Thinking Beyond Mayor Emanual

From a Reader - thanks, Tim

THINKING BEYOND MAYOR EMANUAL

This week, two American cities displayed their contrasting moralities in governance.  In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanual was victorious in seeking huge tax cuts for the uber-rich Chicago Mercantile Exchange.  The mayor fought long and hard for an organization whose top skills appear to be, manipulating  food markets around the world to the point of triggering mass starvation in  third world countries, while looking the other way as billons of investors dollars are stolen by one of its tenants.

While twisting arms on behalf of his rich MERC pals, Emanual simultaneously gutted most of Chicago’s’ public mental health clinics to the point where they are unrecognizable to mental health advocates; which is hard to do considering how used to being under siege mental health advocates are.    Emanual did so just days after proclaiming he would use six and a half million taxpayer dollars to entice Hillshire Farms back to Chicago for their couple hundred lousy office jobs.  Remember Rahm celebrating the Groupon IPO and the promise of jobs it would bring?  Check the Groupon IPO stock price to its current listing.  Suckers.  Seriously - Emanual would rather be patted on the head by his masters at the Chamber of Commerce than just provide the most basic care to those who suffer from life-long mental illness.  Now Emanual proposals to heap fines and deny access to those who dare exercise their right to protest the upcoming NATO/WTO conference.  Not to mention his hand-picked, unelected School Board going behind closed doors and voting to close neighborhood Public Schools in favor of Charter Schools – funders of his political agenda.

It does not have to be this way.  Instead of trembling with fear when these treasonous corporations threatening  to move, we could and should do as San Francisco has done – order their corporate employers to pay all of their employees a living wage.  This week the minimum wage in San Francisco rose to over Ten dollars an hour.  San Francisco does not stop there.  The Golden Gate city is in the planning stages of forming their own bank.  So instead of giving tax payer dollars to one of the criminal Wall Street banks, like we do in Chicago,  San Francisco hopes to do what the state of North Dakota has done for many years – own their own bank.  North Dakotans don’t worry about huge bonuses being grabbed by their states’ banking executives.  They don’t sweat some risk-taker sinking billions into risky overseas bonds, because North Dakotans ARE the bank executives.  San Francisco’s’ elected officials get this.  But as long as Chicagoans elect former investment bankers like Rahm Emanual (18 million dollars ‘earned’ from investments in just 2 and a half years), we are doomed to do what the bankers, and the MERC, and the Chamber of Commerce tell us to do.