The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Chicago Teachers Union strike, day 2

I'm trying to make sense of why the Chicago Teachers Union's fight with the Chicago Public Schools has blown up into a teachers' strike (the first in 25 years).

One of my neighbors, for years a member of the local school board, said "every parent in Chicago will vote against Rahm Emanuel" in the next Chicago mayoral election. My experience of the strike, however, was being trapped in the Loop for an hour yesterday as the teachers' rally outside the school board building stopped traffic.

So, in no particular order, here are some sources of information about the strike, its geneses, and its likely outcomes:

  • Washington Post reporter Dylan Matthews, writing on Ezra Klein's blog, modestly provides "Everything you need to know about the Chicago teachers’ strike, in one post". My key takeaway: the CPS faces a $665m deficit this year, despite moving millions from reserves, and next year faces a $1bn deficit. (I can't wait to see my 2013 property tax bills...)
  • The Tribune reports that CPS has offered 2% raises over the next four years and some concessions on its proposed policy of not calling laid-off teachers back in the order they were let go. The article doesn't make clear how the CTU disagrees with the proposal, saying the union hasn't released details.
  • The local NPR station, WBEZ, asks What's really driving teachers to strike? Teachers want air conditioning, smaller classes, more social workers, and yes, last-out-first-in recalls after layoffs.
  • CTU president Karen Lewis may have miscalculated, however, having "openly feuded with Chicago Public Schools chief Jean-Claude Brizard and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, accusing them of not caring about schoolchildren or their education," which made her no friends. Still, 90% of union membership voted to strike, so it looks like they may have gotten the leadership they wanted.
  • New York Times columnist Joe Nocera yesterday wrote a cogent and balanced summary of the issues that nonetheless drew a comparison between this fight and the auto manufacturing fights of the 1970s and 1980s, "with the two sides fighting each other so fiercely that neither noticed that imports were on the rise and globalization was making their squabbles irrelevant."
  • And, of course, both the CTU and CPS want everyone to remember the children, who certainly have their own opinions but aren't being asked by either side.

Even though I have a natural inclination to support labor in general and teachers in specific, it looks to me like the strike over-reached and may have handed the PR war to the city. Ultimately the CPS and CTU run up against arithmetic, and the annoying problem that only the U.S. government can print money. We can't pay for the schools we have right now (or, more precisely, for the teacher pensions we owe), so the teachers won't get everything they want. Are they willing to give back on pensions and salary in exchange for smaller class sizes and air conditioners? (Of course, how medieval are we as a city that we can't provide children with adequate classrooms in the first place?)

And again, the kids are getting the worst of it. As goes an African proverb, "when elephants wrestle, the grass suffers."

Security at the 9/11 memorial

Slate's Mark Vanhoenacker wonders whether the lock-down at lower Manhattan's World Trade Center memorial is a monument to something other than intended:

Advance tickets are required to enter this public, outdoor memorial. To book them, you’re obliged to provide your home address, email address, and phone number, and the full names of everyone in your party. It is “strongly recommended” that you print your tickets at home, which is where you must leave explosives, large bags, hand soap, glass bottles, rope, and bubbles. Also, “personal wheeled vehicles” not limited to bicycles, skateboards, and scooters, and anything else deemed inappropriate. Anyone age 13 or older must carry photo ID, to be displayed “when required and/or requested.”

Once at the memorial you must go through a metal detector and your belongings must be X-rayed. Officers will inspect your ticket—that invulnerable document you nearly left on your printer—at least five times. One will draw a blue line on it; 40 yards (and around a dozen security cameras) later, another officer will shout at you if your ticket and its blue line are not visible. Eventually you’ll reach the memorial itself, where there are more officers and no bathrooms. You’re allowed to take photographs anywhere outside the security screening area—in theory if not always in practice.

Security expert Bruce Schneier wryly (and, given the math, correctly) explains how one could remain safe visiting the memorial even if it didn't have any of these security measures in place: "On the drive to New York, or in your taxi downtown, buckle up, he warned. It’s dangerous out there."

