Tag: Rahm

This morning after my workout I passed a newstand and noted this headline in the Sun-Times:



RAHM WARNS UNIONS (Teachers to work longer Hours)

Day Laborers to show up in greater numbers

Surprised boobala!  Really.  He was a DLCer when he was an alderman in Chicago and Washington DC only strengthened that line of thought.  Note also that the stats show more working class, AAs, Latinos are moving out to suburbs and the wealthier are moving into the City of Chicago.  I was chased out of my little bungalow in Chicago, so that a $2 million house could be built.  I can attest to how the working class, lower middle and now middle were chased out of the City.  Rahm was alderman of one of the north side areas during this time period.

Rahm Emanuel warns teaching, labor unions about changes

Mayor-elect RE is layin down the law to two unions whose cooperation he needs to turn Chicago around:  teachers he wants to work a longer school day and laborers he wants to simply show up at work in greater numbers.  During the campaign, he declared his support for curtailing teachers’ right to strike.  He also made it clear that, if teachers won’t agree to work longer hours for extra pay, he’ll ask the Illinois General Assembly to mandate it.

My guess is (and I was a long time resident of Chicago) the “extra pay” will fall by the wayside and charter schools will benefit from this someway.  

Also, the use of the word “laborers” troubles me.  Nothing wrong with laborer – we’re all laborers in a sense but it cuts down to size certain unions – say carpenters, plumbers – who are rightly proud of what it is they do.  It lumps all into the Laborer camp.  And we all know how laborers are respected in 2011 USA.  Implicit in the wording is that the laborers are getting paid even though they don’t show up for work.

It’s unlikely Chicago’s elites will send their children to public school in any event.  They’ll go to private schools where kindergarten for instance costs something like $14,000 a year.  Class War, anyone!    

LET THE PRIVATIZATION BEGIN.  Because of course it will save the taxpayers lots of money! N.O.T.

I heart Glenn Greenwald and urge you to read the whole article if you already haven’t.  

Has Rahm’s assumption about progressives been vindicated?

For almost a full year, scores of progressive House members vowed — publicly and unequivocally — that they would never support a health care bill without a robust public option.  They collectively accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars based on this pledge.  Up until a few weeks ago, many progressive opinion leaders — such as Moulitsas, Howard Dean, Keith Olbermann and many others — were insisting that the Senate bill was worse than the status quo and should be defeated.  But now?  All of those progressives House members are doing exactly what they swore they would never do — vote for a health care bill with no public option — and virtually every progressive opinion leader is not only now supportive of the bill, but vehemently so.  In other words, exactly what Rahm said would happen — ignore the progressives, we don’t need to give them anything because they’ll get into line — is exactly what happened.  How is that not vindication?

Pretty simple really.  No money, no votes.  If we all stay home in November, what will they do?

Massa calls Rahm “son of the devil’s spawn” and more.

“Mine is now the deciding vote on the health care bill,” he said, “and this administration and this House leadership have said, quote-unquote, they will stop at nothing to pass this health care bill, and now they’ve gotten rid of me and it will pass. You connect the dots.”

“I am sitting there showering, naked as a jaybird, and here comes Rahm Emanuel, not even with a towel,” Mr. Massa said, adding that Mr. Emanuel poked “his finger in my chest, yelling at me at me because I wasn’t going to vote for the president’s budget.”

“You know how awkward it is to have a political argument with a naked man?” he continued.

Mr. Massa added: “I didn’t hit him. But we had words. And he hates my guts. He has hated me since Day 1. And now he wins. So he will get rid of me.”

Mr. Massa’s resignation leaves Democrats working to maintain their hold on a hard-won seat. The 29th District extends from Elmira almost to Lake Erie, and from the Pennsylvania border to Rochester. Republicans in the district outnumber Democrats by more than 45,000. Gov. David A. Paterson could call a special election for the seat as soon as next month, although he could also let it remain vacant until the November election.

A Republican who switched to the Democratic Party because of his opposition to the Iraq war, Mr. Massa lost in his first try to win the House seat in 2006. He was successful two years later, defeating the Republican incumbent, John R. Kuhl Jr.

He was a proponent of a single-payer health care system and was among 39 House Democrats to vote against health care legislation, saying it did not do enough to rein in costs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03…

“I’m getting tired of saving Obama’s can in the White House,” said Conyers.

–snip–

Asked if the president had shown enough leadership in the health care debate, Conyers facetiously wondered why Press would ask the question.

“Of course not, of course not,” he said. “You know, holding hands out and beer on Friday nights in the White House and bowing down to every nutty right-wing proposal about health care, and saying on occasion that public options aren’t all that important is doing a disservice to the Barack Obama that I first met who was an ardent single-payer enthusiast himself.”

He led off the interview by declaring that he was tied of “trying to stop the war in Afghanistan from surging.” He also took several swipes at Emanuel, whom he called, with a slightly derogatory tone, his “buddy.”

“That is essentially what Rahm Emanuel has said: Just give us anything and we will declare victory,” said Conyers. “Not only is it not a victory, but when it doesn’t work, guess who will come at him: the same guys that were saying let’s go along with anything… This is all my buddy Rahm Emanuel trying to get anything. But look the bill doesn’t go into effect for three years. Many of the people that we are trying to help will be dead by then.”   link

What else is there to say?  Conyers will certainly get no argument from me, and I enjoyed hearing it immensely.    It’s too bad that Conyer’s didn’t say it before and vote no with Kucinich and Massa.  The reason Progressives have no power is because they have no balls.  They even run away from the word “liberal”.

I heard on Thom Hartmann’s radio show that CSPAN covered Geithner today vigorously attacking Friedmanomics big time.    Maybe we need Rahm dumped instead of Geithner.  Or, maybe we need them both dumped.  As bad as the Democrats are, the problem is that the Republicans are even worse.  A look at the headline stories on the political page of the Huffington Post makes me wonder whether to laugh or cry.  If this is the best and brightest this country has got, no wonder we’re dying.