Lori Lightfoot: Democrat mayor lording over Chicago's dying Black youth

WASHINGTON: On Outnumbered, with Washington Times Editor Charlie Hurt on the couch, Democrat Marie Harf could not answer a simple question posed by the moderator, Harris Faulkner. On the panel discussing the violence in America’s cities, Harf complains that President Trump unfairly references the unrest being in “Democrat-run cities.” Cities like Chicago where Democrat Mayor Lori Lightfoot refuses to work with President Trump. As does Mayor Wheeler in Portland and de Blasio in New York.

Their hate for the President, and desire to regain the White House, makes the destruction of their cities, and the killing of their youth, acceptable. The ends justify the means if that ends results in Democrat Socialist control over America. (Chicago shooting near funeral home is city’s latest eruption of violence)

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George Soros’ plan to create an Empire and destroy America from within

Faulkner’s reply (paraphrased) was a question: Can you name one Republican-run city that is having riots like Portland or Chicago? And Harff’s Democrat Doublespeak begins. Because she can’t. Democrats have run America’s big cities for decades. And they have done a very bad job. And, Ms. Harf, a message to you and your fellow Democrats, it is not President Trump’s fault.

The city Mayors, past and present, are responsible for their cities. Period.

Portland’s Democrat Mayor Ted Wheeler’s journey into the center of the riots started the segment on Outnumbered. Video shows the instigators chanting “Quit your job,” verbally assaulting the mayor, spitting on him, throwing projectiles at him and threatening him, despite his being surrounded by his armed security.

New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio allows criminals, once arrested, to return to the street to re-offend. To the point of murder. Violent weekend: 10 dead in 30 shootings in New York City on Sunday alone reports:

It was a weekend plagued by gun violence across New York City as the surge in shootings continues, with 11 people killed in two days and 30 shootings with 10 homicides on Sunday alone.

Police say 48 people were victimized in those 30 shootings, including a terrifying caught-on-camera murder in which a man walking with his 6-year-old daughter was gunned down on the street in broad daylight.



In Chicago, Democrat Mayor Lori Lightfoot accepts Federal help to quell the violence in Chicago but does so with caveats. And an Anti-Trump sentiment. She couches her “words” to demean the president, going so far as to blame the president for Chicago’s decades of unrest and violence in minority neighborhoods.

Organized riots the next step in Democrat’s coup against America

Note that I write this as a native of the city who saw, in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, the highrise projects of Cabrini Greens move from a primarily Black neighborhood to a violent project that “white” people avoided. I can remember driving through the Greens in the late 70’s without taking any more precautions than I did driving through any other Chicago neighborhood.

Lightfoot just the last in Chicago’s decades-long history of failing Mayors

Lightfoot is the latest in a long list of Chicago Democrat leaders, including Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who has disenfranchised the Black communities in Chicago. Following the death of Mayor Richard Daily in 1976, the Green fully deteriorated and life became more difficult for Chicago’s minority poor.

The Chicago mayors have all been Democrats since William Hale Thompson (May 14, 1869 – March 19, 1944), the last Republican mayor of the Windy City.

From the Chicago Public Library roster of mayors:

Not one of these Mayors, white or black, has fulfilled the promise to be found in minority communities. Instead, they have thrown out generations of people relegating them to a form of modern-day slavery where they have been kept in neighborhoods, without adequate housing, living in food deserts. Without opportunity. Pandered to every two or four years for their votes.

These liberal enclaves becoming places where jobs are few and public transportation unreliable. In neighborhoods where gang on gang violence threatens children’s lives when just walking to school.

Violence impacting, and killing, Chicago’s youngest citizens

Even liberal CNN notes the deaths of children to violence over the 4th of July weekend. (At least 6 children were killed by gun violence across the nation this holiday weekend) Those children include Secoriea Turner, 8, Atlanta, Royta De’Marco Giles, 8, Hoover, Alabama, Davon McNeal, 11, Washington DC, Natalia Wallace, 7, Chicago, and Jace Young, 6, San Franciso.

