing police officer Jason Van Dyke fatally shooting teenaged Laquan McDonald seconds after arriving at a call. Officers on the scene insisted that McDonald had lunged at them with a knife, but the video footage showed that nothing of the sort had happened. A judge had to order the city to release the footage, and Van Dyke was subsequently charged with murder. Probably by sheer coincidence, jury selection for Van Dyke's trial is scheduled to start this week.
Chicago has tried to improve the relationship between officers and the public, implementing body cameras and giving more officers Tasers (though those themselves are a tool that can lead to death and are frequently misused to force compliance).
But mostly it seemed that under Emanuel, Chicago was focused on trying to rake in more money to deal with the growing debt caused by expensive bureaucracies and underfunded pensions. As Reason's C.J. Ciaramella reported earlier this year, Chicago is impounding motorists' cars and collectively fining the owners millions, often for petty crimes—burying them in debt in the hopes of digging the city out of its own debts. Emanuel has also jacked up property taxes even further. Small wonder that the greater Chicago area has been losing citizens for the past two years, including its millionaires.
And yet, through all of this, Emanuel seemed to think that the problem was not enough government meddling in its citizens' lives. Under the mayor's urging, Chicago Public Schools implemented a program requiring high school seniors to submit to a selection of approved post-graduation options in order to actually receive their diploma. "Move as far away from Chicago as I possibly can" was not one of the approved choices.
Emanuel's legacy is to affirm everyone's worst perceptions of Chicago's governance: that it's utterly corrupt and cares more about keeping the revenue streams that line officials' pockets and budgets than about holding itself accountable for serving its citizenry.
To read Emanuel's speech, go here.
The post Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel Won't Run for Re-Election appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The bloodletting in Chicago last weekend, with 74 people shot, 12 fatally, was enough to horrify even locals, who are relatively inured to chronic slaughter at the hands of gun-wielding felons. "Unbelievable," said state Rep. La Shawn Ford, a black Chicago Democrat who went so far as to call on President Donald Trump for help.
The shock was also evident beyond Chicago. Rudy Giuliani blamed Democrats in general and Mayor Rahm Emanuel in particular. The mayor's legacy, he tweeted, is "more murders in his city than ever before." Everywhere, there was agreement that the city's mayhem is out of control and in urgent need of measures to contain it.
But don't believe the hype. There are not, in fact, more murders in Chicago than ever before. The number of homicides peaked at 920 in 1991. The death toll last year was 674—and that was down 15 percent from 2016. This year, even with the latest frenzy of shootings, the number of homicides is 25 percent lower than it was at this point in 2017.
These are real signs of progress, however tardy and insufficient. If this year's trajectory holds, it would mean some 280 fewer people dying violently this year than just two years ago. Another year on this trend line would put the city about where it was in 2013—when the number of homicides hit the lowest level in 48 years.
Contrary to popular myth, cynically promoted by Trump and other outside critics, Chicago is not an exceptionally dangerous city. In terms of violent crime, it is less afflicted than a number of large cities, including St. Louis, Baltimore, and New Orleans.
Republicans blame unbroken Democratic control of Chicago for its mayhem. But partisan coloration is an unreliable indicator of crime patterns. Of the 10 states with the highest rates of violence, seven voted for Trump. Los Angeles, whose homicide rate is enviably low, has had only Democratic mayors since 2001.
It's easy to blame the mayor for the persistent bloodshed—and former police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, who is running against Emanuel in the February election, does not pass up the opportunity. McCarthy headed the Chicago Police Department from 2011 to 2015, and he claims credit for the improvement that occurred in that period.
But he was also in charge of Chicago police when an officer shot and killed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald—a gross overreaction that police labored to cover up. The spike in murders began just after the release of dashcam video showing the victim walking away from police before being riddled with bullets. The revelation, which contradicted official accounts, sparked public outrage, particularly among African-Americans.
One problem in Chicago is the dismally low number of homicides that police are able to solve—about 1 in 6. But the department's poor reputation among many of the people most at risk discourages the sort of cooperation from citizens that cops need to catch the killers.
The city's record of failing to discipline officers who resort to unjustified lethal force is corrosive. Last year, WBEZ reported that since 2007, the city's Independent Police Review Authority had "investigated police shootings that have killed at least 130 people and injured 285 others"—and "found officers at fault in just two of those cases, both off-duty" incidents.
The Chicago Reporter provided additional evidence. "From 2012 to 2015, the city spent more than $263 million on settlements, judgments and outside legal counsel for police misconduct," it found. If police want more help from the communities they serve, this is not the way to get it.
Despite these failures, the decline in homicides suggests that the city and the department are doing something right. But what that might be is hard to determine with any confidence.
The fight against crime can't be restricted to more or better policing. Chicago's crime problem is concentrated in a small number of poor, blighted, mostly African-American neighborhoods. Those areas owe their plight largely to a sordid history of systemic, deliberate racial discrimination and violence, endemic poverty, and official neglect over decades.
The conditions that breed rampant crime in parts of Chicago came about not by accident but by policy. The recent attention shows that people here and elsewhere care about the violence. Do they care about fixing the causes?
The post The Truth Behind Chicago's Violence appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Chancelor Bennett, known by his stage name, Chance the Rapper, recently announced that he is the proud new owner of Chicagoist. The purchase was announced in "I Need Security," one of four new songs that he released late Wednesday evening.
