Taking a breather from the horrors of the new proposed cabinet, I want to tell you about a useful new book that relates an interesting piece of Chicago history while it offers a kind of step-by-step manual on how to organize for social change. It’s all about how a small band of dedicated citizens helped defeat a massively funded and powerfully organized civic and governmental effort to bring the 2016 Olympics to the city.
Yeah, the summer Olympics are considered largely as a worldwide sports and social spectacle and viewed by most cities and nations as a kind of prize. They result in glorious shows, as we saw recently in Paris despite a few glitches; even more spectacular were the summer games in China of 2008.
The next one—2028—will be held in Los Angeles once again, after 1932 and 1984, both times proving to be profitable for what is now the real Second City. And therein lies the contentious issue. Virtually every other city that has hosted the Olympics has lost money—often billions of dollars.
Worse it leaves a lot of empty, otherwise useless structures newly built for the games and athletes support services. It can displace hundreds of people and degrade the environment. Yet hosting one generally remains desirable for government and is usually very popular with the public—but there are often pockets of dissent as we found out here in 2009 after then-Mayor Richard M. Daley launched a bid and program for the 2016 Olympics. He assembled every prominent civic leader and governmental entity for the drive, which lobbied all the appropriate national and international entities for the bid. Several other countries also sought the games, but Brazil was the main contender because South America had never been rewarded with one.
A few small entities here objected on various grounds including the fact that Chicago had such a checkered racial history. That ‘s when Tom Tresser, a long-time community and arts organizer known for his critiques of Tax Increment Financing or TIFs--along with a few associates launched the opposition group—a rag-tag batch of dedicated dissenters, whose work he details in the book at hand. Read the full review.
