What will Obama "Change"? What particular "Hope" does he offer?

Since I enjoy doing research, I looked up the murder rate in Chicago (although it's worth noting that state senators aren't in charge of the Chicago PD) but what the hell, Republicans will talk about anything except policies so I'll buy in. Here are the murder rates for Chicago by year:

# 2003: 598
# 2004: 448
# 2005: 449
# 2006: 467
# 2007: 435

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Chicago

You can see the US casualty rate (that we've lost 4148 troops) in Iraq here:

http://icasualties.org/oif/

So even ignoring all the dead Iraqis, and the four million Iraqi refugees -- you can see that your statement is false.

Thunderdog claims that Republicans lie and exaggerate -- you didn't prove him wrong.

Looked that up too -- at least 4% is municipal taxes (which Obama has nothing to do with whatsoever) and the reason it's so high is that they're trying to reduce their huge deficit -- a concept that the Republicans should be intimately familiar with.

According to CPS, the graduation rate is 71%. Another study says 54%. Not sure how this involves Obama, but it's because many of the students are poor -- those who are affluent have lower dropout rates. Obama has policies to help reduce poverty, just as it was reduced under Clinton (and then increased under Bush).

Well you have to be more specific because he has spoken out against corruption, but what corruption in particular?

Actually as you can see above the murder rate appears to be stable or dropping.

"As a state senator, Barack Obama wrote letters to city and state officials supporting his political patron Tony Rezko's successful bid to get more than $14 million from taxpayers to build apartments for senior citizens. "

Obama supported housing for senior citizens, then the Republicans try to spin that as evil by connecting two unrelated events. Not terribly surprising.

 

Chicago youth violence: An indictment of the US Democratic Party
By Alexander Fangmann and Jerry White
6 June 2008
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In recent months there has been a string of violence, mostly gang-related, which has claimed the lives of dozens of youth in Chicago, Illinois. In a single weekend in April, 36 people were shot, and nine died of their injuries. Since last September, 24 Chicago public school students have been killed in such shootings.

The victims of these tragedies have been working class and minority youth, including many who were innocent bystanders.

Last March, for example, Chavez Clarke became the 20th Chicago public school student killed up to that point. Chavez was 18 years old and a student at the Simeon Career Academy. He had hoped either to attend an apprentice school for drafting and architecture or train as a truck driver. He was caught in gang crossfire as he walked down the street with his twin brother, Travez. Two students from Dunbar Career Academy, aged 17 and 19, were ultimately charged by police in Chavez’s murder.

Another youth, 16-year-old John Mendoza, was found bludgeoned to death in an alley. Although his family insisted he wasn’t in a gang—and had recently changed schools to avoid gang conflict—two funeral homes, fearing retaliation, refused to provide arrangements suitable for the family. Another would only hold an abbreviated morning wake if an additional charge of $2,000 for security was paid. Only after Jose Mendoza, the boy’s father, contacted a friend in the funeral business was the family able to arrange a service.

The tragic loss of these young people has provoked shock and anger. Families who have lost loved ones have made sincere appeals to end the violence, while others have volunteered to escort children to school.

The political establishment in the city, however, has been unable to offer any serious solution. Instead, its only answer has been greater law-and-order repression including proposals—backed by Mayor Richard Daley—to arm the entire 13,500-strong Chicago Police Department with military-style assault weapons.

At a City Hall news conference, Police Department Superintendent Jody Weis proposed flooding south and west side neighborhoods known for gang activity with SWAT and Targeted Response Units in full battle dress, with aerial support from police helicopters.

The local media have already dubbed such a show of force as a “surge,” in reference to the troop surge in Iraq.

Chicago is not the only city in which the methods of the Iraq war are being brought home. In Washington, DC, police chief Cathy Lanier announced Wednesday that in order to stop violent crime and drugs a checkpoint would be set up in the city’s Trinidad neighborhood to stop cars, check identifications and exclude people the police decided did not have a “legitimate purpose” in the area. “Welcome to Baghdad, DC,” the local head of the American Civil Liberties Union said of the so-called “Neighborhood Safety Zone” plan.

The conditions for implementing such antidemocratic measures in Chicago have been prepared by sensationalist media coverage. Nowhere, however, can one find any serious discussion in the media or the political establishment of the social roots of the problem.

In an oblique reference to the desperate conditions confronting the youth involved in such violence, Mayor Daley, said, “When the killing is done, you still don’t have a job, in fact, it greatly decreases the chances that you ever ... will have a job.”

