EDITORIAL: The boss wants to steal everything, and when the bosses are crazy liars -- like Rahm Emanuel, Frank Clark, Forrest Claypool, and Janice Jackson -- workers have to get everything in an enforceable contract...
Despite the silly writings in Chicago's corporate media about the infamous career of Forrest Claypool, everyone who has paid attention from the point of view of the city's workers and the majority of Chicago communities knows that Claypool's entire career has been devoted to ruthless union busting, massive privatization, and the imposition of a Greek-style austerity through the city's parks (except those serving the city's few wealthy communities). Of course, Claypool was appointed by the most prominent union-busting big city mayor in the USA -- Rahm Emanuel. And to provide some "diversity" cover, two reactionary hacks, Frank Clark and Janice Jackson (no one at Substance will use the "doctor" for the Chief Education Officer until everyone in Chicago has had a chance to read her "doctoral" writings...).
Forrest Claypool and Rahm Emanuel when Emanuel announced that Claypool was the new CEO of CPS. Catalyst photo.So from the day Rahm Emanuel announced the new "team" at CPS to replace the old group of reactionary union busters, it's been clear that the confrontations would grow, and that the teachers in the city's nearly 600 real public schools were going to have to make ready for another strike.
Rahm Emanuel's record is already clear, so it's important to review the union busting and privatization career of Forrest Claypool, so that teachers and union members who believe what they get from the corporate media are insulated from the lies.
In both of Claypool's supposed triumphs in the past (the Chicago Transit Authority and the Chicago Park District), Claypool's dubious success was based on unions that surrendered the power of their members, in one case because of the corruption of the union's leadership, in the other because of the unions' (plural) weaknesses. Claypool was able to decimate the city's parks, to the point where today the city's parks are useless for Little League baseball whenever there is a heavy dew, let alone a rain, because of the arrogance of the leadership of the same union that scabbed on the Chicago Teachers Strike of 2012, Local 73 of the Service Employees International Union.
