The January 6 Capitol riot was not the real insurrection
America is under attack from within, and it’s not by the DC rioters from 17 months back
By Ian Miles Cheong | Samizdat | June 11, 2022
As members of the House of Representatives gather to attend the hearing of the US House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, one can’t help but wonder about the hypocrisy of the spectacle, especially in light of the Biden administration’s soft touch approach to the George Floyd riots that swept the nation in 2020.
As the pandemic raged during the summer of 2020, thousands of Americans took to the streets to protest, and in some cases riot, over the death of George Floyd, an African-American man who was killed in police custody.
Floyd’s death was a flashpoint in America’s growing racial and cultural divide, exacerbated by social justice activists who maintain that police in America are racist, and that their actions are enabled by systemic racism inherent in America’s culture, history, and its very foundations.
The riots saw over a billion dollars in property damage, according to reporting from Axios, but the true cost of the violence is even higher due to their impact on cities – not to mention the human cost and the destruction of anything that wasn’t properly insured.
Opportunists and looters ran amok in American cities, wreaking havoc on commercial districts – and even residential neighborhoods. Black- and minority-owned businesses in cities like Kenosha and Minneapolis were burned to the ground by rioters chanting ‘Black Lives Matter’ slogans, few of which have recovered.
In Seattle, Antifa and Black Lives Matter activists took over an entire neighborhood. Dubbing it ‘CHAZ’ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) or ‘CHOP’ (Capitol Hill Organized Protest), the protesters sectioned off a portion of the city, turning it into a police no-go zone. It was rife with crime. Several people, including minors, were shot and killed in the so-called ‘autonomous zone’. Several sexual assaults allegedly took place. Only one man was arrested over one of the fatal shootings a year later.
In the US alone, at least 25 people are estimated to have been killed while participating in protests and incidents related to the political violence that occurred throughout that summer. Retired police officer David Dorn was murdered on the streets of St. Louis while trying to protect a pawn shop. His death was a rallying cry for conservatives and supporters of the police who were tired of seeing the men and women in blue vilified for doing their jobs.
The impact of the George Floyd riots cannot be understated. It continues to reverberate throughout America as numerous liberal cities have moved to implement bail reform, defund police forces, and put in place legislation to hinder so-called ‘police brutality’ – effectively neutering law enforcement.
The nation saw a drop in police recruitment and rise in resignations, transfers, and an overall decline in morale. Cities like San Francisco, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, and Minneapolis have seen spikes in property crime, violent crime, and carjackings as prosecutors refuse to try cases, letting felons back out onto the street with little more than a slap on the wrist. The shocking examples of victims falling by the wayside as violent criminals with extensive arrest records get away with racially-motivated assaults on whites, Asians, and Jews. Their crimes go unpunished while Joe Biden and members of his administration continue to rail against the threat of ‘white supremacy’ and wave around Transgender Pride flags, giving empty speeches about society’s apparently most marginalized demographic – trans people.
‘Move out of the cities’ has become a common refrain among conservatives who cite the destruction of America’s most prosperous and populous locales as a reason to embrace rural living outside of suburbia.
Cities, once the pinnacle of American culture, and home to monuments honoring the Founding Fathers, have become a sad parody of themselves. Crime goes unpunished, drug addicts litter the streets with needles, and homeless people set up camp right in front of the world’s largest corporations. In Seattle, Amazon was forced to shutter its downtown office due to violent crime.
At the height of the summer, innumerable statues were torn down, damaged, or removed by the cities due the racially-charged protests. Few were ever held responsible for the destruction of these historical monuments.
Despite the destruction and ruination of American cities, and the attack on America’s founding values, Democrats have chosen instead to not only ignore the riots’ cost to American lives, but champion the protests as a positive, progressive development.
Approximately $90 million was given to Black Lives Matter, and millions more have been spent on reshaping American culture through diversity initiatives in corporate boardrooms, civilian government, and even the military. The mayors of Portland and Minneapolis endured struggle sessions. Democrats took a knee in a symbolic gesture honoring Black Lives Matter.
When Democrats insist that the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill was one of the worst moments in American history, they’re ignoring the ongoing destruction of America and absolving themselves of their participation in it.
“The insurrection on January 6 was one of the darkest chapters in our nation’s history,” said President Biden at an event on Friday. Describing it as “a brutal assault on our democracy, a brutal attack on law enforcement,” the president insists that “it’s important that the American people understand what truly happened and to understand that the same forces that led to January 6 remain at work today.”
Biden is right about one thing – the forces that led to January 6 remain at work today.
