National and international action on climate changed appears to be stalled, and the impact of Chicago’s widely-praised climate action plan will be limited as long as coal-fired plants are allowed to operate here.  Scientists warn that time is running short.

Community groups are coming together for a summit on climate change, considered as an issue of human rights and environmental justice – as well as high utility bills and pollution-related health problems – from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Wednesday, February 8 at the Senior Satellite, 5701 W. Congress.

“Too often, climate change is only seen as something tackled by a United Nations conference,” said Theresa Welch, associate director of the South Austin Community Coalition. “But neighborhoods, particularly the poor and communities of color, are the worst hit and last to recover from such environmental devastation.

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In a march on City Hall tomorrow, community and labor groups will present Mayor Emanuel with a golden toilet representing the TIF subsidy recently returned by CME Group, which was to help build a luxury bathroom, cafe, and fitness center.

Led by the Grassroots Collaborative, the groups are asking Emanuel to use $33 million recently returned by CME, Bank of America, and CNA, to restore jobs and services in the city’s schools, clinics, and libraries.

They’re also calling for a moratorium on new TIF projects in the LaSalle Central TIF district, which they view as the epicenter of TIF subsidies benefiting corporations at the expense of neighborhoods.

Community activists from across the city will rally at the Chicago Board of Trade, 141 W. Jackson, at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, February 8, and march to City Hall.

Jobs for Chicagoans

Eric Tellez of Grassroots Collaborative cited recent research showing that jobs from downtown development spurred by TIFs have largely gone to suburban commuters.

“This is Chicago’s tax money – why isn’t it being used to employ Chicagoans?” he asked.  Restoring funding for city services “protects jobs with good wages for people who we know will live in Chicago.  They provide services for our neighborhoods, and they employ people from our neighborhoods.”

Meanwhile, as details emerge regarding CME’s role in the collapse of MF Global last October, Stand Up Chicago is highlighting issues of accountability – including the need for outside regulation of “self-regulating” exchanges.

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The Sun Times reports Saturday on Ondelee Perteet at the sentencing hearing for the young man who shot and paralyzed him in 2009. Ondelee shows impressive maturity and generosity of spirit.

At the Chicago Reporter, Kari Lydersen talks at length with the 17-year-old West Side resident and his mother about the personal costs of surviving violence: Ondelee struggles to maintain his positive attitude, and his mother struggles to care for him and pay the bills.

It’s part two the Reporter’s “Too Young To Die” series by Lydersen and photographer Carlos Javier Ortiz, and it’s part of the Local Reporting Initiative, which you can follow at the Community News Project blog.

Classmates of Ondelee interviewed him for a video by the Westside Writers Project, another LRI participant, in 2010.

Last week the first report of the Reporter’s series showed that Chicago’s homicide rate is double that of New York City. At Chicago Magazine’s The 312 blog, Whet Moser has a fascinating piece looking at differences between the two cities that may help account for that.

New York has less than a third the number of gang members that Chicago has, and various experts suggest this could have to do with differences between the two cities in public housing and incarceration policies.

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Take two minutes and watch this video on the police firing range now planned next to sensitive Calumet area wetlands.  It’s by poet and activist Acie Cargill, and it’s an effective piece of grassroots advocacy.

If you’ve been following the issue through written descriptions here or elsewhere, it will give a good picture of  the area being impacted; if you haven’t been following the issue, you’re likely to get interested.

(I like Acie’s rendition of Can’t Stop Loving You, too; nice to see folks out dancing.)

Women from eleven religious orders are working with hotels in the Indianapolis area to curb sexual trafficking associated with the Super Bowl this weekend.

Incidents of sexual trafficking tend to spike around major sporting events, said Grace Skalski of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph in LaGrange, which participated in the Super Bowl 2012 Anti-Trafficking Initiative.

The nuns called over 200 hotels asking if employees had been trained to recognize, document and report incidents of human trafficking.  They ended up providing training to employees of several hotels and supplying nearly a hundred hotels with brochures, information about the hospitality industry’s code of conduct on child sexual exploitation, and contact information for victim hotlines and safe houses.

Religious orders in the Coalition for Corporate Responsibility for Indiana and Michigan buy stock in hotel chains in order to establish dialogues on the issue of human trafficking in the hospitality industry.

“These are activities that happen in the dark,” said Sister Ann Oestreich, co-chair of CCRIM. “What we are attempting to do is to shine a light on sex trafficking and reduce opportunities for it to happen.”

“Human trafficking is a tragic violation of human rights that devastates its victims, strips away their dignity and security, and tears at the fabric of our global society,” said Sister Pat Bergen of LaGrange Park.  “It is a form of imprisonment and oppression which demands a compassionate response to the cries of victims who long for a future with hope.”

With Mayor Emanuel aligning himself with an extremist group focused on attacking teachers, a group of Chicago parents has decided it’s time to speak up in their defense.

“We’re upset with all the teacher-bashing that’s so fashionable today,” said Erica Clark of Parents For Teachers.  “It’s a complete distraction from the real issues facing our schools.”

