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<span class="post_date" title="2015-12-04">December 4, 2015</span>
<h1 class="headline" itemprop="name"><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/04/rahm-emmanuel-laquan-mcdonald-and-black-rebellion-in-chicago/"
rel="bookmark">Rahm Emmanuel, Laquan McDonald and Black
Rebellion in Chicago</a></h1>
<p class="post_meta"> <span class="post_author_intro">by</span> <span
class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/author/paul-street/"
rel="nofollow">Paul Street</a></span> </p>
<div class="post_content" itemprop="articleBody"><b><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/04/rahm-emmanuel-laquan-mcdonald-and-black-rebellion-in-chicago/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/04/rahm-emmanuel-laquan-mcdonald-and-black-rebellion-in-chicago/</a></small></small></small></b><br>
<p>Beneath a carefully constructed pretense of concern for racial
justice, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel has long been a dedicated
corporatist “law and order” enemy of Black America. During his
time as a top political operative in the arch-neoliberal Bill
Clinton White House, the notorious bully Emmanuel (later to be
nicknamed “Rahmbo”) was a driving force behind the 1994 federal
“three strikes” Clinton crime bill.</p>
<p>That draconian measure helped make Bill Clinton “the
incarceration president” and contributed to a significant
increase in the monumental hyper-imprisonment and criminal
marking of Black Americans. Among other terrible things, the law
put 100,000 more officers on the streets, allocated $10 billion
for new prison construction, and eliminated Pell Grant funding
for inmates pursuing college degrees while in prison.</p>
<p>Prior to that outrage, Emmanuel joined up with Bill Daley to
lead Clinton’s passage of the North American Free Trade Act
(NAFTA) – a critical investor rights measure that helped capital
drain millions of jobs away from industrial regions where
impoverished Black populations desperately needed paid
employment.</p>
<p>NAFTA-encouraged deindustrialization notwithstanding, Emmanuel
was a leading force behind Clinton’s vicious 1996 “welfare
reform.” The “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity
Reconciliation Act’s” elimination of poor families’ former
entitlement to basic family cash assistance has wreaked havoc on
Black families stuck in jobless ghettoes ever since.</p>
<p>As Barack Obama’s original White House chief of staff, Emmanuel
consistently steered policy rightward, towards the interests of
the nation’s predominantly white 1% and contrary to those of
America’s disproportionately nonwhite lower and working class.</p>
<p>As Mayor of Chicago, Emmanuel moved quickly to shutter 54
public schools in low-income Black and Latino neighborhoods in
the largest deliberate mass school closure in history.
Emmanuel’s schools chief provided principals with a guide on
“how to handle civil disobedience and to report the names of any
teachers and students involved in protests.” The schools closure
program has always been a big taxpayer money grab for wealthy
Emmanuel allies seeking to build private charter schools in the
wreckage left by public school closings.</p>
<p>Emmanuel has stonewalled on numerous abusive and criminal
practices on the part of his city’s police force. He flatly
denied the Chicago Police Department’s operation of an illegal
“black site” detention facility (Homan Square) where thousands
of mostly Black and Latino suspects have been “disappeared” and
forced into false confessions. The Black Site hellhole was
exposed by <em>The Guardian</em> earlier this year. Its
existence was well known across Black and Latino Chicago.</p>
<p>Sadly enough, Emanuel has won solid majorities of the Black
Chicago vote in both of his Chicago mayoral election victories
to date (in April 2011 and April 2015). As the left Black
commentator Bruce Dixon noted last spring, “Rahm Emanuel’s
biggest asset was the overwhelming support of Chicago’s
well-established black political class of preachers, business
types, ‘community leaders’ and public officials….Nearly every
prominent black elected official in town, Democrats all, came
out for Rahm, for privatization, for gentrification, for
austerity, for more of the same. This is the state of black
politics in 2015, and the reason that Rahm Emanuel carried every
single one of Chicago’s majority black wards.”</p>
<p>The facts of the Laquan McDonald case are well understood by
now. Anyone who follows the national news closely knows that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>* White Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke executed a
Black male teenager in cold blood on a busy street on the
city’s South Side on October 20<sup>th</sup>, 2014. Van Dyke
shot McDonald 16 times, riddling Laquan’s body with bullets
while the victim lay in the pavement.</p>
<p>* The Chicago Police lied about and covered up the murder,
going so far as to threaten eyewitnesses with arrest and
delete more than an hour of videotape from a fast food
restaurant near the murder site.</p>
<p>* The City of Chicago rushed to offer McDonald’s mother $5
million on the condition that she stay silent.</p>
<p>* The city buried a dash cam video that clearly displayed the
savage killing for thirteen months because Emmanuel feared its
release would spark civil unrest (this during the ongoing
protests over racist police murders in Ferguson, Missouri and
elsewhere around the nation) that might endanger his
re-election chances the following April.</p>
<p>* The video might have never surfaced if lawyers and
journalists had not been tipped off to its existence and but
for the order of a county judge last week.</p>
<p>* Emanuel, running for re-election at the time of the
shooting, fought to keep the video from going public. He
claimed that releasing it might taint a federal investigation
even though the U.S. Justice Department did not ask the city
to hold off.</p>
<p>* Emmanuel demonstrated a complete lack of comprehension of
the public’s outrage over the killing and its cover-up when he
claimed this week that he decided to fire city police chief
Garry McCarthy because he had become “a distraction” – not
because McCarthy has for years overseen a police department
notorious for racist abuse and corruption.</p>
<p>* Emanuel’s arrogant response to the McDonald scandal has
been to “do as little as possible — until the furor caused by
the release of the video forced his hand.” (<em>New York Times</em>
editorial board).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The part of the emerging story that blows me away the most,
however, is less well known. It concerns a meeting that Emmanuel
held with Chicago’s leading Black ministers and pastors right
before he finally released the Van Dyke murder video last week.
