In June, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration selected Elon Musk’s The Boring Company to build a non-stop express train from downtown to O’Hare Airport. The development is yet another example of Emanuel’s plan to transform Chicago into a city for the wealthy few.
Emanuel has stated that Musk’s express train will be fully financed by private investors. But the city’s 2009 parking meter fiasco has taught us that working Chicagoans end up on the losing side of fast-tracked privatization schemes. Morgan Stanley Investment Partners (MSIP) paid the city over $1 billion to lease the city’s parking meter system. But in an information memorandum released in 2010, MSIP estimated that, by the end of the lease in 2084, the firm would rake in over $11 billion from parking meter users by charging higher fares.
As with the parking meter deal, Emanuel’s O’Hare express privatization scheme will first and foremost benefit the same set of corporate elites who have profited from years of cuts to public goods and services. Under Emanuel, Chicago has been on the forefront of both recruiting corporate headquarters and displacing African-Americans. Tax giveaways meant to entice corporate CEOs have coincided with school closings in poor neighborhoods of color and service cuts that have made life in Chicago untenable for many working families. As a result, the city faces extreme economic disparity, hosting a racial wealth divide far worse than the US average.
Soon after Emanuel closed 49 public schools in 2013 in part to reduce $100 million from the Chicago Public Schools budget, he authorized a $55 million taxpayer handout to support the development of the Wintrust/DePaul Stadium project and a Marriott Hotel near McCormick Place Convention Center. Since being opened, the stadium has fallen short of attendance predictions and, as studies have shown, such publicly funded sports arenas don’t actually spur economic growth but they do leave taxpayers buried in more debt.
This is neoliberal policy at its core: the public sector is slashed while assets and services are left in the hands of the private market.
Although Musk’s project would be the first airport express train project of its kind in the United States, such ventures in other countries have concentrated public wealth in private hands. A study conducted for SNCF French National Railways finds that 84 percent of private airport express train investors across the globe overestimate the number of riders they will attract by at least 20 percent.
When such privately funded trains fail to hit their ridership targets, the projects can expect a public bailout to keep the trains running. For example, lower than expected ridership on Vancouver’s airport express train forced the Canadian government to pay its private financier over $20 million a year.
The proposed O’Hare express train, set to cost riders an estimated $25 for a one-way ticket, is poised to further deepen Chicago’s crises of growing inequality, neighborhood neglect and displacement of longtime residents. As previous CTA plans have suggested, the express train will likely be given priority over expanding and maintaining local train service, which could ultimately force working people who rely on the Blue Line to experience reduced service and longer travel times.
In light of the growing unaffordability of the city, Mayor Emanuel should be prioritizing ways to make the city more affordable and accessible for everyday residents. He should focus on adding more bus and train service frequency to reduce long wait times and overcrowding, and more train or bus rapid transit connections to job centers in the suburbs. Instead of building a second train line to O’Hare airport, which will disproportionately benefit the rich, why not make public transit free for everyone and provide CTA employees with a fair contract?
In 2015, CTA collected $587 million from riders, on par with the nearly half billion collected by the city’s Tax Increment Financing districts each year between 2011 and 2015. Rather than creating slush funds for developers, the city could be providing free transit for Chicagoans.
As always, these questions are not decided by actual financial means—or democracy—but by political priorities. With Musk’s O’Hare express train, Rahm Emanuel is once again prioritizing adding services and amenities for the rich—and sticking the rest of us with the bill.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.