r. just sent me this by hugh iglarsh in counterpunch via friends of the park.  please follow the link below and read the whole article, as it is great.
i know obomba doesn't care, but we damn well should. it's our park, and our neighborhood.

....
    chicago doesn’t need this hollow monument to gentrification, elitism and privatization 
on its lakefront. we as a nation don’t need more crumbs from the tables of the billionaires who choke and starve us, or more tainted foundation dollars turning angry activists into tame “social entrepreneurs.”
what we do need is tough, radical, grassroots democracy – which is to say, the community itself, and not self-appointed champions with their own agenda, taking on the strategic neglect and cancerous disinvestment that constitute slow-motion ethnic cleansing. in the unlikely event that barack obama really wants to make life better for all on the south side of chicago, he will need to come down from his sky-scraping glass and concrete fortress 
and join those on the ground, listening to what they say. If obama could do that, which 
at this point he cannot, he might come to the sobering conclusion that his world 
is not their world, his friends are not their friends, and his hopes and dreams,
as embodied in his fraudulent and destructive non-library, are built on their despair.

read the whole article here.

it's soul good.