Daley: Stop throwing darts or risk losing Olympics
July 8, 2009 BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter
An impassioned Mayor Daley today portrayed the 2016 Summer Olympic Games as the economic salvation for Chicago, but warned that the city just might lose the Olympic sweepstakes "if people keep throwing darts."
"In the next eight years of any city in America, tell me where the economic development is gonna come from. Is it gonna come from the military? The military builds in the south and southwest. It does not build in the Midwest and East," Daley said.
"You tell me one economic program that anyone has offered — both in the private sector or public sector. Every other city would love to have this—when the federal government will spend billions of dollars on infrastructure and on security. Besides that, the national and global publicity we receive from the build-up all the way to 2016. This is the only economic engine. We're talking about jobs. We're talking about contracts…coming into Chicago."
But, the mayor warned, "If people keep throwing darts at it, maybe they will not get it."
Pressed on whom he believes is "throwing darts," Daley said, "Did you read any headlines?" He added, "You beat us up." ...
The mayor added, "People can discuss this, but this is the best economic engine we have going. I have nothing [else] up my sleeve."
Got that smartass?
The Daleympics are now the only “economic engine” that can save the City from ruin!
... China’s manufacturing index, the CLSA PMI, dropped for the fifth consecutive month. According to Reuters, manufacturing is 43% of the economy in the world’s most populous country. Things are bad enough that the foreign press is starting to run photos and video of Chinese middle class workers heading back to the rural areas where they used to live.
Reuters says that "For Chinese policymakers worried about social stability the most alarming news may have been the employment sub-index, which showed factories shedding jobs at the fastest pace on record." ...
The recession has been deeper than expected and the timing and strength of a recovery is "highly uncertain", the Bank of England said today.
Its latest quarterly inflation forecast revised down the outlook for the economy, predicting a 4.5% year-on-year decline at its lowest point - considerably worse than Chancellor Alistair Darling's Budget forecast last month of 3.5%. ...
London Admits It Can't Top Lavish Beijing Olympics When It Hosts 2012 Games Facing an economic downturn, British officials are trying to keep costs down By Thomas K. Grose Posted August 22, 2008
... It would, of course, be fiscal insanity for London to try to replicate the Beijing gala, which included enormous spending on construction projects. China spent around $44 billion on the games, an amazing sum. In comparison, Athens, four years ago, spent $12.8 billion. "These games were an absolutely unique experience. This was the world's biggest country presenting itself on the world stage," says Ian Henry, head of the Center for Olympic Studies and Research at Loughborough University.
That's not to say Britain is doing things on the cheap. The government's Olympics budget has already ballooned to $17.4 billion—nearly $13 billion more than estimated in its wildly optimistic initial bid. It's spending $981.8 million on the main stadium in Stratford, East London—a cost that's jumped $54 million just since November.
...the National Audit Office recently reported that the budget remains under threat. For instance, it said, the planned $1.87 billion Olympic Village—with 3,300 apartments—hasn't found secure financing, which could force the government to inject more cash. And although nearly $1.55 billion has been earmarked for policing and security, the auditors weren't convinced that's an adequate amount. The need for tight security was hammered home on July 7, 2005, the day after London won the international competition to host the 2012 Games, when four Islamic terrorists set off suicide bombs in London that killed 52 people.
Even if Britain keeps to its Olympics budget, there's no guaranteed payoff. A recent Merrill Lynch study found that 10 of the last 11 games caused lingering financial problems for host cities. The main horror story was Montreal, which needed 30 years to pay off its debts for the 1976 Games. ...
Sorry, Mr. Mare, but however many shells and peas and card trick and pyrotechnics you throw into the air to get us to stop looking at the city’s hemorrhaging coffers and shady deals, “Da Olympics” isn’t a fucking “economic engine”.
Economic engines are durable and sustainable; the Olympics are a sugar-high.
(And, Jesus Buggerwood Christ, Mr. Mare, you’re already getting a cool billion of stimulus dough right off the top, and for the remaining half-a-trillion still on the table, you are free to submit proposals for any or all of it to a federal government that is now positively groaning under the weight of expatriate Illinois politicians and technocrats.)
But Hizzoner wants what he wants, so rather than playing straight with his fellow Chicagoans, he doubles-down on the bullshit and threatens Armageddon with one hand, and promises salvation with the other.
The Olympics will dry every eye, diaper every baby, walk every dog. It’ll get the shit off your shoes. It’ll make your husband stop drinking and your boss quit riding your ass.
