Today's Stories

September 30, 2009

Vijay Prashad
McChyrstal's Afghan Desolation

Paul Craig Roberts
Another War in the Works

September 29, 2009

Marshall Auerback
A Neoliberal Hijacking

Alan Farago
Recovery Without Feeling

Jeff Sher
Shopping for Health Care

Bruce Jackson
60 Minutes and the General

Gareth Porter
Fears of Defeat in Afghanistan

Jonathan Cook
Palestinians in the Israeli Army

Bouthaina Shaaban
Arabs in the International Balance

Dave Lindorff
Looking Under the TARP

Stephen Soldz
Spreading Hysteria About Swine Flu "Hysteria"

Sara Mann
The Party of No Meets the Island of No

Website of the Day
Cosmos, Autotuned

September 28, 2009

Laura Carlsen
The Sound and Fury of the Honduran Coup

Anthony DiMaggio
The U.S., Iran and Nuclear Terror

Paul Craig Roberts
More Lies, More Deceptions

Neve Gordon
On Palestinian Civil Disobedience

Bill Quigley
Street Report From the G20

Harvey Wasserman
Obama's LBJ Moment

Nicola Nasser
Stuck Between Two Failures

Ben Rosenfeld Murder in New Orleans: Remembering Kirsten Brydum

Website of the Day
The Short March

September 25-7, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Ruin of His Presidency

Daniel Wolff
Speculating on Education

Rev. William E. Alberts
How "White Magic" Makes the Ism of Race Disappear

Mike Roselle
Send Lawyers, Guns and Money

Saul Landau
Covert Memories From Miami

Eshan Azari
Why Afghan Intellectuals Live in National Despair

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Pentagon Feedlot

Robert Jensen
Is Obama a Socialist?

Jonathan Cook
Sleeping with the Enemy

Nelson P Valdés
Cuba, Hurricanes and the Internet

David Michael Green
Dumping Dubya

Ramzy Baroud
The Goldstone Report and Israeli Impunity

John V. Whitbeck
The Partition Straightjacket

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trial Delayed ... Again

David Ker Thomson
The Lady Vanishes

Seth Sandronsky
Obama and Race Management

Jim Goodman
Why are Farmers Afraid of Michael Pollen?

Charles R. Larson
From Oppression to Opportunity

David Yearsley
Froberger's Travels

Kim Nicolini
Hardcore Capitalism

Lorenzo Wolff
Transparent Pink

Website of the Weekend
An Emergency Appeal in the Fight Against Big Coal

September 24, 2009

Steven Higgs
Even in Indiana, Doctors Support National Health Insurance

Christopher Brauchli
Death Pays

Marshall Auerback
The Shortfall at the FDIC

Stephanie Westbrook
Italy's Fallen Soldiers

Nadia Hijab
Know Your Dictator

Sen. Russell Feingold
Fixing the Patriot Act, Restoring the Constitution

David Macaray
Goodbye "Norma Rae"

Binoy Kampmark
Curry Bashings in Oz

Joe Allen
Dancing With the Hammer

Website of the Day
The Most Corrupt Members of Congress

September 23, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
The Economy is a Lie, Too

Gabriel Kolko
The United States in Afghanistan: Eight Years Later

Uri Avnery
The Waldorf-Astoria Summit

Shamus Cooke
The First Shots of the Trade War

Missy Beattie
The Sound of Money

Gareth Porter
Taliban Rising

Mark Weisbrot
How Much Repression Will Hillary Clinton Support in Honduras?

Dr. Susan Block
The Murder of Annie Le

Norm Kent
Pot and the Right to Pursue Happiness

Richard Neville
Apocalypse Porno

Website of the Day
In Carver Country

September 22, 2009

Franklin C. Spinney The Huge Hole in Gen. McChrystal's Afghan Counterinsurgency Strategy

Russell Mokhiber
Who's the Pimp?

