This is a long post. If you have a lot to do because NATO is here all you have to read are the next paragraph. The City of Chicago has no idea how much this whole thing is going to cost. When they say they do they are lying to you. The City of Chicago is going to lose money on this event no matter what happens. This means that you and I are going to pay for the little fellah’s 1% leadership sleep over party. We might get a police riot we can’t pay for because we don’t have enough insurance to pay for it because no one would insure our police plus policemen from around the country. So if we do have a police riot then it’s going to cost us a lot more money than we thought. The only thing being showcased is Mayor Emanuel’s willingness to use force and his clever capacity to control people. You can’t show case a city by closing its museums, sealing off its public transit and arresting dissidents/citizens but it is a hell of an audition tape for larger office and speaking fees on HOW to shut down democracy.

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The worst thing about Mayor Rahm Emanuel is that his evil is not confined to the City of Chicago and when it leaks out of the confines of the city that’s when it does the most damage to the lives of the working people who live in it. You might remember when his little cloven hooves travelled down to Springfield and virtually stripped Chicago teachers of any labor rights they’ve ever had while insuring that over the next decade CME Group and a few other corporate bandits will not pay taxes on $85 million a year… that sums up to almost a trillion, with a “t” dollars in taxes on the money they will be taking from us. Good to know who is being sacrificed as we get our fiscal house in order.

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When a union says that they’ve negotiated a historic “win-win” with an administration whose concept of fairness begins and ends with the eventual destruction of unions and privatization of all municipal services you know that someone has lost and it’s not the Administration. Such is the case with Laborers Local 1001, who apparently have learned nothing from what happened to the host of presently extinct private union organizations around the country. A union not concerned about the welfare of its future members has no future.

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I did not know Chris Drew well but what I did know of him was that he was an activist, a good man and dedicated soul. He was a Champion of the City and though monuments and newspapers will not note his passing all of us are the poorer for him not being with us. Jay Becker passed on this Facebook message about how Chris lived and who he was and I thought here at the Tutorial we’d mourn one of our own… an ordinary person, being an extraordinary citizen in a time of deep struggle and desperate strife. Chris Drew got off the bench and was directly involved in democracy. Thank you Chris, rest well.

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Since Governor Romney has sewed up the nomination tighter than one of Chris Christie’s old suits, the only remaining Republican election drama is which name the Bairn of Bain Capital intends to place on the bottom of his bumper sticker. Yes, friends, it’s once again time to play that quadrennial game sensation sweeping the nation: Let’s Guess Mitt’s Vice Presidential Pick!

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America is a country that is always at war with itself. We live at the point where what it claims to be clashes with the hard-cold reality of what it actually is. The claim that we are the land of the free has never been true for every soul under the Stars and Stripes. In fact every “freedom” we enjoy was won with someone’s blood and taken from those in power not given by our Constitution or won on some distant shore in some foreign war. We must clearly face that we live in a time of scapegoats or solutions.

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Afternoon furless ones, miss me? I have been following the traditional feline mourning rituals for my claw-brother, Jinx, the Handsome. He will be missed, long may he hunt. Now that the public grieving period is over I return to the doings of my campaign investment, Mayor Emanuel. It appears he has convinced you that more time doing something that is not working is effective and that less health clinics means he is serving more patients. Is it possible that your aldermen are even more witless than even I imagined? I find that incredible as I do not believe that most of them are worthy of your vaunted thumbs.

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Now the general election has unofficially begun, you and I and pretty much everyone dear to us, except of course, beleaguered Kansas City Royal fans who eat BBQ at least twice a week, are about to be buried under such a blizzard of polls, we’ll be lucky to evade frostbite burns.

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I am only writing this because you should be calling your alderman about the Infrastructure Bank and telling them to vote no. You can do that by going here and putting a little dangerously informed accountability on their uninformed hindquarters. You see tomorrow our aldermen are not going to make a mistake, which is what they will tell you at some point in the next four or five years, because that’s how long it typically takes a financial bubble to explode.

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There are a lot of reasons why this Infrastructure Bank is a terrible idea. Earlier posts have walked you through the straightforward boring ones. That it violates the Tutorial’s five rules of good public policy. The fact that it finances commitments that we already don’t have the tax base to fund, meaning we already don’t have enough money to properly maintain the crumbling infrastructure the Mayor is using as an excuse to build more infrastructure that will be around to crumble while he takes on more debt to the worst kinds of lenders… his friends. That it was created to be free of both oversight and accountability and that the entities involved are as trustworthy as a shark with a bleeding swimmer. But now it’s time to get wonky and talk about financialization so that you will understand what public-private partnerships are really all about.

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Sometimes the people in power lie and when they do so they depend on two things. One, you have no idea what the hell they are talking about. Two, the people in the media, covering them, have no idea what the hell they are talking about and will write down what they say word for word without reservation. When one’s idea is so bad that even our crack stenography corps over at the Sun-Times and the Tribune who WANT to endorse it suggest caution you know something Satan wouldn’t claim is about to become a terrifying new reality. Such is the case with the already incredibly shaky Infrastructure Bank.

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Some small- minded pundits are guaranteed to grouchily opine this is neither the time nor the place to be re-circulating unfounded conspiracy theories. Then again, mightn’t it be more imprudent to ignore the latest rumors and dark mutterings concerning something as important as the nomination of a presidential candidate? Of course we’re talking about the uncanny similarities between the 2012 Republican primary race and a game of Angry Birds.

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I’ve not written anything about the Trayvon Martin shooting or the endless to near pointless coverage of it because I know it to be tip of an ugly thing this country is not going to ever face and believe it or not that ugly thing is deeper than racism and printed on this country’s DNA like curse from Satan’s lips. Trayvon was shot down in the streets of his father’s neighborhood because society gave Mr. Zimmer permission to kill him. Society also gave permission to kill Dr. George Tiller, Bradon Teena, Rep. Gabby Giffords, the Knoxville Unitarian Church congregation members, Shawn Bell, Matthew Shepherd, Rekia Boyd and Shaima Alawadi and all Mr. Zimmerman and these other people did was accept the responsibility for doing what society wanted. I can say this because we are spiraling downward and fighting to fly.

