Unburying Democracy

Rising from the undead.
1. CPS Students “Go Zombie” At CPS Headquarters And City Hall To Protest Death Of Chicago Education.
From The Chicago Students Union:
Chicago Public School students will be “going zombie” this Friday to represent the death of Chicago’s public education system. They will march at 4 p.m. from CPS headquarters, at 125 South Clark Street to City Hall where they will request a meeting with Mayor Emanuel. They are demanding that CPS funding given to charter schools be re-allocated to public schools; a democratically elected board of education, and; that the TIF surplus be used for public education.

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Posted on October 31, 2013

Scariest Holiday Ever

Boo.
* Pat Quinn going as governor.
* Bill Daley was going to go as a candidate for U.S. senate or governor, but decided to stay home instead.
* Joe Berrios going as himself – can’t think of anything scarier.
* Sheila Simon going as herself – a ghost.
* Bruce Rauner going as Rahm Emanuel – and vice versa.

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Posted on October 30, 2013

By Justin Elliott and Theodoric Meyer/ProPublica

Two weeks after Edward Snowden’s first revelations about sweeping government surveillance, President Obama shot back.
“We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information not just in the United States, but, in some cases, threats here in Germany,” Obama said during a visit to Berlin in June. “So lives have been saved.”
In the months since, intelligence officials, media outlets, and members of Congress from both parties all repeated versions of the claim that NSA surveillance has stopped more than 50 terrorist attacks. The figure has become a key talking point in the debate around the spying programs.

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Posted on October 23, 2013

Another Beachwood Special Report

“Mayor Rahm Emanuel plans to balance next year’s budget by asking smokers and cable TV customers to pay more, cutting spending and hoping that a rosier economy will fill city coffers with more tax dollars,” the Tribune reports.
“The picture of what the mayor will say Wednesday when he delivers his annual budget address to the Chicago City Council emerged as top aides briefed aldermen behind closed doors Tuesday.”
The Beachwood has learned Rahm will propose the following measures:

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Posted on October 23, 2013

Yet More Evidence Of War Crimes

“On a sultry evening in August 2012, five men gathered under a cluster of date palms near the local mosque in Khashamir, a village of stone and mud houses in southeastern Yemen,” Letta Tayler writes for Foreign Policy. “Two of the men were locals and well known in their community. The other three were strangers.
“Moments later, U.S. drones tore across the sky and launched four Hellfire missiles at the men. The first three missiles killed four of the men instantly, blasting their body parts across the grounds of the mosque. The final strike took out the fifth man as he tried to crawl to safety.
“Yemen’s Defense Ministry described the three strangers as members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a group that the United States calls al-Qaeda’s most active branch. The men were killed, ministry officials said, while ‘meeting their fellows.’
“But these two ‘fellows’ had no known links to AQAP. Rather, they were precisely the kind of Yemenis that the United States has sought as allies in its fight against al-Qaeda. One, Salim Jaber, was a 42-year-old cleric and father of seven who preached against violence committed in the name of Islam. The other was the cleric’s 26-year-old cousin Walid Jaber, one of the village’s few police officers.
“Just three days before his death, Salim Jaber had delivered a particularly adamant sermon against AQAP at the Khashamir mosque. The three strangers then showed up in the village in search of the cleric, relatives of the Jabers said. Fearful that the men might be seeking revenge for his sermon, Salim met with them only after his cousin offered to accompany him for protection.
“Salim Jaber is yet another innocent casualty in America’s covert war on terror. His case is one of six that I document in a new report for Human Rights Watch about the toll of America’s largely unacknowledged air strikes in Yemen. All six strikes were so-called targeted killings, the deliberate slaying of a specific person by a government under color of law. All six raise questions about the legality of the Obama administration’s targeted killing program. All six help explain why many Yemenis fear the United States more than they fear AQAP.”

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Posted on October 23, 2013

By Charles Ornstein/ProPublica

Last week, Ryan Lizza, a Washington correspondent with the New Yorker, did what I and many other journalists have done in the past three weeks: He attempted to sign up for an account on healthcare.gov, the federal government’s health insurance marketplace site.
And like me, at least, he initially thought he had succeeded. What follows is an instructive lesson in the speed of the news cycle and how incorrect information takes on a life of its own.
Here’s what happened:

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Posted on October 22, 2013

By Steve Rhodes

Remember when Barack Obama was going to restore our relations with the rest of the world? It hasn’t quite worked out that way.
*
“The U.S. National Security Agency swept up 70.3 million French telephone records in a 30-day period, according to a newspaper report that offered new details of the massive scope of a surveillance operation that has angered some of the country’s closest allies,” AP reports.
France is pissed.

