Chicago on the Make

by Andrew J. Diamond

  After a seven-day walkout that paralyzed the nation’s third largest school system, the CTU won enough concessions from the city to claim victory—among them, a modest pay increase over the next four years, a limited right of recall for displaced teachers, the maintenance of a pay schedule based largely on seniority, no increase in health care costs, an evaluation system that followed the minimum state requirements for using student performance on standardized tests, and the right to appeal teacher evaluations. CTU president Karen Lewis referred to the deal as an “austerity contract,” pointing to the fact that the 17.6 percent salary increase was much lower than the 30 percent sought.

  But this was only phase one of the austerity offensive against Chicago public schools and the communities depending on them most. The following May, Emanuel’s school board voted 6–0 to approve his plan to close forty-nine elementary schools, most located in black neighborhoods, a move that would entail laying off some 3,000 teachers and school personnel and forcing some 12,000 students to walk longer, and at times more dangerous, routes to school. Although school closings were sweeping the nation at the time—Philadelphia’s School Reform Commission had recently voted to close twenty-three, for example—this was the biggest single round of them in U.S. history. Then, in August 2013, the school board voted 7–0 to approve a budget plan that slashed individual school budgets by 10–25 percent, a steep cut that would force the elimination of school libraries (160 schools in the city already lacked them), a sharp reduction in special education and guidance counseling services, the gutting of physical education and art and music programs, and a virtual halt on physical improvements like the badly needed installation of air conditioning.

  “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel, during his stint as President Obama’s chief of staff, told a room full of corporate chief executives in November 2008.3 Five years later, he was practicing what he preached. In her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein highlights how champions of free market reforms capitalized on the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina to privatize the New Orleans school system—a striking example of what she refers to as “disaster capitalism.”4 While Chicago did not have hurricane winds or floodwaters to help its privatization program along, the Emanuel administration conjured up its own crisis with school closings and deep budget cuts, rationalizing them as a painful but necessary way to deal with a now $1 billion school-operating deficit and an underfunded pension system. It was yet another doomsday scenario, following in the footsteps of the ones that had justified CTA cuts under Daley and the litany of austerity measures enacted by Emanuel during his first years in office. Yet this particular scenario was about more than just balancing the budget. Emanuel and the school board intended to induce a real crisis that would validate the transfer of schools to the private sector. With their budgets worn down to the bone, public schools were now bound to demonstrate the failings that the champions of charter schools had always attributed to them. Far more than his predecessor, Rahm Emanuel understood the brave new world of disaster capitalism. Austerity, for Emanuel, was not merely the backdrop for normal business affairs; it was a powerful wellspring of economic activities and, as such, a critical source of patronage.

  But those working amidst the rubble of this policy-induced catastrophe—namely, the leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union—were not buying the crisis idea for one minute. If Emanuel had inherited a political landscape shaped over the decades by neoliberal sensibilities and forms of governance, he also faced some new conditions. Like his predecessor, Richard M. Daley, Emanuel tried to use budgetary smoke and mirrors, but many Chicagoans had peeked behind the curtain and seen that the mighty wizard was a fraud. Unimpressed by Emanuel’s appeal for sacrifice in the midst of crisis, the CTU called for the mayor to use TIF funds to fill the budget gap and argued quite persuasively that a small tax on transactions made on the city’s financial exchanges would quickly and easily fill the budgetary gap.

