Chris Christie’s Super Bowl Flop

[Auggie]

The Nation / 2-3-14

Chris Christie was not only booed at a couple of Super Bowl events this week but he’s now catching flak for blowing the big bucks the game was supposed to rain down on New Jersey in the first place.

Four years ago Christie celebrated the deal with the NFL that would bring the game to his state for the first time, saying, “It’s great for New Jersey’s morale and the sense of who we are.” But as The Star-Ledger wrote in an editorial yesterday, Christie allowed Jersey communities to be treated like a “bunch of nobodies who just happen to have a football field close to Manhattan.”

“The NFL promised some $550 million would be coming to the region. Most of it will be going right back out” with the league, the Ledger says. “New Jerseyans probably ought to blame our embattled governor for the second-rate treatment we’re receiving today.”

That’s in part because the NFL deal included Sochi-like measures to “wall off the MetLife Stadium from the surrounding community,” meaning that…. “local bars and hotels would not be permitted to run the shuttle buses they normally use to transport fans to the games.” (Fans who booked hotels within walking distance of the stadium had to take $35 cabs to Secaucus, where they then waited hours in an overheated, overcrowded “mass transit debacle.”)



MORE: http://www.thenation.com/blog/178210/chris-christies-super-bowl-flop

[FSogol]

1. Grifters gotta grift.

[Earth_First]

2. You couldnt walk to the venue?!

[WinkyDink]

3. Bwahahahaha! No. Highways. Swampland.

http://www.clui.org/newsletter/winter-2013/new-jersey-meadowlands

[Earth_First]

4. Shows my cluelessness on the area...

I had no idea.

Which begs the question: why was the Superbowl held here?!

[WinkyDink]

6. Proximity to NYC and the networks, maybe. A "cool" (heh) factor (See: Broadway Joe.). I have

relatives in Jersey City and Bayonne, so I'm very familiar with the area!

[2naSalit]

5. Not to mention it was a toxic waste dump

for decades. That is what was done to "reclaim" the swamp.

Pollution by sewage, refuse, and hazardous waste: various types of waste have been dumped legally and illegally in the Meadowlands. During World War II, military refuse was dumped in the Meadowlands, including rubble from London created by the Blitz and used as ballast in returning ships. After the war, the Meadowlands continued to be used for civilian waste disposal, as the marshes were seen simply as wastelands that were not good for anything else. The opening of the New Jersey Turnpike in January 1952 only amplified the continuing environmental decline of the Meadowlands, as both spurs of the Turnpike travel through the region from the Passaic River to just past North Bergen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey_Meadowlands

They've done a lot to it since I was there last, the stadium was just getting started then. The pictures look pretty good but I bet there's still some nasty stuff (pollution) and more than a few "missing persons" still there. I remember acres of barrels of toxic waste.

[WinkyDink]

7. Secaucus was known for its smell back in the day. Now it's home to TV studios.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWOR-TV

[Cha]

8. "Before he went all faux humble"! Exactly!

"One measure of how much has changed for Christie is that the local Jersey color he used to revel in now seems entirely out of reach. In October, before Bridgegate and before he went all faux humble, Christie recalled telling NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell that if the lights went out for his Super Bowl the way they did at New Orleans’s a year earlier, “there will be bodies strewn in the parking lot for the people who are responsible for the lights going out, because that’s the way we handle matters in New Jersey.”

Thanks Auggie