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Visit Bookworm Rooms, site for the video. She writes "I suspect this is a bump, not a groundswell, but it’s amazing nevertheless: inner blacks say that overwhelming government interference in the economy stifles the kind of economic growth their communities need."
It doesn’t surprise me at all – rather I am surprised that this is the first real example of working class blacks daring to speak out openly. I served in the infantry with 20 to 25% blacks. They were my soldiers, my NCO’s, my fellow officers and my superiors. I served with men very much in the mold of LTC, now Rep., Allen West. The single difference between the black soldiers and the rest was that the blacks had a bit better natural camouflage at night.
What surprised the hell out of me was when I left the army and was introduced, for the first time, to the race hustler industry. What has surprised me since is how many blacks have accepted the bile that industry sells them, seemingly uncritically. There simply cannot be that great a divide between blacks in and out of service.
So what I see above is what should be the norm. Obama and the left are destroying America, but they are utterly devastating blacks. The question is, how many blacks will it take waking up to reality before what we see in the video above becomes the norm, not the rare anomaly. I really think, as Thomas Sowell suggested, that the time is past ripe for the right to make a play for black support.
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Showing posts with label Chicago. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chicago. Show all posts
Monday, October 29, 2012
Blacks In Chicago Having A Reality Check
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Rahm Caves To The Teachers Union In Chicago
It appears that Chicago's Mayor Rahm Emanuel has caved in to the Teachers Union in order to end the seven day old strike. The offer made to the Teachers Union, and which they have now accepted, includes:
- Suspensions without pay are eliminated
- The board must promote racial diversity in hiring
- Regarding the rehiring of laid-off teachers, now 50% of new hires must come from the laid-off pool.
- The student survey is removed from teacher evaluations (except in special circumstance)
- Merit pay rejected
- 16 percent average pay raise over four years
So the people of Chicago will continue to pay ever greater sums to underworked, overpaid and underperforming public school teachers who will not be held to objective standards of performance. I call this one a complete victory for the Teachers Union and another huge loss for the children and tax payers of Chicago. I was surprised that a Decomcrat would even start to take on a Teachers Union, given that such public sector unions form the financial foundation of the Democrat Party. I am not surprised with the outcome, particularly given that the last thing Obama and Emanuel want at this point, this close to the general election, is the public focusing on Chicago and the corruption of public sector unions.
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Monday, September 10, 2012
Chicago Teachers Strike, But Its Not For Better Schools
The sign carried by the Chicago public school teacher says "On Strike For Better Schools." The teachers strike in Mayor Rham Emanuel's Chicago kicks off today. But are Chicago's unionized teachers really striking for "better schools" for students?
Chicago's teachers are striking because they want more money (a 30% raise over four years), and they do not want any reduction in their benefits, despite the fact the Chicago Public School system is operating over $700 million in debt, threatening the city's solvency. Moreover:
Chicago teachers have the highest average salary of any city at $76,000 a year before benefits. The average family in the city only earns $47,000 a year. Yet the teachers rejected a 16 percent salary increase over four years at a time when most families are not getting any raises or are looking for work.
The city is being bled dry by the exorbitant benefits packages negotiated by previous elected officials. Teachers pay only 3 percent of their health-care costs and out of every new dollar set aside for public education in Illinois in the last five years, a full 71 cents has gone to teacher retirement costs.
But that's not the whole justification for the strike. In addition, the teachers don't want to have to work longer hours, despite the fact that Chicago teachers work one of the shortest work schedules of any school system in the nation.
And lastly, the union doesn't want the "standardized test scores" of Chicago's students considered as part of their respective teacher's performance evaluation. The Union claims that doing so would be "unfair to teachers," assessing that it "could result in 6,000 teachers losing their jobs within two years."
That reasoning is shameless beyond measure - but it might well be accurate as the Chicago schools are not exactly over performing. Only "15 percent of fourth graders are proficient in reading and only 56 percent of students who enter their freshman year of high school wind up graduating."
So you tell me, do any of the unionized teachers' complaints have a single thing to do with creating "better schools" for students? It would seem that Chicago public school teachers are underperforming, underworked and overpaid. It's a public sector union trifecta. The Chicago teachers union is the poster child for why our education system is failing our nation, and why public sector unions should be outlawed.
My hat is off to Mayor Emmanuel for taking on the union, especially since such public sector unions are the Democrat Party's core source of funding. We'll soon see if Emmanuel blinks.
Update: Paul Ryan weighs in, both supporting Emmanuel and twisting the knife on the silent Obama.
