Citizens Finally have Their Say

Ben Joravsky chronicles the 2016 community meetings in The Chicago Reader:

In a more perfect democracy, the campaign to host the 2016 Olympic Games would have been the subject of intense public scrutiny from the moment Mayor Daley proposed it three years ago.

The financial projections would’ve been scrutinized by independent-minded aldermen and their whiz-kid staffers. There would’ve been public hearings where ordinary citizens would get to question Daley’s Olympics planners. There might even have been a referendum, carefully worded to let people know exactly what they were getting into—something along the lines of “This could cost us all a ton of money. Do you still want it?”

And if the answer were yes, we’d have moved on to try to win the International Olympic Committee’s approval.

But what Chicago has is not an ideal democracy. So here we are three years later, heatedly pursuing Mayor Daley’s Olympics dream whether we want to or not.

Read the full story. Get the full schedule of the 2016 community meetings. GO AND DEMAND THE TRUTH!