4 new songs at https://t.co/m5rYnxzNGY pic.twitter.com/yLWFHnRTy8
— Chance The Rapper (@chancetherapper) July 19, 2018
Chicagoist was part of the local news empire that started with New York City's Gothamist, founded in 2003. The group of sites was purchased by billionaire Joe Ricketts in 2017, who shuttered the suite later the same year after employees voted to unionize. The closure affected 115 journalists, including those who worked for Chicagoist, DCist, LAist, and similar city publications. Three of the publications affected—Gothamist, DCist, and LAist—were relaunched in February by New York public radio station WNYC.
According to Gothamist, Chance's Social Media LLC purchased the Chicagoist website from WNYC.
"I'm extremely excited to be continuing the work of the Chicagoist, an integral local platform for Chicago news, events and entertainment. WNYC's commitment to finding homes for the -ist brands, including Chicagoist, was an essential part of continuing the legacy and integrity of the site. I look forward to re-launching it and bringing the people of Chicago an independent media outlet focused on amplifying diverse voices and content," he reportedly said in a statement. Or as he rapped in song form, "I bought the Chicagoist just to run you racist bitches out of business."
It would appear that Chance is already getting into the investigative spirit with a set of lyrics directed to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel:
And Rahm you done I'm expectin' resignation
An open investigation on all of these paid vacations for murderers
(As Genius notes, Chance's anger is motivated by Emanuel's 2017 proposal to spend $95 million on a police and firefighter training center in response to a Justice Department investigation that concluded excessive force was disproportionately used against black residents. In November, Emanuel walked out of Chance's speech to city council when the rapper suggested that the city should put the resources into public schools and mental health programs.)
The move is in sharp contrast to a news experiment currently being explored by the state of New Jersey. As Reason's Joe Setyon previously reported, New Jersey has put aside $5 million to subsidize local news in response to a "growing crisis" in local coverage. If the concerns associated with such a move being carried out by one of the most corrupt states were not obvious, Politico's Jack Shafer explains:
Even if the consortium stays clean, won't it avoid politically charged stories of great watchdogging potential because it will fear to bite the hand that feeds it? Government-funded news outfits like NPR and PBS, ever fearful of offending their funding sources, avoid hard-hitting government news for this reason. Public media may follow the news pack on a story about government corruption, but generally, they're too compromised to lead.
Chance's venture into local media is consistent with his recent embrace of political activism. He met with Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner (R) in 2017 to talk about Chicago public schools and later reported disappointment with the governor's vague answers. Just a few months ago, he tweeted that black Americans were not required to vote for Democrats.
The post Chance the Rapper Buys <em>Chicagoist</em>, Promises to Investigate Rahm Emanuel appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A pay-to-play scandal at Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has prompted two top officials to resign.
Yesterday General Counsel Ronald Marmer announced his departure after an ethics investigation revealed he was receiving a $1 million severance package from the law firm Jenner & Block while also supervising legal work the firm was doing for the school system. And last week CEO Forrest Claypool resigned after the same investigation found he had engaged in "elaborate cover-ups" of Marmer's behavior, including a "pattern of attorney shopping, record changing and lies to investigators."
The revelations shine an unflattering light on the nation's third largest school district, which spends $6.4 billion in public funds managing 514 public schools. Three CPS chiefs appointed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel have now resigned under varying levels of disgrace.
Emanuel at first resisted CPS Inspector General Nicholas Schuler's recommendation that he fire Claypool, saying that the CEO had made a public apology for his behavior and that it was "a sign of character to publicly acknowledge where you're wrong and take responsibility for it."
Schuler found these public displays of "character" wanting, asking in a December 5 executive summary of his report: "What kind of signal would it send to CPS employees, parents and children if the CEO was allowed to change records as part of a cover up and keep his job?"
Schuler's investigation found that Claypool and Marmer's series of cover-ups began when four CPS attorneys determined that Marmer's supervision of Jenner & Block's work violated the school district's ethics policies. Claypool and Marmer then sought a second opinion from two outside lawyers, both of whom came to the same conclusion.
Claypool then solicited the opinion of a seventh attorney, J. Timothy Eaton, a longtime friend of Claypool's who had donated some $5,000 to his various campaigns for public office. Eaton's legal opinion, unsurprisingly, found that Marmer's conduct was totally above board.
Claypool then buried the opinions of the first six attorneys and used the seventh to secure the Chicago Board of Education's approval for yet more contracts with Jenner & Block. Claypool also had the outside attorneys he consulted alter their bills to CPS to remove any reference to "Code of Ethics" and "ethics issues."
Claypool then lied about his behavior in two separate interviews conducted by the Inspector General's office.
The weight of all these revelations prompted Claypool's resignation this past Friday.
Claypool's predecessor, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, resigned in 2015 over a bribery scandal that saw her sentenced to four and a half years in a federal prison. The CEO before her, Jean-Claude Brizard, resigned in October 2012 over his handling of a teachers strike.
Claypool and Marmer's resignations come as Chicago's school system receives a $499 million budget increase. Chicago taxpayers have also seen their property taxes increase by 10 percent, three-fifths of which is earmarked for the Chicago Teachers' Pension Fund.
The post Chicago Public Schools Execs Lied, Altered Records to Cover Up Wrongdoing appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Hey, Chicago kids! If you're expecting your high-school diploma, you're going to have to tell your school what you plan to do with it. Oh, and if you're not going to do what the Chicago Public School system wants you to do with your diploma, they might not give you one!
The City of Chicago has so ineptly financed itself that it has to tax the crap out of its citizens—literally—just to try to keep its underfunded city employee pensions afloat. It's so dysfunctional that it's the only top-10 city in America that's losing population.
Yet, today Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has decided that the failure of teens to map out their post-secondary education future is a big enough problem that city bureaucrats need to get involved. And what they're going to do is such a brilliant example of how disastrous centrally planned governance is. The school system is going to withhold diplomas from graduating high school seniors unless and until they provide the school system information about their post-school plans.
