Following Chicago politics and issues

Danny Solis, once chair of the powerful Zoning Committee, wore a wire for the Feds in his meetings with Ald. Ed Burke, indicted yet still sitting in the City Council. Cartoon courtesy Eric J. Garcia, who publishes one every week.

The mainstream Chicago media and the alternative media.

My advice is to follow select alternative media and compare the corporate media — the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times, of course, and also Crain’s Chicago Business.

The Tribune has been bought by the raptor hedge fund Alden Capital, notorious for strip mining newspapers and selling off their assets. The Trib had also suffered from the huge newsroom layoffs besetting legacy news media, but it is still an invaluable source with excellent local reporting. The reporting is high quality and independent from the sanctimonious and usually right-wing editorial page, the voice of the Chicago FIRE (not the soccer team or the TV show, but Finance-Insurance-Real Estate. If Chicago has a deep state, they’re it.) 

The Sun-Times was bought by a group of investors including the Chicago Federation of Labor and prominent union locals. Investors also include players in the financial sector, a prominent developer, and people who had ties to the Emanuel and Daley administrations. Its reporters are a good source on progressive issues, but its editorial pages often reflect its big business more than its labor ownership stake. It has far more limited reporting resources than the conservative, Republican-owned Tribune. WBEZ, Chicago’s public radio station, has good local news coverage. 

The Chicago Reader. Decades of cutting edge political reporting, now an on-line shell of its former self but still with some good reading. Follow Ben Joravsky and Maya Dukmasova on Chicago politics, Deanna Isaacs on the culture beat. Joravsky’s reporting archives and his podcast are essential for understanding Chicago politics and the corruption and hypocrisy of its politicians and business class. 

Joravsky’s podcast collaboration between the Reader and the Chicago Sun-Times is uploaded Tuesday – Friday. These two-hour discussions with prominent local political activists, politicians and journalists are a sometimes fascinating and entertaining deep-dive into Chicago politics. Sometimes not, but he has to fill two hours four times/week. Who has two hours to listen? Skip ahead to the subjects that interest you or listen to the shorter bonus episodes. Here Chicago politics is demystified.

The Chicago Reporter  does investigative reporting on issues of race and poverty. Ownership fired key journalists like Curtis Black and suspended publication for a while, but is back on the web with new staff. Black’s columns with their incisive and nuanced explorations of Chicago politics and issues are still on the website, invaluable as backgrounders. 

Chicago Daily Line  Political reporting for a professional readership, also interesting for non-professionals. They have an expensive subscription service, but if you explore their site, you’ll find some “unlocked” news articles, a free podcast, and some free features in their “resources” section. You can sign up for a free newsletter here.

Politico also has Shia Kapos’ “Illinois Playbook,” a daily email newsletter on Illinois politics, also with article links. 

City Bureau is a non-profit covering Chicago and training journalists. You can subscribe to their newsletters or read articles online. 

Also with pay walls: neighborhood news and city news at Block Club Chicago.

The Invisible Institute. Jamie Kalven’s journalism project focuses on police abuse and accountability.

Capitol Fax. Rich Miller, formerly a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, publishes a blog (free) and subscription-only newsletter read by insiders, mostly state political news, occasionally some city.

The South Side Weekly. Arts and politics from Chicago’s South Side with a focus on racism and progressive politics.

Broadcast, podcasts

WTTW News.  The daily news program of Chicago’s public TV station, WTTW. The PBS News Hour, national reporting and interviews; Chicago Tonight, local news reporting; with local and national news on its website. Like NPR, often boring and cautious, and often informative.

WBEZ 91.5. The local NPR affiliate has Chicago news.

The Ben Joravsky Show, mentioned above.

Chicago Public Schools: Chicago’s public school system, like public schools in every major city, is kept in perpetual crisis and is central to city politics, with the activist Chicago Teachers Union central to progressive challenges to city officials.

The Chicago Tribune editorial page has an anti-union, pro-charter and anti-tax bias, but the news reporting on the schools makes the Trib indispensable.

Chalkbeat. Non-profit news organization with excellent coverage of Chicago schools.

Background: Rick Perlstein, “The Chicago School. How Chicago elites imported charters, closed neighborhood schools, and snuffed out creativity.” Jacobin, April 20, 2016.

Chicago Public School stats. This is the CPS website, with useful data. But take the “student-teacher” ratio statistics with a grain of salt … or just ask a teacher or parent in a neighborhood school.

Background

Three excellent introductions for understanding racial justice in Chicago from the Great Cities Institute at UIC. The first includes short commentaries by Barbara Ransby and Eve Ewing, among others.

“Between the Great Migration and the Growing Exodus: The State of Black Chicago.”  Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy, Great Cities Institute.

“The Latino Neighborhoods Report: Issues and Prospects for Chicago.”  José Miguel Acosta-Córdova, Great Cities Institute, October 11, 2017, 172. 
 
Gangs and Violence. “The Fracturing of Gangs and Violence in Chicago: A Research-Based Reorientation of Violence Prevention and Intervention Policy.”  This report from the Great Cities Institute is an invaluable introduction to understanding race and violence in Chicago. It demythologizes mainstream media reporting, which relies too heavily on law enforcement sources and framing.

City Council Voting Records. Dick Simpson et al. regularly publish reports on the Chicago City Council, with percentages showing  how often aldermen vote with the mayor. If a former alderman happens to be running for city treasurer and says he was always so progressive, you can look back and find out what a stooge he was when he was in the city council. This could be the publication most loathed by Chicago’s political establishment — too helpful in defining its members. The latest report: “Emanuel and Lightfoot City Councils: Chicago City Council Report #12 June 12, 2019 – May 18, 2021.” 

