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Neoliberal political institutions are beholden to the interests of capital and professional classes, leaving working people and communities of color without a voice to shape priorities that benefit their interests. To counteract this elite-dominated political system, the Service Employees International Union Health Care Indiana and Illinois (SEIU-HCII) and the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), worked with community organizations to form the United Working Families (UWF) Party of Illinois in 2014. UWF is a model of labor-led working class organizing in the electoral system. UWF brings together a left-labor-community alliance under an independent political party formation to champion a left-wing social democratic platform to empower working class people in their workplaces and communities, and to fight against Black and Brown oppression. UWF has provided leadership trainings for a cadre of working class, people of color and women and has been successful electing their leaders to municipal, county and state level government offices.

Both mainstream and progressive commentators heralded President Obama's economic stimulus program as sounding the death knell of the global neoliberal accumulation regime and inaugurating a form of Neo-Keynesianism. Although some funds have been earmarked for urban infrastructure projects, elite actors have used the shock of the crisis as a pretext to delimit and dismantle the public sector. In this article, we examine the case of Chicago's public transportation in order to evaluate these countervailing forces. On one hand, federal stimulus money has been used to rehabilitate deteriorating public transit infrastructure. On the other hand, the response of local elites to budget shortfalls caused by the current economic crisis has involved support for a combination of service cuts and intensified attacks on unions to "share the burden". Our study of neoliberalism in Chicago's public transit sector illustrates how local elites strategically wield the state as an instrument for accumulation, whether by retrenching the role of the state or mobilizing for a more activist role of the state in seeding accumulation.