Needless to say, the mayor offered nothing to alleviate such conditions. This summer the city is only offering 18,000 summer jobs to the hundreds of thousands who will be searching for one. Last summer teen unemployment reached 34.5 percent, the worst on record since World War II, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. The situation will be worse this summer, the center says.

Youth violence cannot be separated from the miserable prospects young people face in America’s third largest city, and the unprecedented social polarization that has taken place there.

Like Detroit and other Midwest “rustbelt” cities, Chicago has been decimated by decades of deindustrialization, losing hundreds of thousands of steel, trucking, railroad, meatpacking and other relatively decent-paying jobs since 1979. From 2000 to 2005 alone, the region lost 22.2 percent of its manufacturing jobs. The official jobless rate, which grossly underestimates the real situation, rose to 5.4 percent in April, up from 4.7 percent last year.

Nearly 600,000 people—or one out of every six residents—live in poverty. The poverty rate for children is one out of three. Most poor residents live in extreme poverty, according to the Heartland Alliance, with an annual income less than half the government’s official poverty line.

 

An astounding 85 percent of Chicago public school students live in poverty, according to federal statistics. The graduation rate from these under-funded and overcrowded schools is only 51.5 percent, according to the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center.

These conditions are an indictment of the capitalist system and the Democratic Party, which has controlled City Hall in Chicago since 1931. The pro-business policies of Daley, who has been mayor since 1989, are the culmination of a long shift to the right by big city mayors from the Democratic Party, which abandoned liberal social policies in the late 1970s and fully embraced the “free market.”

A recent study on the city’s gangs by the Justice Policy Institute noted that violence had “exacerbated in Chicago during the mid-1990s when the public housing authority shifted millions of dollars from needed maintenance and renovation of the city’s high-rise projects to finance a drug enforcement campaign involving massive gang sweeps.”

“When that strategy proved largely fruitless,” the institute noted, “the city began to demolish the projects, forcing more than a hundred thousand tenants to move. Instead of building new housing for them, the housing authority gave displaced tenants rent vouchers. Scattered relocation to other segregated, high-crime areas of the city dislocated people from long-established social networks and increased friction and violence among Chicago gangs.”

The leveling of huge public housing projects like the Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green was carried out under the Clinton administration. The administration claimed that public housing, welfare programs and the “cycle of dependency”—not the lack of decent jobs, decaying schools and other forms of social neglect—were the driving forces for crime and drugs. On this basis, the Democrats and Republicans gutted federal welfare programs, privatized large sections of public housing and, at the same time, increased police repression and incarceration rates.

The highly publicized plans to provide successful “mentors” to displaced public housing residents in “mixed income” neighborhoods—which include condominiums selling at the market rate of $500,000 or more—have proven a farce. Only one-third of the affordable housing units at Cabrini-Green were replaced, and the housing agency used tightened restrictions—including the legal records of family members—to exclude even more from public housing.

Much of this was designed to push poor people out of the city center to make way for the housing boom and the gentrification of working class neighborhoods. In addition to reserving the most exclusive reserves for the rich, better housing went to relatively well-paid professional workers, while poorly paid service, entertainment and retail workers—in many cases disproportionately African-American and Hispanic—were squeezed into poorer and poorer areas.

Participation in gang violence is an expression of alienation and demoralization of layers of youth who are responding to a sense that there is no longer any room for them in the city. This sentiment is reinforced by massive police presence aimed at excluding them from better-off areas of the city and the destruction of recreation, education and other vitally needed social programs.

That some young people engage in self-destructive activity, however, is also function of the failure of the trade union and civil rights establishment, which offers youth no perspective for struggle and improvement of their conditions. The trade union bureaucracy has overseen the shutdown of basic industry and the decimation of workers’ living standards, while enriching itself through labor-management collaboration. Sections of minority workers who, along with the working class as a whole, had in an earlier period won improved living standards through trade union struggles, have seen virtually all of it disappear, while their sons and daughters are faring even worse.

Then there is the civil rights establishment, including such figures as Jesse Jackson, which long ago abandoned any struggle to seriously improve the conditions of the working class. Instead, in the name of “racial equality,” they have concentrated on integrating themselves into the ranks of the corporate and political elite.

In this regard, mention must be made of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, who has pointed to the 1984 election of Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor, as a key motivating factor for his entry into political life. Washington, like his white counterparts in the Democratic Party, was a loyal defender of the capitalist system who carried out regressive policies that contributed to the social catastrophe confronting young people and workers in the city.

Obama himself was elected state senator from Chicago and then US Senator from Illinois during a period when tens of thousands lost their jobs and social programs were being cut. He is deeply integrated into the Cook County Democratic Party, the corrupt political machine that has long dominated Chicago politics.