I’ve known Rahm Emanuel for years. He’s a former colleague of mine. Rahm and I have not agreed on every issue or on a lot of issues, but Mayor Emanuel is right today in saying that this teacher’s union strike is unnecessary and wrong. We know that Rahm is not going to support our campaign, but on this issue and this day we stand with Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
“We stand with the children and we stand with the families and the parents of Chicago because education reform, that’s a bipartisan issue. This does not have to divide the two parties. And so, we were going to ask, where does President Obama stand? Does he stand with his former Chief of Staff Mayor Rahm Emanuel, with the children and the parents, or does he stand with the union?
That sound you hear from the White House is a cricket chirping. It bears remembering that one of Obama's first acts in office was to support the teachers unions and end the D.C. Voucher Program - a program that gave poor children in our nation's worst school district the opportunity to attend the same private school in which Obama's children were enrolled.
Updates: Michelle Malkin has a great column on Karen Lewis, the Chicago Teachers' Union president. Lewis is a thug, a communist and a travesty.
The Heritage Foundation also has a good article looking a bit more closely at teacher compensation in Chicago.
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Monday, July 14, 2008
The Cover & The Story
. . . Preckwinkle soon became an Obama loyalist, and she stuck with him in a State Senate campaign that strained or ruptured many friendships but was ultimately successful. Four years later, in 2000, she backed Obama in a doomed congressional campaign against a local icon, the former Black Panther Bobby Rush. And in 2004 Preckwinkle supported Obama during his improbable, successful run for the United States Senate. So it was startling to learn that Toni Preckwinkle had become disenchanted with Barack Obama. Even as I hope for some measure of peace and comfort to the bereaved families, I must also hope that we as a nation draw some measure of wisdom from this tragedy. Certain immediate lessons are clear, and we must act upon those lessons decisively. We need to step up security at our airports. We must reexamine the effectiveness of our intelligence networks. And we must be resolute in identifying the perpetrators of these heinous acts and dismantling their organizations of destruction. A year later, Obama agreed to speak at an antiwar rally in downtown Chicago, organized by Bettylu Saltzman and some friends, who, over Chinese food, had decided to stage the protest. 
Although I found the above quite funny, I think it unfortunate also. That's because it detracts attention from the magazine's main article, a particularly unflattering look at Obama and his history in Chicago politics.
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You can find the New Yorker article here. It paints the picture of a manipulative man bound up with tremendous ambition unencumbered by any sense of loyalty. Some of the snippetts:
Read the entire article. There is much more.
Preckwinkle is a tall, commanding woman with a clipped gray Afro. She has represented her slice of the South Side for seventeen years and expresses no interest in higher office. On Chicago’s City Council, she is often a dissenter against the wishes of Mayor Richard M. Daley. For anyone trying to understand Obama’s breathtakingly rapid political ascent, Preckwinkle is an indispensable witness—a close observer, friend, and confidante during a period of Obama’s life to which he rarely calls attention.
Although many of Obama’s recent supporters have been surprised by signs of political opportunism, Preckwinkle wasn’t. . . .
. . . Preckwinkle was unsparing on the subject of the Chicago real-estate developer Antoin (Tony) Rezko, a friend of Obama’s and one of his top fund-raisers, who was recently convicted of fraud, bribery, and money laundering: “Who you take money from is a reflection of your knowledge at the time and your principles.” As we talked, it became increasingly clear that loyalty was the issue that drove Preckwinkle’s current view of her onetime protégé. “I don’t think you should forget who your friends are,” she said.
. . . .
. . . Some Obama supporters professed shock when, recently, he abandoned a pledge to stay within the public campaign-finance system if the presumptive Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, agreed to do the same. Preckwinkle’s concern about Obama—that he is a pure political animal—suddenly became more widespread; commentators abruptly stopped using the words “callow” and “naïve.”
. . . .
Many have said that part of the appeal of “Dreams” is its honesty, pointing out that it was written at a time when Obama had no idea that he would run for office. In fact, Obama had been talking about a political career for years, musing about becoming mayor or governor. According to a recent biography of Obama by the Chicago Tribune reporter David Mendell, he even told his future brother-in-law, Craig Robinson, that he might run for President one day. (Robinson teased him, saying, “Yeah, yeah, okay, come over and meet my Aunt Gracie—and don’t tell anybody that!”) Obama was writing “Dreams” at the moment that he was preparing for a life in politics, and he launched his book and his first political campaign simultaneously, in the summer of 1995, when he saw his first chance of winning.
. . . .
