Posts Tagged ‘chicago teachers union’

Adapt or die: Lessons for Republicans to be learned from Chicago’s mayoral election

Posted: April 13, 2023 by John Ruberry in Uncategorized
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By John Ruberry

“I heard my momma cry, I heard her pray the night Chicago died.” The Night Chicago Died, Paper Lace, 1974. 

Any doubt in my mind that Chicago would be the next Detroit evaporated last Tuesday night as election results came in showing that far-left Democrat Brandon Johnson would replace the disastrous Lori Lightfoot as mayor of Chicago. 

It was the night Chicago died.

There are serious lessons from this Democrat battle for Republicans. 

Moderate Democrat Paul Vallas, a policy wonk who can produce a white paper as easily as quickly as a Kardashian can upload skanky pics on Instagram, offered a commonsense solution to Chicago’s crime epidemic: hire more cops.

Woke triumphed over wonk.

Johnson, whose political career is a creation of the neo-Marxist Chicago’s Teacher Union, has a “roots cause” outlook in regard taking back Chicago. He favors sending social workers to domestic disturbances instead of police officers. And almost as if on cue on the day after the first round of voting for mayor, Andres Vasquez-Lasso, a 32-year-old cop, was shot to death responding to a domestic disturbance call.

Living just five miles north of Chicago, I agree with Johnson on one thing–there are many mentally disturbed people living in America’s third-largest city. Of course, there is one root cause leftists never speak of, the dominance of fatherless households in Chicago’s most-crime ridden neighborhoods. 

Six months ago, few Chicagoans had heard of Johnson. He’s been a Cook County commissioner since 2019, a rubber stamp body, for the most part, is controlled by Toni “Taxwinkle” Preckwinkle. She is also the chairman of the Cook County Regular Democratic Organization, aka, the Chicago Machine. 

Well, it was Chicago’s Machine.

The new machine in the city is the Chicago Teachers Union, which is aided by a couple of key allies, two other public-sector unions, SEIU and AFSCME. 

Johnson, after a few years as a teacher, where he admitted he never assigned homework, moved on to be a CTU organizer. In fact, he kept collecting about $100,000 a year from the union even though he was an elected official. 

And despite Johnson’s “defund the police” rhetoric from 2020, which be backed off of as his campaign gained traction before the February runoff, Johnson is Chicago’s mayor-elect.

With crime soaring in Chicago, how did that happen? 

That’s easy, it was that new machine, CTU and friends, that got Johnson elected. 

“They were brilliant,” former ABC Chicago political analyst Clarence Thomas told Chicago’s Morning Answer Dan Proft last week of CTU. “They did it, they went door to door, they knocked on doors, they found those vote by mail ballots, and said, ‘Hey, let’s fill this out, let’s send this in.'”

Vallas, meanwhile, ran a conventional political campaign, heavy on collecting corporate campaign contributions, big-name endorsements including Dick Durbin, former governor Pat Quinn, recently retired six-term Illinois secretary of state Jesse White, and many Chicago alderpersons. Illinois’ most-read newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, endorsed Vallas.

That was a wonderful strategy–that is, if Vallas was a candidate for mayor of Chicago in 1991. 

How many doors did Dick Durbin knock for Vallas? Or Quinn? How many voters did the Chicago Tribune reach out by way of text messaging, reminding them when, where, and how to vote? How many voters did Jesse White contact in regard to receiving a mail-in ballot? How many social media private messages did those pro-Vallas alderpersons send? How many people got rides to polling places from those corporate megadonors? 

The answer to those questions is the same: almost certainly zero.

The Chicago Teachers Union game plan that got Brandon Johnson elected will be replicated by leftists nationwide in 2024. Listen, I hate early voting and I despise mail-in ballots, but until the rules are changed–and that is, if they are changed–Republicans have to adapt to the new ballgame. 

The CTU looked for voters, found them, and they made sure they voted for Johnson last week–as well as the two weeks prior to Election Day. A low turnout–about 35 percent—clearly upped the odds for CTU/Johnson.

As for that abysmal turnout, shame on you, Chicago.

One more thing about Vallas. When he conceded on election night, he trailed Johnson about 10,000 votes. But that evening there were still around 50,000 outstanding mail-in ballots, and yes, they are still trickling in and being counted. Vallas learned too late that the game had changed. He knew the great majority of those mail-in ballots were from Johnson voters. 

Get to work, Republicans. Find out who your voters are, connect with them, stay in touch with them, and get them to vote.

And yes, knock on doors. More people can be found at home now, many people work from there. Times have changed. 

Adapt or die.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Brandon Johnson, the elected official who still collects big checks from the Chicago Teachers Union, will be a disaster as Chicago’s mayor

Posted: March 5, 2023 by John Ruberry in crime, elections, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

For all of you cynics who says there is no real choice in most elections, next month’s runoff race for Chicago mayoral election proves you wrong. 

The unpopular and incompetent incumbent, Lori Lightfoot, finished third in last week’s first round of voting, collecting an anemic 17 percent of the vote in a nine-candidate field. Former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas took first place with 33 percent of the vote and Cook County commissioner and Chicago Teachers Union organizer Brandon Johnson in second with 21 percent of the tally.