And to be very, very clear: This is not a "choose your own post-education adventure." You will choose from one of four government-approved options. If you want a diploma you will be required to provide proof you've been accepted to:
That's it. That's what the City of Chicago has decided your choices for success are after you've graduated high school. Got an entrepreneurial spirit? Go get an official post-secondary stamp of approval with a business degree, kid. Or else it doesn't count. Part of a family-owned business? The city plans to regulate and tax them out of existence anyway.
There's an entire list of ways this demand offends the conscience. First and most obvious, it treats people who are becoming adults as though they are wards of the state and withholds a diploma that they've earned unless they provide information to the Chicago Public School system that they have no authority to even ask for.
Second, note that how all of these post-school options tie the teen further into environments subject to continued government control and operations even after reaching adulthood. Granted both the colleges and trade schools could be privately operated, but both are heavily dependent on government grants and subject to significant government control.
Third, since the demand requires merely acceptance and not actual commitment to attend (at least that's what the reporting is saying now) and community colleges accept pretty much everybody, it's just insulting bureaucratic busywork when all is said and done. They can't take your diploma back if you get accepted into college and then don't attend. And that just makes it all the more offensive. It's paternalistic government nudging designed to socialize and fundamentally trick teens into thinking that this is the sum of all their choices after graduation.
Fourth, imagine being a teen and not grasping the busywork "nudging" nature of this demand, concluding post-secondary education is out of reach for you for whatever reason, and believing that you have to join the military in order to get your diploma.
And finally, this is clearly a jobs program—but not for these students. It's a jobs program for post-secondary educators and administrators, an attempt to force an increase in demand through this not-so-subtle coercion. Emanuel pretty much said so himself:
"Starting with the freshman class, right now in high school in Chicago, by the time they come to graduation they'll have — basically think of it this way — you want to make 14th grade, not high school … universal in people's educational program," he said. "And what I mean by that is if you graduate you'll have to have a letter of acceptance from a college, a letter of acceptance from a community college or a letter of acceptance from the armed services or a letter of acceptance from a trade, carpenter or electrician."
Note that Emanuel is confusing "universal" with "mandatory" here. This is the first step in pretty much mandating post-secondary educations for people who might not and perhaps should not be otherwise pursuing them. And according to the Chicago Tribune, this rule is supposedly coming into play starting with students who graduate in 2020.
Need an antidote? Listen to Mike Rowe, famous from Dirty Jobs, talk about our screwed up overpriced college system and the value of trade jobs. Mind you, Emanuel's proposal is friendly to teens pursuing trades, but with the government's oversight (and veto power) over what pursuing a post-school trade actually looks like:
The post Chicago Mayor Threatens Teens' Diplomas Unless They Participate in Approved Post-School Education appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Late last month, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Windy City's local ABC affiliate teamed up to produce what amounts to little more than a hit piece targeting the city's food trucks.
The joint reporting (if that's the right term) alleges that the city's food trucks have been ignoring rules Chicago drafted several years ago to regulate the city's mobile-food vending businesses. The Sun-Times and an ABC 7 I-Team Investigation both allege the trucks are parking where they shouldn't and overstaying maximum times at parking meters.
Some of the allegations may be true. Even if they are, though, it's the city's downright awful rules for regulating those trucks that are to blame here. Full stop.
Just how bad are the rules? In a 2012 column, I referred to them as "disgusting" and "nefarious" and noted they carry harsh fines of up to $2,000.
"Food trucks are severely limited in where and how long they can serve customers," wrote Diana Sroka Rickert, in a great Chicago Tribune column this week that pointed out many of the ordinance's glaring flaws. "The trucks cannot be within 200 feet of brick-and-mortar restaurants, and they're not allowed to stay in the same location longer than two hours."
And, notes Rickert, "these rules should never have become law in the first place."
There's another side, of course, and it's no surprise that the Illinois Restaurant Association, whose members are protected from competition by the law, "supports the crackdown," reports CBS Chicago.
The restaurant association claims that it "supports food trucks and was pleased to work with both the Mayor's Office and Chicago's aldermen to ensure that all parties' best interests were represented in the current ordinance." Notably, the restaurant association statement fails to include mention of, say, maybe working with the food trucks themselves, who are after all the key party here, and whose interests the Chicago ordinance flatly fails to take into account.
In November 2012, shortly after the ordinance's passage, the nonprofit Institute for Justice sued Chicago on behalf of a city food truck owner. The suit rightly argues that the city's food truck rules are unconstitutional.
A 1960 Illinois Supreme Court decision, Chicago Title & Trust Co. v. Village of Lombard, struck down as unconstitutional an ordinance that prohibited new gas stations from operating within 650 feet of existing ones.
The court—in a ruling so on-point it hurts—found no such basis existed under rules that served only to protect existing filling stations from competition from new entrants and that failed to have any basis in protecting the health, safety, or welfare of residents.
"Under the police power of the State new burdens may be imposed upon property and new restrictions placed upon its use when the public welfare demands it," the state's high court ruled in Chicago Title & Trust. "The police power is, however, limited to enactments having reference to the public health, safety, comfort and welfare."
"Chicago's food truck rules are some of the worst in the nation," IJ's Robert Frommer, the lead attorney in the case challenging Chicago's rules, told me this week. "They exist not to protect public safety but the bottom line of a few well connected businesses."
A judge is set to hear oral arguments on cross-motions for summary judgment in the food-truck case next month.
