Why we are running for city council
Chicago is home to people who live in vastly different worlds—complete with unequal sets of opportunities and realities. All you have to do in order to see these two different cities is to drive a few miles from the West Side to the Gold Coast or around Rogers Park. It’s like night and day. And it is truly a great crime, if not the greatest crime, for such great wealth to exist side-by-side with such extreme poverty.
The divide between the rich and poor is growing, exponentially. The twin parties of the rich are not going to help us. We need to help ourselves. We need to shake up City Hall.
The Real Chicago:
The unemployment rate is officially 11 percent, but probably well over 20 percent in reality because the official figure only covers people collecting unemployment. Just like in every other major city, the courts and the cops violently and illegally target Black, Latino and poor people, filling up the largest prison system in the world with cheap labor. The mayor is leading a drive to create a full blown apartheid education system. Everywhere you look workers are being asked to make less and pay more for the things they need. At the same time, corporations get millions of dollars in handouts every year and have the dominant influence over the politicians they help select.
Rahm Emanuel, Mayor 1%, is a millionaire banker and political fundraiser. He is not working for the people—not even partially. In fact, he is a major functionary for the dictatorship of Wall Street that we live under.
Ten percent of the population of Chicago lives in extreme poverty. Twenty-two percent live under the government’s poverty line ($23,000 a year for a family of four!). 1 out of 5 people need food aid at some point every year. The majority of the people in our modern metropolis live a few paychecks away or a pink slip away from poverty.
Instead of fighting a war on poverty and creating jobs, City Hall and Springfield and Washington DC are waging a calculated and systematic war on working people’s pensions, laying people off, reducing wages, dismantling affordable housing programs, closing public schools, deporting record numbers of immigrants, slashing food aid, raising taxes and fees on workers and the poor, closing badly needed health clinics and waging a war on unions.
Let’s be clear. The business organizations, the media and the political class are simply providing cover for Wall Street’s hoarding and tax evasion when they repeat over and over again that there is no money for jobs, living wages, for housing, for quality health care for all, for an excellent education system for all or for the many services that people depend on in a modern society. There are in fact more than enough resources and creativity in Chicago and the nation. Not only that—we are the ones who create the wealth and we have every right to use society’s resources and money to solve our problems and to create a city and a country in which we are truly united and equal.
other words, it doesn’t have to be like this. Chicago can be run in the interests of the vast majority. Together we can take the city to a new level of peace and harmony. But in order to change things we’ll need to go beyond the normal channels, we’ll need to upset the status quo. Mass action and organization is our main source of power in the struggle for justice.
It’s time to build an independent, fighting movement of the people, across the country, that can make history by eliminating poverty, violence, racism and inequality—once and for all. The stranglehold the fat cats and their two parties have over society must come to an end. The people must and will claim City Hall for their own and run the city in our interests.
We believe it is very possible for Socialists to win seats in the Chicago City Council and we are going to do everything we can to win the election for alderman in the 49th Ward. But much more than winning a political office, we are running to win the battle of ideas against, and help get rid of, the corporate dictatorship over the United States. We are running to popularize and struggle for Socialism. Socialism, an economic and political system of cooperation, is superior to and a thousand times more democratic and economically powerful than the plutocracy we live under.
We are in solidarity with and hope that there will be many socialists, revolutionaries and progressives who enter into the 2015 election in Chicago. The Chicago Teachers Union is planning a major push in the 2015 elections. We support their struggle to stop the war on teachers, students and public schools.
Get involved with the campaign. Share this announcement widely. Stay tuned for more information very soon. 773-920-7590.
A Job is a Right!
$15 Minimum Wage Now!
Close Prisons, Not Public Schools!
John Beacham is a community college teacher, a union member, a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation and an anti-war/social justice activist. He was the Midwest coordinator of the PSL campaigns for president in 2008 and 2012. In 2008, Beacham ran for State Representative in Illinois.
