via the [ Sunlight Foundation ]

“Vis-a-Visclosky: Or How I Learned to Take Campaign Contributions and Turn Them Into Earmarks”

It comes as no surprise that Indiana Democrat Pete Visclosky’s favorite word to say in Congress is “Indiana.” While staying out of the spotlight in Washington, he has been a champion for his Northwestern Indiana congressional district, bringing home millions of federal dollars to create jobs and win fans. Since the decline in manufacturing, new jobs have become essential for this Rult Belt region and Visclosky, from his position on the House Appropriations Committee, has sought to get as big a piece of the federal pie as he can for his constituents.

This hard work bringing home federal dollars has made Visclosky a national news name as his connection to a lobbying firm, the PMA Group, which represented many of the recipients of federal money earmarked by the congressman, has brought him under investigation by the FBI. In the past two weeks, Visclosky’s offices and campaign committess have been subpoenaed and he has reliquished control of the Energy & Water Appropriations Subcommittee to Rep. Ed Pastor.

All of this is due to the connection between campaign contributions flowing from the PMA Group and their clients to Visclosky’s campaigns and the millions of dollars in earmarks to PMA Group clients that Visclosky secured in his post on the powerful House Appropriations Committee.

After studying campaign contribution data for 1998-2008 (compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics) and earmark data for FY2008 and FY2009 (from both Taxpayers for Common Sense and Legistorm), the connection between those PMA Group clients that contributed money to Visclosky’s campaigns and the earmarks they received is clearly evident. The visualization below — created by our terrific designer Kerry Mitchell — shows how connected the earmarks are to the receipt of campaign contributions. Click on the image for a larger version:

My problem here is that many of these earmarks went to benefit the political elite in the region and did not go into benefitting the citizens.

Thomas Regional

via [ Slate ] Dairy of a 100-Year-Old Man by Leon Despres

A Haiku for My Doctors, Sept. 11, 2008

I have made my visit to my heart doctor. Last time he told me to come back in two months. Today, he says cheerfully: “You’re doing well. Come back in six months.”

Six months! That’s like getting a gold bond on my life. Not payable for six months, or later. I am exhilarated. I must rely on a whole set of physicians. Today’s lively medical send-off stimulates me to write a haiku with a modest pattern at the end:

I owe them all so very much,
My life and fun and sense of ease
And welcome freedom from disease
My…

Cardiologist
Dermatologist
Ophthalmologist

And my … me-di-cin-nal generalist.

Challenging the Daley Machine: A Chicago Alderman’s Memoir by Leon Despres
Book Review: Political war stories from a thorn in the side of Chicago’s famous Boss

In 1955, south-sider Leon Despres was elected to the Chicago City Council-the same year that Paddy Bauler famously uttered that “Chicago ain’t ready for reform.” Ready or not, Chicago got twenty years of reform efforts from Despres, one of the few independents in the council and the most liberal alderman in the city. His demand to cut out the corrupt sale of city driveway permits made him enemies from the very beginning. Over the years his crusades to ban discrimination, preserve Chicago landmark buildings, and gain equality for African-Americans-when Daley-beholden African-American council members refused to help-threw wrench after wrench into the Machine. And, not incidentally, changed the city. But Challenging the Daley Machine is more than a memoir. It’s a historical portrait of the way things were done under the Boss, when changing times and a changing city forced the Machine to confront the problems Despres championed. His battles against the seemingly monolithic Machine are also an inspiration to anyone who is facing long odds, but is convinced he/she is on the side of right.

[ Chicago Tribune ]

Over his 101 years, Leon Despres took artist Frida Kahlo to the movies, drove the first Mayor Daley to distraction, and fought a long and often lonely crusade for civil rights and political reform that saw African-Americans gain entry to the mayor’s office and the White House.

Despres, a former Chicago alderman, died of heart failure Wednesday in his Hyde Park apartment, said Kenan Heise, who collaborated with Despres on his 2005 memoir….

During his 20 years on the City Council, he lost many more battles than he won against Richard J. Daley and the Democratic machine. When the mayor lost patience with the 5th Ward alderman, he simply turned off Despres’ microphone, said William Singer, a North Side independent alderman in the 1970s.

Yet the city has moved closer to much of what Despres fought for — fair elections and an end to patronage and segregation. Singer said younger Chicagoans may not realize how much the best of the city today reflects Despres’ legacy.

“For those of us who followed him to the City Council, he taught us that it was important for us to raise the issues even if we were sure to lose,” said Singer, who also ran for mayor against Richard J. Daley

Read more: Leon Despres, 1908-2009: Chicago alderman challenged elder Mayor Daley — chicagotribune.com.

Thomas Regional

On March 26th the School of the Art Institute held a panel discussion to “address perceptions that artists on Chicago’s South Side are under-known and undervalued or, at worst, intentionally ignored” as Jason Foumberg so aptly states in his piece titled “Why Have There Been No Great South Side Artists?” at Newcity Art.

