Sharkey: “Grave concerns about Lori Lightfoot’s plans for our schools”

Mayoral candidate Lori Lightfoot has no record of leadership in public education, yet has presented a number troubling issues for Chicago teachers, clinicians, paraprofessionals and education support staff.

With less than two weeks until Chicago elects a new mayor, corporate lawyer Lori Lightfoot is backtracking from statements made during a March 13 mayoral forum on public education at the University of Chicago, where she said, “And let us not forget, we got 38 schools that are vacant from the school closings…some of which can be repurposed to help us with our training needs in the police department.” The comments sparked nationwide backlash from public education advocates, activists and members of school communities destroyed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s record number of school closings in 2013. Lightfoot’s remarks also raised serious concerns about her ability and willingness to move the school district forward for the schools our students deserve.

Lightfoot’s callous proposal is the subject of a digital ad released by the Chicago Teachers Union this week, which opens by asking who is “the real Lori Lightfoot?” followed by her remarks at the March 13 forum. Next are striking images from the spring of 2013, in which parents, students, educators and thousands of Chicagoans marched through the streets of the city, rallied downtown and were brought to tears by Emanuel’s attack on their schools. Click here to view the full video and learn the truth about Lightfoot’s agenda.

“The plan to repurpose closed schools for police training is, quite frankly, an atrocious idea, and shows little understanding of the climate of that time and the impact the entire process had on the communities affected,” CTU President Jesse Sharkey said. “It’s especially insensitive to parents who continue to battle the ill effects of Rahm’s policies every day, and continue to fight against the isolation and displacement the [school] closings caused.”

“A better idea would be to invest in our schools and provide affordable housing, health care and living wage jobs to help school communities thrive,” Sharkey added.

CTU collective bargaining

In addition to her plan to repurpose closed schools, Lightfoot has taken no stance on issues of concern to CTU members. Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, endorsed by the CTU House of Delegates, supports expanding bargaining rights for negotiation on class size and special education staffing; increasing the number of counselors, social workers, school nurses and other clinicians; and ending job outsourcing such the failed Aramark janitorial deal. Lightfoot has been silent on expanding bargaining rights that are central to the work of our members, at the same time she’s been endorsed by a growing number of political players and Emanuel supporters, from Gery Chico and Paul Vallas, to finance executive John Canning.

School funding

On the issue of school funding, President Preckwinkle supports fairly and equitably funding schools through new progressive revenue streams and TIF reform, while Lightfoot said in a Jan. 17 student forum, in response to a question about funding our new contract, “We can’t negotiate and give away dollars we don’t have.” No one is asking for that. We are, however, demanding that the wealthy—some of whom are her own donors and Emanuel allies—pay their fair share and ensure that the dollars “we don’t have” are found for our schools.

Policing education

Finally, the CTU is a union of educators dedicated to fighting for economic and social justice. Toni Preckwinkle is committed to ridding the city of the gang database and has a long history as a champion of racial justice and reform of the criminal justice system—including expunging juvenile records and curbing cash bail. The Lightfoot record is troubling. In her work as both a private corporate attorney and a public appointee for the Richard M. Daley and Emanuel administrations, she has played a role in the turmoil that exists between the police and many communities of color today.

Lightfoot has said nothing on the issue of policing in our schools—many of which do not have nurses, social workers or counselors. Instead of clearly being an advocate for the people, she has spent decades playing both sides of the fence. The Union and our supporters need answers to where she stands on these critical issues, because while Lori Lightfoot is not Rahm Emanuel today, there is no certainty that if she is elected mayor of Chicago, she won’t become Rahm Emanuel after April 2.

“We’re not sure where she was in 2013, but if she knew the devastation and heartbreak brought by the mayor’s decision to close our schools and displace thousands of students, she wouldn’t be speaking to recklessly—nor would she be the beneficiary of fundraisers held by the mayor’s personal lawyer,” Sharkey said. “So we have grave concerns about Lori Lightfoot’s plans for our schools, our members and the families they serve.”

President’s Sharkey’s comments are in reference to a report this week of Emanuel’s personal lawyer, Michael Forde, being among the hosts of a March 19 fundraiser Lightfoot’s mayoral campaign.

https://www.spreaker.com/user/radiosputnik/education-for-liberation-with-bill-ayers_35

https://portside.org/2019-03-19/why-climate-action-antithesis-white-supremacy

https://portside.org/2019-03-18/trumps-wall-symbol-long-and-toxic-history

By now you’ve likely heard a few of the choice quotes from the Fox News prime-time host Tucker Carlson recorded a few years ago on shock radio: Iraq is a “crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semiliterate primitive monkeys;” “I love women, but they’re extremely primitive, they’re basic, they’re not that hard to understand;” and that Warren Jeffs, former head of the breakaway Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints who had a 12-year-old wife and is now serving a life sentence for assault and accomplice to rape, was only persecuted for being “unpopular” and living a “different lifestyle,” and that “The rapist, in this case, has made a lifelong commitment to love and take care of the person, so it is a little different.”

Carlson says he won’t apologize for being “caught saying something naughty…more than a decade ago.” Naughty? Of course he speaks naughty most of the time, for example just weeks ago he asserted that immigrants make the US “poorer and dirtier and more divided.”

Bret Stephens, the New York Times columnist who works hard to keep his fangs from showing in order to present an image of a Republican with a human face, echoed and supported David French of the National Review who wrote in response to Carlson, “Our nation cannot maintain its culture of free speech if we continue to reward those who seek to destroy careers rather than rebut ideas.”