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One thing you can always count on is that most parents will move mountains to protect, support and secure opportunities for their children. The Chicago Parents for Quality Education (CPQE) are such a group. Yesterday they released a white paper called: The Best Education of the Just the Longest. Clearly not a great step forward in marketing but so incredibly clear and spot on you know that that the Emanuel Administration and the editorial board at the Chicago Tribune could not possibly have understood it as it was written in a language they do not understand… truth.

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On Friday we talked about how our little marmoset of a Mayor and his corporate friends have decided that the best way to build an education system would be to pit schools and kids against each other in a metaphorical death match. That these market-driven schemes have a twenty-three year, verifiable track record of failure at everything except making a collection of rich people richer should not be lost on you. Here’s just one of our thirty sources and as bleak as it is please remember that it doesn’t have to be this way. We could decide to actually educate kids.

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A Race to the Top for Chicago, that’s how Mayor Rahm Emanuel, President Penny Pritzker, CPS CEO J.C. Brizard and notable CPS Board Members David Vitale, Tim Cawley and Jesse Ruiz see it. At the bottom of the concept is that competition will make all schools better. Ironically competition has already demonstrated how it doesn’t always deliver the best goods and services that are a net positive for society… Note the success of Walmart in terms of competition it is the nation’s largest employer. It has done so via the destruction of whole communities for cheap Chinese junk the people that work for them can barely afford. Competiion has allowed Walmart to distort reality so much that it harms social services and drives down the wages and profits of every other business around. How can that kind of competitive model be a good thing for education, where the people who lose will be children and society… you know teachers, students and us?

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Yes, boldness is certainly in Mayor Emanuel’s DNA even if he isn’t from Chicago. When it comes to the Infrastructure Bank, that is going to happen to our fair city, I think it wise to remember that this idea is being put together by a band of financial criminals whose concept of fiduciary responsibility ranks somewhere just above a hungry shark’s sense of compassion for a bleeding swimmer.

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Let us talk of many things, of Cabbages and Kings. Of Ultimate Arbiters. The Court of Last Resort. SCOTUS. The judicial graveyard where appealers go to die. The Supreme Court of the United States, which reluctantly deigned to hear testimony on a subject so obviously beneath them, it was an effort to keep their left eyes open: Obama Care.

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NATO is coming to town and our media has managed to talk about protest permits, will reporters get handcuffed, armor-plated horses, snipers… frick-frackin’ snipers, black-bloc tactics, the shameful 59-45 defeat of the attempted amendment of the idiotic Illinois Eavesdropping Law and if it is a win or a loss that the Mayor didn’t get to keep the G8 meeting… what the hell is wrong with you people? All of this is about the Constitution. In the Constitution, in the First damn Amendment, it actually says: “… or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

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I live in America, where things in some ways are better now than they have ever been. Wearing my uniform of black skin does not have to mean that I could be shot down in cold blood for wearing a gray hoodie without consequences. It does not have to mean that women must endure being sexualized and discriminated against for wanting control of their reproductive freedom. It does not mean that our homosexual brothers and sisters have to fear for their lives simply because they are alive. It does not mean that being a Muslim could make you the target of racist thugs that come into your home and leave you to drown in your own blood. In the past all of those things could be taken for granted in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Now, we’ve the right to fight for justice when these things happen and capacity to confront them as full citizens in defense of own humanity. Things are better now than they’ve ever been but we still live in America and so we still face the Devil’s Standard.

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​Yesterday the good people from the Chicagoland Researchers and Advocates for Transformative Education (CReATE) attempted what had to have felt like an exorcism on Mayor Rahm Emanuel when they presented him with the terrible and not surprising news that everything he knows about education is wrong. In fact, most of what he knows has been tried before and failed miserably everywhere it has been tried and a lot of it has been tried here before in small doses called probation, intervention, reconstitution, transformation and now the new-improved lunacy entitled turnarounds. He even has indisputable evidence that the direction he’s taking is about as responsible a public policy option as putting a toddler in a hungry python’s cage and hoping for the best.

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No. It’s not over. Well, okay, it’s kind of over. But the Republican nomination is not totally- otally over. As it very well should be. How over? So over, the fat lady not only sang, she should be back in her hotel room kicking off her shoes easing into a recliner with the remote in one hand and digging deep into a three pound box of marzipan with the other. Yes, that over.

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Election Day is my favorite day and more than twice in this century I think has been stolen and I know it has been privatized to the point where there are times when we cannot trust the results we are seeing.  We do not know, with complete certainty if our votes are even being counted and it feels sometimes like we’re voting for two sides of the same party, for the lesser of two evils or against someone instead of for something.

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For the past three months the Tutorial staff has been running all over the Chicagoland area getting Dangerously Informed so that we could provide you with endorsements. Because you might be inclined to trust us we should tell you how we decided who we are endorsing and we suggest that as a Dangerously Informed citizen that you pick up some of the Tutorials bad habits and practice them on a legislator or judge of your choice.

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Not easy being a Muppet. Referring to Greg Smith, formerly of Goldman Sachs, who wrote an op- ed in the New York Times about getting the hell out of Dodge, due to his company’s relentlessly spiraling moral depravity. According to Smith, associates are encouraged to pursue profit above all else, and that includes ripping out the eyeballs of their own billion- dollar clients at the same time they mockingly scorn them as Muppets.

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Last week the Tutorial spilt a little ink on the creation of a $1.7 billion dollar infrastructure bank that will be run by two corporate criminal banks; JP Morgan and Citibank; one ERISA violation prone insurer Union Labor Life Insurance Co.; and an entity that makes a healthy chunk of profits from privatizing public assets Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets Inc.. Give that article a read when you have time. This not being a sequel you don’t have to read that one to understand this one but the point of that article was that we’re supposed to trust that rogue’s gallery. A rogue’s gallery, by the way that went out of its way to create a process to shield itself from any sort of transparency. Now it turns out, upon further explanation things are worse than even I could have imagined and I all but imagined the financial “free” market’s equivalent of human sacrifice.

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And now your eagerly awaited Super Tuesday Report. Named for the quantity of contests and not the quality of participants. Perhaps it would be more apt to say Not So Super Tuesday Report. More of a Frenetic and Confusing but Ultimately Unsatisfying with a Slight Aftertaste of Desperation Tuesday Report.  The biggest complaint is lack of resolution. No dragons slain. No damsels rescued. Not even a castle breached. Although there was that bit of swordplay in Ohio. And you can never discount the romantic poetry that is a Rick Santorum victory celebration in Steubenville.

