And in may year 1 , chicago mayor rahm emanuel represents the wealthy and powerful and has demonstrated an ability to empathize in the workingclass and poor cash. Next a Panel Discussion about the book. Its about an hour and a half. With [applause] thanks so much to haymarket for inviting me to do this project. Theyve been so wonderful and to the brewery for being here and the panelists for joining me and everyone for coming. Its exciting to see this much interest and this kind of resistance bubbling up. So i will redoubled from the book from the introduction and then i will introduce the panel and we will talk and then people have some time for questions and comments. So, this is the introduction starting march 4th, 2012 about little over a year after rahm emanuel was elected the mayor. March 4th, 2012, chicagos 175th birthday. And the city celebrated with a public party at the chicago history museum. The yvette promised actors portraying famous chicagoans including Jean Ann Adams an advocate for immigrant children and factory workers. Little did the organizers know that the show would be stolen by a woman some viewed as a modernday jane addams more eccentric and less renowned and accomplished but just as willing to raise her voice and speak up for the formidable. As the chicago childrens choir at dressed he had reason to smile. Months earlier he had been inaugurated as the nations third most popular city taking their range from the lesson very delete the legendary mayor and while his term hadnt been a cakewalk so far things seemed to be going well. The inherited a 700 milliondollar budget deficit and attacked it with an aggressive round of costcutting and layoffs. The union has resisted but ultimately he was able to strike deals and come out on top. Meanwhile he was moving forward with these plans to institute a longer school day the promise that gained popular attention nationwide. He was already assuming the mantle was the grain mayor. In february he announced the citys power plants would close and miles of bike lanes were in the work. He had even to important gatherings for chicago. The nato summit to be held concurrently in may 2012. The first time that both would be held in the u. S. City. There had been protests Like Community groups and unions related to the summit to the School Closings and other issues. But he had shown a knack for avoiding and ignoring them and so far he didnt seem to have suffered too much political fallout. As he watched the singer is the birthday party, he didnt seem to notice a crinkle paper in the crowd. Is that history will judge the of 1 emanuel. He got in early on in the tenure and as occupy wall street had left the nation it was a natural fit for the finance collection and highly lucrative career as an investment banker. A staffer for the museum did notice the banner and told the man holding it to put it away. He complied lowering it into the crowd. The song ended and he began shaking hands with another multi tiered birthday cake. A voice cut through the chatter causing their heads to turn as it was raised again. Im sorry i wish i could do the of place which is burned into so many peoples memories but im sorry i am not going to try. Please dont close our clinics we are going to die. There is no where else to go. Please come a woman with hair peeking out of her scarf and dark circles under her eyes that gave her a formidable the expression. It was a chicago woman who struggled all her life with Mental Illness but still managed to become a of the advocate for herself and others where she lived and for other suffering from disabilities and Mental Illness. For the past 15 years she had been a regular at the Mental Health clinic in the Beverly Morgan park neighborhood. Irish and africanamerican working in the middle class area on the citys southwest side. It was one of the six clinics that he planned to close as the cuts in his inaugural budget. He said it made perfect economic sense and would save 3 million the patient could move to the remaning clinics. But they pleaded that he didnt understand the role of these specific clinics and their lives and the difficulty they would have traveling to other locations. His eyes were fixed on the may year as she walked quickly towards him calling out in that ragged voice with her intense focus. All of the allies were on her except those of the mayor who shook a few more hands and then pivoted quickly and disappeared through the door ignoring her the entire time. She cried out again as he dashed out. Please, stay here. The abruptness, the lack of closing my cities and the crowd around awkwardly gave the impression that they even had been cut much shorter than planned. They fell activist and stepped on the stage and lifted the banner. She centered herself in front of them and turned to face the remaining crowd. People are dying. They arent going to have anywhere to go. And manuels critics and admirers describe him as a quintessential creature of washington and wall street, a brilliant strategist and fundraiser who knows the right way to leverage his personality to get wealthy donors to open their wallets and help him to win races. He became a Prominent Fund raiser for powerful politicians in his 20s and made 18 million in Investment Banking in just two years. He played a central role in to white house is an orchestrated a dramatic takeover of the house of representatives during his years in congress. He clearly knows how politics work. But being the mayor is different or should be. In Washington People are often tabbed as political allies were adversaries fair game for manipulation or intimidation. In congress, he represented his constituents