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The House That Taxpayers Built
Somewhere, probably in a basement, the next great documentarian is scavenging YouTube for clips of congressional inquisitions, Wall Street perp walks and CNBC rants for a future Oscar-winning film about the times we're living through. I'm hoping this future star calls her film "Wall Street II: Cataclysmic Boogaloo," and more important, I'm hoping she gets footage of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, preferably wearing a top hat and monocle.
Even amid CEO testimony, Bernie Madoff grimaces and Rick Santelli diatribes, nothing better captures the moment's destructive greed than a billionaire politician using the municipal office he bought to defend charging $2,500 a ticket to a new Yankee Stadium he forced the public to finance. If there is a single act showing how kleptocracy and let-them-eat-cake-ism are systemic and local rather than momentary and exclusively federal, Bloomberg turning the House That Ruth Built into the House That Taxpayers Built is it.
Foreign oligarchs use guns to confiscate citizens' wages. American oligarchs rely on government to give theft the aura of legitimacy, and Manhattan's richest man is no exception. As an investigation by Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, a Democrat, documents, Bloomberg used various public agencies to extract between $1 billion and $4 billion from taxpayers and then spent the cash on a new stadium for the Yankees, the wealthiest corporation in sports.
The move followed a Bloomberg-backed 2005 initiative giving infamous investment bank Goldman Sachs $1.6 billion in taxpayer-financed bonds to construct its new headquarters -- and amazingly, this encore rip-off is more spectacular. Mimicking tax cheats' deliberately complex transactions, the city owns the stadium, leases it to an agency, which then leases it to a corporate subsidiary, which then leases it to the Yankees. At the end of the Ponzi scheme, the team is permitted to use the taxes it already owes to pay off the mortgage on its new chateau.
New Yorkers might be celebrating if these giveaways delivered verifiable returns to taxpayers. But Brodsky's report notes that "there is little in new job creation, private investment, or new economic activity" from the expenditure. Taxpayers don't even get affordable seats. According to Newsday, they get a stadium charging the highest ticket prices in baseball -- $2,500 for "premium" views (since reduced to "just" $1,250) and $410 for a family of four in the cheap seats.
Like Wall Street firms insisting that trillion-dollar bailouts are a small price for economic stability, Bloomberg first justified everything by saying taxpayers "put next to nothing" into the stadium. (In fairness, a media-mogul mayor who is the planet's 17th wealthiest man may genuinely believe a few billion is "next to nothing" -- but, for comparison, it's more than all the devastating cuts to police, firefighting, school and infrastructure budgets that he proposed in his budget).
Then Bloomberg offered the same laissez-faire paean that financial CEOs cite in opposing executive pay caps. "Don't ever think sports is anything but a business," he said, joining bankers in selectively forgetting that arguments for free-market "business" ring hollow when government is propping up said "business."
If this tale of the House That Taxpayers Built was some anomaly, it might be vaguely funny. But while Bloomberg sets milestones for avarice, the bailout-ism he espouses is the norm.
In Washington, "The Obama administration has broken all records in the distribution of taxpayer dollars to American businesses, primarily banks, automobile manufacturers and insurance companies," reports the Huffington Post. At the local level, lawmakers trip over themselves to throw giveaways at corporate campaign donors.
In the new Gilded Age, socializing risk and privatizing profit has become the standard -- as American as General Motors, Bank of America and, yes, the New York Yankees.
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31 Comments so far
Show AllWhy not a "Heritage protection Bill" ? In order to protect that grand old Game of baseball the American taxpayer will be MANDATED to buy a set number of baseball tickets per year.
Failure to do so will result in a fine. The Ball clubs must in turn promise they will slow the escalation of ticket prices by 1.5 percent per year.
I mean this is about protecting BASEBALL!! What is more American then BASEBALL?
Sioux Rose
GW NORTH: Apt satire.
Bread and Circuses?
Our Bread . . . . Their Circuses!
Bring America Back !!!!...NFL Football.
You can always go to Oakland A's games. Two dollars on Wednesdays. You can watch, for the third year and in a nearly empty house, yet another losing team brought to you by Lew Wolff and Billy Beane, the George Wanker Bush and Cheesedick Cheney of MLB.
GwNorth
Actually my friend, if it goes as it has with all the rest of our industry, I'm sure we will be exporting our Major League jobs to Japan and the minor leagues to China.
Wait till Cuba opens up! play ball
Why is this news? George W. Bush used other people's money, other people's land, and other people's influence to become the owner of the Texas Rangers, starting him out on the road that led to the eventual dismay of the entire world. Fuck Baseball.
