Martin: Welcome to our first broadcast of First Voice of 2011. We’re excited to be back on the air. Today we’re going to be talking about the election…its 14 days away…were going to be voting for the new mayor for the first time in more than 20 years. Mayor Richard M. Daley is not going to be on the ballot…we are also going to be voting for our local aldermen…We’re going to be playing some audio from Don Washington…the founder of mayortutorial.com…its basically a website that he calls an instrument to be dangerously informed. His effort is basically to inform the people of Chicago as much as they can about the mayoral election and all the candidates in them.
Mayra Carrera:
In local news, Attorney General Lisa Madigan decides to sue to block John Birch from receiving more pension payments just days after the city’s police pension board allowed him to collect $3,039 a month. “The public should never have to pay for the retirement of a corrupt public official” says Lisa Madigan.
In national news, the Obama Administration is planning on spending $53 billion dollars over the next six years for the production of a high speed rail network in 25 years time.
Miguel: Welcome back to first voice 90.5 FM Chicago. Earlier this month we had the pleasure of being able to interview some of the candidates for this years mayoral election. We interviewed Dr. Patricia Watkins, Gery Chico, and also Miguel Del Valle. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with mayoral candidate Miguel del Valle as part of our Candidates Speak series.
Miguel del Valle for Radio Arte’s Candidates Speak Series:
Martin: What about communities that have always lived in recession levels of poverty? 45% of Chicago families live below the poverty line and 1 in 3 children live below the poverty line. What is your vision to address that?
Miguel del Valle, Mayoral Cantidate: My slogan is a mayor for all Chicago, a mayor for every neighborhood…Chicago is known a city that works and convert it into a city that works together…the city that works has worked very well for folks downtown…our central economic engine, but it hasn’t worked well for many neighborhoods…in a world class city we have food deserts…we have poverty…[we must prepare] individuals with skills that the workforce is in need of, that the employers are in demand of…a lot of job growth in the future will come from small businesses…the climate for small businesses in Chicago is oppressive…the regulations…it needs to change…[Chicago] is a not a business friendly city as it stands.
Walter Lopez: For some reason there’s never enough money in Chicago…I think the city makes more than enough its just a question of where is this money going?
Zé: Hundreds of municipalities across America will go bankrupt in 2011 according to a leading woman in business, Meredith Whitney, who accurately predicted the credit crunch in2007…her report from December 2010 foreshadowed today’s Wall Street Journal cover story, the first paragraph of which read: “Governors around the U.S. are proposing to balance their states’ budgets with a long list of cuts, and almost no new taxes, reflecting a goal by politicians from both parties to erase deficits chiefly by shrinking government” which will affect the at-risk populations…the mentally ill, the homeless, those at risk nutritionally…that will be a key issue.
Martin: Money is a huge issue and the people who are in charge of making sure our budgets are finalized and that they reflect the needs and concerns of the people are the people that we vote in…I think its really interesting that a lot of times…if you look at this city’s history there’s been a very low turn out for the mayoral elections.
Zé: I had a good conversation with a woman from Little Village on the Pink Line she told me the community was more apt to follow an honest to goodness activist on the streets…than the political class. I think people are more willing to believe authentic people that are not seeking political power as much as they are just seeking to change the conditions of their neighborhood.
Marisol: I think the lack of voter turn out had to do with the fact that people expected Mayor Daley to win..I hope that this year will be a much higher voter turn out since Daley is not on the ballot this year.
Mayra: We will have more of a turnout…there is going to be a change and people want to make sure this change is for the better and that they elect the correct candidate
Martin: Are we really going to have change? Marisol is saying that there is going to be more voters and so are you (Mayra). The guy that is at the front right now of the race is Rahm Emmanuel he’s raised almost, I think its $14 million dollars for this race and the candidate that we just played, Miguel del Valle has raised $200 or $400,000 compared to $14 million… So is true change possible if someone like Rahm Emmanuel is elected?
Zé: I think Rahm Emmanuel’s change will be about as much change as Obama. I mean you really have to–
Martin: Burn.
Zé: –follow the money–
Producers chuckle
Zé: No, its just, its neither a negative or a positive observation its just an objective observation. I mean the reality is money exists behind politics. Following the citizens united ruling…we all saw what happened once you open the floodgates to a corporate domineering of elections…our elections just as every other agency of the government are ruled by those that are the most wealthy and the most powerful.
