In a bold, inspiring, historic, widely-publicized, and risky move, the Chicago Teachers Union, has gone on strike over a host of issues, including compensation, job security, evaluation procedures, and sufficient classroom resources (including air conditioning in the summer).

The strike could be argued as inevitable, given the galvanizing forces on each side: a progressive leadership at the Chicago Teachers Union, and a neoliberal cookie-cutter Chicago Public Schools district which favors non-union charter schools. The strike is unquestionably a big gamble -- if the union wins, they provide a badly needed shot-in-the-arm for public education and for the labor movement. If the establishment wins, they hasten the decline of both public education and dissident labor, spurring further the underway dissolution of middle-class education. The strike has so far garnered support from the public and from union solidarity efforts.

More Chicago Indymedia Links: Chicago Teachers v. Rahm Emanuel | Chicago: America's Epicenter of Resistance | Facebook Photo Album: Rally to support CTU Strike | Rahm Emanuel's Privatize Chicago Plan | New poll: majority support of the strike is increasing

Additional Links: In These Times: Chicago Teachers Strike Headache for Democrats | Robbie Abed's Personal Blog - Chicago Teachers Union Strike: The Real Story | Reuters: Negotiators optimistic Chicago teachers' strike may end soon | Teachers' Leader in Chicago Strike Shows Her Edge | Think Progress: How Illinois' Flawed Funding System Shortchanges Chicago's Students | Democracy Now! - Thousands rally in Chicago teachers strike | Democracy Now- Chicago Teachers Stage Historic Strike | Why are the Chicago Public School Teachers on Strike? | ZNet Commentary: Striking Neoliberalism in Chicago | The Rude Pundit: The Chicago teachers' strike is for the children | Gawker: A guide to Chicago's ongoing teachers strike | Diatribe Media: Education is no cakewalk

The two faces of NATO: PR spin versus video reality
While the Obama and Emanuel administrations are congratulating themselves on a public relations coup, NATO protesters are documenting the wave of police violence unleashed on them in recent days -- particularly Sunday, when protesters sought to exercise a right they thought they had but didn't: to speak truth to power.

City and federal officials have doggedly stuck to the spin about a dangerous band of 'anarchists' who started trouble on Sunday. But it's clear from the videos below -- and dozens more that have begun to surface on the web -- that the only thugs in black on May 20 were the police. And the police unloaded, narrowly missing 75-year-old peace protester Nan Wigmore, who was caught in the crush at the front line of the police violence.

The harrowing scenes in the first two videos below, shot by Substance News contributor John Kugler, show police hammering on protesters with billy clubs and their hands, feet and bodies. Protesters clearly shout "There's nowhere to go!" as the police line wails on them to push them away from the intersection of Cermak and Michigan. The protesters' goal? To take their opposition to NATO to the summit itself -- a goal denied by the protest 'permit' which the City of Chicago and the Obama administration ultimately 'granted.' That permit failed to meet even the minimum request of some organizers to be within 'site and sound' of the government bureaucrats' deliberations.

Read more...

NATO brings its war machine home

Thousands protest military arm of global elites in days of protest around annual warmongers' summit

Representatives of CANG8, Occupy Chicago and Chicago Action Medical have condemned systemic police violence at the CANG8/IVAW anti-NATO protest on Sunday -- and more broadly, condemned the military machine that has brought thousands of protesters together in Chicago for a week of actions and events to oppose the NATO meeting and its larger agenda. Luminaries who ranged from Noam Chomsky and Tom Morello to Greece's SYRIZA -- in English, the Coalition for the Radical Left -- encouraged people to protest the NATO summit. The confab of war criminals ended Monday, as activists rallied against war profiteer Boeing.

"The police have been preparing for this mentally, physically, emotionally -- preparing to beat us up for a year," said CANG8 organizer Joe Iosbaker. "This is the violence that NATO is, that NATO brings with them."

Sunday's police violence came on the heels of a peaceful anti-NATO march designed to draw attention to NATO's role as the military arm of global elites -- and to the enormous destruction that NATO military action brings to the people whose countries it bombs and occupies. Read more.

Thousand march to oppose police repression in run-up to NATO summit

Chicago saw thousands of people in the streets Saturday in the run-up to the beginning of the NATO summit. with the afternoon's boisterous but peaceful protest marches marred by sweeping police violence.

Protests began in the morning at the Irving Park Brown Line public transit stop, where protesters donned hospital gowns and canvassed the local neighborhood, then assembled at noon for the “Healthcare not Warfare!” actionto protest the closure of half of the city’s public mental health clinics in a ‘cost-saving’ measure protesters say is both unnecessary and part of the city’s push to privatize public services.

At the same time, supporters of three men arrested in a Wednesday night raid at the Bridgeport apartment of Occupy Chicago activists were gathering at the Cook County Criminal Courthouse for the arrestees’ noon bail hearing on state terrorism charges -- allegations their attorneys call ludicrous. All three men had earlier in the week released a video that documented their targeted harassment by Chicago police, a tape which is said to have enraged local cops.

Protesters called for a 3:30PM emergency protest in the heart of the city’s financial district -- where Occupy Chicago has staged several large marches seeking to create an encampment that has been repeatedly thwarted by police and produced hundreds of arrests last year.

That emergency protest eventually linked up with a planned evening anti-capitalist march staged out of the Haymarket memorial and subsequently swelled to thousands, turning into a rolling wave of opposition to the Chicago police department’s sustained effort to thwart anti-NATO protests.

The protesters’ goal this week? To ratchet up attention on NATO, the military arm of the 1% -- a cold war relic with a clearly overtly aggressive military mission. NATO missions have killed thousands of civilians in Afghanistan, bombed Libya back into the stone age and allowed its rich oil resources to be steered toward more direct control of western oil companies, and turned a blind eye to the repressive regimes of allies in Bahrain, Egypt, Yemen and other Middle Eastern countries. Member states of NATO, let by the U.S., supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq, leaving that nation in ruins -- and its petroleum resources in the hands of western elites and their allies. Read more.