Yesterday, I wrote about a woman who was interviewed on a local TV station in the aftermath of the death last week of Derrion Albert, a sixteen-year old Chicago resident and honor roll student who was beaten to death outside of his high school last week. She very pointedly looked into the camera and pled with officials to help Chicago’s broken communities and to stop being so concerned with the Olympics.

Ten Chicago residents were killed last weekend, ranging in age from 17 to 29. Violence, broken communities and schools, a city facing a deficit somewhere in the range of $200 to $250 million (some estimate it’s now pushing $300 million), a ballooning state deficit of $11.5 billion — this is the reality in Chicago.

So whether you look at it from the grieving woman’s point of view, that any precious tax dollars spent should be put toward cleaning up the city’s problems, or from a purely fiscal point of view, questioning the logic of bringing the Olympics to a city with such vast financial problems, not to mention extensive corruption, the effort to bring the Olympics to Chicago is not only irresponsible, it is the height of delusion. It ignores the reality the city, state and its residents face, in the name of undertaking to put on a production, a show for the rest of the world, in the hopes that it will either fail to notice or overlook the unstable city that is at the center of it all.

Yesterday, I wrote:

“While the President and First Lady travel to Copenhagen to appeal to the IOC on behalf of their hometown, their full-fledged support for staging the Olympics in Chicago may put them in the minority. A local station, WGNTV News, points out that Chicagoans are already on the hook for $250 million, and84% of Chicagoans are against financing any part of the Olympics. Mayor Daley, the biggest proponent of Chicago’s bid, “is rocking a 35% approval rating”. Tomorrow, organizations are coming together to hold a rally voicing their opposition to the Olympics.

Under the contract Mayor Daley will sign if Chicago is picked to host the Olympics, Chicagoans would backstop any Olympic losses the city faces. Mayor Daley has insisted that the risks taxpayers face is small. He points to the surpluses other cities have enjoyed after hosting the Olympics. He chooses not to highlight the fact that it took Montreal twenty years to pay off its debts after the 1976 Olympics. Or the fact that there are already accusations of Daley insiders with schemes in place to pad their pockets with sweet real estate deals and other financial interests in bringing the Olympics to home sweet home Chicago.”

With unemployment at 9.7%, the highest level since June of 1983, unemployment on the rise in 27 states, and states already worrying about budget shortfalls when stimulus funds run out, Chicago’s bid is a continuation of the kind of overstretched spending and impudent policies that got it into the mess it’s in to begin with. What was that saying that gained so much notoriety during the election about putting lipstick on a pig? That is exactly what the Olympic effort is like, putting lipstick on a city with clearly discernible blemishes; when all is said and done, you’re still stuck with a pig.

*Originally published September 29, 2009 on the American Issues Project Blog, here.