Laura Flanders | The Nation
Chicago Teachers Turn Up the Heat on Rahm Emanuel (VIDEO)
Don’t take your eyes of Chicago yet. The NATO protests may be over, but city politics are heating up. Chicago’s Public School teachers are negotiating a new contract, and an impasse could lead to the first teachers strike in the city since 1987. The target of the teachers’ ire is Mayor Rahm Emanuel and a regimen of change that dates back to the days of now Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. A strike before November? Teachers say they are ready for it. Their union is under new leadership and new allies, like Progress Illinois and Occupy Chicago, are at their back. Immediately following the NATO protests, the CTU is holding what it says will be a historic rally and march on the city Board of Education.
Like teachers across the country, the Chicago Teachers Union has come under attack for years. Schools have seen layoffs, new standardized tests and no end of complaints about performance. (Some of the best—and the worst—public schools in the state are in Chicago.) Now Mayor Emanuel and his superintendent Jean-Claude Brizard are demanding (among other things) a roughly 20 percent longer school day and a new, merit-based pay system—along with a 2 percent pay raise. It’s not enough to win over the Chicago Teachers Union. In fact, it has fired them up, and their allies too.
Where Are the Missing 5 Million Workers?
“Where have all the workers gone?” David Wessel of the Wall Street Journal wondered about the labor force this week:
In the past two years, the number of people in the U.S. who are older than 16 (and not in the military or prison) has grown by 5.4 million. The number of people working or looking for work hasn’t grown at all.
Affordable Housing for Seniors in the Cross Hairs in Chicago
The “Age Wave” is upon us. It is estimated that every eight seconds another American turns 65. As is already clear to many, elder care is the crisis we have no plan for. Add housing to the mix of existing concerns about care, health and retirement security and you have a disaster looming—which is why it’s crazy to threaten the largest source of unsubsidized housing still affordable for the middle class—especially when those middle-class retirees are your clients.
At least that’s what a group of retirees had it in mind to tell billionaire property baron (and Romney supporter) Sam Zell when they flew into Chicago from around the country to attend the annual shareholder meeting of one of Zell’s companies, Equity Life Style Properties (ELS), last week.
“This was our one chance in the year to tell Zell and his board how the company’s policies are affecting real people,” said Ishbel Dickens of the Manufactured Home Owners Association of America (MHOAA), who helped organize the residents’ action May 8. But she and most of the residents were excluded from the meeting, and Sam Zell himself stayed away.
Why Didn't Wisconsin's Teaching Assistants' Association Endorse Any Candidate in Today's Election?
This Tuesday, as Wisconsinites went to the polls to vote in primaries to replace Governor Scott Walker and five other statewide office holders, the union of graduate students at the heart of the 2011 Capitol protests that sparked the recall stood apart from their union fellows and refused to endorse any candidate.
Noam Chomsky: Suicidal Policies vs. OWS & Life (VIDEO)
Noam Chomsky has not just been watching the Occupy movement. A veteran of the civil rights, antiwar and anti-intervention movements of the 1960s through the 1980s, he’s given lectures at Occupy Boston and talked with occupiers across the United States. A new publication from the Occupied Media Pamphlet Series brings together several of those lectures, a speech on “occupying foreign policy” and a brief tribute to his friend and co-agitator Howard Zinn.
May Day 2012: Love in a Hopeless Place?
Banish from your head those sepia newspaper photos of massed men in matching hats. Forget, for a moment, the bellow of the grand oratorical leader. May Day in New York City was not like 1912. Instead, picture if you can a swarm of flying pickets darting from the New York Times building to Disney to Wells Fargo Bank. Imagine the benches of Madison Square Park spilling over with teachers and students human-microphoning free college classes in the open air. At Union Square, people from the South Bronx–based Green Worker Cooperatives played a group board game, “Co-opoly,” on a blanket. Cheerful hoodie-wearers whizzed past on bikes.
“I’ve no idea what’s going on,” said Carmen, a unionized postal worker on her afternoon delivery rounds, “I’m working.” Detective Schultz of the Bronx Warrant Squad was working too: “My assignment was to follow that brass band…but I’m part of the 99 percent.”
Welcome to May Day in New York 2012. Chaotic, creative, inchoate, diffuse. Was it a glimpse of what post-industrial solidarity just might look like in the century ahead? Or another display of what remains, when organized worker power has been wiped out?
The Legacy of Chernobyl
Twenty-six years after the meltdown at Chernobyl, the legacy of the 1986 explosion lives on.
"It is a disaster that left a 30-kilometre uninhabitable exclusion zone, displaced hundreds of thousands of people, and still threatens the lives of tens of thousands," writes Greenpeace today.
Protesters Arrested at Iowa Wells Fargo
Add ten more Americans to the list of non-CEOS who’ve gone to jail since the start of the financial crisis. On Monday afternoon, police arrested ten protesters at the office of Wells Fargo in downtown Des Moines, Iowa, among them a former Methodist minister, a Vietnam veteran, several unemployed Iowans and at least a couple of family farmers.
Former minister Stephanie Simmons, who was arrested Monday, explained her actions shortly after her arrest: “I love democracy and my concern, among other things, is the outrageous salaries and bonuses the bank executives are making when there are people just hanging on by their fingernails.”
Simmons lives in Guthrie Center, Iowa (population ca. 1,500). Her congregation of about 130 people supports twenty-seven families with food and other supplies every month.
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