As usual, I urge you to read everything Ben Joravsky writes. Wondering how those Olympic community meetings are going? Check it out - Wanna Buy an Olympics?:
In a more perfect democracy, the campaign to host the 2016 Olympic Games would have been the subject of intense public scrutiny from the moment Mayor Daley proposed it three years ago.
The financial projections would've been scrutinized by independent-minded aldermen and their whiz-kid staffers. There would've been public hearings where ordinary citizens would get to question Daley's Olympics planners. There might even have been a referendum, carefully worded to let people know exactly what they were getting into—something along the lines of "This could cost us all a ton of money. Do you still want it?"
And if the answer were yes, we'd have moved on to try to win the International Olympic Committee's approval.
But what Chicago has is not an ideal democracy. So here we are three years later, heatedly pursuing Mayor Daley's Olympics dream whether we want to or not.
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That said, the two hearings I sat through were fairly impressive dog and pony shows.
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