Yesterday, March 31th 2009, Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley told the city residents he’s entertaining the idea of allowing the corporate food giant, Kentucky Fried Chicken, to spray paint their logo over the top of freshly filled pot holes on Chicago’s city streets.  Highlighted is a link to the Sun Times article.   Daley went on to say, ““If they give us $25 million or $30 million, we’d be glad to look at it. . . . I want the money up front. I’ll take $50 million if you give me $50 million.”   When he was approached about corporate logos on Chicago’s public streets he added, “It all depends if they’re ready to give 50, 60, 70, 80 million. There’s a lot of potholes out here.”

We at BombChicago.com feel this is a perfect example of how government is quite literally selling out it’s citizens public space to the highest bidder. On one hand, government speaks of the problems graffiti poses and how it’s simply destruction of property with no artistic value.  They spend countless thousands of dollars with there graffiti blasters removing such blight.  On the other hand, the city has no problem looking the other direction when there’s brutality massive amount of money involved.  If the city could figure out how to monetize “illegal street art” I’m sure they would not be so objectionable.

We at BombChicago.com have witnessed in our short two week long life, people pleading with us to stop the project because we’re “essentially advertising for them (the graffiti artist)”.  We are politely going to respond with, ABSOLUTELY NOT!  Not when this amount of hypocrisy exists.  We must and will push back.

NBF
Bombs Away

Here is a link to an update to this post.  It was written and published May 23, 2009 by spiderpig.