Greg Grandin
Zelaya's Brazilian Gambit

Nikolas Kozloff
Salvaging Democracy in Honduras Will Be Tricky

John Ross
Mexico Convulsed by Paranoia

Ron Jacobs
Gen. McChrystal's Salespitch

Tariq Ali
The Afghan Folly

Dave Lindorff
NYT Trashes Single-Payer

Harvey Wasserman
Tom Friedman's Idiocy Atomique

Vijay Prashad
Is Anything Better Than Nothing?

Kareem Shora
After the CIA Torture Report

Website of the Day
Did a State Dept Official Sell Nuclear Secrets?

September 21, 2009

JoAnn Wypijewski
Will Trumka or the Steelworkers Push Labor Into Battle?

Carl Finamore
Backstage at the AFL-CIO Convention

Uri Avnery
Sliming Goldstone and His Report

Nikolas Kozloff
Joe Wilson's Immigration Hypocrisy

Paul Simpson, M.D.
Why Your Doctor May Have PTSD

Alan Nasser
New Deal Liberalism Writes Its Obituary

Ray McGovern
CIA Torturers Running Scared

Dave Lindorff
Thoughts on Saving an Old Barn

Lina Thorne
Women, War and Afghanistan

Jeb Sprague
Confronting the G20

Website of the Day
Petition: Save the Yellowstone Grizzly

September 18-20, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
When Gossip Came Back and Our Modern Age was Born

Russell Mokhiber
Meet the Real Death Panels

Mike Whitney
The Post-Bubble Malaise

David Michael Green
Can America be Salvaged?

Jonathan Cook
Boycott Derails Jerusalem Rail Line

Nadia Hijab
Sinking the Goldstone Report

Mark Weisbrot
Recession, Recovery and Reform: Will Anything Change?

Michael Winship
Let's Make a Deal, Beltway Edition

Michael Leonardi
The Nuclear Dump in the Mediterranean Sea

Andy Worthington
The Kuwaiti Who Met Bin Laden

Fred Gardner
The Prohibitionists' Manifesto

David Macaray
What Happens in Congress Stays in Congress

David Rosen
System Failure and the Garrido Case

Jason Mark
Hacking the Sky

Mike Ferner
In Praise of Senator Baucus

Farzana Versey
The Great Indian Rope Trick

Ron Jacobs
Dr. Guillotin and Dr. Faustus: an Interview with Marc Estrin

elin o'Hara slavick
Flags for Hiroshima: Artist's Statement

Gilad Aztmon
Vengeance, Barbarism and Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds

David Yearsley
Mendelssohn as Organ Maestro

Charles R. Larson
Darkness, Dignity and Hope in Liberia

Lorenzo Wolff
Dialing Up The Clash

Website of the Weekend
Meet Your Conservative Movement

September 17, 2009

Joshua Frank
Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler

Brenda Norrell
Cry Me a River: Uranium and Genocide in Indian Country

Robert Weissman
The Financial Crisis, One Year Later

Pam Martens
The Filmmakers vs. the Capitalists

Franklin Lamb
Palestinian Camps Are Ready to Erupt

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cuban Five: An Insult to Humanity

Jed Bickman
Drone War Over Pakistan

Alan Farago
The Mayor of Coconut Creek Gets Butterflies

Website of the Day
C.R.O.C.

September 16, 2009

Ray McGovern
Torture and Accountability

Stephen Green
America's Strange Health Care Debate

Andy Worthington
Is Bagram Obama's New Secret Prison?

Dean Baker
Short Sellers: the Unsung Heroes of the Financial Crisis

Anthony DiMaggio
Killing the Messenger

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cuban Five: The Unheard Call

Benjamin Dangl
Justice Follows Direct Action

Robin Willoughby
The World Seed Conference: Good for Farmers?

