"An estimated 17.8 of Chicago live in rat

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from the Windy City.

How has the struggle for Black equality and social justice in Chicago weathered under the Washington administration? After nearly four years in office, and as Mayor Washington campaigns for re-election on April 7, this is a question worth posing.

Despite a few tangible reform measures, the hopes of 1983 remain unfulfilled. Conditions for the Black population are still terrible-and getting worse. Still, many of Washington's reform-minded measures have proven popular among Blacks and working people, many of whom hold to the hope that the mayor, while unable to tackle such chronic problems as unemployment and poverty, is at least moving in the right direction.

The abuses of the patronage system, for example, under which precinct captains beholden to ward committeemen traded thousands of city jobs for votes, has been severely weakened under Washington.

The mayor has sponsored a Freedom of Information Order that opened city files to public inspection. The slippery deals and greased palms that once oiled the white Democratic City Hall machine no longer occupy the exalted status of semi-official policy. (The financial doings of some Washington aides, however, nevertheless prove that old ways die hard.)

Collective-bargaining agreements have been won for thousands of city workers, replacing the "handshake" agreements of the past. Affirmative action has been promoted in city hiring, and the mayor has supported local civil rights legislation for gays and lesbians.

Funding for emergency shelters and food for the homeless has been increased. The mayor, too, has taken measures to ensure that Black neighborhoods receive equal provision of city services, a not-insignificant step in a city where the Chicago Transit Authority has been known to run trains right through Black neighborhoods during winter storms.

"Fast Eddie" and the racists Such measures have helped Washington to retain considerable popularity with Chicago's Black population and many white voters. But another factor is also important in explaining the mayor's appeal: the caliber of a political opposition that finds it difficult to restrain its racist impulses.

Since taking office, Washington has faced a bitter and persistent campaign to sabotage his initiatives by the 4 SOCIALIST ACTION MARCH 1987 now claim a majority on the city council, counting his own tie-breaking vote.

While the mayor's opponents in the Democratic Party have suffered setbacks, they have not given up their efforts to regain control of city government. Just as Republican candidate Bernard Epton, backed by the city's Democratic Party bosses, warned voters in 1983 to "elect him before it's too late," former Mayor Jane Byrne also hoped to don the mantle of the "Great White Hope" in the February Democratic primary, proposing as her initial campaign slogan-"Jane Byrne-the only chance."

She backed off from this slogan, however, for fear the racist tone of such an appeal would backfire among the more liberal "swing" vote in the lakefront communities. Still, one of her advisers bluntly acknowledged that Byrne "has to make the case that she is the one shot white voters have to beat Harold Washington."

During her term as mayor from 1979 to 1983, Byrne established herself as a straight-out union hater, waging such a ruthless drive to crush the city firefighters' strike in 1982 that even the Chicago Sun-Times-a strong opponent of the strike—felt compelled to distance itself from her union-busting tactics.

Today, Byrne attacks Washington for being weak on the issues of crime and drugs. She calls for more police, even though Chicago already has the highest proportion of police to population- 4.2 per 1000 residents-of any city in the nation.

Vrdolyak, too, plays on similar themes in his race against Washington in the general election. Vrdolyak is running on the Solidarity Party ticket, an electoral front The report adds that children are suffering the worst, with 75 percent of single-parent households experiencing hardships ranging from lack of money for food to inadequate medical care.

An estimated 17.8 percent of Black residents of Chicago live in rat- and roach-infested homes.

Twenty percent of Black people eat less than the minimum government standard for a nutritional diet.

Sixteen percent of Black Chicagoans have had their utilities turned off.

Official government figures indicate that an estimated 857,000 Chicagoans live below the poverty level. And since 1969 Chicago has lost more than one-fourth of its factories and roughly a quarter-million jobs.

Is Chicago bouncing back?

Washington, however, claims that "we're bouncing back," and points to the creation of 100,000 neighbor -hood jobs since he took office. "Our stress on neighborhood development is beginning to pay off," the mayor says.

Most of these jobs are low-paid service jobs, while higher-paid industrial jobs continue to disappear. Blacks, of course, have been virtually excluded from the "upswing" of the economy after the low-point of the early 1980s recession.

In fact, as Roosevelt University urbanologist Pierre de Vise told the Chicago Sun-Times, "Washington's most ardent supporters have been the hardest hit during his term."