Soon after the Sun-Times and ABC7 reports, at the behest of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the city began handing out $1,000 tickets to food truck operators. The mayor, wrote the author of the Sun-Times article in a follow-up piece, "promise[d] to do what his own administration has failed to do: Issue a blitzkrieg of citations and fines against food truck owners caught thumbing their noses at the city's much-ballyhooed ordinance."
Blitzkriegs and ballyhoos reminds me of a fantastic Echo & the Bunnymen song. But it doesn't make the Chicago ordinance any less awful, or any less unconstitutional.
In speaking with him this week, IJ's Frommer noted something I have as well, namely "that the size of Chicago's food truck industry is dwarfed by those in cities with good laws."
Consider that Chicago, a city that boasts more than 2.7 million residents, has an estimated 60-70 mobile food trucks. That's roughly one food truck for every 42,000 residents.
Washington, D.C., by contrast, has around 660,000 residents. But the District, which updated its food truck rules with better ones several years ago, has more than 100 food trucks, according to DC Food Truck Association membership data. That translates to roughly one truck for every 6,600 residents, or nearly seven times more food trucks per capita than you'll find in Chicago today.
That wasn't supposed to be the case under Chicago's rules. Mayor Emanuel, who co-sponsored the 2012 ordinance, said at the time the law would help Chicago to "finally move forward as a city."
Yet today there are roughly half the number of food trucks on the road in Chicago as there were operating when the ordinance became law.
Instead of moving Chicago forward, under Emanuel's leadership food trucks—and the city itself—seem stuck in reverse.
The post Chicago's Awful Crackdown on Food Trucks appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Yesterday, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel spoke at the conference of mayors in Washington, D.C., on a panel on policing and violence. But although the panel was hosted by Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (D), who saw protests and riots over the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, the panel was not about police violence.
In fact, Emanuel, who recorded an 18 percent approval rating in December largely because of protests over the 2014 police shooting of 19-year-old Laquan McDonald, video of which was released late last year, did not mention the controversy at all, nor did he mention the Department of Justice (DOJ) civil rights investigation into the city's police department. Instead, as the Chicago Tribune reports, Emanuel stuck to City Hall talking points about combatting street violence. At one point, while noting "record" graduation records in Chicago, he said getting students through high school had "the biggest impact" on street violence.
Emanuel was re-elected less than a year ago with an 11 point margin over his challenger, Chuy Garcia, who was backed by the teachers unions. His victory was due in part to Emanuel's efforts at education reform as well as other modest reform efforts. Police reform was not part of that effort and, importantly, neither Garcia nor any other significant candidate for any other city office made police reform a campaign issue.
After activists pushed the issue of police violence into the political discussion in Chicago, teachers unions saw an opening to find new supporters for its own opposition to Emanuel, which never had anything to do with police reform. On Monday, the teachers unions, held an "alternative, people centered celebration" of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that ran counter to the city's own annual, often apolitical, MLK breakfast. The city event was met by activists protesting police violence.
But while the teachers union may have its own agenda against Emanuel, police reform doesn't fit into it. As activists from Black Lives Matter have noted, police unions are a part of the problem of police violence. Activists associated with Black Lives Matter were so concerned about police unions that one of their first online policy efforts after unveiling "Campaign Zero" was a database to track police contract provisions that contribute to the problem of police violence.
The theory is the same for teachers unions—that, like with police unions, they by design produce rules that protect bad actors. Charter schools and other education reform efforts around the country have emerged largely to bypass those kind of contract provisions that keep bad teachers on the job and thus offer poorer children the quality education most state constitutions guarantee. Such a guarantee in California has led to a lawsuit that argues provisions negotiated by teachers unions have had the effect of denying children a quality education. It is a similar argument to the ones on police unions—that provisions negotiated by police unions have the effect of denying citizens their civil rights. Just as a union contract prevents a Board of Education from firing a bad teacher, so do union contracts prevent police departments from firing bad cops across the country.
So the Chicago teachers union's attempt to glom on to the police reform movement is disingenuous at best. But so is placing all the blame on Rahm Emanuel, who has only been mayor since 2011, when the police department and the policies they operate under have been formulated and maintained by democratic institutions at the local and state level. Emanuel's resignation would work better if it were joined by resignations by the rest of Chicago's political class, who bear as much, if not more, responsibility for the policies they have supported that have led to the lack of accountability for police violence Chicago has long suffered for. Something similar is happening in Flint, where some critics are choosing to lay the blame solely on the dirty water crisis on Governor Rick Snyder (R-Mich.), because he appointed an emergency manager who approved the decision to switch water supplies, when the democratically-elected city council voted 7-1 in favor of that decision first*.
Such blame shifting, whether it's about police violence, quality of education, or dirty water, erodes democratic institutions by inoculating them from accountability. Residents of Chicago who choose to blame Emanuel alone, just as residents of Flint who choose to blame Snyder alone, will keep voting for the politicians who predated Emanuel and Snyder and supported the policies that have contributed to today's problems.
*Clarification: there's also plenty of blame for the state foul-ups, and cover-ups, after the decision.
The post The Twisted Politics of Police Violence in Chicago appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In his Sunday USA Today column, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit and University of Tennessee Law School channels Walter Russell Mead, who has noted that public-sector unions simultaneously provide big-city Democrats with patronage-fueled political power and make it next to impossible to reform things when problems (inevitably) arise.
This is especially true in Chicago, writes Reynolds, where embattled Mayor Rahm Emanuel is drowning between a rock and a hard place as financial woes and police-abuse scandals mount.
As in most large, Democratic cities, the police and other city workers are unionized and, effectively, almost impossible to fire. As Mead notes, "There is a harsh conflict of interest between the city's employees and the city's voters. … It is in the interests of public sector unions to shelter employees from oversight and threats to their job security, regardless of how well they perform."