Panelists included:

• Andre Guichard, artist and owner of Gallery Guichard
• Joyce Owens, Chicago State faculty, Art & Design Department
• Lowell Thompson, artist and writer
• Natalie Moore, reporter, Chicago Public Radio
• Patrick Rivers, SAIC faculty, Visual & Critical Studies Department

Living so far south that I inhabit a whole other state (which is still part of Chicago’s Calumet region), my marginal location gives me a very useful perspective on this subject. The subject speaks to the importance of identity and place and the old stories of enfranchisement. And I am very glad it has been brought up. I hope many Artist from Northwest Indiana participate in the ongoing discussions.

A major characteristic of my identity with Chicago growing up on the North Side was what was absent. I had a massive blackhole in my awareness of the city’s South Side. My family took advantage of a few South Side islands such as Hyde Park, China town, and Maxwell Street and I was a Sox fan, besides that I had no other identity with the South Side.

Chicago is known for its iconic neighborhoods, and yet during my youth - from the 1960s through the 1980s, most of Chicagoan’s lived in what I now call “Gap Areas.” These are places that lie between identities, mostly serving the nimby instincts (not in my backyard) of more powerful iconic identities. Consequently, these places tended to receive discarded land, material, infrastructure, and peoples; out-of-sight, out-of-mind. Whether they are brownfields or brownpeople north siders were too preoccupied with the forming of their own identities that they gave little attention to the South Side. It is hard for an enlightened northsider to speak to a Blackhole, even if they grew up in one.

When I think about this topic and its ramifications for Artist I don’t just think about the agents of art (makers and consumers) but also the place of art. Whatever you may think about the person, place also has an important role in Art. And when you add markets to the mix, well then, you just created hierarchies of place and centers of the arts which are highly biased toward monied interests.

There has always been a conflict between where the market is and where the artist live. Artists (or the Creative Class), being more mobile, have been known to abandoned where they live to migrate in mass and cluster around these highly capitalized creative centers. But now that capital has become highly mobile itself, actually much more mobile than people, there is no reason we can not bring these markets to these once discarded communities and neighborhoods and seed the development of more great artist.

See I believe, some of the blind neglect by the institutions of art and the media has expression in our built environment. The built environment is a physical record that also solicits certain behavior - it’s the construction of the Dan Ryan all over again. What has occurred on the southside with respect to the art world is another form of white flight and building barriers.

We are only beginning to see revitalization in the Bronzeville neighborhood and the near southside. My worry is that developers such as Community Builders, who are developing the Ida B. Wells area, have neglected the importance of Culture and the Arts to such an extent that they have not attracted the necessary capital to seed a vital cultural life.

Although Pilsen is a near southside community it can serve as a good example for seeding the development of a cultural center. There are several initiatives that make it a vital place for artist to live (the Hispanic Art Museum and the Podmajerski properties to name just two). The last decade has also seen an expansion of the art scene into Bridgeport and farther south. Then of course there is Hyde Park, Beverly and Morgan Park.

But what is forgotten are the neighborhoods that lie under the plumb of existing and fallow 20th century industry - steel mills and oil refineries. There has been very little to no progress in these neighborhoods.

By the title “Why have there been no great South Side Artists?” Jason Founberg references Linda Nochlin’s famous Feminist essay, “Why have there been no great women artists?” This is a great rhetorical tactic that worked well for women in the arts in the late 1980’s and early 1990s. It creates a dialectic between the art establishment and South Side Artists. The framing of the dialectic repositions the South Side Artist to a position of equivalence. Remember this is also the era that produced the Guerilla Girls, Hillary Clinton and other effective tactics of identity politics to empower disenfranchised women. If I was a community organizer, I would say we made same great gains here. So, as much as we need to continue building channels for great artists to reach the great show rooms of the Art establishment so too we need build the channels that brings the Art establishment to the South Side.

Finally, there are perceptual advantages to living at the margins of this Metropolis. ….

Last Final Note: 

The “Invisible Artist” panel discussion will air on Chicago Public Radio at a future date to be determined. A related exhibition, “Change…” is on view through April 30 at the South Side Community Art Center, 3831 S. Michigan.

Thomas General Arts, Northwest Indiana, Regional

<Looking back at November 2006>This conference occurred more than 2 years ago at Indiana University Northwest. This is the kind of stuff that peeks my interests and tickles my hand. There was great significance to hosting such a conference at this time and place. Northwest Indiana had been looking for strategies to revitalize the region. They had developed the Marquette Plan, the Regional Development Authority, transportation projects, etc. This was in a continuation of efforts to move things along.

This brings to mind two issues.

