Aldermen don’t have much on their docket these days–a proposed smoking ban, possible tax hikes to sort out for next year’s budget, a multibillion-dollar O’Hare expansion, questions about who and where federal corruption investigators might turn their attention to next. So last week the council skipped debate on city issues to tackle a pressing problem: the scourge of communism. The aldermen’s initial focus was on a resolution memorializing the 1945 Warsaw uprising against the Nazi occupation.
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The anticommunist activity wasn’t limited to a few minutes of eloquence on the council floor. Matlak has been working behind the scenes on a second front, this one a resolution condemning the Chinese Communist Party. His proposed measure blasts the party’s anti-Americanism, its attempts to restrict access to the Internet, its restrictions on Christian worship, and its crackdown on the Falun Gong meditation movement, and it calls for support for people who leave the party. “All persons in the United States who uphold democracy and respect human rights should help in the fight to end communist totalitarianism,” it proclaims.
But resolutions like this, though purely symbolic, can make local voters happy. In this case, word spread through the Chinese community that Matlak’s was going to be taken up by the Committee on Human Relations, which is charged with honing legislation on human rights and veterans’ issues before it goes before the full council. As it happened, the schedule for the committee meeting held just before the City Council meeting last week was chock-full of anticommunist measures. In addition to Matlak’s resolution, the committee was to take up a proposal sponsored by 11th Ward alderman James Balcer that would honor the flag of precommunist Vietnam as the “Freedom and Heritage Flag” of local Vietnamese-Americans.
“Um, can anyone here translate, please?” Ocasio asked.
“I believe, Mr. Chairman, that the fact that other cities have done this”–most notably Boston and Saint Paul–“supersedes what the State Department says,” Balcer told him.
Ocasio was cagey about the source of the calls urging him to hold the resolution. “It was one of the administrative offices,” he said. “And an alderman’s office said to look at the language.”