I keep hoping (as does Schneier) that we will someday get past our obsession with fighting the last war. It seems to me that if we have massive security around a memorial site, the terrorists win. What are we protecting? Eleven years ago a psychotic religious criminal gang attacked us, and we went crazy. Even knowing that a goal of the attack was, in the words of the nutjob who planned it, to cause us to over-react, we did exactly what he wanted. Isn't it time we went back to normal—if for no other reason than to prove the terrorists wrong?

Trenton, N.J., mayor arrested

As Josh Marshall tweeted just now, "If a Mayor from NJ can be arrested on corruption charges, what's left for us to believe in?" I don't know:

Trenton, N.J. Mayor Tony Mack and at least six other people were arrested by federal authorities on Monday morning as part of a corruption investigation, according to WNBC.

The arrests follow the FBI's search of Trenton City Hall in July. Federal prosecutors are expected to announce the details of the investigation later on Monday.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

I've just finished Jane Jacobs' foundational work on urban planning. I first came across the book in 2010, started reading it in May, then put it down and picked it up a few times.

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published 51 years ago, Jacobs demolished the philosophy of urban planning that had prevailed since the 1920s. The Cabrini Green housing projects, massively disruptive road-building like the Dan Ryan and Congress Expressways, and a way of top-down analysis that looked at thriving neighborhoods like Boston's North End as slums, all exemplified post-war urban planning; Jacobs tried to reverse it.

Some things that stood out:

[One] category of uses is conventionally considered, by planners and zoners, to be harmful, especially if these uses are mingled into residential areas. This category includes bars, theaters, clinics, businesses and manufacturing. It is a category which is not harful; the arguments that these uses are to be tightly controlled derive from their effects in suburbs and in dull, inherently dangerous gray areas, not from their effects in lively city districts.

For example: a shopping mall surrounded by parking lots has a few restaurants attached to it. Who wants to walk to these restaurants? How likely are people to linger there, or to happen upon a previously-unknown, independent night spot? Contrast that with, say, North Clark Street in Chicago, where a person can walk for almost 30 blocks, from Lincoln Avenue (1800 N) up to Irving Park Road (4000 N), and never be more than a few meters from a restaurant, a bar, an interesting shop, or a three-flat. In fact, the restaurants and shops often occupy the ground floors of the three-flats. As Jacobs writes, along a street like that, people are always around, throughout the day, living their lives—unlike in the suburbs, where shops close and the area is deserted.

Or this, in the chapter "Gradual money and cataclysmic money," in which she takes on blacklisting and slum clearing:

The immense new suburban sprawls of American cities have not come about by accident—and still less by the myth of free choice between cities and suburbs. Endless suburban sprawl was made practical (and for many families was actually mandatory) through the creation of something the United States lacked until the mid-1930s: a national morgage market specifically calculated to encourage suburban home building. ...

City people finance the building of suburbs. To be sure, one of the historic missions of cities, those marvelously productive and efficient places, is to finance colonization.

But you can run anything into the ground.

Fortunately, over the past 50 years, communities and their planners have listened to Jacobs. She herself worked tirelessly (and successfully) to prevent Robert Moses from destroying SoHo and Chinatown with the Lower Manhattan Expressway.

I should note, I put the book down several times because it made me mad—not at Jacobs, but at people like Le Corbusier and Robert Moses. I'm about to put Robert Caro's The Power Broker on my reading stack*, as I put Jane Jacobs next to Suburban Nation in my bookshelves.

Labor Day link roundup

Clearing out the ballast:

  • Despite the initial forecasts, Hurricane Isaac's remnants missed Chicago.
  • Beloit College, just outside Rockford, Ill., has published its Class of 2016 Mindset. Since 1998 they've published a list of facts about the way incoming first-years think. This year's list includes "Women have always piloted war planes and space shuttles" and "A bit of the late Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, has always existed in space."
  • The Economist's Gulliver blog bemoans Tampa's and Charlotte's piss-poor walkability, and how Tampa especially repudiates the loony-right conspiracy theory about Agenda 21.
  • The wackos also got on NPR this morning with a story about yet more efforts to forbid Sharia law, which ended with the vacuous understatement "The proposals are a solution in search of a problem, according to many." Apparently NPR just wanted to shine a light on the crazy without correcting it.
  • Speaking of crazy, with just four weeks left in the season, the Cincinnati Reds are the best team in baseball right now, with the Washington Nationals just behind them. The Cubs, now 51-82, earned their "E" just yesterday, fully two weeks after the Houston Astros (41-93) became the first team to earn mathematical elimination this season.