Eric Walberg
EuroPeace, the Sounds of Silence

James Ridgeway
Bring That "Boy" Down

Website of the Day
Baucus' Bogus Bill

September 15, 2009

Mike Whitney
The Real Lesson of Lehman's Fall

Mutadhar al-Zaidi
The Story of My Shoe

Marshall Auerback
Government Spending is the Solution--Not the Problem

Afshin Rattansi
The Deal That Led to the Srebrenica Massacre: Former UN Spokeswoman Fingers Holbrooke and the Clinton Administration

Jonathan Cook
How US Tax Breaks Fund Israeli Settlers

Gareth Porter:
Niger Redux? IAEA Conceals Evidence Iran Nuke Docs Were Forged

Dave Lindorff
Congress Needs More Catcalls

Winslow T. Wheeler
Obama and Pentagon Pork

Franklin Spinney
Bin Laden's Latest Message and the Nuttiness of the War on Terror

Karen Korenoski /
Michael Yates
Up in Wood Smoke: Boulder's Dirty Little Secret

David Macaray
Government Cheese

Susie Day
President Mao-bama's Little Red Primer

Website of the Day
The Cotton Pickin' Truth: the Persistance of Slavery in Mississippi

September 14, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
The Health Care Deceit

M. G. Piety
The Danes Do It (Health Care) Better

Shamus Cooke
Wall Street Under Obama: Bigger and Riskier

Bouthaina Shaaban
Three Faces and a Homeland

Alvaro Huerta
In Defense of the Undocumented: Immigrants and Health Care

John Ross
Mexico Loses Its History

Harvey Wasserman
The Supreme Court and Corporate Money

Adam Federman
The Plight of the Bumblebee

Stephen Fleischman
The Federal Twist

Robert Jensen
Can Journalism Schools be Relevant in a World on the Brink?

Website of the Day
The Origin of Sex Offender Registries

September 11-13, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Big Speech: Math Trumps Rhetoric

JoAnn Wypijewski
Trumka Takes Over AFL-CIO

Carl Ginsburg
The Patient as Profit Center

Leonard Peltier
I am Barack Obama's Political Prisoner Now

Franklin Lamb
Ted Kennedy's Changing Take on Israel

Benjamin Dangl
Throwing Bullets at Failed Policies

Mike Whitney
How to Fight Deflation

John Berger
In Search of Antonello

Saul Landau
Watergate and Modern Scandals

Russell Mokhiber
Disgraceful Democrats

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Pryor's Judgment

Felice Pace
NPR's Linda Gradstein Has Done It Again on Gaza

Jordan Flaherty
The Battle Over Discriminatory Housing Laws in New Orleans

Ron Jacobs
It's Time to be Impolite About Afghanistan

David Macaray
The Utility of Boycotts

David Correia
Welcome to the Business-Friendly Carpenter's Union

Robert Bryce
Wind Turbines and Bird Kills

Christopher Brauchli
Defenders of the Classroom

Paul Krassner
Aha! A Few Words About the 9/11 Truth Movement

Charles R. Larson
Deracination

Kim Nicolini
"Extract:" An Exercise in Economic Realism

David Yearsley
Tall Buildings: the Sound and the Silence

Lorenzo Wolff
In Defense of the One Hit Wonder

Poets' Basement
McEnteer and Corseri

Website of the Weekend
Pizarchik: the Wrong Choice

September 10, 2009

Joshua Frank
Inside Hanford's B Reactor: a Tour of the World's Most Toxic Nuclear Site

Dean Baker
Bernanke's Bad Money

Brian M. Downing
The State of U.S. National Security

Franklin C. Spinney
Portrait of an Afghan Firefight: Up Close and Personal

Andy Worthington
No Escape From Guantánamo

Chase Madar
Samantha Power and the Weaponization of Human Rights

Farzana Versey
A Tale of Two Slums

Ronnie Cummins
Whole Foods, Fair Trade and Organics

Binoy Kampmark
Health Care, Obama and the System

Timothy Lebrón
The Conservative Case for Health Care Reform

Charles R. Larson
A Solution to the Health Care Dilemma

Website of the Day
The Debtor's Revolt Begins!