1. What is the role of the Artist in urban vitalization?
   • Too often the artist’s voice in these kinds of discussions are treated like a craft booth artist, pedaling their cute works. Otherwise they are deaf, dumb and blind. Artists are to perform and be quiet. This is what I call the “Dirty Dancing” treatment. I am often embarrassed for Artist who accept such roles. 
   • I believe the Artist needs to step up and contribute their voice to the built environment. I believe that Artist voice should take the leading role more often in civil society. 
2. And what has happened in the last 2-years?
   • I am not certain anything has happened. I don’t know of any new initiatives or changes in the way the region is approaching revitalization. 
   • It appears to me with the announcement of the BP project the region has actually regressed from advancing such initiatives. 
   • Revitalization of the region reverted back to a reliance on old heavy industry, in this case the refining of the even dirtier fossil fuels - the Alberta tar sand.
   • The region became ensnarled in a lack of initiative and culture once again. Indiana and regional Leaders approved environmental permitting with out ANY objection. It wasn’t until Illinois voice objection to violating the the Clean water act that the issue was heard. Regional Leaders and the press did not investigate. They promoted the project without investigation. They approved with out reviewing impacts, particularly to initiatives outlined in this conference.

Drawing the Lines: International Perspectives on Urban Renewal through the Arts
This conference promotes conversation about art and urban renewal on the broader international scale alongside more local applications in Northwest Indiana. Drawing the Lines brings together the multiple constituencies whose perspectives are necessary to evaluating the merits of urban revitalization models.

Drawing the lines seeks to:

• Explore models of urban renewal through the arts,
• Reflect on the impact of renovations efforts in the community,
• Understand how government and private markets affect urban change,
• Share best practices among community based leaders and scholars, and
• Build a coalition to create concrete initiatives for the Northwest Indiana region.

Conference Abstracts:

• “The Arts Can Define a Region”
  John M. Cain, South Shore Arts
• “Revive:  Using Art to Help Heal a Superfund Site”
  Minda Douglas, Marcia Gillette, and Ann Cameron, Indiana University Kokomo
• “The Impact of Visual and Expressive Art on Public Policy and Public Voice”
  Karen G. Evans, Indiana University Northwest                                          
  Daniel Lowery, Calumet College of St. Joseph
• “Cool Cities” Through Their “Creative Class”: A Model for Revitalizing Indiana’s Essential Cities”
  Bruce Frankel, Ball State University
  Deborah Malitz, Indiana City Corp.
  Larry Francer, Historic Farmland
  Flo Lapin, Goldspace Theater, Muncie
  Richard Sowers, Anderson Symphony
  David Bowdon, Columbus Symphony, Terra Haute Symphony, Carmel Symphony
• “The Interstices Between Art and Economic Development”
  Michelle Golden, Books, Brushes and Bands
  Mary Kaczka, Hammond Development Corporation
  John Davies, Woodlands Communications
  Daniel Lowery, Quality of Life Council
• “The Poetics of Space: IU Northwest’s Sculpture Garden”
  Neil Goodman, Indiana University Northwest
• “Available:  post-industrial development and design at Lake Calumet”
  Ellen Grimes, w / M. Powell, A. Kirschner, and M. al Khurasat, University of Illinois at Chicago
• “Urban Redevelopment and the Arts:  Flagship Cultural Projects in Los Angeles and San Francisco”
  Carl Grodach, University of Texas at Arlington
• “Leveraging Culture to Build a City’s External Brand and Internal Cohesiveness”
  Tom Jones, Smart City Consulting
• “The IU Northwest Klamen Mural Project”
  David Klamen, Indiana University Northwest
• “Art in the Region” 
  Patricia Lundberg, Indiana University Northwest
• “Looking at Urban Renewal Trials”
   Peter Matthews, University of Mar
• “Spaces of vernacular creativity”
  Steve Millington, Manchester Metropolitan University
• “The Other City Beautiful: Philadelphia and its Avenue of the Arts”
  Micheline Nilsen, Indiana University South Bend
• “Bilbao: a spectacular but somehow disenchanted city”
  Antonio Román,, University of Deusto
• “The Creative Class and Urban Economic Growth Revisited”
  Michael Rushton, Indiana University, Bloomington
• “Creating A Vision for International Community Development:  Indianapolis in 2050”
  William Plater, Indiana University Purdue University, Indianapolis
• “Projects to Save a City”
  Sanjit Sethi, Memphis College of Ar
• “The ‘Guggenheim Effect’ and the ‘New Bilbao’: On the Social Costs of Bilbao’s Urban Regeneration”
  Lorenzo Vicario and Manuel Martínez-Monje, University of the Basque Country.