Chicago’s municipal elections are non-partisan, but the remaining candidates are Democrats.

Vallas has been largely successful in other education jobs, including posts in Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Bridgeport, Connecticut–but he has butted heads repeatedly with teachers’ unions, most notably the far-left Chicago Teachers Union, which has strongly backed Johnson’s candidacy. And that’s not all. Johnson, who earns over $100,000-a-year as a Cook County commissioner, also has collected nearly $400,000 as a legislative coordinator for the CTU over the past five years.

So not only is Johnson in the pocket of the Chicago Teachers Union, the CTU is in Johnson’s pocket. 

As of this writing, Johnson has not said if he will quit his CTU post and stop cashing that paycheck. 

According to the Illinois Policy Institute, over the first two months of 2023, Johnson’s campaign was the recipient of over $4 million in contributions. Over half of that came from the Chicago Teachers Union and its affiliated unions. Of the rest, most of that cash was contributed by other unions, while just five percent of his campaign funds came from other sources.

Watch out, taxpayers. 

Johnson favors, as does the CTU, an array of anti-business and anti-consumer taxes and fees, including the hated employee head tax that Mayor Rahm Emanuel eliminated in 2014, although Johnson only wants large companies to pay for a new head tax.

The 2020 riots devastated Chicago’s main shopping and tourism district, North Michigan Avenue. Johnson supports “new user fees for high-end commercial districts frequented by the wealthy, suburbanites, tourists and business travelers.” Such fees will finish off North Michigan Avenue and similar areas. I used to work in the hospitality industry, and Chicago’s hotel taxes, the highest in the nation, were frequently used by officials in other cities to lure conventions away–Johnson wants to hike those hotel taxes by 66 percent. The COVID-19 has devastated ridership on Metra, the Chicago metropolitan area’s public train system, Johnson wants to institute a suburban commuter tax for Metra riders.

Johnson also backs a real estate transfer tax on high-end homes, a financial transaction tax, and maybe, a 3.5 percent municipal income tax on wealthy Chicagoans. In regard to the city income tax, which the Chicago Teachers Union supports, he said that it was a mistake by another far-left group, presumably United Working Families, to wrongly says he backs it.

Fine, that very well may be true. But late last month, on his Fox Chicago Flannery Fired Up show, host Mike Flannery asked Johnson five times if he backs a city income tax. Johnson deflected–he refused to answer “Yes” or “No.”

Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, and St. Louis are among the failed cities with a municipal income tax.

Most Chicagoans believe that crime is the biggest issue in the city. Where does Johnson stand on crime and the police?

“I don’t look at it as a slogan,” Johnson said of the defund the police movement in 2020, “it’s an actual real political goal.”

Since then, Johnson has waffled, he says many 911 calls are over domestic disturbances. Quite true. But the day after Election Day, a Chicago Police officer, Andre Vasquez-Lasso, was murdered by an 18-year-old gang member. Vasquez-Lasso was responding to a domestic disturbance call.

Last week, when former Chicago Police superintendant Garry McCarthy was asked by Amy Jacobson on WIND’s Morning Answer about Johnson’s support for sending social workers to respond to such domestic altercation calls, he replied, “We’re gonna end up with some dead social workers.”

And if Chicago elects Brandon Johnson mayor next month–remember, Vallas only received only one-third of the vote last week—get ready for an emptying city. The Detroit-doom scenario for Chicago is not far-fetched.

I’ll end with an apocryphal story about an Illinois governor, Adlai Stevenson, who twice was the Democratic nominee for president.

“Every thinking person in America will be voting for you,” someone remarked to Stevenson. The governor replied, “I’m afraid that won’t do—I need a majority.”

Let’s not go Brandon.

John Ruberry regularly blogs five miles north of Chicago at Marathon Pundit.

Information on the Adam Toledo killing that the mainstream media is overlooking

Posted: April 18, 2021 by John Ruberry in crime, culture, News/opinion, politics
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By John Ruberry

If you receive your news only from mainstream media outlets then you probably don’t know that Adam Toledo, a thirteen-year-old Chicago seventh-grader, was likely a member of the Latin Kings gang, a criminial organization whose reach is worldwide.

Toledo was killed in a police shooting at 2:30am on March 29, It was a Monday, which is what my parents called “a school night.” That night the young teen was with a 21-year-old, Ruben Roman, who was on probation for gun crimes. 

Chicago’s former police superintendant, Garry McCarthy, places the blame on Toledo’s death on street gangs, not the cop shot who shot him. “They have the ‘shorties’ who they give the gun to,” McCarthy told WBBM-AM. Toledo apparently was one of those “shorties.” Youngsters such as Toledo, if caught, usually end up in the more lenient juvenile court system, although with Kim Foxx as Cook County’s prosector, the adult courts are quite lenient too.

