Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama & Neo-Liberalism are the Daleys' Gifts to Chicago and the Nation. Thanks.
Chicago's Daley regime was a half century orgy of arrogance, racism and plunder. Thanks to President Obama, it not only continues with the succession of Rahm Emanuel to the fifth floor office of Chicago's mayor, but with nationwide implementation of diastrous policies toward housing, schools, infrastructure and public workers, all pioneered in Chicago.
Rahm Emanul, Barack Obama & Neo-Liberalism are the Daleys' Gifts to Chicago and the Nation. Thanks.
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
“For 43 of the last 56 years, some guy named Richard Daley has occupied the fifth floor office in Chicago's City Hall.”
Last month, at the installation of the new White House chief of staff Bill Daley, President Obama declared the man had “public service in his DNA.” What Obama actually meant was that Daley, a lobbyist and JP Morgan Chase exec who helped write NAFTA, hailed from the predatory family of wolves that have ruled Chicago for two generations and who helped launch his own career.
For 43 of the last 56 years, some guy named Richard Daley has occupied the fifth floor office in Chicago's City Hall. And now Barack Obama has enabled the wolvish Daley clan to elect its own successor, Rahm Emanuel.
In the last two decades, Chicago's property tax levies have been Jim Crowed so that revenue collected in wealthy areas is not shared with poorer ones. When combined with the pervasive residential segregation that is the U.S. norm, the so-called “tax increment financing,” or TIF system pioneered in Chicago, provides an ostensibly color-blind and race-neutral way to achieve this goal, that has been imitated nationwide.
The city's public assets have been looted, leased and privatized, and its once extensive public