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For the past month, every week someone from the Sun-Times or the Tribune rediscovers the latest “education” idea wherein a CPS school creates a six-year program that connects high school students with associate degrees to some corporation. The corporation will be designing the curriculum and the graduates get dibs on interviewing for the jobs. It sounds like that most disturbing phrase in politics: “win-win” where one of the “winners” is like the gazelle at a cook out held by lions. The real problem here is that we’ve spent the past thirty years disinvesting in public enterprises, especially schools that we’ve reached the point where poverty is overwhelming education’s capacity to contend with it. In a democracy you call that an epic system fail.

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When anyone HAS to tell you “trust me,” don’t. It’s one of the ways you can tell someone is lying to you. When that person is Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his partners in his new enterprise are JP Morgan, Citibank, Union Labor Life Insurance Co. and Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets Inc. you should check to make sure they’ve not stolen what remains of your retirement funds, house or soul. These “people” to quote Mitt Romney, have committed the sorts of frauds that get human beings like Bernie Madoff to be thrown under a jail while they get slaps on the wrist. One of the partners has a history of gambling away the pensions of widows and orphans in one shady endeavor after another. Another partner makes its profits off of privatizing public assets… that they plan to help fund. If this sounds like a hustle or a dodge to you then you’ve been paying attention. If you haven’t let’s have a closer look at the Mayor’s partners that we’re supposed to trust as a part of the Marmoset Machine.

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In the past two weeks we’ve seen five corporate criminals promise to give the city $1.7 billion dollars to build the public infrastructure their taxes should be paying for… if they were paying any. The Mayor was given permission by Mike Madigan to allow a corporate polluter to escape paying for the damage they’ve done to an entire community. And the G8 will not be coming to Chicago, sparing the President the embarrassment of a an urban riot in his home town during the election season and allowing the Mayor to spend tens of millions of dollars on God knows what from now until the end of time. What, you didn’t read the stories that way? That’s because you’ve been caught in the Emanuel Hustle, where the Mayor can do no wrong and there are no consequences for the wrong that’s being done to you, me and the common public good.

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Odd week for Mitt Romney. The roller coaster candidate was on the receiving end of more mixed messages than a basement bulletin board at the United Nations on Take Your Schizophrenic to Work Day. While cruising to an easy victory in the Arizona primary he barely eeked out a squeaker in Michigan. That’s the problem with running around 12 different home states, eventually you’re bound to trip and stumble up some familiar front steps.

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It’s Occupy Education Day and the Tutorial is doing its small part in this big movement because this transfer of billions of public dollars into private hands has nothing to do with education and everything to do corporate control. The most disturbing thing about what’s happening to our children, their teachers and our society is that the very corporate business concepts Mayor Emanuel is applying to the public schooling commons have never worked anywhere and some of them have already failed here.  Everyone should read Ken Saltman’s great book the Failure of Corporate School Reform, it will set your teeth on edge.

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My aunt Sharon has led a hard life. It’s so hard that she’s been singing about it as a Chicago and international Blues Diva for years with her band Texas Fire. She is smarter than me, smarter than you, smarter than us and she rarely voices her poltical opinions in public. In fact if you don’t walk away from talking to her laughing then you haven’t really been listening. So when she puts something down on paper or at least brings it to my attention I am always entertained. I found this on the Facebook Page when I woke up and don’t get me wrong… I do not like President Obama’s policies very much and know him so let’s let that dog lie quietly. But her take on what really animates the Tea Party and Conservative America is so clear you can see all the way through it to the other side of the Sun. Enjoy. The (Comments) are the Tutorials.

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For the second time in three years the workers at UE Local 1110 demonstrated what democracy looks like and defended their jobs from the soulless considerations of a corporate “person” who does not care if their children eat or go hungry. The principle foundation of democracy is an active and engaged citizenry; that has the capacity to control, create and prevent change and the workers at UE Local 1110 demonstrate what that means.

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Once again, the wacky wheel of destiny takes a mighty spin and the big red pointer lands smack on the name of the next Great White Republican Hope- Rick Santorum. The seventh or eighth candidate to vault into the lead of the GOP sweepstakes primarily because he is not Mitt Romney.

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Almost a year from the day his campaign investors purchased the office of Mayor of Chicago for Rahm Emanuel he delivered a substantial return on their venture capital down payment in the form of a substantial slice of the CPS budget and total control of the CPS Board to hand out almost ALL of that budget. Dropping $12 million private dollars into a campaign to get a fat $5.1 billion dollar budget in public dollars is the kind of piracy common to Wall Street bankers, Pay Day Lenders and Private Equity Privateers.  This describes the leadership of the CPS Board; Penny Pritzker, David Vitale and Tim Cawley; powers Rahm Emanuel’s Marmoset Machine’s political operations and from where and defines the billionaire “school reformer philanthropists” like Martin Klondyke.

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Don’t mean to overreact and risk boosting everybody’s blood pressure higher than opening offers on Facebook’s upcoming IPO, but this might be a halfway decent time to seek out a nice safe steel bunker to hunker down in or behind, because it’s awards season and heavy metal statuettes are being tossed around like dimes at a county fair. Like the flurry of resumes from the outer office of Michele Bachmann’s inner circle. As plentiful as the doubts currently circling Mitt Romney’s Super PAC. We’ve already been treated to the golden plated spectacle of the Grammies, BAFTAs, Golden Globes, People’s Choice Awards, Machine Tool Diamond Awards, Screen Actor Guild Awards and what with the Emmys, Oscars and CMAs right around the corner, this might be the perfect opportunity to weigh in with the most consequential of them all: the 2012 Political Animal Awards. Note: No tuxes have been bruised in the creation of these awards.

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In a sweeping ordinance designed to bar the Chicago Police Department from shutting down cell towers, aiding or engaging in preventive arrest, the track-tracing of activists; where law enforcement and other authorities take information from confiscated electronic devices to target other activists and citizens as well websites and social media sites and finally from directly blocking access to the web in any way shape or form. The ordinance also requires the set up a special committee to credential social justice, community groups, civic and religious organizations and independent media outlets to insure that as many perspectives as is possible are covering the G8/NATO. The idea is to create positive civic pressure on the Chicago Police Department, elected officials and citizen activists to be on their best behavior. In a country where preventive detention and spying are accepted norms Ald. Munoz reminds us how things are supposed to be and that for evil to flourish all good men have to do is… nothing.