  The groundswell of opposition to Emanuel’s austerity education budget had been gradually building under the radar since the last few years of the Richard M. Daley era. After the CTU had failed to muster citywide opposition in 2006 to the school closings initiated by Daley’s Renaissance 2010 plan, a number of disgruntled teachers within the union began to join forces and to reach out to grassroots organizations in areas affected by school closings, such as the Pilsen Alliance, the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization (KOCO), and Blocks Together, a community organization in the Puerto Rican Humboldt Park neighborhood. By 2007, the group, led by high school history teachers Jesse Sharkey and Jackson Potter, had launched a regular forum on the school closings and convinced the CTU leadership to form a committee to address the issue. Although union leadership would swiftly abandon the cause, the teachers pressed ahead, continuing to collaborate with community organizations in neighborhoods threatened by school closings. In 2008, in the midst of the global financial crisis, members of the group, which now called itself the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE), read Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, engaging in a discussion of its ideas which, according to Potter, was like “a light bulb going off.”5 In May 2010, with Karen Lewis as its presidential candidate, CORE triumphed in a runoff election against the United Progressive Caucus (UPC), which had controlled the CTU for thirty-six of the previous forty years.6 True to the organizing and ideological approach that had catapulted the movement forward from the start, CORE immediately moved the issue of publicly funded corporate subsidies and the tax increment financing (TIF) system to the center of its agenda. “Corporate America sees K–12 public education as a $380 billion trust that, up until the last ten or fifteen years, they haven’t had a sizable piece of,” Lewis asserted following her election. “What drives school reform is a singular focus on profit. Not teaching, not learning—profit.”7 Such views about Chicago’s school system had not been voiced so loudly and clearly since the days of Margaret Haley. The CTU had become the catalyst for a broad-based multiracial movement, and Karen Lewis was quickly being bandied about as a legitimate challenger to Emanuel in the upcoming election.

  Anticapitalist rallying cries were not confined to the teachers’ movement. Outrage over TIFs and pinstripe patronage was increasingly being vented by neighborhood groups and political organizations dealing with affordable housing, immigrant rights, access to health care, homelessness, violence prevention, and other issues. Chicago was witnessing the emergence of a citywide movement of grassroots organizations soldered together by a sense of common struggle against the stark inequalities created by the long-standing collusion between City Hall and the downtown business crowd. When Richard M. Daley announced he would not be seeking reelection in September 2010, a new feeling spread through the ranks of activists leading the charge: hope. “The Daley legacy was so deep because people thought Chicago could never change,” remarked Amisha Patel, the executive director of Grassroots Collaborative, a coalition of labor and community groups.8 In December, Grassroots Collaborative looked to channel this new spirit by organizing a mayoral candidate forum, called New Chicago 2011, which drew 2,600 people representing more than thirty community organizations across the city.

  Grassroots Collaborative was strikingly successful in bringing together unions and community organizations, including the CTU, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the Action Now Institute, the Logan Square Neighborhood Association, the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council, and Organizing Neighborhoods for Equality: Northside (ONE Northside). Rahm Emanuel’s campaign announcement just weeks after the collaborative came together might have “crushed [the] moment”—in the words of Patel. But the movement pushed forward, picking up new momentum with the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street movement nationwide. On October 10, 2011, with Occupy Wall Street protesters camped out in the financial district along LaSalle Street, the new face of the Chicago left revealed itself. Four thousand protesters joined the Take Back Chicago marches on the Chicago Art Institute, where memb
ers of the financial futures trading industry were attending a reception for the 27th Annual Futures & Options Expo. Some four months later, in February, Grassroots Collaborative and Stand Up! Chicago, another labor-community coalition, coordinated the famous “golden toilet” demonstrations to protest the granting of $15 million in TIF funds to the CME Group in 2010 for the purpose of rehabbing bathrooms, upgrading the cafeteria, and building a fitness center at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. As a result of the pressure, CME Group chairman Terrence Duffy promptly announced the company would return the money. Duffy was not alone in feeling the heat. In early March, the White House suddenly announced that the Group of Eight (G8) meeting that was to take place in Chicago in mid-May would be moved to Camp David to avoid disruptive protests.