For that matter, fuck all professional sports. If you want to see a game played by people who play for love not money, support your local high school.
Even better... any sandlot where kids play unsupervised and know the basic rules of the game. Of course, it may be impossible anymore. I don't mean what passes for 'Little League' or the like. I mean a bunch of kids playing on a dirt field put together by friends from 12 to 17 who looked out for each other, especially if you got hit with a line drive on your nose...
Yeah, right. Hollywood can't even make that movie.
Bring America Back !!!!............Mayor Bloomberg is a Fox in the Bush. He is rich enough and smart enough to lurk around until he gets a shot at the Big Prize--The White House.
....Notice how he does not dirty his hands much, but he turns out at all the celebratory and honorariums==like the annual Ground Zero. Hey, whats not to like about the Yanks ?
...Couple weeks ago, Bloomberg was appropriately indignant, without going overboard, when AF One buzzed the town doing the paparazzi Statue of Liberty pix ! Gee, that will be my aircraft someday..he thinks !!
***Bloomberg must be licking his chops when he sees Obama and Clinton embodying the third term of "W" Bush ! Of course they both have pledged their fielty to AIPAC and to Israel==the radical Zionist right wing lobby which controls all US policies in the mid-East ! Bloomberg is esconced and embedded with Aipac.
**The good Mayor hardly batted an eyelash when former NY Gov Eliot Spitzer got kicked down into the brothels. NOr is Bloomberg trying to ride the coat-tails of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani==so called Americas Mayor !!!
Seems Bloomberg's not interested in a steppin stone by way of Gov, Senator or Congress, but he just wants to slide into home plate like the Yankees. His home plate sure looks more like Pennsylvania Avenue in Wash, DC !!
"In the new Gilded Age, socializing risk and privatizing profit has become the standard -- as American as General Motors, Bank of America and, yes, the New York Yankees."
Pretty much the punchline of the story here: basically the description of the New Kleptocracy
Once again I feel compelled to give a shout out to my hero Jim Bouton, former Yankees pitcher and author of "Ball Four".
[ http://www.jimbouton.com/ ]
I'm not even sure if a more recent book by Jim, "Foul Ball", even made it to the library shelves. Too bad; it's a good read and I recommend it.
It's the story of Bouton's involvement in a project to restore a minor-league baseball field in business since 1892, Wahconah Park, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
The competition arrives in the form of a corporate consortium opposing the restoration of Wahconah Park in favor of building-- what else?-- an expensive NEW stadium. Naturally, this approach requires close cooperation with local politicians to engineer tax breaks, subsidies, zoning variances, etc. And, surprise!, it's sold all the way down the line as a "win-win" outcome for the local baseball team franchise, the fans/citizens, and the operators of the new stadium.
I mention this book because it is a true microcosm of the sleazy capitalism that drives events on every level of Amerikan business.
The David-and-Goliath matchup is the same. Bouton and his partners are "framed" by their opponents and (of course) a co-opted local media as short-sighted egotistical amateurs relying on sentimentality instead of business sense, etc. Once the new stadium proposal gains momentum, it's a foregone conclusion that it's both inevitable AND the best alternative. Which makes it the only "pragmatic" game in town.
I've largely lost interest in MLB as, like all national sports, it's disappeared into the quicksand of corporate control and media hype. But both Bouton's experience and the huge mega-deals like the new Yankees stadium demonstrate the Bankster Way of Life-- sucking revenue from common citizens to grease the skids for a Plutocrat Bonanza.
ยท Yr Obd't Servant
The Western Enlightenment notwithstanding, claims to rule by Divine Right never really got debunked in the cultures of the west.
Where such claims were once made by kings and prelates and widely accepted by average folks, they're now instead made by capitalist oligarchs and corporations -- and likewise widely accepted by average folks.
Question: could I be forgiven for hazarding the cynical-sounding observation that human thinking hasn't made useful progress in this respect...??
For sure never forgiven by Randians, who would claim: since capitalism HAS produced endless miracles like talking refrigerators and iPods, average folks are provably on their way to liberation and should have NO cause for complaint.
{Stupid me, I keep forgetting these deeper Capitalist Truths...!]
terry
You could not be more correct. The law of this country, in fact, lifted its codifying of 'first come, first served' from the English and European monarchies they fled from. Thus the robber barons, etc., the private 'police'(Pinkertons), assaulting, infiltrating, and prosecuting labor in the streets aided by judges and the police on grounds of 'property rights' that even now extend to public property and to hell with what we, the people, think or elect reps for. And, of course, those same 'property rights' don't apply to the average homeowner who might simply want to prevent police intrusion for no reason.