And, also like most large blue jurisdictions (and some red ones), Chicago is in financial trouble, not least because of the high pensions secured by those unionized workers, pensions that the city can't really afford to pay. In May, Moody's downgraded Chicago's credit rating to "junk," with a negative outlook, based on this and other problems.
If Emanuel gives the Black Lives Matter protesters what they want, politically powerful police unions will be angry and, if it looks like crime will rise, more businesses and taxpayers will flee the city, making bankruptcy more likely. If he doesn't give in, then he'll face more protests and unrest, which will probably lead to more businesses and taxpayers fleeing the city, also making bankruptcy more likely.
At Reason, Ed Krayewski has been out front and loud in discussing the generally underappreciated role of unions in police-abuse scandals. Check out his piece from a few weeks ago on the matter here.
The post Rahm Emanuel's—and Chicago's—Public-Sector Union Problems appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Rahm Emanuel looks set to win the run-off election for Chicago mayor by double digits, fending off challenger Jesus "Chuy" Garcia and securing a second term. The Democrat Emanuel fell 5 percent short of winning a majority of the vote in the general election in February, setting up today's run-off. Garcia was supported by a slew of progressive figures, from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to Jesse Jackson and Cornel West, who called Emanuel "too paternalistic." The oft-abrasive former congressman and White House chief of staff got the message. In one of his last TV ads, Emanuel offered that Chicago could do better and, "I hear ya," so could he.
Though Chicago's mayoral election is nominally non-partisan, both of the last candidates standing were Democrats and the run-off was framed as a show-down before far-left economic illiterates of the Bill de Blasio/Elizabeth Warren variety and a more moderate-ish brand of Democrat. For Chicago the stakes were dire, as John Stossel noted in a column last month:
Emanuel relishes conflict and famously said that in politics, "You never let a serious crisis go to waste." That comment scared libertarians and conservatives, who know that government usually uses crises as excuses to increase its power.
But here's the surprise: Emanuel has been in crisis mode for four years now, and sometimes he made the right decisions as a result.
"Crisis" is not just political rhetoric. Mayor Daley and his predecessors pandered to a shallow public and gullible media by spending, borrowing and refinancing. Borrowing helped Daley stay in office for 12 years, but cities can't keep borrowing the way Chicago has.
Moody's downgraded Chicago's credit rating almost to junk-bond level last year because the city promised to pay billions of dollars in pensions to city workers but doesn't have the money.
Chicago is the next Detroit.
Emanuel tried to do some sensible things. He privatized some jobs, giving private contractors a chance to prove that they do city work better than city workers do it. He closed 50 of the city's worst schools. But he made little progress in addressing the immense pension liability.
As Stossel pointed out, Emanuel faced fierce resistance from public employee unions on dealing with the $20 billion in unfunded pension liabilities, and many lined up against him in the election. Chicago could still become the next Detroit. The city's voters have signalled, maybe, that they're willing to try to avoid that.
The post Rahm Emanuel Wins Second Term as Chicago Mayor appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Rahm Emanuel, current mayor of my old hometown, Chicago, is not a gentle soul. But he's smarter than his big-spending predecessor, Richard M. Daley, and the union pawn, Jesus "Chuy" Garcia, who becomes the new mayor if he beats Emanuel in a run-off election April 7.
Emanuel was the tough Obama chief of staff who reportedly stabbed a table with a steak knife as he listed political enemies.
He relishes conflict and famously said that in politics, "You never let a serious crisis go to waste." That comment scared libertarians and conservatives, who know that government usually uses crises as excuses to increase its power.
But here's the surprise: Emanuel has been in crisis mode for four years now, and sometimes he made the right decisions as a result.
"Crisis" is not just political rhetoric. Mayor Daley and his predecessors pandered to a shallow public and gullible media by spending, borrowing and refinancing. Borrowing helped Daley stay in office for 12 years, but cities can't keep borrowing the way Chicago has.
Moody's downgraded Chicago's credit rating almost to junk-bond level last year because the city promised to pay billions of dollars in pensions to city workers but doesn't have the money.
Chicago is the next Detroit.
Emanuel tried to do some sensible things. He privatized some jobs, giving private contractors a chance to prove that they do city work better than city workers do it. He closed 50 of the city's worst schools. But he made little progress in addressing the immense pension liability.
Maybe it would have been politically impossible. The pensions are owed mostly to union teachers, cops and firemen, and none will give an inch. Teachers union protests roused the public against Emanuel's school closings.
"That school was the center of our neighborhood!" goes the refrain from the anti-Emanuel voters. "It provided good jobs."
That's probably why Emanuel was forced into a run-off election.
But bad schools should close. And some union schools were really bad.
Emanuel's opponent in the run-off, Garcia, vocally supports the unions and joins them in opposing both pension reform and competition from charter schools at all costs.
Garcia also wants a "moratorium on charter schools." But charters are a rare bright spot in the failing city.
I suppose union manipulators like Garcia worry that if more parents see how much better schools get without unions in charge, they might get other dangerous ideas. They might demand flexibility and market-based solutions in other areas.
One of my favorite things about Chicago is the so-called "Chicago school" of economics—free market advocates such as the late Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman.
Friedman said, "a major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it … gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself."
Chicago's corrupt political culture has little interest in letting ordinary people experience real freedom.
Have you heard of "pay to play"? It's when politicians award contracts to businesses that pay bribes. Bribery is illegal, but clever political manipulators reframe it in ways their lawyers can call legal. It happens everywhere, but Chicago has been famous for it. Emanuel continued the tradition—one of the things he hasn't gotten right.