The group, which started recently with a Facebook page, held its first action Tuesday, the first of several “phone –in days,” with members of parent and community groups calling CPS chief Jean-Claude Brizard asking him to withdraw current plans to close and “turnaround” 16 schools. The group argues that a 15-year record shows that these policies don’t work.

“Whenever anyone talks about ‘school reform’ these days, the first thing you hear is some attack on teachers,” Clark said.

She points out that SB 7, which reduced teachers’ collective bargaining rights, “was heralded as the most important ‘school reform’ bill of the year – but it had nothing at all about what really matters: class size, equitable funding, less emphasis on standardized testing, a richer, more interesting curriculum.  It was all about attacking teachers.”

“If you listen to the rhetoric of so-called school reform, you would think there are no good teachers in the system,” she said.  “But if you talk to parents – if you look at the data CPS collects in the surveys where parents rate schools and teachers – there’s a lot of support for teachers.

“Parents deal with their kids’ teachers on a regular basis, they see how hard they work, they see that they are working in the trenches every day for their kids.”

Breitbart connection

Emanuel appeared in a video produced by the Education Action Group, based in Muskegon, Wisconsin.  EAG’s leader, Kyle Olson, blogs on the Big Government website of journalist-provocateur Andrew Breitbart, whose exploits include doctoring video to make U.S. Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod look like she was fomenting racial division.

Two years ago Olson was forced to apologize after he was exposed for videotaping an interview with Frances Fox Piven, the activist academic who was a frequent target of Glen Beck, under false pretenses.

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TIF subsidies returned by three corporations should be declared surplus and used to restore cuts in public services; and Mayor Emanuel should hold off on new TIF spending until he can implement his TIF reform panel’s recommendations, groups working on the issue said Tuesday.

News broke Monday that CME, CNA and Bank of America were returning a combined $33 million, CME saying it didn’t need the money now that the state has cut its taxes, CNA and Bank of America admitting they hadn’t met job creation goals.

CME had been the target of a series of protests by Grassroots Collaborative, which on different occasions set up a classroom outside the corporate headquarters to dramatize lost school funding, declared the site a “corporate crime scene,” and held a bake sale for the corporation.  Last week Stand Up Chicago delivered a golden toilet to CME, which was to get $15 million for a luxury bathroom, cafe, and fitness center.

Restore public services

“With communities reeling from proposed school closings, cuts to libraries, and the shutdown of six mental health clinics, the $33 million dollars should be immediately returned to critical public services that working families of Chicago depend on, and not redirected back to downtown TIF slush funds,” said Amisha Patel.

She said the news reflects the impact of groups working to highlight the issue of corporate subsidies and tax breaks.

Also Monday, Emanuel announced he would create an online TIF database and order random independent audits of TIFs.  It was his first action on the recomendations of his TIF reform panel since its report last August.

Illinois PIRG released a report calling on Emanuel to fully implement the panel’s recommendations as a first step toward TIF reform, and to declare a moratorium on new TIF spending until the reforms are in place.

“If the Mayor and the City Council admit that TIF is broken, why would they continue to use the program before it gets fixed?” said Celeste Meiffren, author of the report.

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Judging from the Tribune’s attack on its co-chair, the Chicago Educational Facilities Task Force must really be raising some hackles among the editorial board’s friends at the Board of Education, in the mayor’s office, and among the coterie of rich folks who are pushing what’s come to be called “school reform.”

Though the task force passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on school closings and other actions, the Trib focuses on Rep. Cynthia Soto.  In their zeal to lash out, the editorialists get a lot wrong.

First of all, of course, it was the task force that issued the call for a moratorium, after a public hearing where – as happens every year – parents and teachers complained about a CPS decision-making process that ignores their input.

Second, the Trib declares that legislators shouldn’t meddle in school closing decisions.  But the task force is mandated by the legislature to monitor compliance with the new school facilities planning requirements, which the legislature passed in 2009.

It includes legislators along with representatives of CPS, teachers, principals, and community groups, and it represents a first step at giving the public a real voice in the process.

Prior to the task force, there was virtually no accountability for CPS decisions — not since mayoral control was established in 1995.  Clearly, some people want to keep it that way.

‘Not in compliance’

“CPS’s historic and continuing lack of transparency and evidence-based criteria for decisions resulted in the pervasive climate of public suspicion about what drives CPS to take school actions and allocate resources, often in ways perceived to be highly inequitable,” as the task force noted in a recent resolution.

The Tribune argues that school closing decisions should be made locally.  Sure they should.  But does that mean they should be made by downtown administrators with no input from the schools and their communities?  The Trib thinks so.  The task force says no.

The Tribune’s argument hinges on ignoring the real reason for the moratorium call.  The editorial cites a quote from Soto about the new administration needing time to get to know communities better.  It ignores the task force resolution, passed this month with only the dissent of the CPS representative, that the school district is “not in compliance” with the requirements of transparency and open process mandated by the law.

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