Each of these children filled with joy, hope, and promises of a bright future. Cut down by liberal policies in Democrat-run cities. New York, Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, Washington DC, Chicago, and San Francisco.

Democrat cities in Democrat states where children are expendable over liberal Democrat policy.

Before guns, Chicago Teachers Unions have been destroying minority children

Schools where children are segregated by zip code and denied school choice options by a powerful Chicago Teachers Union. Where neighborhood schools have been closed, and sold, causing young children to take life in hand just to walk through rival gangs to attend elementary school. Behind sale of closed schools, a legacy of segregation – The Chicago Reporter

Also from The Chicago Reporter, The Chicago teachers’ strike isn’t just about kids – it’s about union power too

“Teachers’ unions often say they go on strike to improve conditions for students. A closer look at recent walkouts suggests they are also fighting for something else: membership.

Many of the demands the unions are making almost certainly would benefit students. But beneath the rallying cries, these unions are facing a new reality that suggests they are also fighting for something else.

In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in Janus v. AFSCME that workers are free to choose whether to join a union. Since then, we’d argue, teacher strikes have been as much a fight for the soul of the union as they are for the soul of public education. What the teachers’ unions want and need is membership.”

The Teachers Union has also come out against the concept of Charter Schools, an option for Chicago’s minority children whose path beyond poverty starts with education.

Parent’s fall options as public school unions hold America hostage

During a CTU strike in Chicago, an opinion by Jonathan Butcher (Heritage Foundation) ran in the Chicago Sun-Times. In Tired of the teachers strike? Remember that charter schools are an option, Butcher writes:

More than 120 charter schools operate in Chicago, and these schools enroll more minority students and children from low-income families. According to University of Chicago researchers, more Chicago charter school students enroll in college and complete at least four semesters than district school students. A RAND study found that Chicago charter students were more likely to finish high school and also found higher rates of college enrollment compared to district students.

Yet, charter schools have historically not been supported by Democrat leadership for the simple reason that the Teacher’s Unions demand a status quo that keeps teachers as members of the union, providing a steady stream of financial support to the leadership.

And that in reality, decades of neglect by Democrat-run cities have destroyed generations of minority children.

Rebutting Butcher, The Progressive article CTU Strike: Are Charter Schools the Solution, Rather than the Problem, in Chicago? – One party is selfish; the other is only interested in educating kids. Can you guess which is which? places the blame for Chicago’s failing schools on Charter Schools. The solution is to reduce choices for education, not increase them.

In 2018, Chicago public radio station WBEZ produced a documentary on the school shuttering, noting that the city’s residents have been subjected to a “generation of school closures.” In recent memory, WBEZ reporters found, “city leaders have either closed or radically shaken up some 200 public schools — nearly a third of the entire district,” under the guise of leveling the educational playing field.

The result has been a systematic dismantling of neighborhood schools, primarily those attended by children of color. This was all done with the assumption that the schools and the teachers and students within them are the source of failure and inequality, and not society at large.

If children are not receiving an education in a school, the writer seems to believe that society is at fault for the disparity of education for Children. Not inadequate housing, food deserts, violence, unreliable transportation, violence or teachers more concerned about union dues and test preparedness versus education to prepare our youth for tomorrow.

A tomorrow far too many may never see.

Relegating the poor to public housing and a lack of opportunity

In the article Cabrini-Green and a horror film that captured the fears of public housing,

Decades before writer-director Bernard Rose’s horror flick (Candyman) arrived in theaters, public housing had come to represent the unruliness and otherness of U.S. cities. And Cabrini-Green stood as the symbol of every troubled housing project — a bogeyman that conjured fears of violence, poverty and racial antagonism.

Cabrini-Green was conceived as a model of civic redevelopment, and as a source for a more democratic form of urban living. It was built in stages on Chicago’s Near North Side beginning in the 1940s. Ultimately it contained 3,600 public housing units and more than 15,000 people.

The Chicago Housing Authority began dismantling the violence-plagued housing project in 2010.

