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Big banks like Chase have repeatedly targeted communities, taxpayers, and even our schools with predatory debt. It's time to fight back.
Chicago’s school year kicked off amid a looming budget crisis that jeopardizes stability for both students and teachers. At the heart of the issue is a silent killer of public education: predatory bank loans, particularly from JPMorgan Chase.
During a bargaining session with the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), I urged Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to stop allowing big banks to hold Chicago students hostage. Instead of delaying contract negotiations with teachers and risking program cuts that harm students, CPS and state officials should take legal action to recover the funds lost due to these toxic bank deals.
CPS has a deficit projection of over half a billion dollars, perpetuated by the several hundred million dollars in predatory loans from banks like JPMorgan Chase taken out nearly a decade ago. These loans have strangled CPS finances and prevented the district from providing the high-quality education Chicago's children deserve.
Predatory loans are a familiar problem for families in Chicago and around the country. These risky loans are hawked as a short-term solution to fill a gap in finances–with a steep interest rate buried in the fine print that balloons over time.
Chicago Public Schools should hold banks like Chase accountable for the harm they’ve caused Chicago’s schoolchildren.
Chase has repeatedly targeted communities, taxpayers, and even our schools with predatory debt. Chase and its predecessor banks pushed Black and brown Chicagoans into the predatory subprime mortgages that caused the 2008 financial crisis, leading to a tsunami of foreclosures that resulted in a massive loss of household wealth in communities of color.
And nearly 10 years ago, Chase closed a predatory deal with CPS that has haunted our finances ever since.
CPS was already reeling from drastic cuts to special education services in 2016, prompted by the immediate payment of $234 million in termination fees for bad deals they entered into a decade prior. An unfair school funding formula forced 50 schools to shutter three years earlier and continued to destabilize the same South and West side neighborhoods.
A twin set of threats were on the horizon: a potential takeover of schools by Governor Bruce Rauner, a Republican who was hellbent on making Illinois more like Texas, and a threat by Mayor Rahm Emanuel to lay off 6,000 teachers to close a budget gap caused by structural underfunding.
The school district desperately needed funds to pay for projects like lead abatement. Rather than face a takeover or mass layoffs, they decided to issue bonds in order to pay the termination fee. But because CPS’s credit rating had been downgraded to “junk” just a few months prior, financial giants like Chase and Nuveen exploited the opportunity.
Banks purchased the bonds from CPS at a lowball price but then sold them to other investors just months later for a much higher payoff. Over a span of two months, Chase bank made a 9.5% profit on $150 million in bonds through this arbitrage scheme, an annualized profit of 82%. This calls into question whether Chase met its legal obligation to give CPS a fair price for the bonds. Our schools are still impacted by these bad deals, paying $200 million annually for loans taken out during this moment of crisis.
CPS was also the victim of toxic interest rate swaps deals that cost the district, Chicago, and the state of Illinois hundreds of millions of dollars in the early 2000s. Banks had marketed swaps as a way for cash-strapped governments to save money, but they were laden with hidden risks that materialized as a result of the 2008 financial crisis, causing payments to skyrocket and costing taxpayers a fortune.
As with Chicago’s parking meter and Skyway deals, future generations of taxpayers were stuck holding the bag. From 2012 to 2016, the City of Chicago handed over $145 million to Chase Bank alone to terminate these toxic swaps.
CPS should hold banks like Chase accountable for the harm they’ve caused Chicago’s schoolchildren. There is strong reason to believe the banks that trapped CPS into these predatory deals violated their legal responsibilities to the district. While the district has improved its financial health since 2016, recovering the millions lost to predatory lending would help build on their progress.
Decades of underfunding and predatory banking have swallowed the district’s reserves. Now, faced with a federal reduction that could slash funding by $800 per student, the district has reached an inflection point: Will CPS hold banks accountable and fund the programs, resources, and staff that students deserve—or will they make cuts that set kids back?
It is easy to stand on a police line. It’s easy to yell at politicians. It’s easy to say things and do things by yourself. It’s hard to organize your neighbors and talk to new people about things they don’t immediately understand. But we must.
A few weeks ago, I plunged into Lake Michigan. Unlike usual, the water felt warm. It was easy to run all the way in and easy to float over the waves. Montrose beach was crowded with families, pitching tents to keep out of the sun. Children played, laughed, and cried. Midwesterners who still hadn’t made it out into the sun crisped their pale shoulders. It would have been a perfectly relaxing day, but fighter jets circled above everyone’s heads—doing dives and turning every which way. Mothers plugged their children’s ears and I saw a baby wearing noise canceling headphones.
It was the Air and Water show—an annual proud display of American military capabilities. They are the same jets that fly over the shores of Gaza, dropping bombs on families. That’s what I thought about—it was just by happenstance that we were there watching these planes as a performance rather than in Gaza as a weapon of mass slaughter. The more places I travel to, the more I realize how much the world looks the same. People everywhere are really kind and generous—the only thing that separates us is if the stars align to have us born under the boot of the United States or not.