As local reporter Mike Fourcher determined, the alleged purpose
of this gathering and other meetings held with Black
constituents was to assuage Black fears and anger about how City
Hall had dealt with the case. When speaking to the ministers,
however, Rahmbo had a different and more iron-fisted message for
the city’s Black religious leaders. He <em>warned them that
they’d pay if protests went too far. Da mare wanted the
pastors to know that he would withhold money for jobs programs
in the city’s Black ghettoes if violence ensued</em>. By
Fourcher’s account:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The Mayor…asked the group to stress peaceful protest through
the Thanksgiving weekend and to avoid violence. ‘He encouraged
us to encourage the community to exercise their first
amendment rights, but to do so peacefully,’ said Rev. Barrett.
‘The point of the meeting was how to encourage that peaceful
protest.’ According to attendees, the Mayor then told the
group that if there was violence over the weekend, he would
not be able to find resources to bring jobs into their
community. ‘He said, if things go bad then don’t come looking
to me for jobs,’ said Rev. Brooks. ‘There was something about
how if you don’t encourage peace, don’t look to me for
resources,’ said Young Leaders Alliance head Jedidiah Brown,
who was also present<em>.”</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>It doesn’t get much more offensive than that. It takes real
sociopathic chutzpah to bully normally obedient Black pastors
like that after you have just been caught with your racist
police-state pants down in hideous fashion. Curiously enough,
Emmanuel seems to have at least momentarily lost the outward
loyalties of the city’s Black bourgeois elite. As Glen Ford
notes on <em>Black Agenda Report</em>, reflecting on mass,
Black youth-led protests that took place last Friday in
Chicago’s tony Michigan Avenue shopping district:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“It seemed as if the protective shield of Black Misleadership
Class collaboration that has for the last 30 years insulated
white mayors from the wrath of Chicago’s outraged Black rank
and file, had suddenly been stripped away. Black ministers
joined militant youth in marching down the city’s ‘Magic Mile’
Michigan Avenue shopping district, demanding that heads roll
for hiding video evidence in the death of 17 year-old Laquan
McDonald, shot 16 times by Officer Jason Van Dyke. For 400
days, Cook County States Attorney Anita Alvarez refused to
indict the cop, or release the police dashboard video of the
shooting, or to explain why another critical video had
apparently been destroyed. Alvarez finally bowed to pressure –
and a court order – indicting the cop for first degree murder
and releasing the death video….But the community’s rage could
not be contained. The Black Caucus of Chicago’s Board of
Aldermen demanded that Police Superintendent McCarthy resign.
So did Rev. Jesse Jackson and even Bobby Rush, the sell-out
Black Congressman who has been a dependable servant of the
Emanuel administration. The strength of the movement in
Chicago can be measured by the fact that so many elements of
the Black collaborationist political class have been forced to
take a stance in opposition to Mayor Emanuel and the white
corporate forces that he represents, and ultimately to compel
the mayor to fire his favorite cop.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Soon, however, the misleaders can be expected to resume their
normal role of collaboration with the city’s predominantly white
and corporate masters. As Ford notes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The young people that are soldiers of this struggle
understand that movements are defined by their demands. In a <a
href="http://byp100.org/young-black-organizers-decline-private-meeting-with-mayor-to-discuss-the-video-of-the-execution-of-laquan-mcdonald/">joint
statement</a> by the Black Youth Project 100, We Charge
Genocide, Assata’s Daughters, the #LetUsBreathe collective,
and a Black Lives Matter chapter, they declared that
‘Indicting cops does not change the policies that promote the
violence and trauma inherent in the Chicago Police
Department.’ They want Rahm Emanuel’s resignation, too. The
Black Youth Project also demands defunding of the Chicago
police, and investment of those dollars in the Black
community. They call for reparations for slavery, Jim Crow and
mass Black incarceration; an end to all profit in the criminal
justice system; a guaranteed income for all; a federal jobs
program, and freedom from discrimination for all workers; and
an end to displacement of Black people through
gentrification…. These are demands for social transformation –
demands that will put the young activists on a collision
course with the Black Misleadership Class who are the first
line of defense for the white ruling class, and who will soon
close ranks in Chicago and elsewhere to try to stop this
movement.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The fight for racial justice in Chicago, as across the nation,
requires rank and file class struggle within the Black community
itself. The white, Latino, and Asian working class could learn
from that.</p>
<p><em>Paul Street will speak in Chicago twice next week. He will
talk (with Bruce Dixon) on U.S. Imperialism and the 2016
Elections with the Illinois Coalition for Peace, Justice, and
the Environment on Thursday December 10, 6:30 pm, Grace Place,
637 S. Dearborn. He will speak on Rahm Emmanuel, Laquan
Mcdonald and the Racist Mass Incarceration State at the Open
University of the Left, Saturday, December 12, 2:30 pm at the
Logan Square branch of the Chicago Public Library, 3030 West
Fullerton (North Side). </em></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class="author_description"> <em><strong>Paul Street’s</strong> latest
book is <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1612053270/counterpunchmaga">They
Rule: The 1% v. Democracy</a> (Paradigm, 2014)</em> </p>
</div>
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