Olympics in Chicago may Crunch Budget, Minority Rights
Will Chicago get the Olympic games?
We can certainly hope not. All the self-promoting captains of Chicago industry and their slick corporate website (Chicago2016.org) cannot cover up the fact that the Olympics will be a double dose of Daley’s favorite gruel: public subsidies to the rich, and massive ‘urban-cleansing’ for the poor. Don’t get me wrong — I like sports too, but take a minute to figure out how many schools will have get cut in order to build the stadiums, how many homeless people locked up before Chicago is ready for the world’s wealthiest tourists and I have to conclude that it’s better just to watch it on TV.
First, the Games have always been a massive public subsidy to private enterprise, and Chicago 2016 will be no different. According to the 2016 Bid Committee’s published ‘plan’ we’re supposed to believe that private investors will pay for: constructing a kayak-whitewater course in the lake, a velodrome on Northerly Island, not to mention an 80,000 person stadium in Washington Park, and an 
Chicago’s Little Village High School (3120 S. Kostner) cost an estimated $75 million, although the Board has never presented a final price tag. Now, the Board estimated the new Westinghouse High School will cost more than $100 million. The $500 million (minimum) that would go to the Olympics is needed for school construction and other work now. (Substance photo by George Schmidt). Olympic Village in the South Loop which will then be converted to ‘mixed income housing.’ Where will these magical investors come from? Where they were when Chicago was building a publicly funded Stadium for the Bears, a publicly funded Millennium Park, not to mention paying for private development with tax dollars sucked out of our schools through TIF’s?
At press time, Mayor Daley had finally admitted that the games would cost Chicago $500 million. Think of how quickly the cost of Millennium Park increased once the claims were history and construction had begun. (More close to home in the Chicago schools, think of how five years ago a new high school could be built for $60 to $75 million — Little Village — but now a new high school is supposed to cost more than $100 million — the new Westinghouse).
Massive benefits for the cities business owners, paid at public expense. Sound familiar? It should be. The same people who are heading the charge for the Olympics, Mayor Daley and Aon’s Patrick Ryan are also the leaders of Chicago’s school privatization plan. Ryan’s close friend and colleague R. Eden Martin actually wrote “Renaissance 2010” for Mayor Daley (as the 2004 report “Left Behind” for the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club) a year before the mayor announced (in 2004) the massive privatization plan. Martin, among other things, serves on the Board of Aon Insurance, Ryan’s corporation.
The other important reason to oppose the Olympics will be the police violence, urban cleansing, and racism that will accompany them. The Olympics has always been marked by ugly suppression on a city’s ‘undesirable’ elements, as the homeless are chased away, protestors are locked up, screws are turned on blacks, minorities, and workers.
Famously, in Mexico City in 1968 hundreds of Mexican students were killed while protesting at National University. But just in case you think that Olympic repression is a foreign phenomenon, remember the 1984 Games in LA, where Police Chief Daryl Gates oversaw the jailing of thousands of young Black men in the infamous “Olympic Gang Sweeps” by reviving the notorious Anti-Syndicalism Act of 1916.
As sportswriter David Zirin points out, “The Atlanta games in 1996 were no different... as African-American occupied Public Housing was razed to the ground to make way for Olympic facilities.” Atlanta also made homelessness illegal for the occasion.
Ultimately, the Olympics is about a fantasy—a dream of our city’s powerful ‘civic fathers’ of a modern and functional global city. But theirs is a dream without poor neighborhoods, under-funded schools, homelessness, or any of the urban realities they have chosen to ignore. The Olympics is their pipe-dream, which they will impose on us while schools fall apart, public housing is neglected, and public transport crumbles. Those of us who depend on such programs for our livelihood, or well-being can hardly afford such fantasy.