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The Tutorial has been silent for the past three weeks because I have been watching our political system at “work” and whenever I tried to sit down to write anything I was either consumed by incoherent rage or nearly bottomless sadness. These are the sorts of emotions that lead to cataloguing the End Times not writing thought provoking and occasionally funny things that build a better reality. And I think we can all agree that we need a better reality. I say this is because this one is either a mass performance art project or a compact with demonic entities. You choose which one it is but it bears no resemblance to the democratic society in which we want to live. Which brings you and me to the G8/NATO meetings; coming to Chicago and on display to the entire world this Spring.

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There’s something about Mitt. And whatever it is, a few folks are definitely allergic. Maybe they sense he has the same connection to humanity that a drive shaft has to bouillabaisse. Could be he’s worth more than most small Balkan nations. Might be the Mormon thing or perhaps he just smells odd.

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Today in Cook County Criminal Court, Judge Stanley Sacks heard oral arguments in a motion to dismiss the State’s felony eavesdropping charge against artist Christopher Drew on grounds that the law and the application of the law are unconstitutional. Having heard both sides, the judge will take consider the arguments and will issue a ruling on March 2.

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It’s been more exciting than a zip- line over crocodile infested streams watching the Republican Reality TV show currently playing across the nation. Specifically talking about their grueling marathon gladiator contest where the last person voted off the island becomes Red American Idol and wins the opportunity to oppose Barack Obama in the grudge match this fall not to mention grab all the money they can from the Koch Brothers secret PAC account money machine. Let’s Make a Deal.

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What if CME, CNA and Bank of America giving $34 million dollars back to the city is a bad thing, that you not having an alderman is a worse thing and that the Mayor of Chicago is openly paying people to work against the best interests of parents and school children? By the way we used to call such behavior a felony, the Tribune and the Sun-Times have decided that such a thing may not be “appropriate”. (A statement that I am personally nominating for the Donald Rumsfeld Phrase of the Year Award.) What if all of it was part of an evil plot to transfer public resources to private entities to feed/build a political machine whose agenda is so terrible that the last thing it wants is accountability? If any of the above upsets you please understand that it is happening to the entire city right now. It’s happening because that’s what the new machine is all about.

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As rare and mythical as the unicorn, it too cavorts amongst the clouds with double rainbows birthing from its unfathomable depths. But instead of worshipful 12 year- old girls, it is conservative politicians who tack drawings of this inamorata on walls above their beds. We’re talking about the legendary… Mainstream. The message is relatively straightforward. Inside the Mainstream, you will rub elbows with everything that is good and right and true and just about America. Families have 2.4 children, none of whom sport barbed wire piercings or dragon neck tattoos or ever talk smack back. Lawns are broad and green and crabgrass free. And children are cheerfully shuttled to school in orderly processions of grey and beige Minivans. The place to be.

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In the past year the Emanuel Administration has refused to cooperate with any and all attempts of Inspector General “Silent Joe” Ferguson’s office to be the check on its power that is meant to be citing attorney-client privilege to hide everything from how money is being spent to who is making decisions about how authority is being carried out. It has also brought the G8/NATO conferences to Chicago and then enshrined a series of permanent social control laws in place, which are not as dangerous as the pool of untold, untraceable and unaccountable millions in security contracting the Mayor will now have under his control for what appears to be forever. Individually any one of these events would be beyond alarming but when taken as a whole with the Mayor’s propensity to do the reprehensible, hiring protestors to push corporate school reform while keeping the general public out of the meetings for example, is truly terrifying.

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Tonight President Obama will be giving the State of the Union address and it is said that he will be sounding the “populist” clarion call to arms for his liberal base. Given the actual center right policies the Obama Administration has undertaken I’m not even sure if you or I should believe him but you should vote for him because the other guy, who or whatever it is will be far worse for us than the devil we know. Remember what a mess the Republicans made last time they had the conn? Tonight, as you listen to President Obama’s State of the Union and Gov. Mitch Daniels’ repugnant response what you may realize is how much of each is empty rhetoric and how you may not even be who they are trying to speak to or about.

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Some people we once really respected are referring to Mayor 1%‘s governance theater (propose an extreme version of a policy, then back off just slightly when the inevitable outcry occurs, getting what he wanted to begin with) as being “a good leader” while also trying to argue that the G8/NATO ordinances really don’t amount to very much. Criticism of them is “hyperbole.”

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Obama’s inevitable base-confusing, enemy-inspiring, high-rhetoric, plea for civility and tone-deaf collection of tested campaign slogans is about to amuse, bemuse and possibly upset you. Will Durst gives you something more wholesome to do than shake your head and wonder when you will be detained.

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I’m only going to say this once and I’m going to use small words because I want it to stick with our media friends and the 41 Aldermen who voted for the G8/NATO crackdown ordinance. The United States Constitution has already provided us guidelines that give people the ability to express their views and municipalities the capacity to enforce the law. That Mayor Emanuel is uncomfortable with the Constitution should tell you good citizen that the people he is bringing to our fair city have a lot to answer for and that he should not be trusted with a public office.

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Surely you’re longing to hear some scathingly humorous remarks concerning the New Hampshire Primary. And it would be our honor to relate a few pithily amusing jibes about 2012’s primary Primary. Only, sorry. Not going to happen. Can’t be done. NH is so… over and done with. Day before yesterday. Such archaic news, you probably read about it in some ancient medium like a broadsheet gazette with sepia toned daguerreotypes.

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For the past week or so there has been a lot of hand wringing and angry expletives hurled about because our libraries are closed on Mondays. An honest discussion of what is happening here is long overdue. For the Aldermen and the Mayor to act surprised and start running the disingenuous talking point of needing a “willing partner in labor” should insult your intelligence. Mayor Emanuel’s people wrote the budget so they knew that they would be cutting staff and/or services; that’s why they wrote it the way they did. One would hope that the Aldermen read the budget… no scratch that, understood the budget. Because if they read and understood the budget then they knew they were voting for service and/or wage cuts. The library closings are not about having the money to pay for libraries or even library staff. It’s about having a set of values that says the people who provide city services should be paid enough to live in city and contribute to its economy.

