Until he was tapped as a shiny new national and global asset by the white American ruling-class and catapulted to rock star status in the summer of 2004, then Illinois state senator Barack Obama was not particularly popular in the Black Chicago South Side that he deceptively called “home.” Besides being an outsider from Honolulu and Harvard Law, he was an aloof and arrogant part-time law professor over at the conservative and heavily white University of Chicago, an institution long known for displacing and lording over Black South Side communities.
Ominous developments in three states this summer – Oregon, Texas, New Jersey, and one city – Chicago, provide a glimpse into the Pentagon’s new playbook to recruit soldiers from high schools across the country. In brief, the military has been engaged in a robust lobbying campaign to lower academic standards to make it easier to recruit youth.
Sara Flounders, Secretariat member of Workers World Party, speaks about the protests against NATO in Chicago. Her remarks were made in May of 2012, at a Workers World Party forum in New York City.
President Barack Obama and North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen met at the White House on May 9 to discuss the military bloc’s summit in Obama’s political home base of Chicago on May 20 and 21.
Earlier Rasmussen had paid visits to Germany, Britain, Italy and Spain for the same purpose. Presumably France wasn’t included because of the uncertainty of who the head of state would be after last month’s presidential election.
The City of Chicago has enacted new measures to restrict free speech and protest–but not without a fight, as Brit Schulte and Caitlin Sheehan report.
ON JANUARY 18, the Chicago City Council overwhelmingly approved Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s ordinances to give police new powers to crack down on protests ahead of the NATO/G8 joint summit coming to the city in May.
Recently released FBI documents prove the existence of highly sensitive National Security and criminal investigations of “Turkish Activities” in Chicago prior to September 11, 2001. These documents add further support to many of the allegations that former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds has claimed, in public and in Congress, since 2002. The documents were released under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request into an organization called the Turkish American Cultural Alliance (TACA), an organization repeatedly named by Ms. Edmonds as being complicit in the crimes that she became aware of when she was a translator at the FBI.
Lee Sustar reports from Chicago on an occupation by workers who want what’s theirs from management and the Bank of America.
WORKERS OCCUPYING the Republic Windows & Doors factory slated for closure are vowing to remain in the Chicago plant until they win the $1.5 million in severance and vacation pay owed them by management.
In a tactic rarely used in the U.S. since the labor struggles of the 1930s, the workers, members of United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) Local 1110, refused to leave the plant on December 5, its last scheduled day of operation.