To understand what’s going on, we have to look at how the January 6 riot was caused by a general sense of discontent with America’s downward trajectory. It was staged by a collective of Americans who refer to themselves as patriots, who are unhappy with the continued destruction of America and its values. When they raised their voices, they were mocked, silenced, and disenfranchised as traitors and conspiracy theorists – all this even before the events of that fateful day. And after that day, many were arrested – some of whom were forced into solitary confinement and stripped of their rights even to this day. They have had few defenders, and the legacy media remains unwilling to even speak of their plight.
If there’s an insurrection, it’s ongoing, and it’s seeing through the destruction of America’s core values. When all is said and done, the events of January 6, 2021 will be nothing more than a footnote in the history books.
Ian Miles Cheong is a political and cultural commentator. His work has been featured on The Rebel, Penthouse, Human Events, and The Post Millennial.
Widespread US face surveillance is ‘imminent reality’, says tech privacy report
RT | May 18, 2019
Georgetown researchers are warning Americans about a sophisticated real-time face surveillance system that’s about to become an “imminent reality” for millions of citizens across the country.
The ‘America Under Watch’ report is a warning that authorities in select US cities may soon be able to pick you out from a crowd, identify you, and trace your movements via a secret network of cameras constantly capturing images of your face.
The report claims both Detroit and Chicago purchased software from a South Carolina company, DataWorks Plus, that gives police the ability to scan live video from cameras located at businesses, health clinics, schools, and apartment buildings. Both cities say they are not currently using the technology.
DataWorks says it provides software which “provides continuous screening and monitoring of live video streams.” The system is also designed to operate on “not less than 100 concurrent video feeds.”
According to the research team’s report, live footage is captured by cameras installed around Detroit as part of Project Green Light, a public-private initiative to deter crime which launched in 2016. The expanse of the police department’s facial recognition policy last summer, however, means the face recognition technology can now be connected to any live video, including security cameras, drone footage, and body-worn cams.
Illinois, meanwhile, is host to one of the most advanced biometric surveillance systems in the country, the report claims, adding that the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and the Chicago Transit Authority have had face surveillance capabilities since “at least 2016.”
Similar face surveillance is also apparently on the horizon for NYC, Orlando, and DC.
The report authors, Clare Garvie and Laura M. Moy, are now calling for a “complete moratorium on police use of face recognition” to give communities a chance to decide whether they want to be monitored in their streets and neighborhoods.
Last week, San Francisco became the first US city to ban facial recognition software used by police and other municipal agencies.
Barack Obama’s Great Tower of Nothing: Gentrification on a Presidential Level
Photo Source Jason Scragz | CC BY 2.0
By Hugh Iglarsh | CounterPunch | November 2, 2018
In Chicago, a low but persistent rumbling is heard these days, especially on the South Side. It is Frederick Law Olmsted, America’s greatest landscape architect and the planner of what would become the city’s Jackson Park, turning in his grave and muttering Victorian imprecations against Barack Obama and his eponymous foundation.
Why? Before we get to that, let’s see what Olmsted wrote back in 1871 (the year of the Great Chicago Fire), when Hyde Park, Woodlawn, South Shore and other southern lakefront precincts – what would now be classified as inner-city neighborhoods – were still remote, barely settled suburbs of a fast-growing city:
There is but one object of scenery near Chicago of special grandeur or sublimity, and that, the lake, can be made by artificial means no more grand or sublime. By no practical elevation of artificial hills, that is to say, would the impression of the observer in overlooking it be made more profound. The lake may, indeed, be accepted as fully compensating for the absence of sublime or picturesque elevations of land.
There are three elements of scenery however, which must be regarded as indispensable to a fine park to be formed on your site, the first being turf, the second foliage, the third still water. For each of these you are bound, at the outset, to make the best of your opportunities, because if you do not, posterity will be likely to lay waste to what you have done, in order to prepare something better.
Prophetic words. The Obama Foundation, together with city government and the University of Chicago, is now indeed laying waste to one of Olmsted’s major urban landscaping accomplishments, and not in order to replace it with something better.
If Obama, the U. of C. and City Hall have their way, a large chunk – two square blocks, to be exact – of Jackson Park, one of the jewels of Chicago’s 19th century park and boulevard system, will be repurposed, denuded and rendered unrecognizable. If the deal goes through as planned, the private and unaccountable Obama Foundation will be allowed to lease 19.3 acres of prime lakefront land forever for the grand total of one dollar. This stolen public space will house the Obama non-Library, formally dubbed the Obama Presidential Center. (Breaking news: On Wednesday, the Chicago City Council unanimously approved the deal transferring control of the parkland to the Obama Foundation and committing the city to costly “road and pedestrian improvements.” The foundation plans to break ground in 2019, pending federal approval and resolution of lawsuits filed by park protectors, as described below.)
