IOC Newsletter - No Confidence in Civic Federation
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"Dear Members of The International Olympic Committee" by Thomas Tresser is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.tresser.com. 2011. The bulk of this work consists of reprints from Chicago area newspapers and other source sites. This work is dedicated to citizens around the world who speak truth to power, who defy authority to wrest control of their government from special interests, the insiders, the arrogant and unresponsive. “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it’s the only thing that ever has.” - Margaret Mead “Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” - Frederick Douglass 2 CONTENTS I. Introduction II. Contributors III. Essays - “No Games Rallies April 2” - “What Happened When We Went to Switzerland (and met the IOC) - “Why We’re in Copenhagen (meeting the IOC - again) - “What Happened When We Went to Copenhagen (to influence the IOC again) - “Lessons Learned From the Olympic Fiasco” - “Why I Fought the Bid” – Joan Levin - “Why I Fought the Bid” – John Viramontes IV. The Emails 3 I. INTRODUCTION I’m putting this book together because there is no record of the opposition to Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics. The Chicago media supported the bid with its endorsement and its money and failed to do its due diligence before lending its collective voice and authority to the bid. A few citizen efforts to oppose the bid; No Games Chicago was the most organized, persistent and effective. Our story has not been told. 2009 was the centennial year for Daniel Burnham’s Plan for Chicago. It was a perfect time to re-visit the questions “What is a city for?” and “How do we build a city where everyone can prosper – not just a select portion of the population?” The bid for the Olympics represented just one approach to making Chicago a “world class city.” What, exactly, does that mean? Unfortunately, despite dozens of community organizations dedicated to grass roots economic development – despite a handful of major downtown so-called civic “watchdogs” groups – despite a number of major groups dedicated to protecting parks and open lands – despite the presence of major university urban planning departments and community-connection programs – despite all that civic architecture – the questions were NOT asked. The conversation never took place. Only a few alternative press journalists criticized the bid and the point of view it represented. In fact, the third time a local TV news reporter came to the front of my house in Lincoln Park to get me on camera reacting to a 2016-related news item I asked the reporter, “Isn’t there anyone else you can go to for the anti-games point of view?” She thought for a second, “No.” “Why is that, do you think?” “Because the Mayor has intimidated everyone.” “Isn’t THAT a story you should cover?” She looked at me as if I were insane, “I want to keep my job” she said 4 As long as a year after the decision to award the 2016 games to Rio de Janeiro, the local media repeated the bromides propagated by the City and the 2016 organizers. The discussion was still couched in terms of “jobs lost” and “a great opportunity” and a 30 minute documentary created by the former marketing director for the 2016 effort and aired on the local NBC affiliate omitted any mention of opposition to the bid and closed with calls for a bid for the 2020 games. The loss of the bid was quickly followed by Mayor Daley’s momentous decision not to seek re-election and Chicago enjoyed a brief period of “anything can happen” in its civic imagination for the first time in decades. The run up to the 2011 Aldermanic and Mayoral elections would have been a perfect time to ask the questions about what vision for the City will dominate the political landscape for the next few decades. Unfortunately, that did not happen either. So, I’m putting this book together to tell some of the story of the No Games Chicago effort to stop the 2016 Olympics from coming to Chicago because no one is questioning privatization deals or the Big Concrete, Big Contracts, Loop-based mega-projects that suck public tax dollars up by the billions but which are not going to give all citizens of Chicago anything like a fair return on their investment. If we can interrogate and stop one such bad project, maybe concerned citizens can stop the next one. I say “some of the story” because this really is the bare bones. I’m including my own op-ed pieces that originally appeared in The Huffington Post Chicago as well as a few essays by No Games organizers on why they opposed the bid. The bulk of this text is comprised of the email messages No Games transmitted to the members of the International Olympic Committee as part of our campaign to convince them to award the games to some other city. 5 By way of context, the No Games effort was launched on January 31, 2009 with a public forum at The University of Illinois Chicago student center. I had met the founders of No Games, Bob Quellos and Ramsin Canon in November of 2008 and I was there as a volunteer to help with publicity and logistics. I quickly became involved as an organizer and built out the web site and edited it going forward. I also became a key spokesperson for the effort. On April 2, 2009 The International Olympic Committee’s Evaluation Commission arrived in Chicago for its first review of the four finalist cities (Chicago, Tokyo, Madrid and Rio). We organized a protest rally at Federal Plaza and a march from there to the AON Building where the 2016 Committee was headquartered. The Evaluation Commission was ushered around the city to visit the proposed venues – most of which were to be in public parks. Members of our coalition followed the official party as they toured Washington Park and Lincoln Park. We also booked a room in the Fairmont Hotel where they were staying and held a press conference outside the hotel asking to be received by the Commission. Amazingly, we were invited to meet with some of the members of the Commission on April 7th. Two of our team met with six of the Commission, including its chair, Ms. Nawal El Moutawakel, a Moroccan hurdler who won the inaugural women's 400 m hurdles event at the 1984 Summer Olympics. This was the first time, to our knowledge, that an opposition group had been officially received by an Evaluation Commission. Bob Quellos, speaking for the team, laid out the essential reasons why Chicago did not deserve to get the games: a. Chicago is broke and can’t afford to shoulder the costs for the games, b. Chicago is corrupt and incompetent and will botch the construction and other aspects of the operation, c. Our infrastructure is crumbling – especially our mass transit, which can barely meet the needs of today’s users, let alone hundreds of thousands of visitors over a three week period, and most importantly d. The people of Chicago do not want this party; we have many other pressing priorities that should command our attention and our dollars. 6 Lori Healy, the President of the 2016 Committee, sat silently off to the side as we gave this presentation, which lasted about 15 minutes. It would take a book of its own to describe and distill the hundreds of hours of research our team members did on the games of the recent past and the debt they left the host city and to break down the many meetings we held across the city to explain our position, seek allies and listen to other community group’s concerns. But let me boil down our strategy to this simple imperative: we had to convince the Olympic delegates who would be voting in Copenhagen, Denmark on October 2, 2009 NOT to vote for Chicago as the host for 2016 games. The decision to award an Olympic games is decided by a simple majority of members who are present. According to the 2009 membership directory there were 111 IOC members. We had to convince 56 members that picking Chicago would be a mistake.