Obama's knockdown, drag-out fight with Chicago's South Side denizens

President Obama was in for a surprise when he found that Chicago's denizens aren't as enamored of him as he thought they were. He's running into heavy flak from the very people he used to community-organize for on the South Side of Chicago, taking incoming for not giving them a big enough slice of the pie in the establishment of his presidential library going up there. What's more, they say they want to hold him "accountable" for not doing anything to better the lot of black people during his presidency, which is probably the real issue, and one that never got discussed at the time. Well, it's being discussed now, right in front of him, and it's not pretty.

The Chicago Tribune reports: At a community forum Wednesday night, a discussion about the proposed agreement morphed into a shouting match over whether Obama actually loves black people. One man in the audience yelled, "No," while others said he wasn't necessarily "their brother." Seems that when you hector people to stand up to "the man," you can't be surprised when they stand up when you are "the man." The fight centers on a demand a group of community organizers calls "a community benefits agreement." As with unions, the shakedown calls for Obama to agree to dispense x number of jobs for local residents. Obama wants nothing to do with that with his presidential papers, so he's claiming he doesn't want to pit one group of community organizers against another. Any other place, there'd be NIMBYs whining about zoning regulations, but on the South Side, where community organizers such as Obama have been active for years, you get mau-mauing for "jobs" and other political spoils from the locals, just as Tom Wolfe described in his essay about San Francisco welfare bureaucrats and their indigent charges energized by community organizers, called "Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers." As fun as it is to see Obama finding himself on the sharp end of community organizing as he constructs his huge, windowless, cementy, prison-like presidential library on the South Side of Chicago, there's obviously truth in the charges that he hasn't done much of anything for black people. For one thing, there's the Chicago murder rate, which is starting to rival that of Central American countries. Most of the victims are black. Meanwhile, race relations with whites and others are no great shakes, either, with polls showing they deteriorated rather than improved. Education was a loser, too, with Obama cutting net funds for black educational establishments as well as shutting down charter school vouchers in places like Washington, D.C. Under Obama, bad race relations expanded even as Obama billed himself as the centrist healer – they actually reached an all-time low, according to this poll. Black incomes went down, the black unemployment rate went up, and blacks were thrown back to welfare programs such as food stamps just to survive. With a record like that, it's downright tragic that black people did not speak out earlier. Now they're stuck with Obama in their neighborhood, and for once, they are just protesting the plutocrat. What do they have to lose?