  And yet, as the dust settled from this whirlwind of contentious politics that whipped through the city during this moment of regime change, Mayor Emanuel started, undaunted and relatively unimpeded, down the road paved by the neoliberalization agenda of his predecessor. In addition to keeping the school privatization program on track, with the approval of eleven charter school openings in the fall of 2014 and seven more in the fall of 2015, Emanuel’s handpicked school board voted to authorize $340 million in contracts to two private firms, Aramark and SodexoMAGIC, to provide custodial and building maintenance services to the Chicago Public Schools. Shortly after the start of Aramark’s contract, a survey of principals indicated shortages of supplies, dirtier schools, and teachers spending more time cleaning their classrooms. Then, after the story broke and Emanuel told Aramark to “clean out the schools or . . . clean out their desks and get out,” the company announced it was laying off 476 custodians. The school board wiped its hands of the affair, claiming the privilege of public unaccountability that neoliberal governance bestows. “It’s not actually CPS laying off the custodians,” CPS spokesman Bill McCaffrey told the press. “It’s the private contractors that work for us.”9

  But far bigger problems were coming to light as the school board sped ahead on its seemingly inexorable drive towards a privatized future. In December 2013, Juan Rangel, cochairman of Emanuel’s 2011 campaign, was forced to step down from his post of executive director of the United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) amidst a federal securities probe into its use of a $98 million state grant to build charter schools—believed at the time to have been the largest government subsidy for charters in the country. The grant was merely a portion of a total of $280 million in state funds allocated to UNO between 2009 and 2014, enabling a small neighborhood organization devoted largely to housing and immigrant rights issues in the Pilsen-Little Village area to grow into the city’s biggest charter school operator and the largest operator of Hispanic charter schools in the nation. Emblematic of the interplay of race and neoliberalization in Daley’s Chicago, Rangel had effectively parlayed UNO’s ethnoracial legitimacy—carefully cultivated by his predecessor Danny Solis—to make the organization (and himself) indispensable to Daley and then Emanuel after him. UNO would serve as middleman and fixer as the city imposed charter schools on its Latino communities, and with every charter school UNO opened, City Hall would gain legions of teachers, janitors, administrators, and parents in these communities who were, in one way or another, loyal to it. All this the CTU understood and it cried foul. But the advance of charter schools continued unabated.

  Indeed, Emanuel’s first term in office witnessed a litany of scandals and mishaps related to the city’s privatization deals: Aramark’s incompetence, Rangel’s improprieties, and the rampant malfunctioning of the Chicago Transit Authority’s new privatized fare collection system, Ventra, which ended up costing the city $519 million ($65 million more than expected). Yet City Hall’s belief in the private sector as holding the solution to all its problems never wavered, even for a moment.

  The Emanuel administration also ignored the tough talk about the injustices of the TIF system within the ranks of Chicago’s new anticapitalist insurgency, not wavering in the least in its determination to keep funneling a disproportionate amount of TIF funds into the Loop while denying the areas most in need of them of their proper share. Between 2011 and 2015, almost half the $1.3 billion in TIF financing earmarked by the Emanuel administration went to the Loop district, an area that holds only 11 percent of Chicago’s population and accounts for just 5 percent of its geography. The South Side, by contrast, received about 16 percent of TIF funds, the West Side only 9 percent, and the Southwest and Far South Sides just 4 percent each.10 Moreover, TIF funds in the Loop went to projects that created few new jobs for residents of the city’s poor and working-class neighborhoods during a time when the position of young African Americans in Chicago’s labor market was particularly weak. In 2014, 47 percent of African Americans aged 20–24 were out of school and out of work, compared with just 31 percent in New York and Los Angeles. By contrast, only 10 percent of white Chicagoans in this same age group were unemployed and out of school.11

