Thursday, March 5, 2015

More reasons NOT to vote for Rahm Emanuel from In These Times article ...

I have already posted why I'm not voting for Rahm in my previous post, "Why I'm NOT voting for Rahm Emanuel and Why I AM Voting for Jesus Garcia)." This article gives even more reasons to not vote for Rahm and to vote for Jesus Garcia.
Rahm has had four years to show us what he has to offer. Now we now have a chance to tell him we're not interested. Here's an excerpt from this article:
The Chicago Tribune reported that of Emanuel’s top 106 contributors, 60 of them received favors from the city. Another in-depth investigation discovered that City Hall had lied repeatedly about a signature initiative of the Emanuel years, automated cameras that issue tickets for the running of red lights. The administration insisted the cameras led to a 47 percent decline in “T-bone” crashes, when the true number was 15 percent—and they also caused a corresponding 22 percent increase in rear-end collisions. That reinforced suspicions that the cameras weren’t installed for the safety of “the children,” as Emanuel sanctimoniously insists, but are a revenue grab, a regressive tax that falls disproportionately on the poor.
The International Business Times discovered that Emanuel was evading his own, much-trumpeted executive order banning campaign contributions from city contractors by shoveling $38 million in city resources to his donors via “direct voucher payments,” a sketchy loophole that lets businesses get city money without bids or contracts—without, in fact, any way of documenting what the money is used for.
And a joint investigation between public radio station WBEZ and the magazine Catalyst Chicago demonstrated that the Chicago Public Schools CEO Emanuel hired, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, was able to juke the statistics on high school graduation rates—which supposedly went from 70 to 85 percent over the last decade—by contracting with for-profit online education companies that demanded very little work from students, while still allowing them to receive diplomas from the last school they attended.