Ah, yes. Let’s have a civil debate about whether a nation of people (from the Cradle of Civilization) are “semiliterate primitive monkeys,” or whether women are “primitive,” or whether a rapist who makes “a lifelong commitment to love and take care of the person,” is in fact rapist, or just a little different.

Kathleen Parker, Washington Post columnist and resident resectable reactionary, noted that Carlson’s advertisers were abandoning ship, and urged Tucker not to “Bow to the Mob.”

An Arizona social activist named Imraan Siddiqi responded to Brett Stephens: “Ilhan [Omar] quoted a Diddy lyric and you wrote 10 articles about it. Tucker called Iraqis monkeys—and those are “ideas,” to be “rebutted.”

Here is an account of my dinner with Tucker Carlson: https://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2017/05/my-dinner-with-tucker-carlson.html

By Robert C. Koehler

Artificial Intelligence is one thing. Artificial morality is another. It may sound something like this:

“First, we believe in the strong defense of the United States and we want the people who defend it to have access to the nation’s best technology, including from Microsoft.”

The words are those of Microsoft president Brad Smith, writing on a corporate blogsite last fall in defense of the company’s new contract with the U.S. Army, worth $479 million, to make augmented reality headsets for use in combat. The headsets, known as the Integrated Visual Augmentation System, or IVAS, are a way to “increase lethality” when the military engages the enemy, according to a Defense Department official. Microsoft’s involvement in this program set off a wave of outrage among the company’s employees, with more than a hundred of them signing a letter to the company’s top executives demanding that the contract be canceled.

“We are a global coalition of Microsoft workers, and we refuse to create technology for warfare and oppression. We are alarmed that Microsoft is working to provide weapons technology to the U.S. Military, helping one country’s government ‘increase lethality’ using tools we built. We did not sign up to develop weapons, and we demand a say in how our work is used.”

Wow, words of conscience and hope. The deeper story in all this is ordinary people exercising their power to shape the future and refusing to increase its lethality.

With this contract, the letter goes on, Microsoft has “crossed the line into weapons development. . . . The application of HoloLens within the IVAS system is designed to help people kill. It will be deployed on the battlefield, and works by turning warfare into a simulated ‘video game,’ further distancing soldiers from the grim stakes of war and the reality of bloodshed.”

This revolt was what Smith was responding to when he said he believed in a “strong defense,” implying that moral clichés rather than money are what drive the decisions of large corporations, or at least this particular large corporation. Somehow his words, which he attempted to convey as reflective and deeply considered, are not convincing — not when juxtaposed with a defense contract worth nearly half a billion dollars.

Smith goes on, acknowledging that no institution, including the military, is perfect, but pointing out that “one thing is clear. Millions of Americans have served and fought in important and just wars,” cherry-picking such lauded oldies as the Civil War and World War II, where America’s enhanced lethality freed slaves and liberated Europe.

Fascinatingly, the tone of his blog post is not arrogant toward the employees — do what you’re told or you’re fired — but, rather, softly placating, seeming to indicate that the power here isn’t concentrated at the upper levels of management. Microsoft is flexible: “As is always the case, if our employees want to work on a different project or team — for whatever reason — we want them to know we support talent mobility.”

The employees who signed the letter demanded cancellation of the Defense contract. Smith offered their personal consciences an out: Come on, join another team if you don’t want to cross the line and work on weapons development. Microsoft honors employees of multiple moral persuasions!

Artificial Intelligence is a high-tech phenomenon that requires highly complex thinking. Artificial morality hides behind the nearest cliché in servitude to money.

What I see here is moral awakening scrambling for sociopolitical traction: Employees are standing for something larger than sheerly personal interests, in the process pushing the Big Tech brass to think beyond their need for an endless flow of capital, consequences be damned.

This is happening across the country. A movement is percolating: Tech won’t build it!

“Across the technology industry,” the New York Times reported in October, “rank-and-file employees are demanding greater insight into how their companies are deploying the technology that they built. At Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce, as well as at tech start-ups, engineers and technologists are increasingly asking whether the products they are working on are being used for surveillance in places like China or for military projects in the United States or elsewhere.

“That’s a change from the past, when Silicon Valley workers typically developed products with little questioning about the social costs.”

What if moral thinking — not in books and philosophical tracts, but in the real world, both corporate and political — were as large and complex as technical thinking? It could no longer hide behind the cliché of the just war (and surely the next one we’re preparing for will be just), but would have to evaluate war itself — all wars, including the ones of the past 70 years or so, in the fullness of their costs and consequences — as well as look ahead to the kind of future we could create, depending on what decisions we make today. Complex moral thinking doesn’t ignore the need to survive, financially and otherwise, in the present moment, but it stays calm in the face of that need and sees survival as a collective, not a competitive, enterprise.

Moral complexity is called peace. There is no such thing as simplistic peace.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.

https://www.spreaker.com/user/radiosputnik/education-for-liberation-with-bill-ayers_34

http://inthesetimes.com/article/21778/false-accusations-antisemitism-ilhan-omar-israel-palestine-democrats?link_id=2&can_id=5444a8adac48215f6b1259942c394d4f&source=email-why-false-accusations-of-anti-semitism-against-ilhan-omar-are-so-harmful-feinsteins-green-new-deal-problem&email_referrer=email_508820&email_subject=why-false-accusations-of-anti-semitism-against-ilhan-omar-are-so-harmful-feinsteins-green-new-deal-problem