Somehow, investment firms that give money to Emanuel's campaign win fees to manage the city's money. Somehow, lawyers who give the right politicians money get lucrative contracts from the city. What a coincidence!
It's as if Chicago voters face a painful choice: waste or corruption. Day by day, the political class milks taxpayers dry.
Once Chicago goes bankrupt, though, a judge will presumably force the city to stop throwing money to cronies, whether unions or businessmen. Pensions will have to be trimmed so that they are sustainable.
Then the rest of America will learn from Chicago's and Detroit's failures. Maybe.
I'm doubtful, though, because so far, the political class didn't learn much from Detroit, Stockton, Greece, Cuba, Venezuela or the Soviet Union.
Maybe these are people who will never learn.
© Copyright 2015 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
The post The Chicago Fray appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>So what crime issue got Gov. Pat Quinn worked up last week? The danger posed by Illinoisans holding state permits to carry concealed firearms. "My foremost duty as governor is to keep the people of Illinois safe," he said in issuing an amendatory veto of a bill to legalize concealed-carry in the last state without it.
His changes included a ban on carrying guns in establishments that serve alcohol and limiting each carrier to one gun with a magazine holding a maximum of 10 rounds. But in the end they didn't matter, because the General Assembly overrode his veto. The new law sets up a system obliging the state to issue licenses to registered gun owners who pass a background check, undergo 16 hours of safety training and pay a fee.
Quinn responded: "Following a weekend of horrific violence in Chicago in which at least 70 people were shot and 12 killed, this was the wrong move for public safety in Illinois." But of those 70 shootings—or the 1,000-plus shootings that preceded them this year — it's safe to wager that few if any involved legal weapons used by individuals legally entitled to own them.
It's exceptionally rare for a previously law-abiding person to take a legally purchased firearm, load it, walk out the door and shoot someone. But that's the specter that dominates the mind of Quinn when the subject of concealed-carry comes up. It also preoccupies Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
The problem of gun violence in the city, though, is a problem of violence committed by criminals and juveniles who are not allowed to own guns, much less carry them in public. To worry about legal permit holders in that context is like fretting that you may have left a faucet running as you try to escape a flood.
The discussion arises because of a federal appeals court decision last year striking down Illinois' ban on concealed-carry. Noting that the Supreme Court says the Second Amendment guarantees the right to have guns in the home for protection, it concluded there is no logic in denying individuals that means of self-defense in public spaces.
"A right to bear arms," wrote Judge Richard Posner, "thus implies a right to carry a loaded gun outside the home." The court gave the state six months to create a permit system.
Chicago Democrats act as though this is either a) a surefire formula for more bloodshed or b) a reckless leap into the unknown. It's neither. In recent years, we have accumulated a wealth of evidence about what happens when a state establishes a "shall-issue" system under which qualified citizens may pack pistols.
Since Florida blazed the trail in 1987, state after state has followed. During that period, the national homicide rate has fallen by more than 40 percent. Florida's dropped even faster. Back then, its murder rate was far higher than Illinois'. By 2011, it was lower.
It would be too much to assume that the spread of concealed-carry accounts for the improvement. Lots of factors have produced the national reduction in violent crime. But it hasn't gotten in the way.
Opponents, however, never tire of insisting that letting individuals tote firearms will unleash mass carnage. The Washington-based Violence Policy Center makes much of the fact that since 2007, by its count, 516 people have been killed by permit holders.
But a quarter of those were suicides, which are not a danger to public safety. Though the figure sounds high, it's less than 90 a year—in a country with more than 50,000 homicides and suicides annually.
The number of licensees who make lethal misuse of their guns, likewise, is a microscopic percentage of the estimated 6 million people who are authorized to carry. The overwhelming majority behave in a responsible, lawful way. The people behind the epidemic of violent crime in Chicago, by contrast, don't bother with permits and wouldn't qualify for them.
For this group, the new law is irrelevant. Politicians who use the ongoing slaughter as a reason to oppose it only confirm that when it comes to government's most important function, they haven't got a clue.
The post Illinois Politicians Don't Understand Concealed Carry appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The post Rahm Emanuel's Popularity Drops appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The losses came despite Emanuel's moves to raise more money at Taste 2012 by charging attendees at the nightly concerts at the Petrillo Music Shell $25 for reserved seats and adding $40 daily gourmet meals prepared by local chefs alongside the traditional ribs-and-ice cream fare that has made the festival synonymous with Chicago summer for decades. The mayor also cut Taste from 10 days to five and moved it away from July 4.
The post City-Run "Taste of Chicago" Lost $1.3 Million Last Year appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>President Barack Obama, left, and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel walk on the tarmac upon the president's arrival in the Second City in October on Air Force One. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)
The 53-year-old Emanuel, who is busy raising money for his 2015 reelection campaign in the Windy City, has had discussions both over the phone and face to face in the past month with Democratic Party donors and fundraisers about a possible White House run, according to sources.
The post Rahm Emanuel Could be Thinking of a 2016 White House Run appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Emanuel made his remarks at a Chicago Police Department graduation ceremony Monday morning.
The post Rahm Emanuel Calls For Assault Weapons Ban appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When Chicago public school teachers started the fall semester by turning down a $400 million contract offer that would have boosted pay by 16 percent over four years, my first concern wasn't for the children. It was for the Democrats.
Sure, the walkout by Chicago Teachers Union members caused havoc for kids. But I've been to public school, and I can tell you they didn't miss much.
The strike's lasting damage was to the party that since at least the early 20th century has been labor's best friend. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is not just some schmuck in the donkey party: He is President Barack Obama's former chief of staff, the congressional leader behind the Democrats' 2006 House takeover, a Clinton administration arm twister so feared that he is still known by his '90s nickname, Rahmbo.