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One fall morning, Leon Finney Jr. speeds from block to block pointing out each of the townhomes and high-rise apartment buildings he’s built in the Woodlawn community in the past four decades. With his personal cameraman in tow, the community organizer turned real estate developer and pastor pulls his Lexus sedan to the side of the road every few blocks and hastily jumps out with his keys still in the ignition. At most stops, he hikes forward 30 or so paces and then turns around, flashing a wide grin as he walks toward the camera. It’s a windy day, and his trench coat flaps in the wind, exposing his pink sweater vest and signature bow tie.

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There has been much talk about what the Emanuel Administration and his bound concubines who you may know as Aldermen have been up to. Last week one of the many heinous consequences of the slow motion civic train wreck you may know as the city budget manifested with much sturm und drang. (I’m using the German because of the trajectory our government appears to be on both locally and nationally but it just means storm and concern.) The latest catastrophe, the closing of libraries, a connected catastrophe, the seemingly random closing of schools and as yet under reported apocalypse of where exactly the money is going to or coming from to provide “security” for the G8/NATO monkey dance are all connected by one thing… the extermination of the common good.

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When Mayor Rahm Emanuel says: “I misspoke, and I take responsibility for the confusion,” that tighter protest rules and higher fines for thwarting police would be temporary measures designed just for a pair of spring meetings of international leaders in Chicago he’s lying. Hal Dardick knows this but this isn’t about Hal’s inability to find his way out of a damn closet. This is about the collective failure of the entire press corps to start reporting on the systematic stripping of the public’s right to assemble and dissent with some damn context. Mayor Emanuel’s ordinance is designed to crackdown on, limit and place controls on the NATO/G-8 protests and what the means is taking a fish-billie to the knees and face of the 1st and 4th Amendments. Maybe I’m too stupid to breathe without directions but I thought it was the media’s job to embody the 1st Amendment and to defend the 4th Amendment?

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As we discussed yesterday the Tutorial staff spent the last two weeks asking activists, community members, public officials, workers, homeowners, neighborhood groups, journalists, artists, organizers and political junkies important political stories that will just be missed this year by the likes of Fran Speilman and Hal Dardick. They will miss these stories because their idea of fact checking consists of asking someone powerful for the proper spelling of their name. As we said yesterday this list might surprise and upset you, I’d say sorry but it’s not my fault that things are this screwed up in 19th century… I’m sorry 21st century Chicago.  The Story: Where Did All the Good Guy Aldermen Go?

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Goldman Sachs is a cancer on democracy, there I said it and I wasn’t struck by a bolt of lightning but thanks to President Obama signing the NDAA I’ve now just become even more subject to arrest and permanent secret detention. Thanks President Obama if I didn’t KNOW that half the GOP field and the next GOP President is one terrorist incident, which could be anything from using this power I’d not vote for him. But this isn’t about that it’s about Goldman Sachs, the most destructive and evil force on the planet and possibly in this dimension, which is at present taking up residence in Chicago and is an integral part of Mayor Emanuel’s new political machine.

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Well it’s 2012 and because the Mayans ran out of space on giant piece of stone people are going to lose their minds in all manner of creative ways. Ironically none of that will impact how the city that works will continue to not work for the great mass of the folks who live here, you know us. Here at the Tutorial we’ve spent the last two weeks scouring the city and sometimes the web talking to activists, community members, public officials, workers, homeowners, neighborhood groups, journalists, artists, organizers and political junkies what they think we might have to look forward to this year in Chicago… in terms of political donnybrooks that our crack Chicago media will not only miss but will get absolutely wrong.  The hard part wasn’t finding things. I think if we gave Fran Speilman and Hal Dardick a table cloth two football fields wide and spotted them the location of the table they couldn’t cover it.

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Another year is almost in the books. We’ve almost made it all the way around the sun again and a lot has happened, some good, some bad and some so ugly that Medusa herself would fall down dead from terror if she were face to face with them. But we’re not Medusa; we’re citizens so it’s our responsibility, pleasure, honor and calling to do just that. We are obligated to stand up to the powerful and for principle in the face of civic violence and evil. We are charged with that most sacred of things in a democratic state. That we hold the powerful accountable and make what is just and right practical. It was not practical to end slavery or give women the vote. It was not practical to stop children from working in sweatshops or pass the New Deal. It was not practical to wage the Civil War or finance the Marshall Plan. It was simply just and light will prevail.

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Bah humbug everybody. And I imagine that sentiment is being echoed by more than a few of you overly familiar with the soft dark underbelly of this “happiest time of the year.” Those of us who have been washed prone by the gushing holiday faucet of red and green greed and are dreading the repurposed solstice celebration as it drips down the gutter of melancholy revealing the regurgitated fruitcake of gloom and despair. Whoa. Wow. Sorry about that.

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Politics is neither the art of the possible nor the science of how people decide how resources are divided. It is instead a reaction to the threats, tensions and stresses in any society and the legal manifestation of its moral center. The common core of every social contract is that when the governed are in trouble or in danger those who govern attend to their needs and that society as a whole responds to societal problems. In the land of the free and the home of the brave we have reached a point in our politics where it is becoming clear to the governed that those who govern them are not concerned with their welfare. It is called Calamity’s Equation; the point where what is needed by citizens is not produced by government and we here in America are seeing it play out in our everyday lives.

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Greetings kibble fetchers, enjoying your early spending spree on goods made in Indonesian sweat shops? I hope so, I have a fantastic “put” offer that even now is being paid for by the Federal Reserve but I digress. We, your betters, will be gathering for the G8 and NATO meetings here in Chicago, the home of the CME Group and Mayor Emanuel. It is the perfect marriage of the “financial system” we have put in place to enrich the worthy and crush/control the impudent, you and the political system we’ve bought, funded and are in partnership with to enforce our financial system. Whatever does one call a system where business and government work so comfortably together to the point where they are the same? For some reason I am seeing a bundle of sticks but I’m sure you’d over react to the term. Let’s just call it efficient and leave it at that.

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The mad mud tossing between Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, the last two Republicans still standing, is quickly ramping up to levels not seen since the Agincourt catapults. The candidates and their surrogates are busy dredging up dirt with fleets of front loaders, personally wetting it down with outraged spittle and other anatomical fluids and its getting ugly out there folks. Not to mention- moist.