Shit, if Chicago were going bald, Da Mare would proclaim with a straight face that the Olympic torch gives off magic invisible Rogaine fumes; if Chicago suddenly came down with mass limp-dick, he’d swear on his father’s grave that the runoff from Olympic swimming pools will turn Lake Michigan water to liquid Viagra.
But why?
Well this paragraph from the heart of Da Mare’s jeremiad gives the game away (emphasis added):
"In the next eight years of any city in America, tell me where the economic development is gonna come from. Is it gonna come from the military? The military builds in the south and southwest. It does not build in the Midwest and East," Daley said.
See, despite his well-crafted reputation as a visionary (part of which is very much deserved), the Mare-for-Life of the third largest city in the American Empire has the sensibilities of a cardboard condo hustler. To his mind, if we ain’t throwing up new buildings fast!fast!fast! then the world is veering dangerously close to falling off its axis.
And with Chicago is looking down the barrel of a glutted commercial real estate market from now until the end of President Hillary Clinton’s second term?
Repent! The End is Nigh!
But for anyone capable of expanding their economic peripheral vision just a little past “dirt pusher”, you can see that the collapse of the real estate market really isn’t the End of Days. That there are other, genuine economic engines on which a city not stone-drunk on property development might focus.
Illinois has the sixth largest high-tech economy in the United States. A recent University of Minnesota study found that the Chicago metropolitan area has more high-tech jobs - 347,100 -- than Silicon Valley, Seattle, Boston and other high-tech centers in the United States. ...
A major transportation hub, Chicago is the third largest inter-modal port in the world after Hong Kong and Singapore. Chicago is one of the largest hubs of passenger rail service in the nation with Amtrak providing connections to New York, Seattle, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington DC. ...
The death of American manufacturing has been greatly exaggerated. According to U.N. statistics, the U.S. remains by far the world's largest manufacturer, producing nearly twice as much value as No. 2 China. Since 1990, U.S. manufacturing output has grown by nearly $800 billion — an amount larger than the entire manufacturing economy of Germany, a global powerhouse.
But growth does not mean jobs. While sales soared (at least until the recession), manufacturing employment sank. Using constantly improving technology to make more-valuable goods, American workers doubled their productivity in less than a generation — which, paradoxically, rendered millions of them obsolete.
This new manufacturing workforce can be seen in the gleaming and antiseptic room in Southern California where Edwards Lifesciences produces artificial-heart valves. You could say the small group of workers at the Edwards plant, most of them Asian women, are seamstresses. Unlike the thousands of U.S. textile workers whose jobs have migrated to low-wage countries, however, these highly skilled women occupy a niche in which U.S. firms are dominant and growing. Each replacement valve requires eight to 12 hours of meticulous hand-sewing — some 1,800 stitches so tiny that the work is done under a microscope. Up to a year of training goes into preparing a new hire to join the operation.
Highly skilled workers creating high-value products in high-stakes industries — that's the sweet spot for manufacturing workers in coming years. After an initial surge of enthusiasm for shipping jobs of all kinds to low-wage countries, many U.S. companies are making a distinction between exportable jobs and jobs that should stay home. Edwards, for example, has moved its rote assembly work — building electronic monitoring machines — to such lower-wage and -tax locales as Puerto Rico. But when quality is a matter of life or death and production processes involve trade secrets worth billions, the U.S. wins, says the company's head of global operations, Corinne Lyle. "We like to keep close tabs on our processes."
... Daley noted that the manufacturing sector of the economy is often overlooked as a source of new jobs.
"The conventional wisdom says manufacturing is declining in importance and no longer the place to go for a rewarding career. It says all the good jobs are in the service industries and information technology," he said.
"In fact, manufacturing is still strong in Chicago -- and will be for many years to come.
More than 590,000 people work in manufacturing in the Chicago area, and they produce almost $60 billion dollars worth of goods a year -- more than any other metropolitan area. And manufacturing jobs are comparatively secure; they have a future; and they pay more than the national average. ...
Chicago is a beautiful city with world-class universities, museums, cultural amenities, a halfway-decent transit system and stands very well positioned -- by history, geography and temperament -- to become the global leader in any or all of these economic sectors. But to pull that off we’d have to stop sprinting from one massive publicly-underwritten boondoggle to the next, buckle down and fix our fucking problems. We might have to get honest about our budget or talk straight to the people about what municipal government can and cannot provide. We might even have to quit playing hide-the-salami accounting games with test scores and dropout rates, and get heart-attack serious about school reform.
