In Baghdad, a $1.1M US-funded soccer field turns to dirt

[n2doc]

BAGHDAD — As the beating heat of the day gives way to night, the soccer fields of Sadr City swarm with young men partaking in what is no doubt Iraq's favorite sport.

The evening bustle in this cramped and impoverished Shiite neighborhood looks far different from the worst days of Iraq's sectarian violence, when some of these pitches were instead killing fields.

For Haider Jameel — janitor by day, soccer coach by evening — one of the patches of land, among a jumble of mechanic shops and scrap yards, has been a back yard for decades.

It went unused only during the grimmest periods of civil war, which peaked in 2006. The Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, the anti-U.S. cleric for whom the neighborhood is named, would use the area to stage attacks. Those the fighters kidnapped were often executed by a nearby dam.

more

http://www.stripes.com/news/middle-east/in-baghdad-a-1-1m-us-funded-soccer-field-turns-to-dirt-1.283546

[Frustratedlady]

1. When are they ever going to balance the books of the military?

That has got to be the largest slush fund of government.

[UTUSN]

2. Another Shrub fleecing of U.S. public money. Here's what he did with the TX Rangers

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http://www.publicintegrity.org/2000/01/18/3313/how-george-w-bush-scored-big-texas-rangers
[font size=5]How George W. Bush scored big with the Texas Rangers[/font]

WASHINGTON, D.C. January 18, 2000 — .... ...Peter Ueberroth, then commissioner of Major League Baseball, told them he wouldn’t approve the sale without more investors from Texas. Ueberroth believed that local owners would be less likely to relocate the team. The commissioner, a GOP donor himself, wanted the deal approved before his term expired at the end of 1989, and so he and then-American League president Bobby Brown took it on themselves to line up Fort Worth financier Richard E. Rainwater. ....

Bush made up for his minor stake by taking more than his share of credit for bringing the owners together. ....

When they bought the team, the Rangers were playing in an old minor-league stadium. It didn’t have the fancy sky boxes and other amenities that helped make other franchises much more profitable. As a result, the team couldn’t compete with other big-city teams for good players. But the new owners weren’t willing to finance the construction of a new ballpark. They decided to hit up taxpayers for the money. ....

Between the sales-tax revenue, state tax exemptions and other financial incentives, Texas taxpayers handed the privately owned Rangers more than $200 million in public subsidies. Taxpayers didn’t get a return from the stadium’s surging new revenues, either. The profits went almost exclusively to the team’s already wealthy owners. ....

But Bush and his partners weren’t satisfied lining their pockets with average Texans’ hard-earned cash. They wanted land around the stadium to further boost its value. To that end, they orchestrated a land grab that shortchanged local landowners by several million dollars.

As part of the deal, the city created a separate corporation, the Arlington Sports Facilities Development Authority, to manage construction. Using authority granted to it by the city, the ASFDA seized several tracts of land around the stadium site for parking and future development. ....

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