The centerpiece of the OPC, hereafter referred to as the Great Tower of Nothing, is a 235-high foot high structure (that’s 50 feet taller than Rockefeller Chapel, the reigning monument to money and ego in Hyde Park) that is as cold and ugly as avarice itself. Although originally marketed as a presidential archive, the huge and handsomely endowed OPC will house no papers or artifacts of the Obama administration and, for reasons not fully elucidated, will have no connection to the National Archives and Records Administration. The actual presidential papers will be stored, at least temporarily, in an abandoned furniture store in a distant and uninviting suburb of Chicago, which apparently will not be open to the public.
The bunker-like edifice, towering over a newly enlarged golf course, will instead serve the Obama Foundation as “an ongoing project where we will shape, together, what it means to be a good citizen in the 21stcentury.” It is becoming abundantly clear that in the Age of Trump, useful citizenship training will center on theory and practice of civil disobedience and mass resistance. But this is not the sort of “ongoing project” the Obama Foundation seems to have in mind. There is talk about “cultivating the next generation of leaders,” which suggests a long-term goal of using corporate largesse to churn out more triangulating Wall Street Democrats in the Clinton-Obama mold. To skeptics, it is not readily apparent how this content-free non-library, really just a big clubhouse sheltering the vaguely purposed foundation and fundraising apparatus of an ex-president who rarely speaks up on public issues, will secure our rights and liberties in an era of encroaching fascism.
Aware perhaps of the project’s political and historical irrelevance, the Obama Foundation insists that the Great Tower of Nothing will bring new life and energy to a comatose neighborhood. The OPC be a “new landmark for the Southside and an economic engine for the city of Chicago, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, creating thousands of jobs – and will help to continue the revitalization of historic Jackson Park.”
These claims are typical pie-in-the-sky developer talk. Yes, the Obama un-library may well turn out to be an engine of development, but not in a way that will benefit the 99 percent. Quite the contrary, as we will see. And as for redeveloping Jackson Park: “No matter how they describe it, they’re taking away parkland,” says the redoubtable Herb Caplan, whose tiny Protect Our Parks group is suing to stop construction of the project, charging that it’s an “institutional bait-and-switch” designed to privatize the commons. This sets a terrible precedent for Chicago’s public lakefront, which by a city mandate going way back to 1836 is pledged “to remain forever open, clear and free of any buildings, or other obstruction whatever.”
So what is the underlying purpose of this over-scaled, oddly empty complex, which may end up costing as much as $1.5 billion to build and endow, all to convert a rare spot of green in an under-parked city into yet another heavily trafficked, highly paved, tightly controlled space? I think it’s pretty clear, if you look at the players, history and trends. It’s all about gentrification, i.e., ethnic cleansing, which is already taking place in Chicago at a pace never before seen.
I contend that the plutocrat-funded Obama Foundation and Presidential Center play the same role in the long-term transformation of the city’s southern lakefront that the Obama presidency did in American politics: that of putting a faux-progressive smiley face on the ugly underlying realities of institutionalized inequality, capitalist skullduggery and white privilege. As others have noted, this white elephant on the lake is actually a Trojan horse, using understandable but misplaced racial pride and identity politics and a fuzzy do-gooder mission statement to mask a real estate scheme that is all about neighborhood flipping and displacement of the poor.
A little historical context will help clarify things. In 1980 – about when Harold Washington was contemplating his historic mayoral run – Chicago’s black population peaked at nearly 1.2 million. The Urban Institute estimates that by 2030, that number will drop to 665,000 – an astonishing 45 percent decline over 50 years. According to journalist and researcher Alden Loury, “The restrictive covenants, red lining and white flight of yesterday have been replaced by stiff resistance to affordable housing, high-cost housing that effectively prices out some people of color, and disinvestment in communities of color regardless of their economic heft.” The result is that the 20thcentury’s Great Migration of African-Americans from the South has become the 21stcentury’s Great Exodus from Chicago, a shift in direction driven by the same virulent, undying racism.
The University of Chicago, which engineered the Jackson Park non-library bid, is the institutional driving force of the Great Tower of Nothing. The University, which used federal urban renewal (or as James Baldwin liked to say, “Negro removal”) funds to boot thousands of mostly minority families out of Hyde Park and nearby Kenwood during the 1960s, no doubt sees the Jackson Park complex as an outpost of its own campus, projecting its identity southward and creating a larger buffer zone for its intensively policed, bubble-like neighborhood. It also serves to reinforce the university’s deep and marketable connection to the Obamas (Barack taught at the law school; Michelle had an executive position at the medical school) and to the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party they personify. But there is more at stake here: Since the OPC project was launched, the U. of C. has announced its intentions of building a 1,200-bed student housing complex nearby, as well as a “boutique hotel.” These ventures would be an unthinkable risk for the cautious institution were it not for the billionaire-funded and city-subsidized boondoggle anchoring the site.