September 9, 2009

Richard Neville
Trigger-Happy in Afghanistan

Melissa Checker
Double Jeopardy: Carbon Offsets and Human Rights Abuses

Nadia Hijab
Settling for ... Settlements?

Robert Weissman
The Stakes at the Supreme Court

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Arabs Call for General Strike

Russell Mokhiber
Pollan, Mackey, Whole Foods and Single Payer

James Ridgeway
The Dotty Factor: Will Demented Geezers Wreck the Economy?

Richard W. Behan
Obama's Imperative in Afghanistan

James McEnteer
The Photo and the Secretary: How to Appall Robert Gates

Martha Rosenberg
Hatchery Horrors

Website of the Day
Belmondo Verité

September 8, 2009

Henry A. Giroux
The Corporate Stranglehold on Education

Stephen Soldz
Psychologist Accused of War Crimes Opposes Investigations

John Ross
Rituals of the Absurd

Jeff Leys
Health Care vs. Warfare: the Future of the Afghan War

Mike Whitney Ashcroft: Repugnant to the Constitution

Shamus Cooke
Obama's Empty Labor Day Speech

Ellen Brown
Did Lehman Brothers Fall or Was It Pushed?

Norman Solomon Men With Guns: In Kabul and Washington

Deepak Tripathi
The Axis of Evil and the Great Satan

Laray Polk
Personality Cults, Indoctrination and Inculcation

Charles R. Larson
Just Who Does He Think He Is?

Website of the Day
The President is Not a Guidance Counselor

September 7, 2009

Vicente Navarro
Obama's Mistakes in Health Care Reform

Bouthaina Shaaban
In Praise of Admiral Mullen

David Macaray
Obama's Labor Day Report Card

Paul Craig Roberts
Indefensible Nation

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Ads Warn Against Marrying Non-Jews

Conn Hallinan
Brazil Flexes Its Muscles

Walter Brasch
The Origins of Labor Day, the Unknown Holiday

Mark Weisbrot
IMF Gives Honduran Government $175 Million

Carl Finamore
China's Birthday Stimulation

C. G. Estabrook
Advance Text of Obama's Big Speech

Website of the Day
One Down, 20,000 to Go

September 4-6, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Deeper Into the Tunnel

Carl Ginsburg
Saving New Orleans' Charity Hospital

Jonathan Cook
The Missing Link in Israeli Organ Theft?

George Wuerthner
The Unintended Consequences of Wolf Hunting

Marc Levy
The Bling They Curse and Carry

Ray McGovern
Holbrooke's Afghan Benchmark

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
It Happened in Miami

Joe Paff
Organizing the Mission

Gareth Porter
Taliban's Tank-Killing Bombs Came From CIA, Not Iran

Devin Beaulieu
Scaremongering About Bolivia and Islam

Anthony Papa
Why Leslie Crocker Snyder Should Not Become New York City's New DA

David Ker Thomson
Love and Dekes in Utopia

Don Fitz
The Case of the Biodevastation 7: What the Police Won't Apologize For

Lee Sustar /
S. Sepehri
The Fallout From Iran's Elections

Jim Goodman
Why Honor Organized Labor?

Wajahat Ali
Domestic Crusaders: Making Muslim American Theater

Ron Jacobs
Agitator Journalism: Remembering Ramparts

Helen Redmond
The Lion Sleeps Tonight: the Crimes and Misdemeanors of Teddy Kennedy

John V. Walsh
Obama to Cindy Sheehan: Get Lost

Charles R. Larson
Mandanipour's Masterpiece: Censoring an Iranian Love Story

Mark Scaramella
Ho-Bleeping-Hum: a Few Well-Chosen Words About Valerie Plame's Book

David Yearsley
Cameron Carpenter's Amazing Organ Transplants

Ben Sonnenberg
Hooking, Breaking Friendships, Cross-Dressing and, Above All, Delphine Seyrig

Poets' Basement
Davies, Orloski and Bready

Website of the Weekend
Architectural Semiotics with Glenn Beck

September 3, 2009

Marcus Rediker
Inside Auburn Prison

Ron Jacobs
Embedded With the Taliban

Mike Whitney
How Bad Will It Get?