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Mayor Rahm Emanuel does not think like we do. He’s not burdened with the need to have government services help anyone he knows and he is not concerned about what the people he is not serving are going to do. Basically he has decided that he will savagely ignore and attack the poor, while reducing services to the middle class and opening opportunities for wealthy and powerful to get wealthier as he wields power as their agent and lobbyist. This demands a new kind of political machine; one that does not need nor want a patronage army or depends on contractors who might lead to embarrassing scandals. This new machine runs on money, depends on the privatization of public entities and the use of public assets and money to expand the power and reach of private, corporate interests.

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Okay. You can stop vibrating like a shaved poodle duct- taped to the foul pole at Wrigley during a night game in April. It’s finally here. The 8th annual Top Ten Comedic News Stories of the Year. Veterans, please advise the newbies this list is NOT to be confused with the Top Ten Legitimate News Stories of the Year. They are as different as 3 bean chili and those flannel pajamas with the feets in them. Like strip mining slag heaps and the director’s cut of “Zookeeper.” Wire- haired dwarf goats and metal flake stainless steel dinnerware.

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It’s not every day when you get to see radically bad public policy run headlong into an epic media fail. When it does happen, the resultant collision leaves the general public looking like it went ten rounds with world’s best heavy weight and ends with in guys in neat Armani suits leaving with a bagful of the public’s money. That’s what’s happening in Springfield right now, where the CME Group and Sears are orchestrating a multi-million dollar armed robbery of the state.

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When I got a look at Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s new selections to the Ethics Reform Task Force I almost forgot that his Congressional campaigns were powered by hired thugs from the Hired Truck scandal or that his stint at Fannie Mae could be summed up as he was so incompetent that the multi-million dollar campaign fraud that benefitted only one Democrat, him went on or he didn’t show up for six-figure payday so he didn’t know about it or he was right at its corrupt center orchestrating the deal. I almost forgot that he’s actively hiding the goings on of the World Business Chicago board and won’t give up the records of his various dealings with all manner of powerful corporate executives. To call his efforts at transparency to date window dressing is an embarrassment to windows. (Wait for it, the joke will come.) Fortunately I almost forgot. I didn’t suffer permanent amnesia.

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I’ve spent months wondering when our media friends will get to the actual issues behind the possible departure of CME Group, the CBOE and/or Sears Holding Company. But I can see that waiting for this to happen is like expecting frogs to fall out of the sky or some guy to walk across Lake Michigan and make fishes and loaves or something …so here we go a-frick-frackin’-gain. Why aren’t we asking how past corporate welfare has transformed Illinois’ into the fiscal equivalent of a capsizing boat in the Arctic? Why hasn’t anyone asked what kind of return on investment are we getting from prior corporate welfare handouts? Clearly more jobs, a thriving economy and a fiscally sound state are not in the cards.

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Let’s take a peek behind the scenes of GOP headquarters to listen in on the coaching strategy for the little game Republicans are currently playing called, “Anybody but Romney.” Think “Whack- A- Mole” with media mallets. “Well, here it is, boys, 2011. About time we scour the country and figure out exactly whom we should pick for our 2012 Presidential nominee. It’s got to be somebody with a legitimate shot to beat that socialist incumbent. Somebody we can trust to toe the party line. But most importantly, we need someone younger than that last guy. Which won’t be hard. So, who do we got running? Okay, okay, thank you, Mitt Romney. You can put your hand down now. Ran the Olympics? That’s great. We’ll definitely keep you in mind. Who else we got?

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I want you to remember that I’m just the messenger who is telling you something you already know. Millions of people, in Spain, Italy, Ireland, England, Greece, Germany and yes, right here in the streets. We are there because we know that unrestrained, global capital has no limits, boundaries or barriers and is stronger than any individual democratic state… including our own. In Greece and Italy they are so strong that both countries now have direct rule by bankers who are enforcing a form of austerity on them so severe that for the next decade hundreds of thousands of them will starve, go without medical care, lose their pensions and face old ages filled with poverty and uncertainty… just like Americans is how they are putting it over there. It is a telling thing that the European terror is that they will become like us.

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In English we call this a lie. In Yiddish the word would be chutzpah. In Korean we’d say 뻔뻔스러운 and then someone would strike you to be certain you’d taken the meaning correctly. This is not a conflict of interest, having the same agency he chose his education staff from to do oversight of the system he just hired them to run. The term “conflict of interest” indicates that the person in the position would be torn between responsibilities or masters.  This good people, is a far more heinous state of affairs. What you are seeing here is crony capitalism and the looting of the public treasury by private entities or in Rahm’s language a hostile takeover. Gee that sounds harsh doesn’t it and some would say hyperbolic but that’s because they’re not paying attention. Here, have a seat, pay attention and get dangerously informed.

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Today, right now, the tireless efforts of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and the Chicago Board of Exchange (CBOE) are about to bear fruit. They are about to get a $100 million dollar tax break via SB 397. Given all the shouting we’ve been doing about the 1% sucking the souls and of the rest of us here’s an example of how much more ass they are willing to kick WHILE we are in the damn streets! Time to get off the bench and call these prick-rat-bastards and tell them to vote no on this odious corporate giveaway; here are the numbers. Get your accountability on and make a call, when you’re done I’ll commence with the hilarity, taunting and invective.

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I get offended when people talk about politics or the economy like it’s some kind of game. Games have winners and losers, with clearly defined rules but when they’re over you don’t end up in a bread line, dodging drone strikes, working in a sweat shop, starving or consigned to a death camp. If you are playing games like that then you could end up a serial killer and should get whatever’s wrong with you looked at as soon as possible. But since we live in a country that is on a trajectory to land us somewhere between the Hindenburg or the Titanic I think we’re down to using musical chairs as a simple way to explain just how bad things are and how EASY, that’s right, EASY it would be to FIX what’s going wrong.

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There are times when I’m glad my grandfather is dead because if he were alive to see what’s happened and is happening to this country it would kill him. If he saw this video where Mayor Rahm Emanuel was run off a Chicago street, something our angry little marmoset of a Mayor had better get used to, and the media’s reaction to it then he’d probably spend his last days serving a life sentence. This would be true because my granddad was from Texas and the media’s reaction would have caused him to reach for his concealed carry and thin out the stenographer, talking head and videographer pool. Then he would have looked at me when I came to visit and said something like: “If’n they can’t do their damn jobs they sure as hell can stop doing the Mayor’s job for him.”