It’s all about property values, tax revenues and “desirable” demographics. Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s one-time chief of staff and currently Chicago’s notorious Mayor One Percent, speaks no other language. But what does Obama, Rahm’s old boss and staunch friend, say about all this?
At a community meeting this past winter, Obama commented: “We’ve got such a long way to go in terms of economic development before you’re even going to start seeing the prospect of significant gentrification. Malia’s kids might have to worry about that.”
If you can get past the dripping condescension of that remark, you encounter its Trump-like disingenuousness. Gentrification has long since begun oozing south of the Midway, the wide boulevard that once formed the university’s southern border. Woodlawn, south of Hyde Park, was declared the third hottest neighborhood in the nation for the first half of 2017, with median housing values rising 18% in that time, according to the City Lab website.
If it wished to, the Obama Foundation could make a strong statement regarding the evils of gentrification and displacement. But that’s not what the Foundation is about.
What it is about is raising money, great gobs of cash, principally by tapping the obscenely rich. In 2017, the Obama Foundation solicited no less than $232.6 million. Million-dollar donations have come from such checkered sources as financier Ken Griffin (Illinois’ richest man, who also gave $20 million to the campaign of Bruce Rauner, the state’s reactionary Republican governor), Goldman Sachs, Bill Gates and George Lucas – whose own attempt to blot the lakefront with a monument to self only recently went down to defeat, as I hope this one does too.
Why the super-wealthy are so eager to contribute to a paper-free “library” and artifact-free “museum” in a part of Chicago they are unlikely to visit is a question that invites speculation. One possible answer is that Obama is redeeming his chits from eight years of meritorious service to the ruling class, including his unstinting if unsuccessful devotion to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an arrangement that would have transferred huge amounts of what was once quaintly known as national sovereignty to our transnational corporate overlords. It was just about the only piece of legislation that Obama was willing to get on the mat and fight for. No wonder he’s expecting and receiving concrete manifestations of gratitude, especially from the tycoons who went unindicted and fully bonused-up after the 2008 meltdown, winding up bigger and stronger and more arrogant than ever.
What we do know is what the oligarchs paying the bills don’t want or like. This includes attacks on the economic and political forces of gentrification, which they view as progress, or advocacy for affordable housing, or acknowledgment of systemic inequality and injustice, or demands for radical change on behalf of – among others – the many poor and disenfranchised people on the South Side. This fundamental class bias – this need to be, as the professional fundraisers say, “donor-friendly” – explains the most puzzling gaffe so far by the Obama Foundation: its failure to negotiate a community benefits agreement with local organizations, which would increase consultation with neighbors and ensure that at least some needs are met and some fears allayed. This is one of the project’s multiple ironies: that Barack Obama, the one-time South Side community organizer, is now thwarting a South Side community from empowering itself and taking part in decisions that will affect it for generations. No longer needing the community’s votes, Obama plays the paternalistic benefactor, giving the neighborhood what he and his rich friends and expert staff know it really needs, and who cares what the non-degreed riff-raff think.
If billionaires want to throw their money away on a gold-plated cultural non-asset like the Obama Presidential Center, who am I to say nay? It is, after all, a free country, especially for those who own it. But let the fat cats put the non-library where, if it can’t do actual good, it will at least do less harm. There are hundreds and thousands of empty lots on the South and West Sides of Chicago, places where construction of any kind would be a plus, bringing some measure of hope and attention to depleted and forgotten neighborhoods. Jackson Park is literally the worst possible location for job creation, despite the Foundation’s claims. There can be no spin-off construction on what technically remains public parkland, no next-door retail or restaurants or residences. Yes, there will be some jobs attached, but they will be classic examples of what author David Graeber terms “bullshit jobs,” PR and legal and security and administrative sinecures that are at best unnecessary and at worst pernicious and/or absurd: e.g., well-paid fundraisers raising funds to hire more fundraisers to raise more funds, ad infinitum. The Obama Foundation and other Establishment-blessed philanthropies of its type are expressly designed to manufacture a certain kind of liberal bullshit. By turning stark social and economic conflicts into fundable, non-threatening “programming,” they lubricate the squeaky gears of the social order rather than confronting its stubborn contradictions. The astronomical salaries paid to Obama Foundation leadership – in 2017, the executive director and CEO earned a combined $1.48 million – suggest that the organization is unlikely to pit itself against the capitalist inequities that shred the social fabric and are the bottom line in the South Side’s racialized poverty equation.
