Open Letter to Alliance Members and the Movement on Supporting the Protecting Chicago Budget: We Need to Tax the Rich!

By Frank Chapman

This is a very critical moment for our movement. The struggle to get Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposed budget passed is a very critical struggle and affects all aspects of our movement because it deals with public safety, housing, employment, all of the people’s needs that need to be addressed. And it is proposing that those needs be addressed by taxing the rich, by getting them to pay their share. Instead of balancing the budget on the backs of oppressed people and the working class, which has been the foundational approach of neoliberalism, we support the Mayor’s proposal 100 percent because it breaks with that disgraceful tradition that has intensified the suffering and oppression of our people for decades. 

This is a very important fight and it opens the doors of progress for all the various struggles we’re involved in, particularly the struggle for community control of the police and justice for those who have lost loved ones to police crimes, to address the problems of torture survivors, the struggle to keep our community safe and not be subjected to military occupation and the gestapo tactics of ICE. All of these issues pivot around this budget. We have to be very very clear that we need to mobilize all of our people to do a mass lobbying of their alderpeople to demand that they pass the Protecting Chicago budget. This is critical in the fight against the scorched earth policies of the Trump administration that have been employed against our city and cities around the country, vis a vis the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” which is really the Big Ugly Budget. This is the time to sound the tocsin, to rally all of our troops to pressure their alderpeople to vote YES on the Protecting Chicago Budget.