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Good morning humans, ordinarily I would begin my column by taunting you about your actual status but it is becoming less fun to toy with you now that your aldermen have given up fighting for you. Fifty to zero on a budget designed to steal milk from your kitten’s saucers and none of them and few of you object. It is good to know that so many of you will be going quietly into the night when the bread riots start there will less of you to… “detain” but I am getting ahead of your futures. In your present there has been some less than intelligent chatter about the failure of this Super Committee. I am truly amazed, when I read what passes for news in your society that you even mastered fire.

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Let me be among the first 40- foot helium- filled balloons to kick- start our national parade of giving thanks. That’s right, we’re just about to butt heads with Turkey Holocaust Day, and to be perfectly honest, its about time. A little tryptophan poisoning might be the perfect prescription for these trying times.

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A few months ago Congress approved a bill stating that pizza can be counted as a vegetable in American school lunches.  Some people might say it’s common knowledge that pizza is not actually a vegetable. To those people I say: I see you passed first grade health class, well done!  However, in an effort to understand Congress’s decision, I went in search of a definition of vegetable-ness, and how it relates to pizza and our school children.  My first stop: Wikipedia.

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A few months ago the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) began to say out loud what anyone who has ever had to deal with the CHA knows has been in their dark little hearts for at least a decade: The CHA is not housing of last resort for the poor and homeless. Huh, really, then who is it for? But the thing that alarms me is that whenever anyone talks about what the government should do the discussion always about the middle class. No one ever talks about the people who are most in need of government’s help and/or protection. In fact the narrative that I’m tired of hearing is how the unworthy poor are sponging off the rest of us and we need to cut services to them and to society in order to balance a budget.

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Zero, that’s how many aldermen think that mental health facilities are worth keeping open. Zero, that’s the sum total of aldermen who think there should be a way to get homeless people to shelters during the winter. Zero, that’s the limit of aldermen thought your children, should have an adequate education. Zero, that’s the number of aldermen who think that we should protect our police and fire functions. Zero, that would be the aldermen that we could name who voted to protect the integrity of our emergency response system… what little of it remains. Zero, all of the aldermen in Chicago who believe in living wages, corporate accountability, pensions and stopping the massive increases in unemployment that is going to hit what remains of the African-American and Latino middle class in Chicago like hammer.

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Yesterday a few dozen people did one of the bravest things you can imagine. They risked arrest and assault at the hands of a Mayor who must be fuming that he can’t be his real ruthless self, yet. We have so many things to be upset about that until OWS we were running in so many directions that we were easily contained but the OWS movement is pulling us all together and showing us that the emperor has no clothes. Last night’s brave actions made me think that we have to begin to move beyond placing our bodies in the gears of the machine and start taking it apart.

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You could make a credible argument that the reason George W. Bush became President and why people don’t know that demand drives an economy or how Medicare and Medicaid work is because we have about the worst high school civics education ever. Fortunately for Chicago there is an alliance of educators who are absolutely affronted that someone can scream fascist-communist-socialist and still be taken seriously in public discourse, like they are an informed individual not the village idiot. They would be the Teachers for Social Justice (TSJ) and for eleven years they’ve been trying to hold democracy together one classroom at a time.

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In ten days stupid economic conversation is going to make a comeback. You may have missed it but while we were out occupying town squares, houses, banks and parks, the Super Committee, or as I like to say, the Gang of 12 was meeting in a dimly lit cloak room deciding how many more children would be going without food so that HNWI, people who have a million dollars in just Wall Street investments, won’t pay another dime in taxes. If they do nothing HNWI people, banks and other corporate prick-rat-bastards that got us into this mess still will pay nothing. The shared sacrifice will be cuts made to programs that people who do not have a minimum of a million dollars in Wall Street investments. We call it austerity and it is incredibly unfair.

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It’s about time for the kabuki theater that is our government to break out into its budget-deficit-debt ceiling-austerity dance. It’s kabuki theater and a dance because it’s a monstrous injustice of epic proportions. The idiot media storylines are simple; we are facing a massive debt and we have to make cuts or how will these negotiations impact the 2012 Presidential election. That would be telling us a lie on one hand and covering a horse race on the other. I’d call it shameful but that would be how you know that ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX and sadly PBS are the corporate media.

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Say what you will about Mayor Emanuel but his comedy stylings are an equal mix of cynicism and taunting. If he thought ending furlough days were a “morale-killer” what does eliminating sick pay, reducing holidays, creating tiered pay grades and drastically reducing paychecks do to “morale” besides prove that he doesn’t give a damn about their ”morale” or well-being!

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Welcome to Monday my arboreal wage slaves. Did you enjoy your commute to your task where you’ve not received a real raise in thirty years? I know I’m happy that your “governments” continue to borrow money from HNWI investors like myself instead of taxing us. Don’t know what a HNWI is? Surprised it’s not on your Sunday “news” programs? How charming. Last week I saw some of your reporters mewling about my campaign investment not providing you plebeians with information after promising to be… what is that abominable word; ah, transparent. I would taunt you on your naivety here but there is no need to drag that word through the mud. This is blatant and obvious stupidity. Transparency, I am still wondering how much more kitten-like you children can be.

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And now, another installment in the continuing saga that is The Herman Cain Sexual Harassment Soap Opera. When last we left him, the candidate was praising his main backers: “The Koch Brothers are my brothers from another mother.”  Guess we should be grateful he hasn’t dismissed his accusers with an offhand: “Bros before hoes.”

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If you’ve been listening to the GOP Debates that have gone on for the past six months and/or follow the horse race that the media is trying to make you interested in over there, stop. If you’ve been reading descriptions of the GOP candidates as getting out of clown cars or thinking they’re funny or crazy or both stop. If you can’t believe that our political system is so weak, fragile and sick that it’s come to this then you are on the right track and you should be outraged with our institutions and possibly yourself if you’ve not been taking our democracy seriously for the past thirty years.

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As the Emanuel budget creeps ever closer to reality the question being raised by aldermen and the media is who is going to suffer not what the budget should be about. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again a budget is where you get a sense of a government’s soul and its objectives. I’ve gone on and on about the over a billion dollars lying around the city that is not being touched for reasons that neither Rahm nor any alderman anywhere apparently wants or intends to explain. Other people have lost hair and years off their lives from all the screaming and carrying on about which services Rahm is privatizing or reducing to a size small enough for his campaign investors over at the Civic Federation or For a Better Chicago to drag into a bath tub and drown.

