Olympics The Chicago Way
From an essay by Steve Bartin in Newgeography.com:
Most American cities chose not to bid on the 2016 summer Olympics and with good reason. With the exception of the 1984 Los Angeles games, the Olympics has proved a big time money loser in city after city. More often than not, it has been staged more for the prestige – think of Berlin in 1936 or China in 2008 – it brings to regimes, particularly autocratic ones.
In Chicago, prestige is important, but graft is the real king. In Chicago, one of the most corrupt big cities, the Olympics represents, more than anything, a grand chance for a giant heist.
Economists have a technical term for profiting from the political process: it’s called rent-seeking. Chicago’s politically favored businesses, unions, and insiders with ties to Mayor Daley and Alderman Burke have perfected this activity. The Olympics just provide another opportunity to clean up at the public expense. – read the full essay –
A disaster for the people of Chicago..and I mean $$$$$$.. The only beneficiaries is the PORK exchange in City Hall. 🙁
Is it just me, or does Daley sound like those traveling salesmen you’d hear about, promising an elixir or tonic to cure ‘all that ails ya?’
I could see a political cartoon of him standing on a podium in front of all these people, with a ‘2016 miracle elixir’ that will be the cure all/end all to their problems.
Kind of like that one guy in ‘Pete’s Dragon’ who rolls into town. He’s already ripped the people off before (one person now has pink hair, one woman ballooned in weight against the word of one of his elixirs), but the man and his assistant then manage to trick them again with an energizing elixir, and they’re of course, like gullible fools, eager to ‘believe’ in this remarkable new item.