But the strike made Chicago's tough-guy mayor look like Chuck "Bayonne Bleeder" Wepner. Striking teachers dubbed him "Empermanuel," accused him of having "no respect for us as people," and even claimed (falsely, it turned out) that Emanuel was a fan of the Canadian alt-rock quartet Nickelback. When the teachers returned to work after more than a week on the picket line, they had scored a big pay increase and crippled the teacher-evaluation testing at the heart of the strike, a resolution Emanuel unconvincingly called an "honest compromise."
Emanuel is one of many recent Democratic chief executives who have, with varying levels of enthusiasm and success, tried to confront government employee unions. California Gov. Jerry Brown struggled for two years to get a minor pension bill through the legislature. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in March got a partial pension reform that is expected to save $3 billion a year out of the Empire State's $133 billion annual budget. Washington, D.C., Mayor Adrian Fenty lost his job when he took on the teachers union.
And since 2006 a very similar story—of a powerful Democratic mayor being slowly pecked to death by his former union allies—has been playing out in Los Angeles. Like Emanuel, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa looks like a throwback to the days when a union-friendly Democratic boss on Election Day could confidently send out goons to patrol the wards with two-by-fours and $50 bills.
But where Emanuel seems generally to enjoy doing public battle, Villaraigosa—palpably needy in person and heroically unfaithful to now-ex-wife Corina Raigosa (the former Tony Villar's last name is a his-and-hers portmanteau)—always seemed to be enacting an inner psychodrama on L.A.'s grand stage. The city's school district is a notorious underperformer, and to his credit Villaraigosa spent much of his first term trying to do something about it. His efforts included trying to manage a tranche of schools directly without union work rules, encouraging charter schools, and finally denouncing the teachers union in a powerful 2010 speech that earned him praise from reformers all over the country.
Unfortunately, it's not clear whether Villaraigosa, who graduated from the unaccredited People's College of Law and began his career as an organizer for United Teachers Los Angeles, wants to confront the unions or blame them for his failures. In 2007 he struck out in an attempt to win education reform in Sacramento but seemed eager to celebrate his own defeat soon after. The unions "had that place locked down," Villaraigosa told New Yorker reporter Connie Bruck. "I couldn't get a resolution that said, 'His name is Antonio Villaraigosa.' I mean, they had it locked down!" Bruck described Villaraigosa's "evident admiration for the union's display of raw power."
That don't-look-at-me attitude still informs Villaraigosa's governance. After years of dire and deteriorating finances (L.A.'s budget hasn't been balanced for four years), the mayor allows government employee unions to carry out their tactic of ensuring that any slowdown in the rate of spending increases is immediately visible to Angelenos in the form of cuts to services. Villaraigosa, whose city manager calls for taxes on real estate sales, entertainment, petroleum extraction, and parking lot revenues, seems to believe voters will respond to office-hour reductions and crossing guard–free intersections by demanding tax hikes.
To the extent possible in L.A.'s Putinesque democracy, voters actually respond by blaming the mayor. In his 2009 re-election race, Villaraigosa squeaked by with a small majority even though he was running virtually unopposed and outspent his nearest competitor (politically unaffiliated gadfly Walter Moore) by 15 to 1.
That such an unimpressive figure was chosen to chair this year's Democratic National Convention is a sign of just how shallow the Democrats' bench is. Having already been promoted several notches above his level of incompetence, Villaraigosa fulfilled party watchers' worst fears during a controversial floor vote over the last-minute inclusion of the words God and Jerusalem in the party's platform. When the voice vote split with no clear winner, Villaraigosa appeared torn between his instinct for party machine strong-arming and his longing to appear statesmanlike. Painful moments of dead air ensued, during which the nearly 60-year-old mayor looked like a little boy overwhelmed by the complexities of a man's job. At last, he unbelievably declared a supermajority, to a chorus of boos that ended up being the convention's defining moment.
There were more troubling fissures evident at the convention. Although speakers from former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm to the president himself engaged in bizarre encomiums to organized labor, union members complained loudly and repeatedly to the media of feeling slighted by the party leadership. If these had been Bill Clinton's New Democrats of the 1990s, the feeling might have made sense. But the current generation of prominent Democrats is among the most union-oriented in history. They're just out of money, and the unions know it.
Rather than offering concessions to Emanuel, Villaraigosa, and other cash-strapped executives, unions have decided to go down swinging. They may be right to see compromise as death. But make no mistake: Laborgeddon is upon us, and it will have long-term consequences for the Democrats no matter who wins this election.
The post Unions vs. Democratic Mayors appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Not surprisingly, those agenda items also are close to Emanuel's heart.
The post Rahm Emanuel Expects More Money From White House for Roads, Schools in Chicago appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The strike, affecting 350,000 students, began when talks broke down over issues including pay and teacher evaluation.
The post Rahm Emanuel Will Seek Court Order to End Teachers' Strike appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Ryan, a Wisconsin congressman, made his comments today at a campaign rally in Portland, Ore.
The post Paul Ryan Supports Rahm Emanuel on Chicago Strike appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"They had [the capital of California] locked down," Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said of teachers unions in 2007. "I couldn't get a resolution that said, 'His name is Antonio Villaraigosa.' I mean, they had it locked down!" New Yorker reporter Connie Bruck described Villaraigosa's "evident admiration for the union's display of raw power."
The Chicago teachers strike today displays a different kind of raw power. In fatter times, the union could allow a powerful Democratic mayor to submit to its will in the relative privacy of a statehouse. In the Windy City, teachers are making a show of force in plain air.