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Two days ago there was another “historic” election. Progressive candidates did well; progressive movements stopped an anti-labor law in Ohio that stripped people of collective bargaining and an ironically named Personhood law that makes women, actual people slaves of the state to defend zygotes, who suddenly would become people just like corporations. The Anti-Immigrant firebrand Russell Pearce was recalled for his extremism. Pundits are already parsing like a politician caught in a sexual harassment scandal about what this means.

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What are conservatives trying to conserve? They treat the environment like a cross between a cat box and an ashtray so that’s out. They’re willing to invade not one but two whole countries and are angling for third to keep energy company execs in silk suits and fancy caviar; so energy conservation is a big no. And when it comes to conserving a tax dollar these fiscal conservative, free-market nut jobs spend money like a debutante with her daddy’s credit card.

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“Niggers by the pound.” That was a contest and the mind set in the office of Cook County State’s Attorney Richard M. Daley. It was the aura of the office. Prosecutors in his officer were knowingly accepting evidence that was obtained via torture. He knew about the torture and the contest and he said and did nothing. What he did instead was advocate for harsher penalties. If there is a banality of evil here is where it was in Chicago.

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Every day I have to hear some member of our “crack” mainstream press corps tell me that the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement are two sides of the same coin. This could be because they are suffering from collective brain damage but we’re not that lucky. Nope, our problem is that of all the institutions that have let us down so hard we have society-wide concussion syndrome the media is among the worst. These people missed the dot.com bubble, the housing bubble, played cheerleader for the financial bubble, supported tax cuts, rode shotgun on not one but two illegal wars and cover twenty people in tri-corner hats with helicopters and sixty-banks of cameras but think that 5,000 people is enough to shut down one of the busiest ports in the world. To call our media inept, lazy and biased is an understatement of biblical proportions. So the fact that they can’t tell the difference between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street is not surprising, that the President can’t is just plain sad.

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Slamming DC. It may be the singular most popular political game around today. Everybody does it. Even incumbents go out of their way to blame Washington for everything that’s wrong with the country. A lot like a baseball manager complaining that his team suffers from a crippling lack of quality coaching.

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Last week while you weren’t looking Mayor Emanuel decided that he was going to make your 9-11 service worse, put more kids in classrooms, tell homeless people to get a cab to get out of the cold and get rid of so many after school programs that we should be calling that part of his budget the Gang Recruitment Initiative. Ah, shared sacrifice has begun. To give you a sense of what people like the CME or GE Capital are sacrificing they are getting a $20 million dollar corporate gift. You see, the Corporate Head Tax is paid primarily by VERY BIG and VERY RICH firms. Small businesses are not paying this thing but our immortal, undead, vampiric corporate masters are or I should say were paying it.

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The Emanuel budget is on the verge of becoming a reality and it slashes jobs, pensions and costs and real services to real people with real needs. You see government is based on the notion of a social contract. The basic contract goes something like this: “I won’t organize a horde of angry villagers to burn down your Ravenswood mailing address and you will provide enough government resources to keep me from getting that desperate and angry. I will consent to the rule of law and courts and you will create a system whose hallmarks are fairness and equality of opportunity. Sadly, our Mayor’s concept of a social contract reads like something out of a Dickens novel complete with sweat shop and debtor’s prisons.

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“I’ve seen the promise of Chicago, this is a strong city, a loving city and a caring city. I want everybody to know in this city, if there is gun violence, it is not over there. It is not down there. If it happens in our city, it is part of your community regardless of where of you live.” – Mayor Rahm Emanuel A budget is where you see the soul of a politician and the worst thing about hypocrites is that they are often cowards. Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s budget is a love letter to callousness. For him to stand at the side of the parents of 263 slain school children while simultaneously putting forward a budget that will certainly put their surviving brothers and sisters at risk is beyond unconscionable.

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One of the worst things about existing under the heel of a corporate mafia boss who longs to become a super-villain is the shocking regularity that he attempts to drive wedges between people who are really in the same sinking boat he’s setting on fire. Yesterday our angry marmoset of a Mayor gave a press conference where he once again made it clear that he is an enemy of all working people in the City of Chicago with pensions and healthcare. That starts with all union workers, who have been told that there will be no living wages and if he can help it, no union jobs at O’Hare or Midway. This war on workers also includes city workers that were reminded by our doll-like Mayor that he was elected to look after the interests of taxpayers not city workers. Huh, here I was thinking that City workers were taxpayers and that if they became unemployed that they would become an additional burden on the system… or is the idea that the Mayor defunds the system so they just become destitute and willing to work for the sor

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Good morning furless, tree-servants, I’ve missed you while I’ve been visiting out of town visiting my holdings in Qatar and the Kuwait, it appears that in my absence a number of you have taken the streets as if asking for our permission to pitch lean-tos in parks is going to make us give your money back to you… how droll. Honestly, if you want to know how we’re reacting your little sleep overs; my campaign partner, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s, Aviation Commissioner Rosemarie Andolino, should put your little arboreal concerns in their proper place. Rosie, as Mayor Emanuel, myself and the rest of the Star Chamber like to call her, is against the idea of a “living wage” for you riff-raff. Yes, a subsistence or desperation wage is more to our liking.

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Easier than duck fat in muffin tins to figure out why Americans are so darn freaked out and polarized these days. It’s because we’re afraid. Afraid we’ve lost our way. Afraid of not being #1. Afraid of what may be in store. Of all that we don’t know. Because, face it, there’s so much we don’t know. We don’t even know… how much we don’t know.

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I Among 300 million people, The only moving thing Was the understanding that no one stood for them.

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From the start Mayor Emanuel has made it clear that his take on public policy is likely to take the “public” right out of the title. He’s also shown an uncanny knack for picking people who truly make you believe that he is a mob boss who desperately wants to metastasize into a super villain. That being the case our job is to stop him making that transformation and casting the Earth into the Sun. His transition team featured a legislator turned lobbyist who had to leave for ethical/legal reasons, the front guy for the worst Daley Administration corruption, a corrupt bureaucrat at the CHA, an investment banker who still thinks that commoditized mortgages aren’t necessarily a bad idea and a police officer-chef whose best quality is clearly loyalty. This led to a financial team reads like a who’s who of the brilliant financial mindset that ran the country off the fiscal cliff and the education team looks like the kind of folks that are on board with the movie Waiting for Superman…

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