Ryan Banister — Chicago Police Department Caught Hiding Millions In Secret Asset Forfeiture Fund

A detailed report released in September 2016 by the Chicago Reader unveiled a secret civil asset forfeiture fund that amounted to nearly $50 million in seized cash which the Chicago Police Department was attempting to keep for themselves. The detailed analysis shows that CPD officials were attempting to pocket 65% of the cash and assets they brought in through civil asset forfeiture. This is policing for profit, and it is no different than highway robbery.

Who are the criminals? 

Of course, 50 million is only a drop in the bucket compared to the total extracted yearly from the US economy through various forms of rent that have been legalized, and the perps get to keep it. The CEO of Wells Fargo was forced to resign — with a 120 million golden parachute. But the poor guy has to suffer the embarrassment.

The Daily Sheeple

Chicago Police Department Caught Hiding Millions In Secret Asset Forfeiture Fund

Ryan Banister 

Rahm fighting for his political life in Chicago. Progressive candidate may win runoff

This would be a positive if another one of these neoliberal "faux-centrist" Democrats goes down. Progressives maybe are starting to make inroads? Think DeBlasio in NYC.

Rahm sold the city of Chicago to the highest bidder, cutting education spending, social supports, going after unions--nothing different than what Scott Walker did in Wisconsin at the state level.

And if you don't think so, look who's defending him now: Republicans. Check out the comments from Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL). Typical mindless fear mongering.

Chicago could follow Detroit into bankruptcy if Mayor Rahm Emanuel is not re-elected, Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) warned Monday.

“Rahm’s re-election is essential to maintaining the value of Chicago’s debt market. We need a strong capable leader… I would worry about the value of the Chicago debt if Rahm was not re-elected…. It’s a concern if we have some of the less responsible people running against him,” Kirk said. 

Idiot, crushing the Chicago economy with austerity is good for the city's ability to service its debt? What is he talking about? Moron. And he'll vote with Senate Republicans to not increase the debt ceiling I'm sure. That's obviously his idea of "capable" leadership.

Rahm's in trouble. Let's hope he's done.

Juan Thompson — Report: Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago Police Operating Domestic Black Site

Chicago will be Chicago. Al Capone is looking like one of the good guys. Add Rahm's name to the list that should be in a dock at The Hague along with George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Barack Obama. So far, Joe Biden seems to be just a war-profiteer.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago Police Department is operating a CIA-style black site on the city’s West Side, according to an explosive new report fromThe Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman. The facility, an otherwise plain warehouse known as Homan Square, also houses military-style vehicles, according to Ackerman. 

The Guardian reports that the CPD detains mostly poor, black and brown people at Homan. Once at the site, detainees are allegedly beaten by police, shackled for hours and denied access to counsel. There is no booking at Homan Square, so details about who has been detained at the facility are scarce. “Witnesses, suspects or other Chicagoans who end up inside do not appear to have a public, searchable record entered into a database indicating where they are,” Ackerman wrote. “Lawyers and relatives insist there is no way of finding their whereabouts.”

The Intercept
Report: Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago Police Operating Domestic Black Site

Juan Thompson

Spencer Ackerman — Bad lieutenant: American police brutality, exported from Chicago to Guantánamo

Torture report

Exclusive: At the notorious wartime prison, Richard Zuley oversaw a shocking military interrogation that has become a permanent stain on his country. Part one of a Guardian investigation reveals he used disturbingly similar tactics to extract confessions from minorities for years – as a police officer in urban America.

When the Chicago detective Richard Zuley arrived at Guantánamo Bay late in 2002, US military commanders touted him as the hero they had been looking for.

Here was a Navy reserve lieutenant who had spent the last 25 years as a distinguished detective on the mean streets of Chicago, closing case after case – often due to his knack for getting confessions.

But while Zuley’s brutal interrogation techniques – prolonged shackling, family threats, demands on suspects to implicate themselves and others – would get supercharged at Guantánamo for the war on terrorism, a Guardian investigation has uncovered that Zuley used similar tactics for years, behind closed police-station doors, on Chicago’s poor and non-white citizens. Multiple people in prison in Illinois insist they have been wrongly convicted on the basis of coerced confessions extracted by Zuley and his colleagues.

The Guardian examined thousands of court documents from Chicago and interviewed two dozen people with experience at Guantánamo and in the Chicago criminal-justice system. The results of its investigation suggests a continuum between Guantánamo interrogation rooms and Chicago police precincts. Zuley’s detective work, particularly when visited on Chicago’s minority communities, contains a dark foreshadowing of the United States’ post-9/11 descent into torture.

Add another name to the list that will forever live in infamy.

Disintegrating American soft power.

Dick Zuley’s history as a military interrogator at Guantánamo and a police interrogator in Chicago scrambles that narrative. It suggests a continuum between police abuses in urban America and the wartime detention scandals that continue to do persistent damage to the international reputation of the United States. 

Chicago, in particular, has its own deep and infamous history with police torture, with black Chicagoans its primary victims. 

The city’s police violence “was institutionalized,” said Tracy Siska, the executive director of the Chicago Justice Project – and continues, in different forms, to this day.
“Today’s interrogation rooms … the techniques are more sophisticated,” Siska told the Guardian. “It’s around sleep deprivation, around food deprivation, isolation, what you’d consider touchless torture, which is more effective and doesn’t leave any marks.”

Disgusting.

The Guardian
Bad lieutenant: American police brutality, exported from Chicago to Guantánamo

Spencer Ackerman
ht Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism

Paul Buchheit — Democrat Rahm Emanuel Puts Chicago Up for Sale

Chicago is being privatized. Assets are being sold off, Wall Street debt is mounting, and the mayor conducts business with multi-millionaire donors who often reap benefits from their connections to City Hall. The people of Chicago, who will be electing their next mayor on February 24, need to know the facts about their city's financial problems. Some of these facts won't be found in the mainstream media.

Like Detroit in 2013, Chicago is becoming a symbol of a divided nation, of a society crippled by a 35-year-old notion that the "public good" is somehow un-American. Other U.S. cities have learned that their people and their public services are not products to be bought and sold. Chicago, under Rahm Emanuel and Richie Daley and an assortment of Illinois Governors, has been headed in the other direction.…

And Rahm is an up-and-coming Democratic insider with ambitions for higher office. TINA takes on new meaning. There is no alternative to two faction-one party rule in American oligarchic "democracy".

Buzz flash
​Democrat Rahm Emanuel Puts Chicago Up for Sale

Paul Buchheit For Buzzflash At Truthout

Alexander Reed Kelly — Obama Selects Billionaire Campaign Backer as Commerce Secretary

True colors showing?

Truthdig
Obama Selects Billionaire Campaign Backer as Commerce Secretary
Alexander Reed Kelly

Greg Palast in on the case, Billionaire Bankster 
Breaks into Obama's Cabinet.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell — The secret: Why Obama really, really wants to cut Social Security

Some of you may be amazed that a Democratic President has, for many years, been so insistent on cutting Social Security. He’s made you believe he is “giving in” for the sake of “compromise,” but in fact, he is as right-wing-ruthless as the Republicans, when it comes to cutting benefits to the middle-and lower-income groups.
It’s no compromise. He actively want’s cuts. Further, this self-anointed “friend of the middle class” could hardly wait to raise FICA, the most regressive tax in American history.
So what motivates this right-winger in left-wing clothing? Here’s a clue:

Monetary Sovereignty
The secret: Why Obama really, really wants to cut Social Security
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell