Rahm Emanuel Is in the Running for a Top Ambassador Post.
One thing Emanuel can't be accused of is inconsistency. During his political career, he has steadily served elite corporate interests, and rarely the interests of the broad public or the causes of racial justice or peace.
Emanuel rose to prominence as the finance director for Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. He excelled at pulling in large checks from super-wealthy individuals. As a high-level Clinton administration aide, he played a major role -- and bragged about it -- in the passage of the disastrous NAFTA trade bill, which was strongly opposed by unions, environmentalists and most Democrats in Congress. He also was a spark plug for passage of the mass incarceration-oriented 1994 Crime Bill , with prison term-lengthening provisions like three strikes.
In 1996, Emanuel
boasted
to a Washington Post reporter of the administration's
tough policies on wedge issues -- crime, welfare, and recently
immigration.In a memo that year, he
urged Clinton
to move rightward on immigration policy by working to claim and achieve
record deportations of criminal aliens. The next year,
Emanuel's approach
was explained by a senior staffer at the Immigration and Naturalization
Service who worked closely with him: As long as we dealt with illegal
immigration, we could be to the right of Atilla the Hun. Rahm felt that
Americans believed too many people were coming into this country, too many
foreigners, so he wanted to show the administration returning people,
deporting them, putting up bigger fences, sending them back.
In July 1996, the Republican-controlled Congress pushed through its
punitive "welfare reform" bill that ended the Aid to Families with
Dependent Children program, added work requirements and gave states the
power to slash support. In the intense White House debate over whether to
sign the bill, Emanuel was one of the strongest voices urging Bill Clinton
not to veto the bill
, as the president had done with earlier GOP welfare bills. Clinton signed
the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996,
prompting
an
outcry
from anti-poverty
activists
and high-level administration resignations.
After leaving the Clinton administration in 1998, Emanuel made a quick
$18 million in two and a half years
as managing director of the Wall Street investment bank Wasserstein
Perella, working out of its Chicago office.
Elected to Congress in November 2002, Emanuel
supported
George W. Bush's disastrous Iraq invasion, and defended the war after
most Democrats in Congress and
most of the public
had
turned against
it. As head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006,
Emanuel seemed oblivious to the change in public opinion. While he took
credit for Democrats regaining the House majority, his selection of
right-leaning candidates,
including Iraq war supporters like himself and former Republicans,
ultimately led to
GOP gains
.
While serving as President Obama's chief of staff in 2009 and 2010,
Emanuel argued for mollifying healthcare reform opponents by significantly
weakening Obamacare
. (He acknowledged years later it was a good thing Obama didn't listen to
him.) In a 2010 meeting with liberal leaders who planned to publicly
pressure the Democratic Party's conservative wing into supporting
healthcare reform, Emanuel famously called them
fucking retarded
Emanuel was known in D.C. for
hyper-combativeness
(earning him the nickname Rahmbo and his ability to gain positive
spin from corporate media: He is on a first-name basis with every
political reporter in Washington, a Washington Post columnist
asserted.
After being elected mayor of Chicago in 2011, Emanuel's administration
faced a
series of scandals
that included concerted warfare against the teachers union and the
closing of 49 public schools,
many in black neighborhoods
.
In his 2015 bid for re-election, he was forced into a runoff by progressive
challenger Jesus Chuy Garcia, a contest that would be decided largely
by African American voters. Emanuel very likely would have lost the
election except for the fact that for 13 months, through the duration of
the campaign,
his administration suppressed
a horrific
dashcam video
showing the death of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, an African American
who'd been shot 16 times by a police officer as he walked away from the
officer. (The city had paid $5 million to McDonald's family without a
lawsuit having been filed.)
Soon after a judge ordered the city of Chicago to release the video, polls
found
that only 17 percent of Chicagoans believed Emanuel when he said he'd
never seen the video and that most city residents wanted him to resign as
mayor.
When it was reported last November that Biden was considering him for a
cabinet post, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
tweeted
: Rahm Emanuel helped cover up the murder of Laquan McDonald. Covering
up a murder is disqualifying for public leadership.
Then-Congressman-elect Mondaire Jones
added
: That he's being considered for a cabinet position is completely
outrageous and, honestly, very hurtful.
Emanuel's 30-year campaign against pro-working-class policy reforms is
unending. Asked last August
how he would advise
the Biden administration, he told CNBC: Two things I would say if I was
advising an administration. One is there's no new Green Deal, there's no
Medicare for All.
If Rahm Emanuel becomes the ambassador to China or Japan -- countries with
the world's second- and third-largest economies -- he will gain new
leverage in a region bristling with ethnic and military tensions.
Everything about his record indicates that such power would be vested in
the wrong hands.
Days after Biden's election, AOC
told
the New York Times that Emanuel's inclusion in the Biden
administration would signal, I think, a hostile approach to the
grassroots and the progressive wing of the party.
We'll soon find out whether Biden is willing to send such a signal.
______________________
Jeff Cohen is an activist, author and co-founder of RootsAction.org. He was
an associate professor of journalism and the director of the Park Center
for Independent Media at Ithaca College and founder of the media watch
group FAIR. In 2002-2003, he was a producer and pundit at MSNBC. He is the
author of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author
of many books including
War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death
. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020
Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive
director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.
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