Shocking Rahm's Shock Doctrine

http://www.thenation.com/blog/173592/shocking-rahms-shock-doctrine#



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One thousand Chicago Public School teachers and their supporters, including this correspondent, packed Daley Plaza in forty-degree temperatures on Wednesday for a rally protesting the city’s announced plans to close 54 kindergarten-through-eighth-grade schools next year. One-tenth of the protesters were detained and ticketed (though police originally said they had been “arrested”) at a sit-in in front of school board headquarters a few blocks to the south. What they are protesting is genuine shock-doctrine stuff—an announcement utterly rewiring a major urban institution via public rationales swaddled in utter bad faith, handed down in a blinding flash, absent any reasonable due process. Though Mayor Emanuel is learning that the forces of grassroots democracy can shock back too. And boy, does he have it coming.

The story went down like this. Immediately following Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s defeat in the historic Chicago Teachers Union strike this past fall, the district, claiming massive underutilization of school facilities in light of an announced $1 billion budget deficit, began talking about closing perhaps 129 schools. The district CEO Jean-Claude Brizard—sacked soon after as a “distraction” to “school reform”—had once said he could only imagine closing perhaps three schools, given the paucity of schools performing better than the ones they would have shut down. Knowledgeable observers thought perhaps a dozen or two would end up getting the axe.
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