The "Bean" and the bucks

Over the last two months I have taken two trips to millenium park. These trips included seeing the "bean" up close. For those of you who haven't seen it I have included a picture. Words really can't express my feelings on this colossal piece of "art". But, I will try. When I first saw it I immediately thought of that rusty looking hunk of steel produced by Picasso that resides in Daley Plaza. My second thought was "No, nothing is quite that hideous, nor as big a waste of money." The Bean isn't that bad. At least the Bean is shiny and new. Other than that I can't think of any reason why a hunk of metal should take up prime real estate. Maybe I don't appreciate art. And the "bean" certainly is a bigger waste of money because in 1967 Picasso refused to be paid $100,000 for his sculpture and actually donated it to the city of Chicago. A fun tidbit is that Picasso never said what the sculpture represented. Theories range from - a horse, to his wife, to his dog. Some say(ok maybe just me) that he had no idea and said "I'll just give them this hunk of crap and say hey - I'm Picasso"

I also walked on the shiny, twisty metal bridge that makes a 100 foot journey into a quarter of a mile journey. It was built by that wonderful lake Michigan polluter, British petroleum. Gee, thanks!That cute bridge more than makes up for polluting our lake and our air. This bridge must be what they are talking about in their commercials when they tell us how much they care about our environment.
Overall , I found the park to be rather disapointing. But the cost of the park is very impressive. The original cost was to be a mere $150,000,000. In the end the cost was $481,000,000. Wow, we got change back from our half a billion dollars. I wonder who got rich on that deal?

It might not be so bad until you hear that the city of Chicago is going to institute record breaking tax hikes. At the same time the CTA is hundreds of millions of dollars in the hole. Routes are being discontinued making it extremely difficult fot thousands of these taxpayers to get to work. At the same time thousands of CTA employees will get laid off of their jobs. Not only that but there are reports of inspectors falsifying reports because they haven't even bothered to actually do their inspections, so some routes may not even be safe. Apparently no one has to answer for this as the only coments from the head of the CTA are about fare hikes and service cuts that will come.

And it's not just Chicago looking to suck taxpayers dry. The Cook county board is also looking for record breaking tax raises along with medical service cuts. It doesn't stop there. The state government is also looking for huge tax increases.

Here's an alternative to raising taxes. Chicago could sell the Picasso instead of raising taxes.

The point here is that it is irresponsible to spend enormous sums of taxpayer's money on useless crap like the bean and millenium park itself when there are real needs to be taken care of for the citizens. It seems that the local political system is trying to use the formula of the roman emperor who said that to keep the people happy you just have to give them "bread and circuses"

Well, millenium park isn't much of a circus, but the people running the show are certainly clowns.