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Untold Story of the Cuban Five: Indictment À La Carte

Saul Landau
Moby Dick and Asian Typhoons

Anat Matar
Israeli Academics Must Pay a Price to End Occupation

Tanya Golash-Boza
How Immigration Enforcement is Weakening National Security

Dave Lindorff
Which Side Are You On?

Andy Worthington
The Story of Gitmo's Two Syrians

Website of the Day
Plundering Appalachia

September 2, 2009

John Ross
Mexico's Plagues

Vijay Prashad
Hey Ram, the Things the Financial Times Group Does!

Rev. Jim Rigby
Why is Universal Health Care "Un-American"?

Joanne Mariner
What the Inspector General Found

Missy Beattie
Hejira: At Martha's Vineyard with Cindy Sheehan

Soren Ambrose
Multilateral Money

Diane Farsetta
Water: the Newest Wave of Corporate "Social Responsibility"

Nadia Hijab
Mulling Mullen's Message

Shamus Cooke
How to Lower the Deficit Without Killing Social Security

Charles R. Larson
Is Dick Cheney Running Scared?

Website of the Day
Inside the Egg Hatchery

September 1, 2009

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Wolf at Trout Creek

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Not Sanctions for Israel?

Mark T. Harris
The Whole Foods Boycott: It's About More Than CEO Hypocrisy

Dean Baker
Bank Profits Are Up: Did You Hear Anyone Say, "Thank You"?

Jeffrey Buchanan
Ending the Human Rights Crisis in KatrinaRitaVille

Robin Mittenthal
A Sea of Monocrops: Old MacDonald Never Had a Farm Like This

Ellen Brown
Mercury Mischief

Martha Rosenberg
Vytorin Marketing is Back

Website of the Day
Crazy Town Hall Protester Interviews

September 30, 2009

The Real Estate Games

The Fiasco Behind Chicago's Olympics Bid

By ANDY THAYER

Anti-Olympics organizers sprinted into the home stretch with a City Hall rally yesterday ahead of Friday's International Olympic Committee vote on which city will get the 2016 games.  About 300 attended the protest which – not to take anything away from the talents and hard work of the organizers – should have been considerably larger. 

Pre-event publicity for the protest in the major media was uncharacteristically good, with many pro-Olympics media outlets grudgingly reporting "the other side," giving time, date and place of the protest.  Moreover, a recent Chicago Tribune poll found that more Chicagoans opposed the bid than supported it – 47 per cent to 45 per cent – and 84 per cent oppose using any public money to support the games. 

That these poll numbers couldn't be translated into larger numbers of people on the street yesterday is a reflection of the fact that many religious and community organizations that focus on survival issues that would be directly impacted by these games – food, housing, education, jobs – are apparently intimidated into keeping their opposition silent. 

Mayor Daley has hung practically his entire legacy on winning the games, and he is notoriously churlish against those who oppose even his minor projects.  Any opposition to D'Mare's primo pet project would likely translate into funding cuts, if not city inspectors and other harassment towards those organizations who opposed the mayor's edict.

That said, despite a multi-million dollar barrage of pro-Olympic advertising, including obnoxious audio ads on the city's buses, pro-Games forces in Chicago have generated no appreciable enthusiasm on their side.  With poll numbers slipping, the Chicago's Olympic Committee was forced to launch a belated, all-ward campaign of public meetings to sway public opinion in its favor.  But this has not translated into large rallies of public support.  By way of contrast, about half a million Spaniards reportedly rallied for Madrid's bid on Monday.

