Opponents of Effort to Privatize Lambert St. Louis Airport Celebrate

Just when the opponents of privatizing were digging down and getting ready to wage serious war against big money, Lyda Krewson, Mayor of St. Louis, flipped her position.

As reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,


Mayor Lyda Krewson on Friday abruptly ended the city’s exploration of privatizing operations at St. Louis Lambert International Airport, citing criticism from residents, business leaders and other elected officials.  “They have expressed serious concerns and trepidation about the process, and about the possibility that a private entity might operate the airport,” Krewson said in a letter to members of a city committee weighing privatization.


Big money didn't win this time, but it took a huge village of people who are not motivated by money.  Today's events proved that bad ideas + lots of money = bad ideas.  I was out of town today, but got back to the city just in time to join the celebration at Yaquis on Cherokee. It was a good time for a photo with my hero, Cara Spencer, who is right on the issues, time after time, and who will fight the fight whenever necessary, with the help of hundreds of dedicated people who go above and beyond because they recognize her for the treasure she is. I don't know the next big challenge for Alderwoman Spencer, but I am certain that she will take the side of her constituents.

Another hero is Tony Messenger, reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. On this web page to the Lambert Airport Sunshine Law website that I recently created, I have listed only some of the articles Messenger wrote regarding the effort to privatize.  He recognized the problems from the beginning and wrote his articles with a laser beam.  There's no doubt that his efforts allowed many others to coordinate their energy against privatization.

Someday, we might know what caused today's death of the airport privatization effort. My best guess is that this deal had such a pervasive multi-faceted stench that it collapsed under various ongoing pressures to expose the details of the process, including the sunshine lawsuit filed by Mark Pedroli. There was a lot to hate about this privatization effort, including the warped incentive structure of the contract with the "Working Group," the apparent self-interested motives of the various players, the sham public hearings and the pie-in-the sky promises of magic wealth-production made by the "Working Group."

All of this must be viewed in the following critical context: the current airport commission, led by Rhonda Hamm-Niebruegge, has been doing a fantastic job by any metric imaginable. Tonight is a night to celebrate, because the good guys won. Big money failed to completely twist local government to serve its profit-driven whims. The dark lining on this silver cloud is that big money got as far as it got and that it took so much work by so many people to put the brakes on the process.

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True war heroes

Many of us "Support the U.S. Troops" in the Middle East even though we have no idea what they are doing on a day to day basis. There is no significant news reporting from the areas where the soldiers do whatever they do, so many Americans fills this vacuum with hopeful imagination. I don't. I assume the worst. Sunshine is the best disinfectant, and there is no sunshine where the U.S. military is operating in the Middle East. At any time over the past ten years, you could read 100 consecutive days of most any local newspaper, and you wouldn't know anything about the day to day conduct of members of the U.S. military. You would barely know that we were at war. There have been no meaningful photos and no stories to advise us of what is really going on, where our heavily armed military encounters civilians. Nonetheless, in our ignorance, we declare ALL troops to be heroes, clapping for them at baseball games and other social events, having no idea what they are actually doing. Imagine honoring any other profession, not having any self-critical information with regard to that person's activities. "Ladies and Gentlemen, let me hear a round of applause for Joe, who is a great musician,"imagine everyone in the room clapping, even though none of them had ever heard of Joe, and none of them have heard him play even one note. Sometimes we do learn what a soldier has actually done, and sometimes it is a actually the story of a hero. Take the case of Hugh Thompson, who stepped up to do what was right, at his own risk:

Returning to the My Lai area at around 0900 after refueling, he noticed that the people he had marked were now dead. Out in a paddy field beside a dike 200 metres (660 ft) south of the village, he marked the location of a wounded young Vietnamese woman. Thompson and his crew watched from a low hover as Captain Ernest Medina (commanding officer of C Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment) came up to the woman, prodded her with his foot, and then shot and killed her. [More . . . ]

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Elizabeth Warren tells the OCC and the Fed that their job is not to hide evidence of lawbreaking

Senator Elizabeth Warren educates Daniel P. Stipano, Deputy Chief Counsel, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Richard Ashton, Deputy General Counsel, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. They look surprised that they should actually be looking out to help out victims of the banks and not helping the banks to hide evidence of law-breaking by those banks that conducted illegal foreclosures. Thank goodness we have Senator Warren on the job.

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Hero worship of Bill Clinton

At Salon.com, Matt Stoller questions the liberal hero-worship of Bill Clinton:

Back in June, Clinton angered Democrats nationwide by calling for an extension of the Bush era tax cuts for the wealthy. He also spoke glowingly of Mitt Romney’s “sterling business career,” getting in the way of an effective line of attack by the Obama campaign. And in terms of deregulation, Bill Clinton was one of the patron saints of the crisis: pushing through the final repeal of the Glass- Act, which legalized the heretofore illegal merger of Citigroup; signing the Commodities Future Modernization Act, which fully deregulated derivatives; and reappointing bubble blower Alan Greenspan to the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve.

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