that the daily grind had a lot more to do with the machinations and maneuvers. Running the city that you are directly effected to serve people and listen to them is supposed to be a different story. But he was treating chicago as if it were washington and perhaps that is why even in his brief tenure as mayor he seemed to find it so easy to ignore the parents, teachers, students, patients and others who carried out multiple protests outside of his fifth floor office in city hall. The citizens frequently noted that he hadnt been sympathetic toward space and his approach. But the least he would meet with people and acknowledge them and make efforts to listen to their proposals and act on their concerns. He cant seem to find the time for many members of the public even as he says he wants their input on issues like School Closings. Parents, grandparents and students at the Community Organization camped out at the city hall for nearly four days to deliver a plan that Community Members drafted in conjunction with experts to protect their local schools from closing and creating a network of Educational Resources and the surrounding income neighborhoods. The response was to ignore us said the organizer. We had our problems with mayor daley that he surrounded himself with people and he himself was a neighborhood person. This man, rahm emanuel surrounded himself with corporate people. The administration is doing the bidding of the corporations and robbing us of the things our parents fought for. So that is to set up the battle line a little bit. So now i want to introduce the panelists who have been kind of at the forefront even before mayor emmanuel but the struggles that have taken center stage since he took office. Brandon johnson is a teacher in organizer and Community Activist with the chicago Teachers Union. [cheering] [applause] and amisha patel as with the grassroots collaborative and take back chicago movement. [applause] and ben joravsky is with the chicago reader. [applause] we will hear first from you. Thank you for your intellect and bravery around this topic. Let me say because the mayor of chicago is always looking for opportunities to run and when shelia introduced the but she said the mayor 1 and you all applauded. So if you are in the commercial cheering for him just be careful the next time you applaud when it is introduced. Let me also say it is an honor to be a Public Schoolteacher. [applause] and a death threat against Public Education is not a conspiracy, it is real. The attack on Public Education we can find in the attack on Public Education at the very inception of this country. I would be remiss if i did not at least acknowledge all of my brothers and sisters in the Teachers Union who are here tonight so think you brothers and sisters. I appreciate you. [applause] this site for Public Education is collective but lets put some things into context. The mayor who represents all that is bad when it comes to Public Education and privatization as a whole. If we think about the history of this country were educating black people and poor people was a legal you fast forward through the civil war and was somewhat permitted but they began to burn down schools that attempted to educate black people and poor people and now you fast forward and they are closing schools. 50 schools here in chicago when he actively pushed for that policy School Closings in philadelphia, kansas city lost half of its Public Schools. The attack on Public Education is real and its being carried out by both democrats and republicans. This is a bipartisan decision to roll back everything we built in this country. So when we think about what has happened here in chicago to first i think it is interesting that before rahm emanuel became the mayor of chicago and there was some flirting of him running, the president of the United States said he thought rahm emanuel would make a great mayor but little did we know that he was only speaking for the 1 . And i think that we have to be extremely critical of both political entities that are dead set on destroying Public Education. When you look at the around this country and you can see republican governors, democratic mayors that are all committed to the interest of private corporations that want to shape education in their image lets also be very clear that these are the same corporate Interest Groups that have found their foothold here in chicago that are also looking to turn a profit off of Public Education. Here in chicago the budget for Public Schools in 6 billion. Its a lot of money that the corporate Interest Group want to make sure they have their hands on and so we have to be very clear just like we have introduced here in chicago with a fight could look like around the country that the group that says that they are in favor of our children and they want to provide choice and opportunity, they are not telling the truth, they are being extremely disingenuous and today through the leadership we are going to expose that. [applause] if we could just try to rush through the strike that i think its quite unfair because it was the most exciting time that i have ever had as a teacher. [applause] foregoing our paychecks to ensure that children in chicago receive a quality of education is something not only teachers can be proud of that parents can be proud of because it was one of the most important and popular strikes that we have ever seen in our country and we can think from emanuel for that. [applause] one of the things we were very clear about is that we were not simply fighting to fend off those that wish to destroy Public Schools. We had a plan that works. In one of the things that we made very clear during the strike you couldnt separate Public Education from the conversation of poverty because poverty in this country actually matters so what we began to do is do a diagnostic test if you will on the Public Schools here in chicago and we discovered over 160 schools in chicago didnt have public libraries. Let that sink in for the rest of the world that children were going to school every single day without access to a library or a librarian, where the class sizes were out of control. 