Rampant Magazine
City budgets are key targets of local organizing and Defund campaigns, but cities themselves are bound by much larger financial forces. A recent book by Destin Jenkins details how cities became trapped by banks and credit rating agencies intent on austerity and racism.
As DSA members prepare for their bi-annual convention this summer, the Sprout Slate in Chicago has emerged as a prominent contender. Rampant sat down with “the slate the uprisings produced” to discuss their thoughts on abolition, mutual aid, multiracial organizing and the future of the movement.
Dorothy Holmes describes her fight for a special prosecutor and carrying forward the citywide struggle for an end to police violence.
Bones discovered in 1989 revealed the gruesome history of eugenics, experimentation, and murder at the Dunning facility in Chicago. Far from an aberration, the brutality of white supremacy was integral to Chicago’s past, showcased at the famous World's Fair that put Chicago on the map.
A Chicago cop put a bullet in a thirteen-year-old child, and many are spinning narratives laced with typical racist dehumanization in an attempt to obscure this fact. It’s the cops who should be under the spotlight, disbanded, and abolished.
Mutual aid efforts during Chicago’s brutal winter saved the lives of many residents who were willfully neglected by City Hall and attacked by the police. The polar vortex mutual aid effort shows the importance of mutual aid as a site of class struggle.
The genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar led many refugees to settle in Chicago. Now, as mass protests roil their home country, Rohingya human rights advocate Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque speaks to his community’s harrowing experience and the current revolt.
This week Chicagoans have a chance to show up for a police torture survivor who is still suffering unjust incarceration.
Corporate polluters continue to make millions from Chicago city government contracts.
The City of Chicago has failed to keep people safe from toxic polluters during the pandemic.
"We're not sitting around waiting for anyone to recognize us as a union in order to be or act as a union." An Amazon worker in Chicago talks to Rampant about what it will take to unionize the behemoth.
Workers at Uptown’s beloved Vietnamese restaurant Tank Noodle shouldn’t be left holding the bag for their Trump-loving bosses’ malfeasance.
Seven days ago a group of activists started a hunger strike to fight to stop the city from allowing a toxic General Iron metal shredder from being built on Chicago’s Southeast Side.
A teacher and CTU member makes the case for rejecting the unsafe reopening plan put forward by CPS and building on the brave actions that teachers have taken to reach this point.
In the two years since Lightfoot was elected, the mayor has deflected responsibility, brutally repressed protests, and delivered working Chicagoans a big bag of nothing. Here’s the timeline of her uninspiring tenure so far.
In last Friday’s press conference, where Mayor Lori Lightfoot attacked the Chicago Teachers Union, she undermined the efforts of those negotiating on behalf of CPS. Just what is she trying to accomplish?
Behind the friendly face of the Dill Pickle Food Co-op, workers laboring in dangerous pandemic conditions are being refused hazard pay by a vindictive management. The union is fighting back.
The pandemic has triggered a housing crisis, a looming cataclysmic wave of evictions, and the seeds of a new housing movement fighting to defend and fight against this current situation and against the return to so-called normal.
Public schools cannot be reopened safely during the current wave of the pandemic, but imagine what they could provide if they were repurposed to save lives, not endanger them.
A Chicago teacher describes the background to the current struggle against the mayor’s attempts to reopen schools as the pandemic rages.
A real life St Nick, hounded by the Klan, distributed not just toys but solidarity and antiracist militancy
In the most contentious Chicago budget vote in a generation, four “progressive” alderpeople buckled to Lightfoot’s pressure and allowed an antiworker austerity city budget to pass for 2021.
A Chicago social worker explains how the mental health crisis response system put forward by the ‘Treatment not Trauma’ plan is a crucial step toward permanently improving the fabric of Chicago’s public health and public safety independent of the police.
Community organizers stand up to a toxic polluter and city officials who continue to practice environmental racism on Chicago’s Southeast side.