Obama used the recent media attention on violence in the city to bolster his “law and order” credentials, claiming that the shooting could be curtailed by restoring funding for community policing. “Additional police improves public safety,” he said. “We’ve got to help local communities put more police on the streets.” He also suggested that lack of parental guidance and moral upbringing could be responsible, saying, “Children have to be taught right and wrong and violence isn’t a way to resolve problems.”

Obama made a perfunctory reference to poor conditions facing young people in the city. However, he has made it clear that, if elected, urban policy would not involve any sharp increases in taxation on corporations and the wealthy or a massive public expenditure to eradicate poverty and provide a decent future to working class youth.



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Unfortunately my lengthy reply got nixed by my own hand. FUCK!

I said "almost as many". 2500 vs. 4100. Split hairs. Chicago's homicide rate is horrific and Obama shares responsibility. These killers are his constituents.

Chicago's rate of taxation is in toto caused by the Democrats. Since they are NO Republicans holding ANY state wide or Chicago office it's pretty clear who to blame. The GOP delegation in Springfield is so small it's not even a veto proof minority. No surprise that in 1950 Chicago was 90% white and presently less than a third.

This article tells it all. Chicago is just another shine town with the bread and circuses of big public works projects. I don't want to live in an Obama Chicago nor an Obama U.S.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/1098057,CST-NWS-census08.article

The drop out rate in Chi is 44%. among black males it's 57%. the CPS uses a disengenuous formula of counting only seniors who drop out. Povery link? Who knows. The latino drop out rate is only 12.7% and while I don't want to dig through census data comparing black vs. latino incomes 9I will later) even if Latinos have a higher household income (I doubt it though-Chicago blacks hold many high paying government jobs that Mexicans don't) the obvious question would be how in the world can indigent, non-English speaking immigrants earn more than
Chicago born and raised blacks.

 

Ummm... 2500 is "almost" 4100?

That's right, it's Obama's fault! (??)

No, it's not 57%. And as for "Poverty link? Who knows." We know, as it's the last line in the study you're trying to cite which says that it's linked to poverty.

Now, if you want to compare education statistics, check out which states overall fare worst -- I'll give you a hint, it's not the Northeastern blue states.

 

I'm not sure why you're trusting the "World Socialist Web Site" for your statistics rather than, say, the radical notion of a school board or federal statistics directly on these matters.

But yes, poverty in some urban areas is very high.

Under Republicans poverty goes up.

Under Democrats poverty goes down.

And more importantly for myself:

Under Democrats lately the deficits have stayed the same or decreased.

Under Republicans lately the deficits have ballooned.

 

Fuck STATES. Look a the Blue COUNTIES. How many counties in NY state are "blue"? 4? What is the drop out rate in Kings vs. Suffolk. Cali is "blue". Is the OC red or blue? Compare the OC drop out rate to red SF or LA County. The South. Of course. What's the percentage of blacks in SC? GA? duh............

 

Surely you're not naive enough to believe that the Dems rhetoric is any more ridiculous than the Republican rhetoric?

Don't you know that it's all a power game? Whoever gets into office wins and gets the spoils for 4 years. Do you seriously think that anyone with the personality type to run for President actually gives a fuck about the little guys?

 

It's the same with anything on that level Nik. Pius "for the people" rock stars make 200k a show and pay their backing band members 1k a week. I was reading about the 10th anniversary of the Truman Show. Jim Carey made 20mil yet much of the crew worked for free.

There was an American baseball player who wrote a famed best seller in 1970 called Ball Four. He admitted some really honest stuff. He said he'd rather star on a losing team than sit on the bench for a winner. He said he rooted for guys in front of him to play shitty or to even get injured.


Another book in the same vein Meat On The Hoof contained a quote from Eric Hoffer that I posted on ET a few years ago.

"If you have a hero, look again. You have probably diminished yourself in some way."

 

Dozens. I really don't look upon a half black guy raised in Hawaii by whites and educated at prep and Ivy League schools as particularly black. By Obamas own admission he only emigrated to Chicago because it was politically fertile.....

I would remind you that I campaigned with Alan Keyes against Obama. (Keyes was keynote at my biggest Congressional fundraiser in '04). By ANY definition Keyes is far blacker than Obama and I lay my life down for Keyes. (in fact I was captured on television standing next to Keyes when Obama stuck his finger into Keye's chest during a heated argument between the two candidates at a parade. I've detested Obama since that very day even though i had a lengthy cordial conversation with him just moments before. I said this before: My biggest beef with Obama is he's a weird dude.