But those kinds of fundamental changes assume that the city sees the rebuilding of a stable, working middle class as its most critical priority, and sadly there appears to be little room for the middle class in Da Mare’s shiny, privatized tomorrow.
Before the global economy went boom, Da Mare’s actions spoke very clearly about what he saw as Chicago’s future; it was to be a metropolis divided between bankers, insurance magnates and real estate moguls (basically his friends) and those who waited tables on them and changed the sheets in their hotel rooms. A glorious, feudal service economy of financiers and happy serfs, with first-rate schools and restaurants for the former, and bike trails and parks for the latter. A global city (whatever the fuck that means this month) where all those inconvenient, “clock watching” city worker union slobs have at last been sacked forever, all city services have been antiseptically outsourced family friends and foreign companies, and Da Mare and 50 contract analysts and budget gnomes run the entire city by remote control from a 50,000 square foot sky box overlooking Millennium Park.
So while there is no reason in the world to assume the Olympics will do damn thing for the working men and women of Chicago except stick them with yet another crippling bill to pay -- or that Da Mare really cares -- it is important to note that does have two important features that long-term, sustainable economic development lacks, but that emperors find irresistible: Prestige and Spectacle.
Which is why Hizzoner has sunk his teeth into it and will say and do anything to hang onto it, regardless of consequence.
Who knows? If some bright reformer could ever figure out a way for all the heroically boring, unsexy, accretive work it will take to rebuild the middle class around a genuine plan for stability and prosperity to come with a Mile Wide Ribbon for Hizzoner to cut, or a continent for him to discover and plaster his name on, maybe then he’d fly around the world over and over again to support and promote the hell out of it.
(AP) — An aide says Lisa Madigan has decided against running for Illinois governor or the U.S. Senate.
Political director Mary Morrissey says the Chicago Democrat will seek another term as attorney general instead.
Madigan plans to announce her decision at a news conference Wednesday afternoon.
Her decision dramatically changes the landscape of both the Senate and governor races. She would have been a top contender for either office.
Madigan has long had an eye on the Illinois governor's office. More recently, top Democrats — including President Barack Obama — have talked to her about challenging U.S. Sen. Roland Burris. ...
"...The armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth them; They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the Soul."
To figure out just where the Palinites might believe their political clown car is headed as it cartwheels down the interstate, belching smoke and shredding itself against the guardrail at at 110 mph, we have to begin with this simple fact: There is nothing vital or alive left inside the Conservative movement. Nothing at all. Rampaging along on the two, moldering stumps of bygone glory – tax cuts forever and Liberals are Devils -- Conservatism has become a raving, headless, dead thing.
Facing this fact, some former Bush water-bearers like David Fucking Brooks and Andy Sullivan have ripped out the copper wiring, sold the appliances and respectively sidled and sprinted away from their upside-down mortgages on what was once prime, wingnut ideological property.
They went all-in on the bugfuck, and because the cannot cope with the fact that their idols were all frauds -- that everyone they trusted turned out to be a swindler and everything they believed in now bloats and rots in the midday sun -- they are left to squat in political mass-grave they have spent the last 30 years painstakingly excavating for themselves, decorating its walls with fading pictures of Ronald Reagan and calling it a temple.
To do what Jefferson Davis did in the waning days of the Confederacy: take the overwhelming evidence of their movement’s disintegration that is now closing in from all sides and try to pretend that catastrophic failure is a good thing:
To the People of the Confederate States of America.
Danville, Va., April 4, 1865.
… Relieved from the necessity of guarding cities and particular points, important but not vital to our defense, with an army free to move from point to point and strike in detail the detachments and garrisons of the enemy, operating on the interior of our own country, where supplies are more accessible, and where the foe will be far removed from his own base and cut off from all succor in case of reverse, nothing is now needed to render our triumph certain but the exhibition of our own unquenchable resolve. Let us but will it, and we are free; and who, in the light of the past, dare doubt your purpose in the future? ...
Now when you begin with a movement that was already stocked to the rafters with goofs and bigots 30 years ago, and then plot the trend lines of their radical yahoo/anarchic Branch Perfidian cult to its logical conclusion, you cannot help but notice that they all seem to intersect at point in the near future occupied by something that looks a lot like Sarah Palin; a perky, Fox-teevee-camera-friendly Brown-shirt in bright, red “Fuck Me” pumps who didn’t so much resign from the governor’s office, as she contemptuously resigned from the very concept of government itself.