Updates as conditions warrant.

August squeaks through to continue the record

August marked Chicago's 11 straight month of above-normal temperatures:

[A] string of warmer than normal readings never before observed here. Meteorological summer itself is to finish as the third-warmest in 142 years of weather records here. Not surprisingly, the season’s been a sunnier than usual one producing 76% of its possible sun—more than summer’s usual 66% here.

The Climate Prediction Center forecasts an above-normal autumn as well. Good thing the election is about empty chairs at empty tables...

Ohio in-person early voting restored

Federal judge Peter Economus ruled today that a Republican law to curtail in-person early voting, in which people can vote in Ohio up until the Monday before election day, was unconstitutional:

The law had made an exception allowing for in-person early voting over that final weekend for military personnel, voters who fell under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voter Act, or UOCAVA. Supporters of the law said that eliminating early voting over those final three days could hurt those voters who otherwise might have more limited access to voting.

But the judge took a different view, saying that opening in-person early voting over those final three days to all voters would not harm those military families. Instead, Economus said the only harm to those voters was that Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, had not set uniform hours for voting over that final weekend.

"This court notes that restoring in-person early voting to all Ohio voters through the Monday before Election Day does not deprive UOCAVA voters from early voting," the judge ruled. "Instead, and more importantly, it places all Ohio voters on equal standing."

Ohio, like many Republican-controlled states, has taken steps to limit the voting rights of exactly those citizens most likely to vote for Democrats. Since the Republican platform is remarkably unpopular once people get to know it, this is their "plan B." It would be sad, if it weren't fundamentally wrong.

GOP needs more "angry white guys:" Graham

I can't tell whether South Carolina U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham was speaking plainly or criticizing his party's tin ear when he said yesterday, "We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term." The Washington Post puts this in context:

Exit polls from 2008 showed that 90 percent of GOP voters were white, a homogeneity that has been consistent for more than 30 years, even as the percentage of the electorate that is white has fallen.

Nonwhite voters favored Obama over Romney by better than three to one in a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll from early August; 74 percent of Latino voters and 90 percent of African Americans backed Obama.

And despite a speaker lineup in Tampa that includes Artur Davis, a black former Democratic congressman; former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice; and Utah congressional candidate Mia Love, who would be the party’s first black congresswoman if she won in November, just 2 percent of convention delegates are black.

That’s according to an analysis by David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. Bositis also said that only two members of the 165-member RNC are black and that none of the leaders of the committees responsible for drafting the GOP platform and adopting the convention rules are black.

“This Republican Party base is white, aging and dying off,” he said.

This couldn't have anything to do with the party's takeover by its loony right fringe, could it? Or the predictable outcome of Nixon's and Reagan's Southern strategy? Nah.

Russia and US liberalize bilateral visa regime

The U.S. Embassy in Moscow just announced sweeping changes to the visas that Americans can get to visit Russia:

Starting September 9, Russian and American travelers for business or tourism will be eligible to receive visas valid for multiple entries during a period of 36 months. The agreement also outlines other simplifications in the bilateral visa regime and eases visa processing time for travelers from both countries.

Thanks to the agreement, three-year, multiple-entry visas will become the standard “default” terms for U.S. citizens visiting Russia and Russian citizens visiting the United States. No formal invitation will be required to apply for a business or tourism visa, although applicants seeking Russian tourist visas must continue to hold advance lodging reservations and arrangements with a tour operator. Both sides have also committed to keep standard visa processing times under 15 days, although the circumstances of individual cases may require additional processing.

When I visited Russia in 2010, the visa application required the actual dates and modes of travel, and an official invitation from the hotel. Russian visas were only valid for the dates on the application, so missing a flight or train could cause serious difficulties crossing the border. (I saved a pdf of the rules in effect through September 9th.)

I'll be interested to see if Russian tourism picks up with this liberalization scheme.