Hand Over Da 'lympics

Or da tin pigeon gets it.

You know when he really, really wants something, Da Mare sometimes says the most extraordinary things.

From the Sun Times:

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!

Of course there was absolutely no mention of the Olympics as Our Last, Best Hope Of Avoiding Becoming East St. Louis back in the boom, flush-with-cash days of early 2006 when Hizzoner first mentioned that he would be dipping his pole into those waters.

And I certainly didn’t notice China dodging the global recession bullet because it hosted the Olympics last year:

Believe It Or Not, China Is In Recession

...
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."
...

or England being spared economic calamity

Bank of England: Recession 'deeper than expected'

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%.
...

because it decided to blow half the Exchequer to prove that the Fun never sets on the British Empire.

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.

Got that? To Da Mare, “economic development” = construction projects. Period.

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.

For example, did you know that Chicago is a technology leader?

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.
...

The third largest inter-modal transportation hub in the world?

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.
...

A trucking giant?

Chicago is the world's largest trucking hub - there are 394,000 trucking industry workers in Illinois, one out of every 14 workers in the state.
...

Did you know that we still make things in America?

Yes, We'll Still Make Stuff
By David Von Drehle

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."

And that Chicago is one of the jewels in the nation’s manufacturing crown (from Da Mare’s own 2003 press release):

...
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.