"People need to understand that in Republican circles, resigning as Governor does not harm Sarah Palin's career. Being a Governor is just ... governing ... and Republicans don't do that.
"In fact, there is a contempt for the idea, and Palin has just reinforced her brand as one with contempt for government. The very word, "Governor," is suspect to them. The only use of the job is to affect redistricting so Republicans can have more power, and to keep a state from "spending" (also known as providing services to the citizens) and especially from asking the rich or corporations to pay any taxes for their use of the infrastructure the rest of us built."
And so, liberated from the need to meet even the most minimal requirements of democratic government – from the mundane need to "propose policy", "solve real problems" or "know what the fuck she is talking about" – Palin is now free to finish the project begun by Rush Limbaugh over 20 years ago: to reduce the existential distance between Hate Radio of the Republican Party to zero.
To mutate into a Being of Pure Media.
A sylph dispensing Delphic fortune cookies pasted together from flag pins, bumper stickers and scriptural confetti.
A wingnut elemental.
A granter of plutocrat wishes and fulfiller of imbecile dreams.
2 Tweet or Not 2 Tweet -- Two University of Chicago students present the classics in 20 tweets or less
By STEVE RHODES
The crumbling of civilization as we know it by the tools of digital technology in the wrong hands continues apace, this time with the news that two University of Chicago freshman "have landed a publishing deal to Twitter the classics of literature," the Mail & Guardian reports. Or is that tweet the classics?
Or are Emmett Rensin and Alex Aciman just smarter than the rest of us for getting there first? ...
Indeed. "Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books, Now Presented in Twenty Tweets or Less," is set to be released later this year by Penguin, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Rensin and Aciman are 19-year-old freshmen.
"Imagine if your favorite character from the Great Works (and a few not-so-great works) had an iPhone, a Twitter account, and a sense of humor," they say on their Web site. …
You mean like this (all of these done by me; took about an hour)?
“Kare9a @ train? Ruh-roh! ” -- Leo Tolstoy, “Anna Karenina”
“STFU or --∞∞∞∞O” -- Herman Melville, “Billy Budd”
“@beginning#hevn-n-urth” -- Yahweh, “Bible”
"4 luv-o-God, Mn3sor!" -- Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado”
“Evrythin iz Awsm!” -- Voltaire, “Candide”
“Alphakidz r dorks! Betakidz rool!” -- Aldous Huxley, “Brave New World”
“lawz or kill?” -- William Golding, “Lord of the Flies”
“Me+axe > pwnbroker+Lizaveta!” -- Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Crime and Punishment”
“rickrolled by world… l8tr, itz all good 4 sum" -- Ernest Hemingway, “A Farewell To Arms”
“Like ≠ =” -- Madeleine L'Engle, “A Wrinkle in Time”
“Okies r dbags” -- John Steinbeck, “The Grapes of Wrath”
“RNsance hearts tyranny :-(“ Graham Greene, “The Third Man”
I wish these clever students success and prosperity, and I know the arc of our cultural deliteratization from "book-as-thoughtful-engagement" to "book-as-collectible-netsuke" was locked in long before this Year of Our Lord 2009, but man, if I’d known they were handing out books deals for this kind of five-finger exercise, I’d have bailed on the whole “writing” thing years ago.
Cuz bookz r a bitch!
Or as Ray Bradbury put it in oldspeak:
"What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives."
As usual, in the Age of Ridiculous, while the NYT spoons out only the rag-and-bone facts:
Palin Says She Will Resign as Alaska Governor By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JIM RUTENBERG
Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska announced Friday that she was quitting her job at the end of the month, a move that shocked Republicans across the country and fueled both renewed speculation about her presidential ambitions and criticism of her political competence.
Ms. Palin’s decision, announced with her family in front of a lake at her home in Wasilla, set off widespread speculation in Republican circles that she is preparing for a run for the presidency in 2012. Ms. Palin, 45, was supposed to serve as governor through the end of 2010; on Friday, she said she would cede control of the state to the lieutenant governor, Sean Parnell, on July 25.
Ms. Palin announced the decision in an often rambling press conference, in which she invoked the words of General Douglas MacArthur and the rules of basketball, but offered few clues about her intentions. Instead, she said she had decided not to seek re-election when her term expires, and that she thought it would be unfair to her constituents to remain in office as a lame duck. ...
It falls to the likes of Lewis Carroll to offer voluptuous truths:
Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
The Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.