The Chicago Teachers Union is not merely saying no to a $400 million deal that would have increased pay by 16 percent over four years. The union is doing so in a way that purposefully humiliates one of the country's most powerful Democrats. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is President Obama's former chief of staff, and he bragged about his school reform efforts last week at the Democratic National Convention.
The complete disarray of the Democratic Party makes it hard to say what the party's strategy is ("Forward"? "We can't wait"? "D is for drive"? "Dead/Alive"?). But Obama and his party at least need to put forward the idea that the Democrats are better than Republicans at coaxing concessions from public sector unions. This shouldn't be hard to do. Given the unions' recent high-profile losses in Wisconsin, San Jose and San Diego, Democrat chief executives theoretically have extra leverage. The unions certainly can't believe they'll be getting better deals if they throw elections to the Republicans. (Not that the GOP could win an election in Chicago, or L.A. for that matter.)
But Laborgeddon is upon us. Early last week, the conventional wisdom was that organized labor had been forced to accept a supporting role at the DNC. I don't see how anybody who watched a fair portion of the speeches in Charlotte could say that conventional wisdom was correct. The Democrats are totally at the mercy of government employee unions. It doesn't matter that cities and states are bankrupt. In fact, the fiscal crisis makes it even more important for organized labor to show its authority over the Democratic Party. The Chicago teachers strike is just a baroque flourish to drive the point home.
The post Democrats Can't Even Pretend to Control Unions Anymore appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Since 1976, Gallup has surveyed Americans' perception of teachers unions' efficacy. In April 1976, 38 percent of Americans believed that teachers unions hurt the quality of public education in the United States. By 2011, nearly half of Americans think teacher unionization has hurt the quality of public education in the United States.
Over this same time period, only roughly a quarter think teachers unions have improved the quality of public education. Interestingly, between 1976 and 1998 when Gallup asked these questions, a declining number of Americans thought teachers unions hurt public education. However, between 1998 and 2011 Americans have become dramatically more skeptical of these unions, leaping from 26 percent in 1998 to 47 percent in 2011.
The post Polling Shows Most Americans Think Teachers Unions Have Hurt Public Education Quality appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Update: Read this story about how the 45,000 kids in Chicago's charter schools are still going to school even as their counterparts in traditional public schools are cooling their heels as teachers strike.
As Reason 24/7 notes, Chicago's teachers are on strike. This, despite what seems like a pretty plum offer from city officials:
Chicago offered teachers raises of 3 percent this year and another 2 percent annually for the following three years, amounting to an average raise of 16 percent over the duration of the proposed contract, School Board President David Vitale said.
"This is not a small contribution we're making at a time when our financial situation is very challenging," he said.
The school district, like many cities and states across the country, is facing a financial crisis with a projected budget deficit of $3 billion over the next three years and a crushing burden of pensions promised to retiring teachers.
So what's the sticking point? In exchange for the salary increase, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and others are insisting that standardized test scores play some role in evaluating teachers and that school principals be given more power to run their schools the way they want to. Teachers say they don't have enough control over their students' socioeconomic situations to be judged on what they teach kids. Responds a union official:
"Evaluate us on what we do, not the lives of our children we do not control," [union head Karen] Lewis said in announcing the strike.
Come on. Nobody—even Rahm Emanuel, a man about as heartwarming as a bloody stool—is suggesting that teahers be held accountable for poverty, crime, you name it. But it certainly can't be that complicated to come up with a way of benchmarking student progress that takes into account the effect of specific teachers. One of the most ridiculous claims emanating from teachers unions is the persistent idea that teaching abilities can't be quantified in any meaningful way as it relates to merit. Somehow, every other profession on the planet—including teaching at the college level—finds ways to assess and reward good performance.
Then again, all discussions about the K-12 system need to at least consider the notion that educating kids is the lowest priority of what we called "The Machine" in this recent Reason TV video:
The post Updated! Why Chicago Teachers Are Striking Despite an Offered 16 percent Raise Over Four Years appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>An Obama campaign aide confirmed Wednesday that Emanuel is making the switch to the Priorities USA Action super PAC. That group is run with the help of former White House advisers and has spent millions of dollars on ads supporting Obama.
The post Rahm Emanuel Called to Super PAC appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"I believe if everybody stays at the table and works through the issues (we'll continue to) make good and steady progress," Emanuel said. "Our kids should stay in the classroom which is where they're going to learn and everyday they're not there a day has been taken away from them and it's not necessary."
The post Rahm Emanuel: Teachers Strike "Not Necessary" appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The convention runs Sept. 4-6. Democratic Party officials did not announce a date or time, and an Emanuel aide said those details had not yet been set.
The post Rahm Emanuel to Speak at Democratic Convention appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The FAA issued a "temporary flight restriction" for a portion of Chicago airspace from May 19 to May 21, during the NATO Summit to be held in the city. Airspace will be limited largely to government aircraft and regularly-scheduled commercial flights.
Other aircraft (including privately-owned drones and even model rockets) will not be allowed into the no-fly zone, and the FAA warns that aircraft violating the order could even be shot down. Only law enforcement planes and commercial flights will be allowed into the 'inner core' of the zone. The exact location has not been announced, and is subject to change, anyway. "[T]his advisory may change with little or no notice. Pilots are advised to check… frequently for possible changes prior to operations in the area," the FAA advises.
Will there be missiles, like in London? No word yet, though the upcoming NATO and G-8 summits have already given Mayor Rahm Emanuel the chance for a power grab, increasing city restrictions on protests and expanding his spending power for the summits.
The post 'No Fly Zone' Over Chicago for NATO Summit appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>