Tom Tressor speaks about No Games Chicago and the methods used to counter the intense propaganda and the threats coming from the City to make Chicago's bid "a dun deal".
To read the Wikipedia entry on the Chicago bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics, the "battle for the bid" as civic activist Tom Tressor calls it, is to miss the realities of the neoliberal and political corruption that have been at the core of Chicago since Jane Adams first spoke up about inequities or Upton Sinclair wrote of the putrefied meat that industrialist like Armour grew rich on selling to the US Army and civilians alike.
A feather for the then Mayor Daley, the debt and dislocation, that are part and parcel of contemporary Olympic industry ventures, would have been born by working class minorities, the poor, and the middle class whose representatives in City Council were ready to stick them with the tab, the loss of popular public infrastructure and affordable communities.
The No Games Chicago site: www.nogameschicago.com lays out the full campaign which recognized that the key players were not Chicago's shallow and corrupt officials or LaSalle Street finance and real estate operators but the IOC members whom they convinced to take a pass on the bid.
Tressor speaks of his current projects that expose the lies of current Mayor Rahm Emanuel, regarding Chicago being broke, which have been the justification for looting the public schools and selling off city services and infrastructure to the financial parasites that are swarming Chicago like maggots a dead cat.
Tom goes on to speak about the path he has been on to revitalize civic engagement through projects like Civic Lab, The TIFF Illumination Project, a run for elected office and the "Chicago Is Not Broke" book project.
Tom Tressor http://www.tresser.com/about/
No Games Chicago site: www.nogameschicago.com
"Chicago Is Not Broke" book project:www.wearenotbroke.org
During the interview Tom miss-remembers the author a the book "Five Ring Circus: Myths and Realities of the Olympic Games", Christopher A. Shaw, whose account of lying public officials, crushing public debt, environmental destruction and human rights abuses around the Vancouver Winter games steeled the opposition in their resolve to expose and work to end the bid which, even though unsuccessful, still cost citizens tens of millions of dollars and wasted public resources.
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