The United States has gone the way all pseudo democracies go based on neo-liberalism, to fascism.
Let's see how long the so-called 'Patriot Act' stays on the books. Eight years and counting.
Now if you could just lift that leg of yours on the hydrant of the mainstream press some folks would be enlightened.Excellant comment thanks.Dog leg! peace yerrrrouttt!
"...$410 for a family of four in the cheap seats."
Which family would that be? Not mine, I know. I wonder if by "cheap seats" the author is referring to the bleachers at the new Yankee Stadium. My last trip to the old Yankee Stadium was in 1985, and I believe one bleacher seat cost only $1.50 back then.
Steinbrenner was paid $450M to build ships for the Navy that were never built, much less delivered. He has made an art out of ripping off the taxpayer for decades. Now he has ESPN as his cheerleader. They constantly remind us of "how great this new stadium is". As a former season ticket holder of another MLB franchise, all I can say is F all pro sports and the politicians who enable this crapola. Sport in the USA is no longer ours. It belongs to the ignorant criminals who run our country. And most of them have no clue about the sport they are watching.
Good point, but coming from Sirota who is a NY Times style liberal. I remember him shilling for the Democrats when, after they had been elected to end the war, they were under pressure to actually end it. He and is fellow Democratic operatives told us to back off, that it would be done but not now etc., giving cover and defusing the movement.
He'll decry the problem, but oppose any progressive solution.
They should bring back the milk carton coupon program for free tickets.I went to a Mets game as a kid with a step dad, (unemployed poet) and had a great time.Cut the coupons from milk cartons for months to save for the tickets.Back then the proletariat could go to a concert or an off Broadway show.Today a night out on the town is a weeks pay at least.
Culture and art have become unreachable pursuits for most of society,we are reduced to staring at the flickering images of a Cathoid ray tube or LCD screen watching the propaganda plays,war games, and forensic copaganda.
Didn't whats his name mayor learn that... Stadium trick from G.W.Shrub?I think Molly Ivans( good golly I miss you ) once wrote about that in her column. peace
Yes, Molly was the last good reason to keep Texas from seceeding.
Here's a link which explains the Shrub's "stadium trick", which pretty much set the pattern for his presidential MO, (take other people's stuff to make yourself important):
http://www.angelfire.com/ok5/pearly/htmls/bush-sec5.html
i don't get it...
another poster said... seats were $1.50 in 1985...
who... in there right mind... any wage earner up to $125,000... and esp. those in the $20-$60K range.. would even go to anther game...
they don't have to be intellectual graduate degree visitors to site like common dreams... all they need is the advertised prices of the seats... i mean... 1.50 to 102.5 (410/4) is what... like a 100000% increase in 25 years...
same with cell phones... cable tv... leasing cars... commercial banks vs. credit unions... atms... and a plethora of products and services used everyday...
if people just STOPPED shelling out the dough... all these enterprises would go broke... period...
many things... like cable tv... started out as a good bargain... but eventually evolved into an extortion racket...
funny thing is... most people sitting in the 102.5 seats probably bitch on the way to... at.. and long after about the high prices...
they could stay home... organize the kids in the neighborhood... get back to basics...
but alas... most of the parent are priming their sandlotters to become rich and famous pro atheletes anyway...
i'm losing my sympathy for the "common folks"... they have a choice where they spend their money...
except for the redirection of public funds away from essential infrastructure... like healthcare... education and public safety... for those more vulnerable members of society... i reallt am getting jaded by the angst about the big bad corporatists...
if people don't spend their money... they go out of business...
sorry... i agree and disagree... we are all in this together... and collectively have made a choice...
bloomberg couldn't pull this off with out thousands and thousands of ticket paying fanns... period.
what if they held at kleptocratic plutocracy... and no one showed up?
You would have to get rid of the kleptocratic plutocrats first. But the hoi polloi could boycott. In fact I think many have.