Martin: So this guy I interviewed Don Washington his whole duty is to look at media and say is it doing its job and its job is to be the watchdog of democracy to inform us to make better decisions and to be the private investigator for citizen…
Interview, Don Washington: “The closer you are to being someone who’s desperate the more you need the political process to work and the further away you are from it usually.” …Media everyday don’t do a good job and I’m not saying I am doing a better job I am doing a different job…media does a good job covering the spectacle…not covering things that help us vote.
Music Break
Martin: That was the first excerpt from the interview with Don Washington. Right now we are going to go to Dante who is calling from outside of Pilsen.
Dante: Hey I’m walking in this horrible weather right now… so I’m just going to pull myself aside…For me as someone who’s lived in the city a few years the two big issues are housing and crime because you got so many politicians like Rahm Emmanuel talking about the way to solve bullying…(inaudible) against queer and transgendered kids in schools and gang violence with more cops…who is going to deal with crime…and not just put more cops on the street? The second issue is housing, most people in this city are housing poor this means they spend 2/3rds of their income on housing. We have neighborhood across the city from Bronzeville to Logan Square, to Pilsen that have been gentrified so rapidly that their ethnic and…economic demographic is changing rapidly that means a loss of local businesses, that means a loss of local culture, that means people getting pushed further west and further south…I am only going to vote for someone that is talking about that at this point. I am not going to spend my time voting for someone who is ignoring what is actually happening in the city…What about like Rahm Emmanuel wants to cut STD clinic funding and doesn’t want to increase the funding of that its like, hey, we live in a city that has the third largest rising population of black queer HIV numbers and where is that coming from? Its coming from…not having STD clinics that are readily available on the south and west side.
Martin: Let’s open it up to our guests, your response to that?
Zé: I think cities everywhere are going to have to start bracing for deep austerity measures the like of Detroit. Detroit obviously hit by the end of the Auto Age some 20 years ago…its 900,000 residents are at-risk…Right now its up to the communities themselves…if your government is unresponsive, its up to you guys to set up your own autonomy ..Egypt should be a huge beacon of hope to all of us…especially in such a free society.
Martin: That discourse is missing from this mayoral debate. What are other people hearing from their community from their family?
Walter: One of the big issues that my family talked about is what I like to call is this vicious cycle…to get a career you need a good education, to get a good education you need to get a job and if there’s a lack of jobs then what do you do? There’s a lot of temp agencies that I like to call sweatshop pimps.
Martin: The question I have is…I am trying to bring it back to this interview [with Don Washington] he is arguing that we are not paying enough attention to what is happening not just in the political process…but in general. There is not enough people having these conversations…about things that affect us…do you see a reason to be involved with holding your local representative accountable or even going to public forums and asking questions…does it make sense to use that process?
Walter: I think we live in a really great country because we have the freedom of speech, we have the right to go up to a politician and ask him a question and tell him whats on our minds and if we don’t start taking advantage of that…a lot of these problems are present because people lie to themselves and say you know what its not that bad, the mayor is doing a good job and I think people lie to themselves…and are afraid to get involved and ask questions.
Martin: I wanna hear from Marisol. Just on the same topic do you see people trying to get involved in this process?
Marisol: The thing is when it comes to young people they are self absorbed..they don’t connect how their politicians affect them, directly affect them so they just don’t pay attention to it. They just care more about their Facebook, the clothes they wear…its a big problem.
Zé: There are more activists now that there ever have been…I think young people care about these issues I mean the fact that we’re talking about it now is proof of that…there are avenues for this sort of activism its just that we don’t know it because the networks don’t talk about it…I mean you have to understand that our media is not looking for the interests of the people, they are looking out for their profits. That’s the way the corporate model of socializing people and selling news to people works…they respond to the people that pay them to do so…their advertisers.
Martin: That’s a perfect segway for the next tutorial…Don Washington was born in Texas raised in South Korea and he has a long history of doing political work…doing local work, got his first job as a community organizer, doing anti-gang/violence work…now he’s doing this mayoral tutorial…it is his mission to inform Chicagoans–what he calls it, to become dangerously informed–he…touches on what Zé is saying about the corporate media…will they ever cover the things we’re talking about now?
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