Minority Superstars!

Who's Gonna Run against Rahm?
By Jim Vail

Amara Enyia announcing her mayoral candidacy in Bridgeport,
home of Mayor Daley who she believes really loved Chicago.

When it comes to politics, I've written time and again that it's a rigged game where those who pay the players win every time.

The US Supreme Court put its stamp of approval on elections going to the very rich by ruling that they can spend unlimited cash to back their candidates.

The question on everyone's mind in the second city is who has the balls to play this game and take on Rahm Emanuel and the millions he has collected in his re-election bid.

Does it matter that he has a 29% approval rating according to the Sun Times, and he is especially hated by the African American people who bore the brunt of his harsh education "reform" policies when he closed 50 public schools?

Hmmm.... Let's see. 

Toni Preckwinkle, president of the Cook County Board, they say is the best candidate to beat him. But what alternative is she coming from the same family - the Chicago Machine.

People hoped the Chicago Teacher's Union president Karen Lewis would run. Her candidacy may have spiced things up for the media when she took on the mayor as the two battled a couple of years ago. But she says she's not interested, and the two haven't spoken, or cursed at each other, for quite a while now.

The seasoned vets who ran in the last mayoral election are no where to be seen. Gerry Chico, former president of the Chicago Board of Education, is safely running the Illinois Board of Education, and Miguel Del Valle has disappeared.

Which brings us to our next generation of "highly qualified" candidates.

The liberal media, and Kari Lyderson in particular, have fallen in love with a possible new shining star on the horizon who has declared her candidacy for mayor.

Amara Enyia, a municipal planner who heads the Austin chamber of commerce and worked in the Daley administration, has declared her candidacy.

She certainly has the markings of a future star political operative should she be truly interested. She has generated some impressive media coverage. 

This is one smart cookie. 

I noticed when she came out to teacher events such as supporting the Saucedo teachers who refused to give the ISAT test, she took up a sign to march and rarely spoke to anyone. In fact, you would have thought she came to represent 125 S. Clark St., dressed in corporate attire among a sea of sweatshirts.

Yet, she knows the right people to align with. She had a kick off political rally a few weeks ago to declare her candidacy officially in which observers said she attracted over 200 people. She had Troy LaRiviere, the brave principal at Blaine Elementary who criticized the mayor and generated a lot of media exposure.

Principal Troy La Riviere speaking on behalf of Enyia.

La Riviere, who said he's been approached by people who would support him for mayor, talked about how he had gone to school at the University of Illinois with Enyia, and how impressed he was that she finished her law degree at the same time she finished her PhD.

And you have teacher activists like Tim Meegan, who is running for alderman against Deb Mell, who also support her candidacy.

I immediately wrote her off from the beginning when I first read Lyderson's story in In These Times, in which the daughter of Nigerian immigrants said Mayor Daley truly loved this city.

Journalist Kari Lyderson 

To me, that statement meant one thing - don't alienate possible future big money supporters, who may have connections to the machine. Not to mention she comes from that world having worked as a consultant in the city administration.

In this day and age of politics and elections, the big money people are looking for their future superstars, no different than recruiters looking for the next hot prospect.

Let's take a look at two African American political/corporate superstars - the president Barack Obama, and Citigroup's Dick Parsons, to see how the game is really played.

Let's start with Obama. The president was once a so-called "grassroots organizer" - something Enyia is touting today. Get your feet just wet enough in this field to put it on your resume. 

Obama then got elected a state senator, ran and lost to Bobby Rush for US Congress, then won a seat on the US Senate, before catapulting himself to the presidency.

The question George Schmidt of Substance News always asked at our editorial meetings was, who sponsored Obama, back when he was getting his bachelor's degree. Obama eventually earned a law degree from Harvard and taught law at the University of Chicago.

Perfect ruling class credentials, and yet he did not come from their class. A true superstar indeed!

Eventually billionaire power brokers who earned White House cabinet positions like Penny Pritzker, did invest a lot of money into this guy's career, and have earned their dividends.

Then there's Dick Parsons, the former head of Citigroup, who has earned phenomenal CEO compensation while most of his corporate undertakings have spectacularly failed. 

This is how Mark Ames wrote about the African American Parsons rise to the world of riches from his humble background:

"Dick Parson's biography can be summed up in two phases of his life: before meeting Nelson Rockefeller, and after meeting Nelson Rockefeller."

http://thedailybanter.com/2012/05/exclusive-failing-up-with-dick-parsons/

Now Parsons, and Obama, didn't just get handed the keys to that old geezer's Porsche without "earning" it.

Dick Parsons, CEO slave to Rockefellers.

In Parsons case, the former "frat boy slacker" had brains enough to run Rockefeller savings and loans and other companies. But there was a reason the American oligarch chose Parsons - the color of his skin.

You see, when Rockefeller hired him to head one of his savings and loans banks back in the 1980s, you needed a face that the public could sympathize with. While the savings and loan scam was no different than today's subprime disaster, back then operators actually went to prison. So the Rockefellers had their front man with a black face front and center, and got away with it.

Just like Obama today who had the public teary eyed when he was elected the first "African American" president, and then proceeded to expand Bush's taxpayer bailout of the banks, drone attacks, deportations and not throw any criminal executives into prison while arguing to the public that CEO contracts are sacrosanct, while worker contracts ain't worth a dime.

Consumer rights advocate and corporate crime fighter Ralph Nader, who ran for president on the Green Party ticket in 2000, called Obama an Uncle Tom after he was first elected.

Uncle Tom is an epithet for a person who is slavish and excessively subservient to perceived authority figures, particularly a black person who behaves in a subservient manner to white people, is how the term is defined on Wikipedia.

And so, today's future superstars are auditioning before the ruling class to represent their interests in this scam of a political system.

Enyia is merely another one lining up to be the next superstar. And indeed, she may, like Obama or Parsons, or whoever, have the best of intentions, along with an amazing resume.

But they ain't representing our interests. In fact, their representing interests out to destroy us all! And have us all teary eyed in the process. 

http://inthesetimes.com/article/16777/amara_and_goliath