Joe
i went to a capital bullets baskeball game in 1996... i forget the cost... we waited too long to get the tickets... so we only could get sky seats... it was about $100 for two people...
then the parking $7-10-12... i forget... then the programs... $5-8? souviniers... 15-20 for a hat or tshirt... then the dining... no hot dogs... full service cafeteria with full course meals... beer had to have been 4-6...
every riser... on every step had a commercial ad... during commercial breaks... little blimps dropped ads on the stands... all around the court... every table had a revolving electronic lcd ad screen...
who could watch the friggin game with all that distraction...
i have no idea what a "pro" sports event is like today... the same for concerts... people will shell out 1200 for a hanna montana ticket...
i know the point of the article is taxpayer money... but many many taxpayers are complicit... because that's what they want... i say that because they still shell out the money...
have you seen the "landshark beer" stadium in florida? the owners there want to "create a new experience" for the fans... and even with 0-13 last year... dolphins season tickets will probably sell out...
yeah squid, i am with you.We have to vote with our "dollars" or lack of them. If i was a rich dad with a daughter I would still ask her to pay for her own concert tickets.Nobody ever paid for mine.My point is, what passes for culture is unreachable to most. peace
Bloomberg - where to begin. He instituted term limits so he could be elected. He overrode due process to got rid of term limits so he could run again. He is currently using the whole city government propaganda apparatus to pump up his image and publicize his campaign. Self-funded, as of May he has already spent more than the total of other candidates combined. Opposing Bloomberg is a topic that needs a lot more exploration, and soon.
But the stadiums encapsulate everything. The story went that the life span of a stadium is only 40 years. (Are you listening, Rome, Verona?) Therefore the perfectly serviceable Yankee and Shea stadiums had to be torn down and each replaced by new arenas right next to them. The story continues that because these stadia are so essential, taxpayer money (billions) must go to make sure the projects occur.
Bloomberg also tried and failed to get a new stadium in midtown Manhattan. Imagine the traffic and pollution. He is still pushing for a new Nets arena in a densely populated area of Brooklyn and is ready to use eminent domain to raze local housing and business. There has been an ongoing fight which has involved an incredibly diverse coalition ranging from local tenants and storeowners, greens and even libertarian Christians from the south.
Building new stadia serve three main purposes:
Contracts for the connected: They provide contracts for concrete and other construction companies. You can figure that one out. I believe those companies were asking the politicians "What have you done for me lately?" Our politicians were also pushing to use concrete to replace the wooden boardwalk on Coney Island. I wish an investigative reporter would find out who got $ for these projects. Certain prominent "activists" are usually ready to remain quiet in return for a piece of the action.
Luxury seats for centurions and patricians: The number and variety of luxury options have increased to take over many of the best viewing areas of the stadia. Season box seats are the perks that corporate types use to butter up clients etc. It is a place to see and be seen by the other elite. Under public criticism, Bloomberg and city officials had to drop demands that they be allocated season luxury facilities.
Publicity for corporations: The new Shea stadium is charmingly named Citifield, to honor the bank that got our bailout money. So, in essence, we, the taxpayer, gave even more money to the stadium via contributions from Citigroup, for a stadium that most of us cannot afford to attend.
None of this money went to badly needed recreational and sports facilities for children and teens. We talk about exercise and health, but do little to promote it except talk. None of this money went to make going to the game a reasonably priced family affair. Noooo stuff like that would be socialism. But a billion or more so that patricians can watch drugged up and overpaid gladiators compete, not socialism.
Joe
Yup... Bloomberg is much like the dispized Paul Allen...
When the citizens of Seattle voted to reject public financing for the new Mariner's Stadium, he pressured city council to override the public process, and tax payers ended up paying for "Safeco field"... Even though they still haven't finished paying for the kingdome, which was torn down to make way for Safeco field...
And just to prove his power, Allen built the seahawks new tax payer subsidized stadium right next to Safeco field...
For thesame amount of money to feed and house and train every homeless person in western Washington for the next two hundred years...
Seattle too? Do you think they have some sort of Jock and Awe club where they plan these schemes?
Joe
Absolutely... The corporatists are always trying to impress each other with the size of their yachts and mansions, and how much they "own"... While free agency may help star athletes make
Tens of millions $$$ per year for playing children's games... It has ruined the career franchise player...
Same goes for the owners... Corporatist Moguls want the glamor of owning a pro team without doing the work of building up a franchise...
Like Gordon Gecko... They don't build anything, but buy up a team and make it "profitable" like that asshole who bought the Sonics and moved them to Oklahoma... (after pressuring the taxpayers to remodel the Key Arena to make them stay, which Will take years to pay off...
At least the Sounders FC have become a major league soccer team...
Lets not loose sight of the apparent fact the the Bloomberg news organization is becomming (has become) the major source of news information in the USA.
D. D. Eisenhower supported sports because he felt it helped to maintain the nations taste for war.
We all might be way better off not watching sports ot TV.
Just remember that Sirota's not really on the team - he's an Obama Democrat. Once you propose something as radical as ending the Iraq war or electing Nader, he's working against you.