The People's Strike - Sept 2002 - The Grand Prix and Other Grand Schemes
from the People's Strike Newspaper
To find out the priorities of this country, this bastion of capitalism you just have to take a look at what is happening in its capital, the District of Columbia. On July 17, in the Washington Post, two articles appeared that brought home the truth about the District's priorities. One was an article that talked about the proposed cuts to the District's public library budget by $1.4 million this year. The second article stated that an additional $1.6 million was authorized for the District's Grand Prix racing course. This additional money for the racing course would bring the total for the project up to $5.1 million.
The proposed cuts to the library would result in closing all but one library on Saturdays and would reduce library hours during the weekdays. City's board of trustees has already approved this proposal. The people running this city think it's more important to bring tourists into the city rather than maintain access to our libraries. This in a city whose children are starved for recreational and educational venues. Ask any long time resident of DC and they will tell you that, when they were kids they had access to recreation and community centers within walking distance of their homes but those centers have disappeared now.
The additional money for the grand prix was approved by a "quasi-independent" (read totally unaccountable to the citizens) commission appointed by Mayor Anthony Williams. The mayor is standing by the Grand Prix event because he wants to attract a grander scheme to the district - the 2012 Olympics. That is why he declared the recent 3-day grand prix event "enormously successful" and that it's proof that the nation's capital can host world-class events. This is despite the fact that the event deafened the community in its vicinity and filled the neighborhood with car exhaust.
Mayor Williams has already spent one million dollars without the consent of the citizenry to woo the Olympics Committee to DC. This in a city where schools were banned from purchasing new supplies between March and September of this year. This in a city where the only public hospital has been shut down. Now there is talk of offering the hospitals grounds for the Olympics.
The Olympics is being sold in the same manner as other grand short sighted grand schemes have been pushed -by saying that this will boost the city's economy. This is how the MCI Center, the Convention Center and the Grand Prix were pushed on us. The reality is, like all these schemes, the Olympics will create more traffic congestion, more minimum wage jobs, massive displacement of poor residents, and massive tax cuts to the rich carpetbaggers. In the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, 30,000 low-income residents were evicted and 10,000 housing units, including 4,000 public housing units, were demolished. The Olympics will give the mayor and city's capitalists a perfect cover for accelerated gentrification of the city.
What is happening in DC is part of a national trend that resorts to short term grand schemes and avoids long term real solutions that get to the root of poverty in urban areas Your city is decay? Homelessness is increasing? Your schools budgets are hemorrhaging? Build a stadium!
The only thing that the city gained so far are playgrounds for the rich. We have a mayor with an eye on the dollar that runs roughshod over the citizens of this underrepresented unautonomous city to please the folks on the hill, to pursue the almighty dollar.
Its time to resist this state of affairs. Residents, in a small demonstration made their voices heard against the Olympics and the grand prix in June. They gave back the mayor a dose of noise that stopped a wooing affair meant to impress the Olympic committee. Now its time to make a bigger noise. Its time to close down the city until the priorities are turned right side up. Anyone who has had enough of the lies, corruption, the noise, the pollution, and the robbing of this city should join the chorus on September 27 to declare Human Need not Corporate Greed.
updated August 2002
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