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Posted on October 21, 2013

By Natasha Julius

Governor Pat Quinn’s blue-ribbon commission on transit reform is due to issue its first report by Friday. This week we’ll give you four recommendations of our own that just might fix this mess.
–
Suggestion #1: Kill Metra.
Suggestion #2: Look At A Fucking Map.
Suggestion #3: Invest In What’s Already Here.
–
Suggestion #4: Put the Public in Public Transit.
The demise of the Jackson Park Green Line has been in the news recently due to Mayor Emanuel’s proposal to rename Stony Island Avenue in honor of Bishop Arthur Brazier. Most of these stories have focused on the 1997 demolition of the elevated structure east of Cottage Grove. However, the struggle over the last leg of track began much earlier.
In a sense, the Jackson Park line was always disposable. Built to serve the World’s Fair in 1893, the tracks originally extended into the park itself. The line was awkwardly and unceremoniously hacked off at Stony Island shortly after the Fair ended, and Stony remained the terminal for nearly 90 years.

View Former Jackson Park Line in a larger map

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Posted on October 18, 2013

By Natasha Julius

Governor Pat Quinn’s blue-ribbon commission on transit reform is due to issue its first report by Friday. This week we’re presenting four recommendations of our own that just might fix this mess.
–
Suggestion #1: Kill Metra.
Suggestion #2: Look At A Fucking Map.
–
Suggestion #3: Invest In What’s Already Here.
There is a set of train tracks running in front of the Cook County Court building along 26th. Remnants of an elevated embankment cut across the city’s midsection south of Pershing. In Chicago and the near suburbs, abandoned rail lines form an elaborate web of disintegrating infrastructure all around us. The potential of these resources to galvanize our transportation system is enormous; wherever possible, they should be given over for public use.
The reclamation of rail rights-of-way is not a new idea. The CTA’s Orange Line and Metra’s North Central were built using existing freight tracks. Planned extensions of the Orange, Red and Yellow lines would use similar strategies. Existing corridors within the city could alleviate the paucity of decentralized connections. They could add tremendous capacity to our mass transit systems without diminishing capacity on surface roads.
Determining which existing lines are eligible for redevelopment is a daunting task. Often abandoned tracks are mixed in with others that are still in use. Trying to sort out which tracks are owned by whom quickly leads you into a black hole of railroad consolidation history. The suggestions given below involve only rights-of-way that have been acknowledged as abandoned in the public record, or those that show visible signs of advanced deterioration. There may be many more; all should be pursued.

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Posted on October 16, 2013

By Natasha Julius

Governor Pat Quinn’s blue-ribbon commission on transit reform is due to issue its first report by Friday. This week we’re presenting four recommendations of our own that just might fix this mess.
–
Suggestion #1: Kill Metra.
–
Suggestion #2: Look At A Fucking Map
Maps may be humanity’s defining achievement. Other species use tools, communicate with complex language and mourn their dead. But who else draws abstract pictures that represent their relationship to their surroundings?
Maps show more than just where things are. They show where things were and where things might be; how the disparate parts of a whole are linked; and how new parts will be added. If you look very closely, sometimes you can also see the missed connections, the regions that the shapers of that reality neglected. The unfulfilled potential of a place.
Looking at a map of Chicago’s mass transit system is both exhilarating and infuriating. Few other places boast the wealth of infrastructure we have here. And yet, outside the Loop, none of these resources connect with each other in any meaningful way. Great varicose tangles of rail twist their way past one another, never interacting, never offering their passengers the benefit of the other’s riches.
Truly strong public transit systems support the communities through which they pass and offer maximum flexibility. They don’t just dump everyone in the middle of town and forget about them. The Loop is a natural hub in Chicago due to its central location. But if you look at a map, if you spend a few minutes applying your imagination, a second tier of local mini-hubs begins to emerge. With fairly modest changes, these areas could offer innovative new ways to travel throughout the Chicagoland area. Every single decision-maker at CTA and Metra should be forced to stare unblinking at a map of Chicago every day until these Magic Eye patterns pop out at them.

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Posted on October 15, 2013