I just breathed a sigh of relief

Why Chicago didn’t want the Olympics | Salon News.

This article nails the objections — Daley’s connected contractors would get all the benefits, while the rest of us who live and work in the city would not only be on the hook for the inevitable cost overruns, we would have our access to the lakefront blocked for years during construction.

Anyone who has borne the burden of “slow zones” for the last 3 years on the CTA “L” lines knows that there are better uses for the money, including increasing transit service to a level that doesn’t mean SRO crowds on the rail cars all day, all night, every day. Fixing potholes would be a close second.

These are simple things that any “great American city” should be able to handle, WITHOUT the impetus of an impending Olympics. Daley is as corrupt as his dad was, but far more incompetent (or simply oblivious, I don’t know which is worse).

It does seem to me that every city resident who’s not a recent transplant or works in the suburbs is against this, because they know that’s it’s just a front for handing out pinstripe patronage to campaign contributors. Even that would be okay if the proposal somehow was building structures in underdeveloped neighborhoods with vacant land, but as always, the development would all be in areas that are already doing fine without the Olympic “stimulus”.

Everyone here is also well aware of the Tax Increment Financing (TIF) funds that have been diverted from city revenues and amount to a “slush fund” for Daley to spend without oversight. Most here were afraid that these supposed “community development” funds would be diverted from the communities they were meant to benefit and go toward paying for the Olympics in well-financed communities near the lakefront.

There is also no doubt that Daley wants to somehow top his father’s legacy — he’s probably already done that in terms of corruption — and that’s what I thought about as I stood in Grant Park on election night last November. Here we all were, standing in the same park where his dad’s cops beat the hell out of hippies, celebrating the elevating of the first black president, and by dint of fate (Daley had little to do with Obama’s rise to power, which was orchestrated by the same people who had elected Harold Washington mayor) Hizzoner was able to wash away all the bad karma that his father had created in 1968 during the MLK riots and the Democratic convention.

Richard M. will never top his father in terms of city services, however, which is ironic because it’s the backbone of Machine politics. The current Daley does things more like a Republican than a Democrat, handing out contracts and incorporating byzantine funding schemes to hide the money chain, while painting a ‘patriotic’ veneer over all of it. For all his faults, his father managed to fix the potholes, didn’t sell off publicly-funded resources to private interests, and most of all, didn’t leave behind a massive debtload that will cripple the city’s ability to provide services in the future. Corrupt as he was, the elder Daley made sure that working-class people in the city had decent-paying jobs as city workers, while his son has “privatized” many of those functions so that the tax dollars spent are distributed to far fewer people, and far less of those dollars get re-spent in the city.

At least now, Daley won’t have the cover of Olympic boosterism to protect him when the effects of his short-sighted policies come home to roost.