Police officers were responding to a reports of gunfire in the Southwest Side Little Village neighborhood when they found Roman, who was quickly taken into custody, and Toledo, who ran. In a just-released police bodycam video, which is difficult to watch and contains profanity, it appears that about a second before he was fatally wounded, Toledo dropped his gun. 

There have been scattered local media reports about Toledo’s reputed membership in the Latin Kings. A British newspaper, News Corp’s The Sun, has been quite direct. Of the national media that has spoken up, left-leaning “fact-checking” site Snopes classifies such speculation as “Research in progress.”  But for the most part the big-time national media hasn’t reported about Toledo and his apparent Latin Kings ties.

To be fair the Chicago Sun-Times reported a few days after the shooting, “Chicago police leaders warned their cops that factions of the Latin Kings planned to retaliate following the fatal police shooting of a 13-year-old. Gang members were instructed to ‘shoot at unmarked Chicago police vehicles,’ CPD warned.”

The national mainstream media clearly has another of their narratives to protect, in regards to this one, it’s that racist police officers are indiscrimanetly shooting members of the minority community, particularly young ones. Meanwhile, the Hey Jackass! site says as of today, 165 people have been shot to death in Chicago so far this year–and 759 others have been wounded. Of those killed in 2021, again according to Hey Jackass, over 90 percent of the victims were minorites. And finally, yet again according to the same source, there have been only eight police shootings in Chicago so far this year–three of them fatal. 

Some people are unfairly blaming Toledo’s parents for his death. Good people sometimes raise kids who end up bad. Toledo was reporting missing by his mother on March 26, three days before his death, but he returned home the next day.

At 13 there was plenty of time for Toledo to turn his life around. 

The Chicago Teachers Union, which for months has stubbornyl blocked school re-openings despite the fact that children are the least harmed age group by COVID-19, said in a statement, “Adam Toledo was loved. He was one of ours.” While students have been truant since the first schools took in kids, remote learning leads to even more of it. Chicago’s elementary schools only opened, part time, for in-class learning a few weeks before Toledo’s killing. The high schools re-open in a similar fashion only tomorrow.  In February, the Centers for Disease Control, declared with safeguards, it was safe to re-open schools, even without vaccination.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

School lockdowns lead to urban carjacking spike

Posted: April 11, 2021 by John Ruberry in crime, culture, News/opinion
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By John Ruberry

The COVID-19 school lockdown continues in America’s biggest cities, despite clear evidence that children are unlikely to become seriously ill from that virus.

One unintended consquence of the closing of public schools to all but remote learning is more crime–and especially more carjackings. 

It is no longer just conservative media calling attention to the link to the school lockdowns and carjackings in big cities. Although CBS was artful in its report in a story last week. “Investigators say the trend is driven by 12 to 15 year olds with time on their hands during the pandemic,” CBS News said. These kids have more time on their hands because their schooling consists of Zoom instruction something CBS omitted in its story.

Last month a 66-year-old UberEats driver, Mohammad Anwar, a Pakistani immigrant, died while clinging to his vehicle in Washington DC after being tased in a carjacking by two girls, a 13-year-old and a 15-year-old. A bystander took video of the crime–which has gone viral. 

“You know, idle minds are the devil’s playground. And a lot of these kids, they’ve been idle for a year and a half now without going to school. And that’s been a big problem,” Miami Police Chief Art Acevedo told Fox News last week.

In that CBS story referenced earlier it was also reported, “The number of carjackings has exploded during the pandemic. Carjackings have increased by more than 100% in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Minneapolis. They are up more than 343% in Washington, D.C.”

Let’s look at Chicago. The pusillanimous nature of the local media creates an opening for straightforward sources. One of those news sites is Hey Jackass! and it reports the raw numbers of carjackings. Well sort of. Stick with me on this one. In 2019 there were 603 reported carjackings and 1,396 last year. So far in 2021 there have been 404. But here’s the kicker. “Carjacking data comes directly from the CPD’s own data set,” Hey Jackass! warns, “so add 20% to obtain the true number.” 

There’s a lot of speculation about why carjackers commit their crimes. Thrill is probably one of them, but also often vehicles are carjacked to aid other crimes. Perhaps it’s a mix of the two. Just last night, another great local crime site, CWB Chicago, told us of a 55-year-old woman who was pushed to the ground inside a Target parking lot as her Audi was carjacked. The criminals drove away with her car and the one they arrived in, a Kia, which was likely carjacked near the University of Chicago a couple of hours prior. Percentage-wise since 2017 the arrest rate for Chicago carjackings has been in the single digits, according to Hey Jackass!

On April 19 Chicago’s public high schools are scheduled to re-open, although how that occurs varies from school to school. Of course the recalcitrant Chicago Teachers Union, citing new COVID-19 numbers, is opposed.

Mental health among students has suffered during the lockdown. 

Once the school lockdowns end–and I believe they will one day–don’t expect the carjackers to give up their horrible hobby. 

Businesses in Chicago, already suffering from 13 months of lockdowns, rioting, and looting, are receiving another hit. Suburbanites, for good reason, are afraid to travel to the city. And the carjackings occur in all neighborhoods, rich, poor, and in between.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.