Alice: I don't much care where--
The Cat: Then it doesn't matter which way you go.
Alice: --so long as I get somewhere.
The Cat: Oh, you're sure to do that, if you only walk long enough.
Alice: What sort of people live about here?
The Cat: In that direction lives a Hatter:
and in that direction, lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad.
Alice: But I don't want to go among mad people.
The Cat: Oh, you can't help that. We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.
Alice: How do you know I'm mad?
The Cat: You must be or you wouldn't have come here.
In the end, not even his magic, wingnut interocitor could save him, and now he gets to wear the "I Lost To The Comedian" sign around his neck at GOP wife swap-o-ramas, glory-hole meet-ups and pity parties conferences until the Rapture.
Potential Coleman GOP Rival: I Love Norm, "But He Lost To Al Franken, For Goodness' Sake" By Eric Kleefeld - July 2, 2009
I just got off the phone with Minnesota Republican state Rep. Marty Seifert, who recently stepped down from his position as state House Minority Leader to run for Governor, about a very important topic: What might happen if former Sen. Norm Coleman runs for the GOP nomination, too. And Seifert gave a sneak preview of what lines of attack Coleman will face from his intra-party rivals if he makes the race, as he's reportedly looking at. ...
Madoff's Mark on Chicago -- Pritzkers among schemer's victims.
The truly astonishing scope of Bernie Madoff's fallen financial scheme is still registering -- even here in Chicago, where victims speaking out about his sentencing on Monday are still in a state of shock.
"Life in jail is too good for him," Stuart Borg of Northbrook told CBS2. "This man has devastated not only people like myself, and richer people than me, but what I've said before – what he's done to these charities. It's unconscionable, and he has no conscience."
Stuart Borg and his wife, Rene, lost several hundred thousand dollars of their retirement money with Madoff.
"It's basically your life savings. It's your children, your grandchildren, the college funds, their inheritance - poof - it's gone."
Executive search consultant William Bakertold the Sun-Times that his losses to Madoff were in the millions.
Meanwhile, Baker thinks Madoff might gain a sense of honor by protecting his family from prosecution.
"I think he might have attained a personal victory if he can sit there and smirk about his wife and sons," Baker told the paper's David Roeder. ...
If I had money to bet, I'd wager Madoff'll be coming out of his cell toes up no later than a year from today -- maybe within a couple of months.
You don't screw over that many grandmas, beggar that many families and rip off that many powerful people -- get caught cold -- and then just slip quietly off to your medium-security cell at Otisville and to play sudoku in peace until it comes time for your strangely-unindicted kin to sit shiva for your filthy soul.
There are other ways this kind of thing ends. Ways that provide for the family.
Traditional ways.
Ways as old as the Romans.
From Godfather II:
Frank Pentangeli: Those were the great old days,you know... And we was like the Roman Empire... The Corleone family was like the Roman Empire...
Tom Hagen: When a plot against the Emperor failed... the plotters were always given a chance... to let their families keep their fortunes. Right?
Frank Pentangeli: Yeah, but only the rich guys, Tom. The little guys got knocked off and all their estates went to the Emperors. Unless they went home and killed themselves, then nothing happened. And the families... the families were taken care of.
Tom Hagen: That was a good break. A nice deal.
Frank Pentangeli: Yeah... They went home... and sat in a hot bath... opened up their veins... and bled to death... and sometimes they had a little party before they did it.
South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford admitted today that he saw his mistress more times, including what was supposed to be a farewell meeting in New York accompanied by a spiritual adviser, according to an Associated Press report.
The governor told that AP that with his wife's permission, went to New York with a "trusted spiritual adviser" serving as chaperone to end the affair. The three went to church and dinner together and parted ways the same night. The AP article does not indicate who the adviser was. ...
Any cult whose most notable contributions to human sexual understanding include "Abstinence Only" sex education, "Purity Balls" and "Praying the gay away" needs to shut the fuck up about the giggity giggity for the next thousand years or so.
"... Whatever her political future, the emergence of Sarah Palin raises questions that will not soon go away. What does it say about the nature of modern American politics that a public official who often seems proud of what she does not know is not only accepted but applauded? What does her prominence say about the importance of having (or lacking) a record of achievement in public life? Why did so many skilled veterans of the Republican Party—long regarded as the more adroit team in presidential politics—keep loyally working for her election even after they privately realized she was casual about the truth and totally unfit for the vice-presidency? ..."