Thomas Case Studies, Economics, General Arts, Multi-media, Northwest Indiana, Regional

Gary is interesting. Some people are just vaguely aware of the problems in Gary, myself included. The center of the Debate often focuses on establishing who is at fault, without ever fixing the problems. Whether they are failures from within the Gary community, or from outside. I tend to recognize that there are serious problems within Gary, but that they tend to be dwarfed in comparison to the effect the external causes have had on the community. If what I have experienced in East Chicago is any measure than I can easily see what the residents of Gary are up against. 

“Gary once held the promise of being the mecca of black america. In my mind, although the dream is tarished, the hope has somewhat faded and the peoples’ reslience has been tested, the promise is still there.”

- Bryan K. Bullock

I write a lot about East Chicago, because I am here. I am not originally from here. I got caught by my shock that America completely fails to operate here, and that some of America’s backbone industries (Steel & Oil) depend and manufacture that failure. 

East Chicago, like many cities across the country, fueled America’s greatness. Still, the promise of America fails them. Gary, Indiana is a neighbor to East Chicago. The realities that have built its history are somewhat different but they too miss the promise of America. Although Mr. Bullock’s voice originates from past aspirations of a people denied, this failure fails all people. Gary has much promise. 

There is a reason these communities are failing. You often do not need to look farther than to who benefits. 

In an effort to overcome “Da Region’s” bad reputation regional leaders, mostly from the southern part of the county, have re-branded the region as the “South Shore.” From my estimation the region has a national brand in “Gary” worth at least half-billion in marketing. Granted the brand requires serious repolishing, but to abandon it is not to understand its worth.

Thomas Case Studies, Northwest Indiana, Regional

In today’s Times Opinion RDA needs to hit the ground running, East Chicago’s Intermodal ambitions are apparently not on the agenda, trumped by that of the Port of Indiana’s. It looks like East Chicago’s lack of interest in engaging regionalism and regional authorities (NIRPC, the Forum, Quality of Life Council, The Marquette Plan), during the first six months of this administration, may have cost East chicago’s “Economic Development Council” the opportunity to do what it has wanted to do - develop a Port or Intermodal facility ASAP. When you consider the timeline for the navigational dredge, the soon to come environmental dredge, and the need to widen and deepen the canal to support such shipping (if Mr. Ruff continues to insist on the present location), build new bridges, do all the feasibility and environmental studies, the lack of developed plans, get the support of the RDA and all other necessary authorities, it was never a quick deal. Now, It looks like Mr. Ruff will have an opportunity to develop an Intermodal Port, only it will be in Portage.

The issue: Regional Development Authority
Our opinion: Now that we have a full slate of board members, they should move quickly, under John Clark’s leadership, on the important work they must do. They need to draft a

Harley Snyder and Lou Martinez have been named to the Northwest Indiana Regional Development Authority. The RDA now begins its work Sept. 26.

The RDA’s first meeting on that date will be at the Northwestern Indiana Regional Planning Commission building in Portage. The RDA should start with a good briefing from NIRPC and take time to listen to the views of the region.
It must then quickly draft a plan that sets priorities and quickly act on it.

In announcing Snyder’s appointment Thursday, Gov. Mitch Daniels said Northwest Indiana has no shortage of plans. What it needs is results.

That’s true, but what the region really needs first is a single blueprint for Northwest Indiana that incorporates those many other plans.

Then the RDA can decide in what order to tackle these objectives and start moving on them.

Bus services need to be consolidated and routes thoughtfully crafted. Passenger rail service needs to be extended to Lowell and Valparaiso. An intermodal facility needs to be developed to facilitate intermodal shipping through the port in Portage. Land along the Lake Michigan shoreline needs to be reclaimed for public use, in line with the Marquette Greenway plan. The Gary/Chicago International Airport needs to be improved and additional airlines recruited.

And that’s just a sampling of the work the RDA needs to do.

The board members need to hit the ground running. They need to ask NIRPC’s expert advice but also others in the region.

And they’re asking you, too, to speak out. It’s your region, and you should have a voice in how it develops. Offer your advice to the RDA members.

The RDA is Indiana’s first truly regional government. Help make it work well.

On the RDA board

* John Clark, RDA chairman and Gov. Mitch Daniels’s senior adviser for economic growth

* Harley Snyder, president of HSC Inc./Real Estate Counseling and Investment

* Howard Cohen, chancellor of Purdue University Calumet

* Gus Olympidis, Family Express founder and president

* Ned Ruff, East Chicago city attorney

* Bill Joiner, president of the Gary Economic Development Commission

* Lou Martinez, president of Lake Area United Way

Offer your advice

The RDA is inviting comments and suggestions prior to its first meeting. Send your e-mail to rda@iedc.in.gov

If you go

The Regional Development Authority will meet at 6:30 p.m. Sept. 26 at the Northwestern Indiana Regional Planning Commission building, 6100 Southport Road, Portage.

Your opinion, please

What should be the RDA’s first priority?

Thomas Local, Regional