I earlier described the Obama Foundation’s Jackson Park follies as a Trojan horse, but perhaps Potemkin village is the better metaphor. The proposed complex is a spectacle that symbolizes community life and culture and memory and scholarship and public purpose without actually containing anything of historical value – just as the Obama administration symbolized progressive politics and racial advancement, concealing its chronic and self-neutering passivity, dead-centrist philosophy and unquestioned allegiance to the powers that be behind a façade of faux-populist rhetoric and wispy good intentions.
Chicago doesn’t need this hollow monument to gentrification, elitism and privatization on its lakefront. We as a nation don’t need more crumbs from the tables of the billionaires who choke and starve us, or more tainted foundation dollars turning angry activists into tame “social entrepreneurs.”
What we do need is tough, radical, grassroots democracy – which is to say, the community itself, and not self-appointed champions with their own agenda, taking on the strategic neglect and cancerous disinvestment that constitute slow-motion ethnic cleansing. In the unlikely event that Barack Obama really wants to make life better for all on the South Side of Chicago, he will need to come down from his sky-scraping glass and concrete fortress and join those on the ground, listening to what they say. If Obama could do that, which at this point he cannot, he might come to the sobering conclusion that his world is not their world, his friends are not their friends, and his hopes and dreams, as embodied in his fraudulent and destructive non-library, are built on their despair.
Hugh Iglarsh is a Chicago-based writer and editor who loves libraries and museums, but not fake ones. This essay began as a soapbox rant he gave at the annual Bughouse Square Debates, sponsored by the Newberry Library. He can be reached at hiiglarsh@hotmail.com.
Neoconservatives have taken over US academic institutions: Scholar
Press TV – February 8, 2016
“Unfortunately today, these neoconservatives whose philosophy is that intellectuals should be in the service of tyrants who rule using big lies and mass murder, have taken over the academy and they don’t belong in the academy,” said Kevin Barrett, who has a Ph.D in Arab and Islamic studies and is one of America’s best-known critics of the so-called war on terror.
“Transparency and freedom are the ideals of the academy; because the neoconservatives reject these ideals, they have no business in the academy” Barrett told Press TV on Monday.
On Saturday, an American female professor at a Christian university who got in trouble after wearing the hijab and saying Muslims and Christians worship the same God has agreed to leave the school.
Wheaton College, located near Chicago, Illinois, and political science professor Larycia Hawkins have reached a confidential agreement in which they will “part ways,” the college said in a statement.
“This seems to be a very strange kind of phenomenon that a professor should not be allowed to teach at a university,” said Barret, who himself was fired from the University of Wisconsin for accusing the US government of being involved in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
“The whole idea is ludicrous but apparently not in Wheaton College, where Islamophobia appears to be mandatory,” he added. “Anyone who doesn’t hate Muslims with all their heart and soul apparently is not welcome to teach at Wheaton College.”
“It’s a disgrace and an outrage and travesty and anybody who cares about freedom in America should head straight to Chicago to protest, to go and occupy the offices of the administration [of Wheaton College] there.”
Chicago Police Kill Middle-Aged Woman While Responding to Call About Teenage Man, Whom They Also Killed
Bettie Jones, left, and Quintonio LeGrier
Carlos Miller – PINAC – December 26, 2015
Responding to a domestic violence call about about a teenage man threatening to hurt his father with a baseball bat, Chicago police arrived and shot a middle-aged woman dead after she opened the door to let them inside.
Then they shot the teenager dead.
Neither one of them was armed with a gun.
Chicago police offered scarce details other than telling the media they arrived at the building and “were confronted by a combative individual, resulting in an officer firing shots, fatally wounding two individuals.”
But dispatchers clearly told officers the situation involved a 19-year-old male with a bat, not a middle-aged woman who apparently was only trying to let them inside the building.
The woman’s name was Bettie Jones, a mother of five, who was either 55 or 57. She lived in the downstairs flat of the two-story building owned by the teen’s father, who lived in the upstairs flat with his wife and son.
Her daughter, Latesha Jones said police shot her from outside the door while her mother remained inside the door.
The teen’s father had told her to be on the lookout for police and to stay away from his son, who was having a mental episode.
The teen’s name was Quintonio Legrier, 19, a Northern Illinois University student studying engineering, who also suffered from mental illness and was prone to outbursts, but was not known to be violent.