  Perhaps the most controversial of Emanuel’s TIF projects during his first term was his authorization of $55 million to subsidize the construction of a new 10,000-seat arena for DePaul University’s basketball team. When the project was announced in May 2013, protesters took to the streets to demand “money for schools, not for stadiums.” Under pressure, Emanuel rearranged the financing scheme so that the city would pay for the acquisition of land for both the arena and surrounding hotels rather than for the construction of the arena itself. The opposition fizzled. At the ground-breaking ceremony more than two years later, the whole matter had become, in the words of Third Ward alderman, Pat Dowell, “a non-issue.”12 Dowell, who represented a ward that was two-thirds African American and who was by the end of 2014 voting with the mayor’s agenda nearly 90 percent of the time, supported the project, at least in part, for the 7,500 construction jobs and 2,500 permanent jobs it promised to bring to her constituents. But it was unclear how many of those jobs would be stable and well-paid enough to support working-class families in Third Ward neighborhoods like Bronzeville, Grand Boulevard, and Fuller Park.

  The DePaul arena deal raised other troubling questions. Should the city subsidize an institution with an endowment approaching half a billion dollars when it was facing serious budget gaps, especially after Moody’s Investors Service had downgraded Chicago’s debt rating to junk grade? Not long after the city council voted almost unanimously—just three nays recorded—to approve the subsidy, it authorized a number of regressive fee and tax increases on telephones, cable television, and parking—all on top of Chicago’s sales tax, one of the highest in the country.13 In other words, the city council was approving measures to extract regressive taxes from its citizens while supporting wealthy private institutions.

  Hence, if the CTU strike had appeared to usher in a new anticapitalist militancy among the ranks of community activists, the spirit of the rebellion barely touched Chicago’s aldermen, who, according to political scientist and former alderman Dick Simpson, continued to wield a “rubber stamp.” Between June 2011 and November 2014, the city council supported the mayor on divided roll call votes 90 percent of the time. Even the eight aldermen belonging to the so-called Progressive Reform Caucus proved reliable supporters of the mayor’s program, siding with his proposals an average of 67 percent of the time.14

  Much has been made of the tactics of intimidation, blackmail, and subterfuge that Emanuel—like Daley before him—employed to command the obedience of aldermen. And yet such factors go only so far in explaining the city council’s abdication of its role as legislative body and check on executive power during Emanuel’s first term. Ultimately, progressives on the city council were unable to muster enough support to challenge the mayor’s policies because there was simply not enough public pressure coming from the wards that were on the losing end of them—and this despite the fact that these years saw the unions, a range of community organizations, and a pesky, talented group of investigative journalists in Chicago’s mainstream and independent press unvei
ling the workings of pinstripe patronage and the neoliberal agenda like never before.15 To be sure, Chicago’s political culture had been reshaped by the CTU strike of 2012. But it had not been transformed in any significant way. The new insurgent style of grassroots coalition building that had crystallized around the CTU strike seemed to hold great potential, but such forms of political mobilization were difficult to normalize and sustain. The city’s emerging progressive forces watched helplessly as the school board rubber stamped the school closing plan—in spite of a series of emotional public hearings—and as the city council rubber stamped just about everything that came before it. Consequently, the fatalism of old started to set in once again.

  And yet some new glimmers of hope appeared in the mayoral and aldermanic elections of February 2015, when county commissioner Jesús “Chuy” García mounted a formidable challenge to Rahm Emanuel. García, the son of a Mexican farm laborer who became alderman of the heavily Mexican Twenty-Second Ward before moving on to the Illinois State Senate, managed to take enough votes (34 percent) to prevent the incumbent Emanuel from winning an outright majority. While García’s ability to force a mayoral runoff race—the first in the city’s history—against an incumbent who had outspent him by more than twelve times suggested that the insurgency was still alive and well, perhaps even more important was the success of the city’s progressive aldermen. Chicago Forward, the super-PAC created by Emanuel supporters to defeat opposition to the mayor’s policies, had funneled substantial funds to a number of pro-Emanuel candidates, but progressive incumbents had prevailed nonetheless. Progressives drew support and funds from grassroots organizations like United Working Families (UWF) and Grassroots Illinois Action (GIA). UWF, in particular, claimed to have knocked on over 153,000 doors and made over 70,000 phone calls.