In The Towers Came Down, and With Them the Promise of Public Housing we meet Annie Jeffery Ricks and her children. The family was homeless following a fire that destroyed their home and possessions. She found harbor in Chicago’s infamous Cabrini Greens where she and her children eventually thrived, again.

At 33, she’d been providing since she was a teenager. Her children were well fed and neatly dressed, their hair combed and cut and braided. The girls as well as the boys played basketball, and Ricks volunteered in their classrooms and attended their games. She had never before considered public housing and knew nothing of Cabrini-Green’s reputation — that it had entered the pantheon of proper names of the scariest places in urban America. But she had put in an application and couldn’t wait any longer. She told Cornelius they were going to get their apartment that day and walk the seven miles to Cabrini-Green in the snow.

Ricks was shown a 15-story plain box of a high-rise, a giant filing cabinet with a facade the color of cigarette-stained teeth. The elevators were out of order, the stairwells dark. Built in stages beginning in the 1940s on Chicago’s Near North Side, Cabrini-Green consisted of barracks-style rowhouses and 23 towers. When Ricks arrived, more than a third of the 3,600 units were vacant. The Chicago Housing Authority said it couldn’t afford to do the repairs to ready them for occupancy, and not just at Cabrini. The C.H.A. had a stock of 42,000 apartments, but the number in use had fallen to fewer than 33,000.

The vacant fifth-floor apartment Ricks entered looked like a crypt. Plywood covered the windows. The kitchen cabinets dangled or were missing altogether. Ricks surveyed the surroundings, counting four bedrooms. There was a full bathroom on one side of the unit and a half bath on the other. The front room was large enough for a dining table and a sofa, and it was connected to the kitchen, which (she checked) had a working stove and refrigerator. The ceilings were high, the walls made of seemingly indestructible cinder block. Ricks had freckles that wandered the bridge of her nose and reached her high cheekbones, which now sharpened to points as she smiled. What she saw looked like a home.

The article continues:

In 1999, Mayor Richard M. Daley said that breaking up the severe concentrations of poverty of high-rise public housing would finally imbue long-neglected neighborhoods with vitality; the mostly black residents who lived there in social and economic isolation would be able to reap the rewards of the resurgent city. “I want to rebuild their souls,” Daley declared. But Ricks believed her soul was doing all right on its own. She refused to go, in 2010, even as every neighbor remaining in her building took whatever replacement housing was offered them. She outlasted them all. “I’m the last woman standing,” Ricks liked to declare.

Ricks held firm to a belief that if she followed the rules, if she kept up her part in an agreement, then she was entitled to all that was promised her. Her three youngest children — Reggie, Rose and Raqkown — were still on her lease, along with two of her nearly 40 grandchildren. She wasn’t in her apartment illegally, she contended. She paid her rent on time. No one caught her with drugs or guns. So how could the C.H.A. just assign her a new unit? But the city took her to court, and a federal judge gave her 10 days to vacate the building. That was that. “I had to go,” she conceded. “Either that or be homeless again.”

The Greens were eventually shut down because of money. The Democrat-run city saw revenue that could be realized from the prime real estate located just miles from Chicago’s ritzy downtown and Gold Coast neighborhoods. The iconic towers housing the poorest of Chicago were torn down and the residents “dispersed” into other neighborhoods, including sending gang members from the Greens into rival territories. Which we can presume has led to much of the gang violence we are seeing in Chicago today.

#SayHerName: Black women on the systemic racism destroying America

Finding solutions on a local level takes federal help

Change in Chicago and other Democrat-run cities is going to require a severe change in the paradigm of liberal policies. It has to begin with putting the citizen first, the political power second. Something Democrats are unable to do (Where change never came: Obama’s hometown | CNN

Tears rolled down her face as Ursula Phoenix stood in Grant Park witnessing Barack Obama, a man from the South Side of Chicago, become the first black President of the United States in 2008.

She thought about her grandfather, who was once stopped from voting at gunpoint. And her mother, who left Alabama for Chicago, looking for a slice of equality. She thought about her 6-year-old daughter growing up in the era of the first African-American president.

“Tonight because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment change has come to America,” she heard Obama declare during his victory speech.