“He was having a mental situation. Sometimes he will get loud, but not violent,” the teen’s mother, Janet Cookery, told ABC 7.
Early this morning, the teen began banging on their bedroom door with a bat, which is when the father called police.
Despite his mental illness, Legrier appeared to be studious and benevolent, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
Legrier was admitted in 2014 to Northern Illinois University, where he majored in electrical engineering technology, according to the university’s website.
He had graduated last year from Gwendolyn Brooks College Preparatory Academy with honors, for having a grade-point average of 3.0 or higher, according to the school’s website.
Legrier, who weighed 150 pounds, was shot seven times. The name of the officer has not been released.
“You call the police, you try to get help and you lose a loved one,” she told the Chicago Tribune. “What are they trained for? Just to kill? I thought that we were supposed to get service and protection. I mean, my son was an honors student. He’s here for Christmas break, and now I’ve lost him.”
Chicago’s Embattled Mayor
By Stephen Lendman | The People’s Voice | December 13, 2015
Career Democrat party member, former congressman, Obama White House chief of staff, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel took office in May 2011 – reelected last April for another four-year term.
He’s notoriously hard-line, neoliberal and pro-Israeli to a fault. The late Chicago-based Citizens Committee to Clean up the Courts chairman Sherman Skolnick called him the “acting deputy chief for North America of Mossad.”
His father, Benjamin, was involved in smuggling weapons to the Jewish Irgun underground terrorist group (co-led by future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin) in Palestine pre-1948.
Their elements were notoriously involved in bombing Jerusalem’s King David Hotel (July 1946 – slaughtering 92 Brits, Arabs and Jews, along with wounding 58 others), as well as the horrific Deir Yassin massacre (April 1948), randomly killing up to 120 defenseless Palestinians mercilessly, including women and children, dozens more in continued fighting – part of the future state of Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing master plan.
Emmanuel is a former civilian IDF volunteer during the 1991 Gulf War. It’s believed he holds dual citizenships – a dubious status for any US politician.
Throughout his political career, he’s been unabashedly pro-war, neoliberal and anti-populist. His abrasive style alienates him from anyone opposing his hard-line views.
Chicago notoriously earned a reputation as the police repression capital of America. A Gitmo type operation on the city’s west side is Exhibit A – operating off-the-books in a nondescript Homan Square warehouse, the domestic equivalent of a CIA or Pentagon black site.
Mostly Blacks are lawlessly arrested, detained, painfully shackled, interrogated, terrorized and beaten without access to counsel for a day or longer – to coerce confessions to offenses never committed or ones too minor to matter.
City police have virtual carte blanche authority to operate with impunity. Responsibility goes right to the top – Emanuel complicit with what goes on, likely much more illegally than now known, including cops killing Chicagoans unaccountably.
In late November, a seven-minute video surfaced, showing officer Jason Van Dyke extrajudicially executing 17-year-old Lanquan McDonald – guilty of being Black, threatening no one, innocent of any crime.
Van Dyke lawlessly shot him 16 times, twice in the back first, mostly as he lay dying. The incident occurred on October 20, 2014. Coverup and denial followed, police authorities calling cold-blooded murder justifiable self-defense.
Emanuel and other city officials lost a 13-month Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit battle to prevent release of the video. It’s damning.
A knife planted on McDonald’s body was exposed as a Big Lie. Video evidence showed him moving away from Van Dyke unarmed when gunned down from behind in cold blood.
Chicagoans are justifiably outraged. Thousands have been protesting outside City Hall for days, calling for Emanuel’s resignation, along with complicit city and police officials.
Police chief Garry McCarthy was sacked. So was chief of detectives Dean Andrews. Protesters want Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez removed for complicity in months of coverup.
Emanuel’s administration is a cesspool of corruption and other forms of lawlessness, perhaps the worst in city history – ill-serving the vast majority of Chicagoans.
On Thursday, state Rep. La Shawn Ford said “(p)eople are (being) hurt. People have died. People feel they are forgotten about in” a city serving powerful monied interests exclusively.
He introduced legislation to amend state law, authorizing a recall election, letting Chicagoans decide up or down if Emanuel should stay or go.
On Thursday, city medical students staged a silent “die-in” outside City Hall for 16 minutes – symbolizing 16 bullets Van Dyke fired into McDonald’s body.
They lay supine, at least one holding a sign saying: “DO NO HARM.” A much larger “die-in” protest occurred Thursday evening.
Some critics called for abolishing the so-called Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) – notorious for covering up cop killings. A criminal code of silence prevails.