Coverage of the bidding war by Chicago's media establishment has been a study in transparent bias.  The Chicago Tribune,  which apparently hopes to position itself as a gate-keeper to the world's media descending on the city, wrote a glowing review of the Chicago bid committee's insurance plan which supposedly will shield taxpayers from cost over-runs.  By contrast, Crain's Chicago Business,  voice of Chicago's business elite, wrote a review of the same plan and apparently strove not to sound like a Merrill Lynch executive on the eve of last year's crash.

Facing sullen opposition to the games – highlighted when many school principals revolted against a school board edict to have the schools fly flags supporting the bid – Mayor Daley pledged that the Games would not cost the taxpayers a dime.  The reality is that if Chicago gets these games, and even if there is no massive fraud and sweetheart contracts (a truly ridiculous "if" in this city and state!), City taxpayers will pay for them – the 84 per cent opposed to such funding be damned. 

First to be tapped will be the hidden sources – the TIFF funds which have siphoned off property tax revenue for years.  Originally set up supposedly to help impoverished areas of the City be redeveloped, for years the TIFF districts have deprived the city's schools, libraries and other social services of money by putting huge amounts of city revenue into slush funds which the mayor and his allies have in turn doled out to large private businesses owned and controlled by mayoral allies – Boeing, United Airlines and Borders Bookstore, to name a few.

The bid committee's vaunted insurance policy to protect taxpayers?  Read the fine print.  Crain's notes that while it provides very good protection against unlikely Olympic disasters – cancellation of the games, tornados, terrorism – it's piss poor in protecting against the most likely Olympic disaster, construction cost overruns.  The reason is simple.  You can pay a reasonable premium to insure against something that's improbable, but to insure against something that's almost certain, you'd have to pay a premium that equaled the cost of the pay-out, plus a profit margin for the insurer.

A crucial factor ignored by most of the popular press accounts of the Chicago bid is that its wildly optimistic financial projections were written up before the depths of the current recession became apparent.  So the Chicago boosters are projecting record ticket revenue from the Games – surpassing all previous ones.  They are projecting record donations by charitable organizations.  Record corporate donations for naming rights.  Seamless sale of the Olympic village facility by the private market following the Games, and no problem raising private capital for the construction.

Laughable even before the crash, these projections seem to be more the product of some truly strong, mind-altering drugs than any sober analysis.  Let's break these down one by one:

**  RECORD TICKET REVENUE.  Ticket prices at Olympic events have already long priced out working class people from the market.  Many venues at Beijing's Olympics featured thousands of empty unsold seats, at substantially lower prices than that which Chicago will have to charge to get the projected record ticket revenue.

A teacher at today's rally asked his students how many of them had ever attended a Chicago Bears game, and thus had at least in a minor way benefited from the millions in taxpayer money given to the notoriously miserly Bears ownership.  Only a couple of students raised their hands, he said.  'Nuf said.  Working class Chicagoans won't be at these games, but we'll pay for them.

** RECORD DONATIONS BY CHARITABLE ORGANIZATIONS.   Between the crash and the multi-billion dollar Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme, many previously flush foundations have seen their portfolios cut by a third or even one half. 

Because the foundations' funding cycles were already well advanced prior to this past fall's market crash, donation cuts by these organizations are projected to really hit their stride beginning in 2010 rather than this year.  In other words, whether we're talking about cuts in foundation grant funding for AIDS services, homelessness or whatever, we probably haven't seen anything yet. 

As the State of Illinois budget situation goes from bad to worse (highest unfunded pension obligations in the nation, for example), and the joblessness increases, the demands on the diminished resources of private foundations will probably only increase in the near-term.

Huge, let alone record, donations by charitable foundations for these games is a fantasy.

** RECORD DONATIONS FOR CORPORATE NAMING RIGHTS.   The only thing that prevented Mayor Daley's Millennium Park (rolled out years late and way over budget) from being an even greater financial disaster was the copious pasting of corporate logos all over the edifice. 