35 to 40 kids in the classroom or even worse, some students didnt even have a regular assigned teacher to their classrooms. No proper ventilation, no airconditioning, no books. This is a city that launched the first black president but we cant get books for students . There is something terribly wrong with that country that will prided itself as this great inclusive situation that will deny poor people the opportunity to learn. So as we began to expos the fact that the mayor was pushing long verdes even though he wasnt going to fund that, he began to push for longer days even though there was no evidence that it was going to result in better learning outcomes. Not only did we expose the fact that we didnt have libraries, no books, no proper ventilation, no airconditioning, class sizes were out of control for most of our students didnt have art and music we are talking about a very basic fundamentals for children to be able to learn and flourish, he was dead set on moving the policies that didnt deal with the big issue for poverty. So when they made the conscious decision to forgo our paychecks to ensure that at least the conversation is raised those are days that we will never forget. But where are we now . Even after the strike and there were some positive links we took away from that strike we are also very clear that after the strike the mayor of chicago was determined to destroy the to ctu so what did he do . He moved an agenda to not only close out the schools but close the largest number of schools in the nations history. So thousands of parents organized and marched for days and connected with community leaders, connected with their pastors, connected with other School Leaders to say with a resounding police we do not want our schools closed because Research Tells Us that closing schools does more to harm our students than actually help them. After thousands of parents came from all over the city to say we dont want schools closed, he stood at a press conference and said this is what parents want. His neglected mess has caused tremendous turmoil in this city. Think about what the first day of school will looked like in chicago. We are talking 50 years from the march on washington and our children are escorted to school with police officers, helicopters, firefighters. It looked like something straight out of alabama. This is the city of chicago in america and poor children are being forced to walk through territories that are not only not safe, but once they got to the schools of things the mayor promised, he didnt deliver and then he took it one step further for the School Budgets had been drastically read joost or in some cases mine, ten, 15 teachers lost their jobs because of his policy to defund the Public Education and one of the other elephants in the room and then i will close with this is that you cannot have a conversation about Public Education without having a conversation about race. [applause] i am a proud one. But our Neighborhood Schools are closed. No one asked me whether or not if my school should be closed. And so now my sons and the kids he is growing up with do not have access to a public Neighborhood School not only did the School Closings overwhelmingly affect black children but it also affected black teachers. Over half of those that lost their job where black and we had seen this gradual the decline of was actually implemented or started 20 years ago when the mayor of chicago took complete control of the Public School system and then he had this ingenious idea to put ploch in charge of the publicSchool System and if you look at his record, he was actually the grandfather of the privatization and corporate takeover. So he has gone to chicago where the schools have been destroyed. Philadelphia schools have been destroyed. Do you get the point . Finally in connecticut they said we know what you are about and they sent them packing back to illinois. We have to figure out somewhere for them to vero. But the move of the mayor should continue to privatize the schools. At the same time calling for more charters is not only going to exacerbate the decline of the teachers but it continues to stratify the School System where you have intensely poor black children in a concentrated school with very little resources and of the very people that the children tend to look towards for some sort of guidance and hope that group is being denied. So my last point is that as chicago with the first black president sitting in the white house, the policies that are being moved by arne duncan r. Destructive. W. E. B. Du bois said it this way that Public Education as the expense of the state in the south in particular has an idea. We cannot allow the idea that move this country forward be destroyed while the first black president sits in the white house. Thank you. [applause] im going to talk about some of the things brandon touched on and also maybe a few things that bin will touch on. My name is amisha patel with grassroots collaborative and we are a coalition made up of 12 organizations that work in the city and across the state on economic and racial justice. Rahm emanuel like many big city mayors