Almost never are officers responsible for killing civilians held accountable. Even the right-wing Chicago Tribune said “it’s common knowledge that Chicago’s system of investigating shootings by officers is flawed…at so many levels…by design…”
Critics want a new independent, citizen-controlled police audit authority established, empowered to sue the city administration and police so killer cops and their superiors up the chain of command to the top can be held accountable for crimes too serious to ignore.
An Illinois Better Government Association study, covering the period 2010 – 2014, called Chicago tops among America’s largest cities in fatal shootings by police, most often targeting defenseless Black males.
Rarely do incidents make headlines. Video evidence showing officer Van Dyke murdering McDonald in cold blood is a rare exception – whether enough to convict him another issue altogether.
Almost never are cops prosecuted imprisoned, especially in cases involving extrajudicial assassinations. Emanuel’s hollow apology for McDonald’s murder and duplicitous promised “complete and total reform of the system” fooled no one.
Protesters outside City Hall chanted “no more killer cops” and “Rahm must go.” Chance for real reform by his or any other city administration is virtually zero.
Last of Chicago’s saloon keeper aldermen, Paddy Bowler, was right, saying: “Chicago ain’t ready for reform” – for sure not with Emanuel as mayor.
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Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks World War III”.
Slaying of Chicago Teen Casts Doubt on Body Cams Holding Police Accountable
Sputnik – 12.12.2015
Although President Barack Obama has pledged $263 million in federal grants to fund body cameras for police departments throughout the country, some still feel the effort will do little to hold officers accountable if they engage in suspicious or unlawful activity.
Lisa Schreibersdorf, executive director of Brooklyn Defender Services, points to the recent case of Laquan McDonald, a 17-year-old who was fatally shot last year by a police officer after he responded to a call about a man with a knife.
An officer’s dashboard camera captured footage of that incident. However, Chicago’s mayor and police commissioner struggled to keep those recordings away from the eyes of the public arguing the footage could interfere with the court case.
Following the efforts of journalists and lawyers, however, a judge finally forced city officials to release the video in November leading to the prosecution of Officer Jason Van Dyke for murder more than a year after the shooting.
“Many have suggested that the prosecution would never have come if the City had succeeded in keeping the video under wraps — an allegation that Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alverez denies, but nevertheless casts doubt on the ability or willingness of the police, prosecutors or even the City administration to hold individual officers accountable unless forced to do so,” Schreibersdorf explained to the Huffington Post.
In many instances, city officials can fight to keep police body-camera footage from being seen by the public and defense attorneys.
In New York City, for example, body-camera recordings legally are categorized as an officer’s file making it difficult for defense attorneys to access it. Police Commissioner Bill Bratton has said that body camera footage would not be released to the public under any circumstances.
“That leaves us in the potential situation of receiving body camera footage only when it serves the NYPD and the prosecution, not when it exonerates our clients or incriminates an officer,” said Schreibersdorf. “Such a scheme favors neither justice nor accountability and is one that we, as public defenders, often the last line of defense against executive power, could never support.”
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel Fires Police Chief Even Though Mayor Was Part of Police Shooting Coverup
By Carlos Miller | PNAC | December 1, 2015
In an obvious effort to detach himself from the growing scandal in the Windy City, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel fired the police department’s top cop today, saying it was the first step in restoring confidence in the Chicago Police Department.
But the coverup of the Laquan McDonald police shooting death extends way above Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, up through the state attorney’s office and to the mayor’s office.
To truly restore confidence, both Emanuel and Cook County State Attorney Anita Alvarez need to lose their jobs.
And it needs to be done now.
After all, it is pretty obvious they tried their best to coverup the shooting to protect their political positions as was pointed out by university professor Bernard E. Harcourt in a New York Times opinion piece:
The Cook County prosecutor, Anita Alvarez, must have had probable cause to indict Officer Van Dyke for the Oct. 20, 2014, shooting death of Mr. McDonald the moment she viewed the police dash-cam video, after her office received it two weeks later. That video, in her own words, was “everything that it has been described to be by the news accounts. It is graphic. It is violent. It is chilling.”
Ms. Alvarez, and other city leaders, surely knew they would have to indict Mr. Van Dyke for murder as soon as the public saw that footage. “I have absolutely no doubt,” Ms. Alvarez finally said last week, “that this video will tear at the hearts of all Chicagoans.”
But the timing, in late 2014, was not good.
Then up for re-election, the mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, was looking ahead to a contested election on Feb. 24, 2015, which would ultimately result in a runoff election on April 7. In Ferguson, Mo., a grand jury was hearing testimony on the police shooting of Michael Brown. The video of Eric Garner being choked to death during an arrest in New York had gone viral. The Black Lives Matter movement was gaining momentum across the country.