As the jets flew over our heads I felt my stomach sour. In two weeks, the Democratic National Convention would come to Chicago and it was a present opportunity to make clear the contradictions that kept me up at night. Once months and months away, the DNC was finally around the corner.
Last week, members of the Democratic Party came from all parts of the country to convene in Chicago. They were coronating Kamala Harris as their presidential nominee, a woman no one really voted for. Even in the face of this blatant lack of democracy, the party members were elated to choose her. They carried signs with her husband’s name and applause erupted from the tens of thousands of people in the United Center when she declared that the United States would have the “most lethal military” in the world under her leadership. To the people well aware of the millions of people the United States killed in the last twenty years alone, her statement was a threat.
The week was marked by the obvious gaps between the people going into the United Center and the people outside of it.
There was a young woman that sat outside the exit of the Democratic National Convention on its third night reading the names of the children Israel has killed in the last ten months. She did it for hours, until her speaker battery died. She did it alone, taking care to pronounce every child’s name correctly and to say their age at the time of their murder. Without her, many of the DNC guests wouldn’t necessarily be confronted with the carnage members of their party is carrying out.
Outside the gates of the DNC I saw a young woman making sure the children of Palestine weren’t just numbers, and I saw people laughing at her for doing so. They laughed loudly and mocked her voice. They mocked the names of the dead babies. They yelled at her to leave them alone. They left the coronation ceremony livid that they had to even hear about Gaza.
That night was demoralizing, and it’s something I will remember for the rest of my life.
Democrats laugh at the names of dead children. They openly refuse to let a Palestinian speak for two minutes at their four day long event. They order riot cops on people protesting a genocide. They have their parties, fundraisers, and happy hours while bodies pile up. If they really didn’t think the genocide was so bad, they wouldn’t get so mad at us for reminding them. They knew that the people they were rallying behind are cheering on mass slaughter—they’ve just weighed their fun, their careers, and their vanity against the lives of 180,000 Palestinians and decided that nothing could be more important than themselves. I don’t care what they said to me, or my friends, but I hope our faces and our presence made them feel even an ounce of discomfort. In the best case scenario, I hope they went to sleep hearing the echoes of the martyrs' names. I still foolishly hope they turn a corner at some point.
There’s a lot to be said about the Democratic National Convention. It happened in the city with the largest Palestinian population in the United States. Plenty of our neighbors here have lost dozens and dozens of their immediate and extended families and Kamala Harris took to the stage to promise her ironclad support to their executioners. Riot cops filed into the streets, prepared to use the kettling tactics they used from the Israeli military. All of a sudden, the place I call home felt unrecognizable. The air of the coronation felt heavy—it didn’t feel like home. There were points where I was with thousands of other people, chanting in unison, but still felt so lonely. Luxury SUVs carried important people into important buildings for important events. And between us and the importance, there were police with rifles strapped to their chests.
But there were also good people. Like the girl outside the convention. And the thousand of people that marched with us. And the Shake Shack worker that joined us because he had 15 minutes before his shift started. And the security that had to kick us out to keep their job but told us how much what we were doing meant to them.
In the lead up to the DNC, we spent so much time thinking about the last DNC that happened here in 1968. Protests against the Vietnam War took to the streets in small numbers, demanding an end to the war. They were met with horrible police brutality, and mass arrests with long legal battles in their wake. Our mentors from ‘68 urged us not to be nostalgic for those days. I still admire them for going face to face with the Chicago riot cops, but I’ve also taken their reflections of ‘68 very seriously—they didn’t end the war on Vietnam. Many of them feel like they could have focused more on building a sustainable movement that people could join for the long haul. The 2024 DNC in Chicago presented us a unique opportunity—we had to take this huge moment of mass mobilization and make sure our efforts and organization doesn’t get washed away after all the balloons on the United Center floor had popped, and the important people flew out of O’Hare. When the dust settlesd and the most powerful people in the world left our city, how should we keep fighting? I was happy when so many people asked us what was next, because it meant we were thinking long term.
In our own discourses on the left, the week was consumed by the discussion of tactics—what works and what doesn’t. An organizer I know reminded us about our responsibility to be a movement people want to join. There are plenty of people who are sympathetic to our cause but haven’t figured out how to be part of it. There’s millions of people without a movement home. Our cause is already popular, it’s already growing every day. Are we doing what we can to make sure people know where to go? Are we keeping our eyes on the prize or are we getting so wrapped up in nostalgia that we can’t see what we will be capable of a year from now if we move strategically? We are nothing without the people. Our responsibility is to the people—not to our egos, not to our careers, not to the vanity of our organizations, and not to our impulses. As a movement we generally have to be better at unlearning instant gratification and also embracing a diversity of tactics. But that’s something for another day.
It is easy to stand on a police line. It’s easy to yell at politicians. It’s easy to say things and do things by yourself. It’s hard to organize your neighbors and talk to new people about things they don’t immediately understand—my hope comes from the idea that once we get really good at that, the light at the end of the tunnel will be as clear as day.
