Blowback

In Ohio this week, the public gave the governor John Kasich a electoral thumping as they comprehensively rejected his attempts to outlaw strikes among public-sector workers and greatly limit the extent of collective bargaining.

His biggest mistake was probably including the police and the firefighters in his plans. They are well-respected members of Ohio society and have powerful, well-organised unions. But even so, the scale of his defeat suggests that even had these two groups been excluded (as Scott Walker did in Wisconsin), he would have very likely been in trouble. In America they call this sort of politics "overreach". Where I come from it is called "biting off more than you can chew".

There is no particular love of unions in Ohio. One old woman, with a shotgun propped up nearby, told a canvasser "get off my porch you union crony". Moderates said things like, "I'm not a union person but..." and basically explained in one way or another that they didn't think the new law was fair.

There was a real show of union strength, with people coming in from all over the country to organise and campaign and someone even told the crowd the morning before the results came in that they were going to stuff Kasich's law down his throat. I was told that there was an incredible "energy" among the unions that had not been seen in a long time. This energy is now heading for Wisconsin in an attempt to unseat the governor there, who has enacted similar legislation. Beyond that, they will be working on the 2012 election.

On buying food

Just deserts

Poor access to fresh food is a solvable health problem

Oct 29th 2011 | CHICAGO | from the print edition


THE corner shop on South Honore and West 59th in Englewood is an uninviting sort of place. Those windows that are not bricked up are covered in heavy security grilles; the shopkeeper hides behind a Plexiglas wall. Most of what is on offer is either packaged or carbonated, and is always processed. [More...]

Food for thought

Fruit vs Candy at Walgreens on Chicago's South Side

Last week I took a trip to Chicago's South Side to report on food deserts. On Tuesday afternoon Michelle Obama was holding an event on healthy eating at a South Side Walgreens.

For someone from out of town, the biggest surprise to me was to find Englewood is so uniformlyAfrican American. It turns out that the food desert problem, at least in Chicago, is very much segregated along racial lines. Like Chicago itself.

I had to ask one taxi driver three times to take me to south 57th before he would believe that I really wanted to go there. On my way out from the Obama event a police officer said "where is your car?", I told him I'd taken a taxi and he told me that there was "no way" I'd get a taxi in this neighbourhood. When I told him I was planning to get the El (the urban train network in town), he expressed some surprise.

I'd like to write more about Chicago's racial divisions in the future. In most of the larger cities I've ever been to there is far more cultural diversity, it may be old news here but there is certainly an economic story to tell here. If anyone can tell me more about about the past, present and future of this issue in Chicago, please do get in touch.

Back to food deserts... I had expected not to be particularly impressed that Walgreens, by tradition a pharmacy, was making much more of an effort to sell fresh and healthy food. But walking around the South Side it is clear what an oasis this is. There are plenty of places selling packets of really nasty 'food' which are high in things like sugar, salt, fat, artificial colourings and every other nasty you might imagine. One of the shops I went into near 59th and S Wood was as scary and as uninviting a prospect as you might imagine. For anyone interested in food deserts, I recommend the reports by Mari Gallagher.

Not far from where Michelle Obama was talking about healthy eating, her husband  had been paired up with something called Candy Corn which has a pretty terrifying list of ingredients that begin with Sugar, Corn Syrup, Confectioner's Glaze, Salt, Honey, and Dextrose. Eeek. I will be truly glad when Halloween, the national festival of sugar, is over.

Mr Obama found nearby promoting a different kind of fare.

Balancing the books in Chicago, part 1.

Reality bites

How to slash a deficit without raising taxes

Oct 22nd 2011 | CHICAGO | from the print edition


AT ABOUT 8.30am on Saturday October 15th, close to the city’s former meatpacking district, one of Chicago’s ancient water mains burst. As the road buckled and water gushed down alleyways, it was a timely reminder that the modern city is built on crumbling, century-old infrastructure. Fixing the problem is not easy, as the city is awash in debt as well as water. [More...]

Balancing the books in Chicago, part 2.

Rubbish competition

City and private-sector workers go bin-to-bin

Oct 22nd 2011 | CHICAGO | from the print edition

ON A cold damp morning in Chicago’s Irving Park a rubbish truck slowly inches its way along an alley, seeking out one of the city’s 240,000 recycling bins. The workers are unruffled over the latest initiative: a competition to see whether the public or the private sector can get the job done better. “We’ll just keep doing it the way we have always done,” says one city worker. [More...]

Correction in the Economist

Correction: The ivory-billed woodpecker


Oct 20th 2011 | from the print edition

Because of a captioning error by our photographic source, our illustration supposedly depicting the ivory-billed woodpecker (Dead or alive?, October 15th) actually shows the crimson-crested woodpecker. The two birds do look very similar.

Pining for the fjords...

Dead or alive?

Two groups say the ivory-billed woodpecker is extinct

Oct 15th 2011 | CHICAGO | from the print edition

WHEN Elvis Presley died in 1977, a lot of people continued to believe he remained alive but in hiding. The world of conservation has a similar phenomenon. The ivory-billed woodpecker was once found across the swampy forests of the south-eastern states. But as the big woods of the Mississippi Delta were chopped down, the woodpecker—with its distinctive tooting call and double knock—was slowly exterminated. Now, as with Elvis, sightings of the bird are hotly debated. [More...]