[Writing about how Obama won his first election through lawyers challenging qualifying petitions:] Publicly, Obama was conciliatory about the awkward political situation, telling the Hyde Park Herald that he understood that some people were upset about the “conflict between old loyalties and new enthusiasms.” Privately, however, he unleashed his operators. With the help of the Dobrys, he was able to remove not just Palmer’s name from the ballot but the name of every other opponent as well. “He ran unopposed, which is a good way to win,” Mikva said, laughing at the recollection. And Palmer said last week, “Anyone who enters Chicago politics and can’t take the rough and tumble shouldn’t be there. Losing the seat was just that—not the end of the world.”
. . . .
E. J. Dionne, Jr., of the Washington Post, wrote about this transition in a 1999 column after Daley was reëlected. Dionne wrote about a young Barack Obama, who artfully explained how the new pinstripe patronage worked: a politician rewards the law firms, developers, and brokerage houses with contracts, and in return they pay for the new ad campaigns necessary for reëlection. “They do well, and you get a $5 million to $10 million war chest,” Obama told Dionne. It was a classic Obamaism: superficially critical of some unseemly aspect of the political process without necessarily forswearing the practice itself. Obama was learning that one of the greatest skills a politician can possess is candor about the dirty work it takes to get and stay elected.
At the time, Obama was growing closer to Tony Rezko, who eventually turned pinstripe patronage into an extremely lucrative way of life. Rezko’s rise in Illinois was intertwined with Obama’s. Like Abner Mikva and Judson Miner, he had tried to recruit Obama to work for him. Chicago had been at the forefront of an urban policy to lure developers into low-income neighborhoods with tax credits, and Rezko was an early beneficiary of the program. Miner’s law firm was eager to do the legal work on the tax-credit deals, which seemed consistent with the firm’s over-all civil-rights mission. A residual benefit was that the new developers became major donors to aldermen, state senators, and other South Side politicians who represented the poor neighborhoods in which Rezko and others operated. “Our relationship deepened when I started my first political campaign for the State Senate,” Obama said earlier this year, in an interview with Chicago reporters.
Rezko was one of the people Obama consulted when he considered running to replace Palmer, and Rezko eventually raised about ten per cent of Obama’s funds for that first campaign. As a state senator, Obama became an advocate of the tax-credit program. “That’s an example of a smart policy,” he told the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin in 1997. “The developers were thinking in market terms and operating under the rules of the marketplace; but at the same time, we had government supporting and subsidizing those efforts.” Obama and Rezko’s friendship grew stronger. They dined together regularly and even, on at least one occasion, retreated to Rezko’s vacation home, in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. . . .
. . . .
Obama’s response to [9-11] was published on September 19th in the Hyde Park Herald:
We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.
We will have to make sure, despite our rage, that any U.S. military action takes into account the lives of innocent civilians abroad. We will have to be unwavering in opposing bigotry or discrimination directed against neighbors and friends of Middle Eastern descent. Finally, we will have to devote far more attention to the monumental task of raising the hopes and prospects of embittered children across the globe—children not just in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and within our own shores.
. . . Despite the politics of Saltzman and Katz, Obama’s now famous speech was notable for the absence of the traditional tropes of the antiwar left. In his biography of Obama, David Mendell, noting that Obama’s speech occurred a few months before the official declaration of his U.S. Senate candidacy, suggests that the decision to publicly oppose the war in Iraq was a calculated political move intended to win favor with Saltzman. The suggestion seems dubious; the politics were more in the framing of his opposition, not the decision itself. As Saltzman told me, “He was a Hyde Park state senator. He had to oppose the war!” . . .
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Chicago & Mosul
In a post by Glen Reynolds at Instapundit, Michael Yon commented in an e-mail that Chicago, with its incredible spate of gang violence, is sounding similar to Mosul where al Qaeda is desperately trying to retain a foothold and is doing so with large scale, indiscriminate violence.As Prof. Reynolds and his readers note, there are in fact vast differences between the two cities. One "has crooked officials, violent gangs with their hooks into government and law enforcement, . . . a culture of corruption that has resisted the central government's effects to clean it up," and is filled "with crazy preachers" while "the other is a city in Iraq."
Heh.
Do see the entire post. There is more.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Obamaspiracy
Will this be Obama's first real election? What happened to all of Obama's other opponents over the years? Read on for the full reptilian tale . . .
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I got the ball rolling on this issue and took it to the 10 yard line by taking note of some very undemocratic activities by our would-be Messiah. Daffyd has picked up the ball, run with it the last 90 yards, spiked the ball in the end zone and done a Lizard-like victory dance. Do slither over to his site and read about "Chicago Rules." It is an exceptional post that ties together some very troubling - and reoccuring - themes that surround he who would be President.
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