U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is slowly dismantling the corrupt Daley scandal “merry-go-round.” He’s firing round after round of indictments, like bullets, at the feet of City Hall employees. Most, like the mayor and some of his “political bad actors” are dancing the “quick step” trying to dodge the bullet-like indictments.
What is amusing and fun to watch are the black alderpersons. All except two are loyal to Daley. With their eyes bucked wide, scared, but smiling, they’re performing a new dance called “the shakes” as the indictments fly around them. Tillman (4th Ward) and Brookin (21st Ward) saw the handwriting on the wall and started working with their constituents over time?”especially Tillman working with the reparations movement and getting the Daley council to pass resolutions and one important ordinance to help the movement’s legal battles. But the remaining 17 are a waste of time, and it’s easier and less expensive just to flush the toilet and let them all go down the drain. It’s easier to elect new ones.
We, the people of Chicago, have seen too many smelly deals and mismanagement of tax dollars over the last 12 years going through without consequences, and we’re told to shut up and take it. These now have come to pass, thanks to Fitzgerald.
An entire new regime is needed at City Hall?”from the fifth floor down to the basement. The corruption is so deep it has roots that anchor illegal deals. The smell is suffocating.
It’s getting worse. Since the scandals got “legs,” fired or dismissed personnel moved from public view to another spot on the “merry-go-round.” There’s only rhetoric from the mayor and his alder-actors. Nothing has changed, even as the indictments are taking on “legs.” If Daley uses his executive powers to privatize the city hall personnel department to cover his violations of the Shakman decree, violations will continue under his pals in the private business sectors. I don’t like crooks or evil people who hurt the weak and take advantage of them. Daley is deceitful, arrogant and racist. Yet, some African-American preachers, and some citizens support him.
What must we do? First, Daley must be removed from office. There are two ways this can be legally done. Vote him out or petition for him to resign before his term is up. If Mayor Washington had one nasty scandal similar to Daley’s many, the white voters would have taken the law into their hands and run Washington into Lake Michigan, not with prayers and bibles but with weapons of all types.
If black people as a group don’t remove Daley and his corrupt “political actors,” our children in future Chicago will act like sheep, as they approach their doom in the space-age slaughterhouses singing, “We Shall Overcome,” while those inside are saying as they enter, “Keep hope alive.”
Seriously, only we can solve our problems in Chicago; we have the numbers. If not us, who? It’s not racist to concentrate on ourselves.
Last year’s annual report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), “The Year In Hate,” states that African Americans are twice as likely as Hispanics and other racial groups to be attacked or harassed by hate groups. Mark Potok of the SPLC said that even decades after the Civil Rights Movement, when black progress is still slow, hate group attacks still appear motivated by white fear of black advancement, the same conclusion anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells reached, after her research way back in 1898!
Since Daley became mayor in 1989, his office of intergovernmental affairs, said, this is our city again. Y’all (N word) are not going to get it again. You’re not going to have it your way and, black Chicagoans, that’s the reality of what we’re dealing with. It’s not “story book,” folks, but the real world of segregated Chicago.
Finally, we African Americans must unite behind one strongly qualified, loyal-to-their-constituency black candidate. This is the right thing to do. Other groups support their own. And in Chicago I have never seen the majority-white neighborhoods on the northwest and southwest sides of town go outside of their communities and ask a black candidate to represent them as the head of their communities.
I agree with my late sister, Marva Jean, who said, “The good decent people always outnumber the evil deceitful people in Chicago.” But most of the good folks in the urban centers don’t come out to vote when local elections are held, and in this way the good endorse the evil. We can bring equal justice to the urban ghettos of Chicago only by getting those Daley-machine, mean-spirited folks out of office by any means necessary.
Methods? Future articles will follow.