This is hardly surprising considering the modest aims of Washington's concrete proposals. His jobs program, for example, amounts to an executive order that compa -nies that obtain "financial incentives" or contract from the city must consider hiring employees referred by City Hall.

The goal of this program? The creation of 1000 jobs in 1987 and 10,000 jobs in three years-rather microscopic figures in a city where official unemployment among Blacks today stands at a staggering 25 percent.

The city's politicians—including Washington-cry that they have no alternative but to impose more taxes or cut services since federal funds are drying up and the city's tax base is shrinking. The city is simply running out of money, they say.

Not everyone in Chicago, however, is in such dire straits. As the Sun-Times noted in a special series on (continued on next page)

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"Has the mayor used his office to mobilize support for the striking Chicago Tribune strikers? Obviously not. Instead, his appointee as police chief directed an attack on the strikers."

(continued from previous page) the Washington administration, "The new Chicago is increasingly poor and increasingly rich, a split city shifting to a service-job base in a world market."

And the "increasingly rich" certainly have money to burn. During 1985 and 1986, a total of 148 new downtown building and renovation projects worth $2.2 billion were completed, according to a recent report by urban affairs specialists Louis Masotti and Mary Ludgin. They note that $4.5 billion in projects were undertaken from 1979 to 1984 and that 51 entirely new downtown buildings are in the works.

One of these projects was Presidential Towers, a $233million luxury-apartment complex built just west of the downtown Loop area (and just minutes east from one of the poorest slum areas in the city). It was built with $180 million in tax-free bonds and a Congressional waiver to the requirement that 20 percent of the units be for low-income families.

Corporate skyscrapers, luxury apartments, and exclu -sive shopping areas are booming in the downtown area, but for the rest of Chicago things are a little more bleak. As the Sun-Times noted, much of Chicago remains "overrun...with 20 square miles of neighborhood wastelands on the South and West sides, where little or nothing has been done."

Class conflict or modest reform The late Sydney Lens, editor of the Progressive, explained the dilemma Washington faces in a succinct 1985 appraisal of his administration.

"If Washington tried to launch a more expansive program," Lens explained, "one that involved higher taxes on business, a dozen business leaders would compel him to retreat. They can lower credit ratings, cut off financing, close down factories, choke off new commercial development, and persuade state and Federal officials to put the squeeze on the recalcitrant mayor."

Lens continued, "Faced with this situation, Wash -ington has had to choose between a strategy of class conflict—a head-on clash with the First National Bank, Standard Oil, Sears, the Arthur Rubloff real-estate firm, the Chicago Tribune, the Council 29, and the White ON STRIN ON STRIKE House-and a strategy that mutes class conflict in favor of modest reform. He has taken the latter route....

The route of "modest reform" demands that Mayor Washington continue to dutifully service the interest on the city's debt, a $230-million annual payment from the city's treasury to private bankers-while blighted conditions ravage much of the city for "lack of funds.

Washington did attempt to impose a $79-million commercial-lease tax on downtown business, which would have levied a much higher city tax on downtown rents. While this proposal was hardly a threat to "free enterprise" in Chicago, it was blocked by the courts. Washington then turned toward a property-tax increase and additional fees that have raised an additional $312 million for the city's budget—again out of the pockets of the city's working population.

It is true that Washington did face some initial antagonism from Chicago's business community. But "Chicago's mayor is scoring surprising points," as the Sun-Times notes, "with once-aloof downtown businessmen." Samuel R. Mitchell, president of the Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry, agrees. "He knows we don't necessarily pitchfork babies," says Mitchell.

Washington, of course, has no fundamental dis -agreement with big-business on the need for fiscal austerity. It was at Washington's request that a Financial Planning Committee was organized jointly by the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago and Chicago United.

This group of "business, civic, and community leaders" has proposed a long-range financial plan for the city that promises scaled-down city services and years of austerity. City employees can expect lower wages, longer hours, less benefits, and lost jobs as more city services are "privatized."

Washington has criticized some particulars of this austerity plan, but he has no underlying disagreement with its perspective. As the Sun-Times noted in its editorial endorsement of the mayor, he has "forged a solid alliance with business on concepts for long-range municipal finance.