Chicagoans are loud, principled, and good people and because of that there're 2.6 million reasons to love this city. For a few days Chicagoans made certain Democrats couldn’t walk around our city without seeing and hearing about the people of Gaza. It’s my hope that we see that as a small success, and also my hope that we saw the week of mobilizations as a jumping off point for building the world we want to see.
Lake Michigan is connected to the ocean through narrow waterways along the northern border of the United States, and someone mentioned at a protest that it’s not unfathomable that the waves crashing onto the shores of Gaza were once here in Chicago, and vice versa. Even if we don’t have skies that are absent of fighter jets in my lifetime, every second spent moving us towards that kind of life was worth it. As long as we don’t throw in the towel, we are closer than ever to that reality.
This blog originally appeared here on Proof That I’m Alive."To love this country is to fight for its people, all people, working people," said the congresswoman.
Taking the stage after United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain denounced Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump as a "scab," U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made even clearer that the Democratic Party is unapologetically centering issues affecting working Americans ahead of the November elections.
The New York Democrat's speech—given just six years after she stunned the party establishment by ousting high-ranking corporate-friendly Rep. Joe Crowley—represented a shift away from a Democratic strategy that has leaned heavily on appealing to centrist voters and painting progressives like Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) as radicals, suggested some observers.
"Democrats giving AOC a primetime speaking slot at Democratic National Convention means they are finally embracing progressives and acknowledging this is part and parcel of their base and future," said journalist Wajahat Ali, noting that Ocasio-Cortez was given just 90 seconds to speak at the 2020 convention.
Ocasio-Cortez began with the story of her unexpected rise from restaurant worker to federal lawmaker, sharing that when she won her 2018 election she was one of tens of millions of Americans who were uninsured, "taking omelette orders as a waitress in New York City" while her family struggled to pay bills.
"Like millions of Americans, we were just looking for an honest shake," said the congresswoman. "And we were tired of a cynical politics that seemed blind to the realities of working people."
Those "cynical politics" are still centered by Republican politicians, Ocasio-Cortez said, who frequently attack her "by saying that I should go back to bartending."
"But let me tell you, I'm happy to, any day of the week," she said. "There is nothing wrong with working for a living."
Ocasio-Cortez told the delegates assembled at the United Center in Chicago and viewers at home that the candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, present American voters with "a rare and precious opportunity."
"In Kamala Harris, we have a chance to elect a president who is for the middle class because she is from the middle class," said the congresswoman. "She understands the urgency of rent checks and groceries and prescriptions. She is as committed to our reproductive and civil rights as she is to taking on corporate greed."
Watch Ocasio-Cortez's speech below:
Ocasio-Cortez's speech came days after Harris introduced a far-reaching economic agenda including an expanded child tax credit, a federal ban on price-gouging in the grocery and food industries, and medical debt relief. On Sunday, Harris rejected a reporter's question about how she would pay for the policies, saying policymakers should focus on the "return on investment" that would come from pulling children out of poverty and ensuring people can pay for essentials.
New York City Council member Chi Ossé said in response to Ocasio-Cortez's speech Monday night that it was "phenomenal to watch an un-bought politician who holds populist, working-class values hold center stage at the DNC" and noted that the lawmaker was greeted by "the entire room chanting" her commonly-used nickname, AOC.
Progressive strategist Waleed Shahid added that he had "never imagined" seeing two grassroots leaders who had challenged their own institutions—Ocasio-Cortez and Fain—being invited to introduce the Democratic presidential nominee.
Elevating outspoken progressive leaders was a smart strategic decision by party leaders, said Evan Sutton of Firekit Campaigns, a former communications director for the American Federation of Teachers.
Like Fain, Ocasio-Cortez took direct aim at Trump, slamming him as "a two-bit union buster [who] thinks of himself as more of a patriot than the woman who fights every single day to lift working people out from under the boots of greed, trampling on our way of life."
"We know that Donald Trump would sell this country for a dollar if it meant lining his pockets and greasing the palms of his Wall Street friends," she said. "The truth is, Don, you cannot love this country if you only fight for the wealthy and big business."
"To love this country is to fight for its people, all people, working people, everyday Americans like bartenders, and factory workers, and fast food cashiers who punch a clock and are on their feet all day, doing some of the toughest jobs out there," Ocasio-Cortez added. "Imagine having leaders in the White House who understand them, leaders like Kamala and Tim."
The congresswoman's brief mention of Israel's U.S.-funded assault on Gaza—which a majority of Democratic voters view as genocide, according to a Data for Progress poll released in May—received applause as she said Harris is "working tirelessly to secure a cease-fire in Gaza."
But some asked where the evidence of such work can be found, as Israel continues to bombard schools and other civilian infrastructure in the enclave, which U.N. experts warned last month has been pushed into famine by Israel's continued blocking of humanitarian aid.
"I understand the political value of AOC getting thunderous applause for cease-fire in Gaza—the fact that the party really wants it COULD pressure Harris—but, so we are clear, Harris is not working tirelessly for cease-fire," said author and podcast host Kate Willett. "That would involve cutting off weapons."