Sunday, January 15, 2017

Golf Comes to the Killing Fields



...on Friday the Justice Department releases a "major report" about policing in Chicago. Anyone unfamiliar with the Obama administration would assume such a report would address the gruesome question of how police can stop the ongoing slaughter of Chicagoans on the city's South and West sides. Last year an average of ten Chicagoans were shot and wounded every day, most of them young men, most of them concentrated in a handful of neighborhoods. Homicides averaged two a day.

So of course the Justice Department has spent countless dollars and man hours to study…civil rights violations by the Chicago Police Department. First things first!

An almost comical case of point-missing arose again this week in Chicago, when the city awarded a $1.1 million preliminary planning contract to an engineering firm for a project in Woodlawn, one of the South Side neighborhoods that has become a killing field. Of course the neighborhood is starved for capital investment, private employers, good jobs, and safe schools that empower children with a useful education. So Mayor Rahm Emanuel had an idea. He wants to raise tens of millions of dollars to…watch out…build a luxury golf course in Woodlawn's Jackson Park....