The video of a police shooting like this in Chicago could have buried Mr. Emanuel’s chances for re-election. And it would likely have ended the career of the police superintendent, Garry F. McCarthy.
And so the wheels of justice virtually ground to a halt. Mayor Emanuel refused to make the dash-cam video public, going to court to prevent its release. The city argued that releasing the video would taint the investigation of the case, but even the attorney general of Illinois urged the city to make it available.
In other words it was Emanuel who had the final say in whether or not the video was released.
With the help of Alvarez, of course, who recently announced her reelection campaign, and who has spent the past two terms protecting dirty cops.
Firing McCarthy is the first step, who admitted today that the initial information about the shooting of McDonald was inaccurate.
Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy admitted Tuesday on NBC Chicago that the initial press release sent out after 17-year-old Laquan McDonald was fatally shot 16 times by an officer last year was wrong.
“The initial press release was mistaken, no two ways about it,” he said. “I guess that’s my fault.”
Police initially said an officer shot McDonald in the chest when the teen refused to drop a knife and continued to walk toward officers. Authorities also said the boy lunged at officers with the knife.
But dash-cam video of the shooting shows an officer shooting the teen several times as he appeared to walk away from police.
McCarthy added that he didn’t see dash-cam video of the shooting until the day after the press release went out.
So not only do we have a mayor who ordered the video not be released and a prosecutor who waited a year to file charges – and also found no wrongdoing in how police deleted surveillance video from a local Burger King – we have a police chief who claims he did not even see the video before describing what took place on the video.
And for that, he was making more than $400,000-a-year.
McCarthy is a liar, of course, as is Emanuel and Alvarez. They all saw the video and chose not to release it. Had it shown exactly what they described, they would have wasted no time in releasing the video.
Also part of the coverup is the president of the police union, who told the media that McDonald “lunged” at Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke. The Fraternal Order of Police also paid the $1.5 million to bond Van Dyke out of jail and is also handling his attorney fees as he defends himself from the first-degree murder charge.
But we expect that from police unions which have proven to defend police officers at all costs. We even expect that from police chiefs.
But we should expect more from our prosecutors and mayors.
Chicago Tribune Sues Mayor Emanuel for Refusing to Release Private Emails About Corrupt Red Light System
By Joshua Brown | PINAC | October 30, 2015
The Chicago Tribune is suing Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel for not complying with public records requests after the mayor refused to release communications about city business conducted through private emails and text messages.
The lawsuit states that the mayor uses private phones and private emails to conduct city business as a way to avoid the public release of his city related correspondences and activity.
The Chicago Tribune seeks to receive emails and electronic communications pertaining to a controversial red light camera system in Chicago, a system mired in controversy and corruption.
The yellow lights were timed shorter with an intended outcome to catch more people running red lights, resulting in more traffic ticket money for the city, according to an investigative report by the Tribune last year.
More than $500 million was generated from the Chicago red light traffic system, the largest in the nation, according to the lawsuit filed last month, which can be read here.
City officials boasted the red light system would make intersections and driving safer, but an uptick in injury-related crashes occurred as a result of the red light system because of the shorter duration of yellow lights.
Because of these crashes, 50 of the cameras were removed at 25 intersections within the city.
Redflex Traffic Systems was the vendor that created the system along with former Chicago city official John Bills. It was quickly discovered that Bills and Redflex CEO David Kidwell were involved in a $2 million bribery scheme to implement the red light system in Chicago.
Kidwell and Bills were both relieved of their duties.
It is common for officials to use personal email to skirt Freedom of Information Act requests.
Recently, Phyllis Wise who is the Chancellor of The University of Illinois used personal emails to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests.
The Chancellor has since resigned from the university. Additionally, it was brought to light that Hillary Clinton used private emails to conduct official government business too.
This is the second time the Chicago Tribune has sued Mayor Emanuel; in June 2015 suit was filed regarding the non-disclosure of emails of a multi-million-dollar no-bid Chicago Public Schools contract. That suit is pending.
According to Chicago Tribune Editor Gerould Kern:
“We are seeking the release of public records on matters of great interest to citizens, but the city refuses to divulge them. Regrettably, the city’s denial is part of a pattern of resistance to releasing public documents covered by the Illinois Freedom of Information Act. We are compelled, therefore, to go to court for the second time in three months to force the city’s compliance.”
But Mayor Emanuel said he has done nothing wrong:
“We always comply and work through all of the Freedom of Information (requests) in the most responsive way possible. I have a practice that my political and personal stays on my private email, and city business is on the government, and that’s the way I operate.”
Written communications by government officials relating to city or government business are subject to Freedom of Information Act requests, including electronic communications.