But things didn’t get better for perhaps the people who needed it most.

That’s because Obama’s national message of hope had an unfortunate exception: his hometown.

Also from the above article:

When President Obama spoke of hope and change in 2008, Ja’Mal Green, a community organizer, believed it would translate to safety on his block.

But that’s not the reality he sees as he walks the South Side streets today. He points to last year’s spike in violence: 762 were killed in 2016, more than New York and Los Angeles combined.

Green says he wishes President Obama would have used his position to bring more attention to the issues impacting black communities, like poverty, the underfunding of schools and the lack of economic investment in rough neighborhoods.

“We are not going to be saying thank you for the eight years of work that he didn’t do in the black communities,” Green says of Obama’s return to Chicago.

During Obama’s tenure in the White House, 3,917 people were murdered in Chicago, police records show.

Nothing can be done for the children of Chicago unless Lightfoot, who claims the President’s only goal is to avert attention from what she calls his failures in fighting COVID, needs to swallow her pride and let the federal agents work with the Chicago Police, among the best in the country, work to quell the violence.

Just yesterday, ten more persons, including a three-year-old girl and pregnant woman, were shot. Three persons being killed. (Girl, 3, seriously injured in shooting in South Shore). It is time for President Trump to take control. And Lightfoot to get out of the way.

But then what? Once the violence quiets, what will be done to change the future for America’s most at-risk youth? President Trump has done more in a few years, than Biden has done in over five decades, or Obama / Biden did in eight years.

Civil Right Lawyer Leo Terrell, a longtime Civil Rights Lawyer, says the President is within his rights to help Democrat-run cities gain control over their cities. (Leo Terrell: The Democratic Party left me). Yet, Mayors Wheeler, de Blasio and Lightfoot, where the violence is the worst, choose liberal hate for President Trump over Democrat love for their communities.

Pastor Darrell Scott writes in Trump helping black communities thrive

African American voters will be hard-pressed to justify casting their ballots for a Democrat next year. In just under three years, we’ve made incredible progress thanks to President Trump’s common-sense policies.

Since Donald Trump’s inauguration, the U.S. economy has created a whopping 1,017,000 new jobs for African Americans, including many right here in Ohio. Today, the national black unemployment rate is at an all-time low of 5.5 percent. Unemployment for black women is even lower, at just 4.4 percent. More importantly, the overall black-white employment gap is smaller than it has ever been. It is great to see so many African American men and women back in the workforce — more than ever before, in fact.

In addition, President Trump’s “Opportunity Zones” initiative is spurring even more economic growth in underdeveloped communities around the country. Through targeted tax incentives, the initiative is projected to generate approximately $100 billion of new private investment in communities that need it most.

That focus on expanding economic opportunity for minorities has been a major priority for the Trump administration. That’s why the president was so committed to reforming the criminal justice system. By eliminating the sentencing disparities caused by the horrendous Clinton-era crime bill, which disproportionately affected African Americans, President Trump is giving thousands of unfairly sentenced black inmates a second chance at the American Dream.

The FIRST STEP Act also included significant reforms to address recidivism, such as helping prisons improve their rehabilitation programs and allowing non-violent inmates to earn early-release credits for good behavior more easily. Thanks to this legislation, non-violent inmates will now be equipped with the professional and social skills they need to become productive members of society following their release.

President Trump also understands that the foundation of economic success is a quality education. That’s why he signed a $360 million grant to support Historically Black Colleges and Universities last year — by far the most that any president has ever appropriated for HBCUs. Even America’s first black president, Barack Obama, never allocated that much money to HBCUs.

After all the progress African Americans have made under President Trump, it’s difficult to even imagine going back to the Democrats’ failed, big-government policies that have held us back for so long

I left Chicago in 1988. And like Leo Terrill, I left the Democrat party as well. My final straw being not violence in Chicago but what I saw as the dishonesty and lawbreaking of Democrat leaders, then-President and First Lady Hillary Clinton. (From Whitewater to Benghazi: A Clinton-Scandal Primer)