Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is the man who once referred to progressive critics of “moderate” Democrats as “fucking retards.” Imagine what he thinks of the “Occupy Spring” crowd.

Rahm helped put into place major restrictions in preparing for the G8 summit that was to be held in Chicago, perhaps to recreate the conditions that led to a police riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Barack Obama, Rahm’s former boss, subsequently moved the G8 to Camp David but, as Rick Perlstein of Rolling Stone recently noted:

… The restrictive ordinances are still in place, with no hint that they’ll go away – leading Bernard Harcourt in the Guardian to wonder whether this wasn’t the point all along: “It’s almost as if Rahm Emanuel was lifting a page from Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine,” Harcourt writes. “In record time, Emanuel successfully exploited the fact that Chicago will host the upcoming G8 and NATO summit meetings to increase his police powers and extend police surveillance, to outsource city services and privatize financial gains, and to make permanent new limitations on political dissent…very rapidly and without time for dissent.” Or, as Rahm himself said, in a different context (the economic meltdown that Obama got landed with in 2009), “You never want a serious crisis go to waste.” Indeed.

You’re suprised? Don’t be. For that is how Rahm Emanuel rolls: underhandedly and opaquely, without consultation, obsessed with finding ways to expand his executive power.