Labor and Washington

Washington has also demonstrated to the business community that his office will do little to stand in the way of its efforts to defeat striking trade unions.

It took Washington 16 weeks before he ordered offduty Chicago police officers to stop moonlighting as security guards to protect scabs during a strike by steelworkers at the Danly Machine Corp.

Chicago's public-school teachers found the mayor strangely silent while a Washington-appointed school board chairman sought to break two strikes by their While Washington supported collective-bargaining agreements for city workers, he at the same time supported lobbying efforts in the state legislature to prohibit strikes by city workers.

The reality of Washington's approach to the labor movement was captured quite accurately by a participant in one of the high-level meetings aimed at preventing the closing of U.S. Steel's South Works mill. Washington's representative, it was said, "tries hard not to offend management for will next election."

One argument often raised by some supporters of Washington is that his brand of politics could spark, as Abdul Alkalimat recently stated in the The Black Scholar, "a new national political movement independent of the Democratic Party." At the very least, some would say, his "progressive" administration has created a more favorable climate for organizing social protest movements around a range of issues.

Washington, of course, has made it clear that he has no intention of breaking with the Democratic Party. "I'm the only one who is the dyed-in-the wool Democrat, head to toe, hip to hip," he told the Sun-Times in reference to his electoral opponents.

Can it really be said that Washington's election has served as a powerful impetus to independent mobilization by Blacks and working people? Has the mayor used his office, with all its resources, to encourage mass protest against budget cuts, marches for jobs, rent strikes to ann : 32 Socialist Action/ Cabrini Projects: Chicago is still the most segregated city.

protest slum housing, or to mobilize public support for striking unions? Obviously not.

Imagine how a really pro-labor mayor could have responded to the strike and then lock-out by printers at the Chicago Tribune? Washington could have appealed to the Black community to join the boycott, generated great publicity by personally walking the picket line, and banned Tribune reporters from City Hall press conferences and briefings.

Instead, we saw Washington's appointee as police chief, Fred Rice, personally direct the violent police attack in January 1986 on the thousands of people demonstrating in solidarity with the strikers at the newspapers plant.

Misery from coast to coast Chicago, of course, is hardly an isolated island of misery in an otherwise tranquil sea of national prosperity. Cities across the country have been ravaged by the bipartisan austerity policies of the Democratic and Republican parties.

Working people face a continuing downward slide into a cut-rate nation of skeleton social services, low-paid jobs, chronic large-scale unemployment, inadequate health care, deteriorating schools—all "defended" by the most massive military arsenal in world history.

Working people are under attack by both the Democratic and Republican parties, who represent that tiny club of the super-rich who, according to the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, comprise one-half percent of the population and control 35.1 percent of the nation's wealth.

The economic and social policies that guide both major parties are rooted in the idea that what's good for business is good for the nation. Daily life for millions of Blacks and working people, however, reveals the utter falsehood of that notion. Private profit and human needs simply don't mix.

Blacks and working people need their own political party, one that won't pay reverent hosannas to private profit, but will rely on mass social protest— demonstrations, strikes, and electoral activity to mount an all-sided challenge to the bipartisan policies that are destroying lives and causing untold social misery.

A striking contradiction stands out when the level of activity and social protest in Chicago is measured not only against the desperate conditions that ravage the Black community, but against the electrifying mood that swept Washington into office.

At best, since Washington's election, there have been only sporadic protests in the Black community, involving small groups of activists, led by Operation PUSH or people such as Alderwoman Dorothy Tillman.

Imagine if the kind of political energy that swept Washington into office were channeled into organizing a new mass social movement for Black rights-like the Civil Rights movement that destroyed Jim Crow segregation-instead of siphoning that desire for action against the racist status quo into the singular goal of capturing City Hall.

And yet what has control of City Hall by a Black Democrat led to? Little more than a few patchwork reforms to an endemic social crisis that requires far more systematic solutions. And it could not be otherwise.

The Democratic Party is a political graveyard for Blacks and working people. The task is to breathe new life into the struggle for social justice and equality by relying not on Democratic Party "saviors," but on building mass social movements that draw their strength from millions of working people, Blacks, unionists, and every victim of this system.

SOCIALIST ACTION MARCH 1987 5

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to rolling back abortion rights won by the

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homes. 16 percent have had their utilities cut off.