Today the Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, held a press conference to announce good news.  The Mayor, President Obama’s former Chief of Staff, declared that the city will build a new school in Obama's honor. The new high school will be built on the near north side of the city; not in the south side district in which Obama served as a State Senator. The school will be a Selective College Prep School, which means 70% of the students will be chosen based on high test scores and other elite criteria; 30% of the population will come from neighborhood youth.

This wonderful news comes just one year after Mayor Emanuel closed 50 Chicago public schools, on the south and west sides of the city (minority neighborhoods), due to low enrollment, lack of funds, and underuse of the schools. It was the highest mass closing of schools in American history. The city also asked the state (which is also billions of dollars in debt) for assistance in paying for a half billion dollars in pension debt owed to teachers and city employees. The Chicago Public school system’s current debt is in the billions.

And yet, somehow, with a smile on his face, and no questions from the media (he took none) the Mayor promised to spend at least sixty million dollars in tax payer money to build a new high school, located blocks away from another high school that does the same thing the new Obama school will do.

The new sixty million dollar school will look great next to the new one hundred million dollar (at least) tax payer funded Barack Obama Presidential Library, that the state has agreed to build and pay for (somehow).

To be fair, President Obama did not publicly or, that we know of, privately ask for either of these expensive projects that are to be done in his name.  These ‘choices’ of how to spend money we don’t have came from our legally elected leaders. This is not about the President. I am just angry that in a city that cannot even afford to buy toilet paper for its occupied schools. A city that just last week fired every adult in three schools, and then turned them over to private hands because it could not afford them. The Mayor has the balls to smile and say, 'we'll just spend sixty million dollars'. All this while our children can't wipe their asses.

Where are all those poor parent protestors who marched in the rain last year when the city closed the schools in their poor neighborhoods? Where are all those people who blame the rich for them not having enough money for education of the poor? Where are all those voices who cry out, tax the wealthy because they don’t need all their money? I hear nothing but silence as hundreds of millions of the people’s hard-earned money is spent for needless things by their leaders. All I see are those same leaders re-elected year after year, while millions are burned into dust.

But, it’s okay; we don’t have a spending problem, right?