Boosters of Chicago's Olympic bid, in a rare attempt to appear fiscally responsible, note that a relatively high number of Chicago venues will be pre-existing sites, rather than ones constructed totally from scratch.  Very good, but naming rights for a venue completed decades ago typically commands a much lower price than those of a completely new edifice.  So record naming rights revenue from these Games?  Not likely.  Certainly not something you can bet the bank (or our tax money) on.

**  EASY PRIVATE DEVELOPMENT AND SALE OF THE OLYMPIC VILLAGE. Okay, so the local private condo market has tanked – even worse than the homes market.  So what does the Olympic bid committee want to do?  BUILD MORE CONDOS! 

Oh, and at a time when major development projects across the city are stalled due to lack of private financing, DON'T WORRY!, we'll miraculously raise the private capital that big time developers around the city have failed to raise for their own projects.

But wait, there's more!  We'll build in a relatively undesirable section of the city's worst local condo market!  Yes, the South Loop saw the greatest year-to-year decline in condo sales of any section of the city this year, according to a recent Chicago Tribune article.  So let's build even more condos there, in a section of the neighborhood which is even farther from the Loop than the current unsold units!  Location location location.  Great thinking, guys!
  
An unspoken assumption in the Chicago bid for the Games is that the local and world economies will substantially improve over the next few years.  But no one (including me) has a crystal ball.

The economy (and tax revenues) may improve in the near-term, or they may not.  Certainly there are important factors that would suggest that a near-term recovery is not in the offing:

* Consumer spending has been the main engine of U.S. (and world) economic expansion for the past several decades, and yet U.S. consumer debt is at near-record highs, and consumer income is declining.  Consumer net worth was blown out of the water by the combined effect of real estate devaluations and stock market / 401k / money market crashes.  In contrast to the consumer-led recoveries of the past few decades, the consumer will likely be AWOL from the next recovery, and there is no other sector of the U.S. economy that is anywhere near large enough to fill that void.

* Japan recently emerged from a similar economic contraction, something dubbed "the lost decade."  This is a very likely scenario for the U.S. economy.  How did the Japanese economy finally drag itself out of the gutter?  Well it wasn't stimulus spending.  They tried that, and its effects were ameliorative at best.  Theirs was an export-led recovery.  Good for them, but given that U.S. manufacturing is increasingly uncompetitive on an international level, how could we export our way out of the current crisis, and who else in the world has the money to buy higher-priced U.S. manufactured goods anyway?

Amidst this likely continuing economic crisis, the Olympics are an unseemly boondoggle.  Just when the needs for social services are likely to increase and the resources available for them shrink dramatically, we are being asked to pump out millions, if not billions for a 17-day party attended by the world's rich.  Add to this the depredations of graft that Chicago and Illinois are rightfully infamous for, and these Olympics are potentially catastrophic to working class living standards for decades to come. 

And for a final whammy, just as private and tax-payer dollars begin to finally stream into working class neighborhoods like Washington Park and other areas of Olympic venues, watch for the current residents to be gentrified out of their homes by rising property tax and rental rates.  This has been the pattern in all previous Olympic games.  The displacement of tens of thousands in Beijing was done by rude government fiat. 

Watch for the kinder, gentler private market to do it here in Chicago.  The effect is the same.  Working class residents, disproportionately dependant upon public transportation, once again forced to move to the transport-poor outer reaches of the city, not unlike that which happened following the destruction of public housing high rises over the past few decades.  Amidst the Olympics-driven real estate and construction contracts scrambles, working class people of color will be displaced for games they could never dream of attending in the first place.  And we will all pay for it, through the nose.

Andy Thayer is a co-founder of the Chicago-based Gay Liberation Network (www.GayLiberation.net).  He can be contacted at LGBTliberation@aol.com

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