CTBA: Center for Tax and Budget Accountability is a truly enlightening source for understanding the city’s revenues and spending. You can’t understand which politicians are your friends and which ones your enemies without understand these issues, and the political class prefers you remain intimidated by any articles on the economy. But here you’ll find clear introductions as well as more technical articles (but still clearly written and understandable) that demystify the city budget, the pension crisis, school funding, affordable housing programs, graduated income tax, more. You can’t understand these issues from reading the Tribune —for example, “Chicago’s pension crisis isn’t really about pensions”  but about debt. Meanwhile, think about which politicians believe the solution is more borrowing — in other words, which candidates are FOB (Friends of the Banks)?

Corruption. Dick Simpson on Chicago and Illinois politics: “Chicago continues to be the most corrupt city in the country and Illinois continues to be the third most corrupt state.” This is the first sentence in “Continuing Corruption in Illinois: Anti-Corruption Report No. 10,” by Dick Simpson, Tom Gradel, Marco Rosaire, Rossi Katherine Taylor. Dick Simpson, UIC government professor who was once a independent alderman, provides some of the best source material for Chicago and Illinois politics. He also tallies and analyzes “City Council Voting Records,” showing when council members vote with the mayor or independently.  He also recently published a memoir, “The Good Fight: Life Lessons from a Chicago Progressive,” which narrates a life at the center of Chicago politics from his first aldermanic run in the ’70s, Harold Washington’s mayoral campaign, up through the rise of Barack Obama.

Thomas J. Gradel and Dick Simpson, Corrupt Illinois: Patronage, Cronyism, and Criminality. The authors estimate a yearly “corruption” tax Illinoisans pay at $500,000,000. The book documents corruption in Chicago and Illinois —  aldermen, legislature, Congress, courts, police, mob. Like history, “just one damn thing after another.”

Kari Lydersen, Mayor 1%: Rahm Emanuel and the Rise of Chicago’s 99%.  A well-written, well-documented and detailed narrative of Rahm Emanuel’s background and record as Congressman, Obama’s Chief-of-Staff, and, mostly, mayor of Chicago; the neoliberal assault on Chicago communities; and the progressive forces organizing in response. Mayor 1% was written before the police murder of Laquan McDonald and Rahm’s decline and fall. Some of Lydersen’s more recent articles on Chicago politics are here in In These Times.

Mayor Rahm Devours Chicago. Drawing by Jordan Whitney Martin, (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). F Newsmagazine.

Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor, American Pharoah: Mayor Richard J. Daley — His Battle for Chicago and the Nation. A detailed narrative of Chicago history during the first Mayor Daley’s career, his rise out of the street gang that assaulted black neighborhoods in the Chicago race riot to the consolidation of machine power and one-party rule. Fascinating account of how almost every major development project was planned to maintain segregation and of the way the political process worked to perpetuate white elite power while modernizing Chicago.

John Hagedorn, The In$ane Chicago Way: The Daring Plan by Chicago Gangs to Create a Spanish Mafia. A gripping street-level account of street gangs, the Outfit, police corruption, and Chicago politics, throwing light on some of the big Chicago questions — why “Chicago ain’t ready for reform,” why violence and corruption go unchecked, gangs in social movements and machine politics, and the different trajectories of black and Latin gangs (and politics).  Hagedorn’s Gangs and the Media website — though not updated for years — is an excellent source on Chicago’s history of race, violence, gangs, police torture and corruption, and gentrification.  His The In$ane Chicago Way is not only a story of Latin gangs in the 1990s — it is also a history of Chicago machine politics, the Outfit (mafia), police corruption and racial violence. Hagedorn’s World of Gangs has a jaw-dropping chapter in which he looks at race and class in Chicago through a comparison of the Conservative Vice Lords and Mayor Daley’s old gang, The Hamburgs. Mike Davis, in his foreword, wrote: “A World of Gangs, however, transcends any academic genre: this is a book, quite frankly, that everyone needs to read and discuss.” And the great sociologist Manuel Castells wrote: “It is an indispensable work to understand the world we live in and essential reading for students of cities and communities.”  

Flint Taylor’s “The Torture Machine: Race and Police Violence in Chicago” is a “riveting account” (Juan Gonzalez) of decades of police torture and official coverup. Indispensable history for understanding Chicago and the criminal justice system.

Gary Rivlin, Fire on the Prairie: Chicago’s Harold Washington and the Politics of Race. You can’t understand Chicago politics today without understanding the black-Latino-white liberal challenge to the Chicago machine led by Mayor Harold Washington, Chicago’s only social justice mayor — how his movement almost “reformed” Chicago, and then why it failed.

For some articles on Chicago politics since Mayor Lightfoot’s election, you can check out a few pieces on my blog. Some of it I think is useful background, though my view of Lightfoot is far less sanguine now that she has shown she will block any serious police reform and carry on an endless power struggle against the Chicago Teachers Union instead of attending to the dysfunctional Chicago Public School bureaucracy.

“What Chicago tells us about the modern political machine and political reform”

“Lightfoot’s mandate — and its problems”

“Understanding the Chicago school strike … and why it’s different”

“A progressive’s guide to the Chicago/Cook County primary”

“Will Mayor Lightfoot keep her promises? Taxes and the progressive agenda”

 

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