If you've had any direct involvement with any level of government, you know that Bush administration-like corruption runs from top to bottom. People run for office to pursue business by other means--throw a contract to a friend, change a zoning rule for a relative, or buy an over-priced or shoddy product with taxpayer dollars because someone greased their palm.
I would like to say that it is an exclusively republican problem, but it is not. True progressive pols are out there, but they are as rare as a clean gas station rest room.
Nothing symbolizes this more than massive sports stadiums built with taxpayers money. The argument is that they bring in jobs, but for their cost, you could more cheaply give a million dollars to everyone who would end up working there as a janitor or hot dog vendor.
What is really tragic is how rarely governments even TRY to get anything from the teams they build these temples for. They play there for a few years, then demand another stadium on the public dime, or move somewhere that will put more public dollars in team owners pockets.
To make our government work, we have to figure out how to make this sort of thing impossible.
If a team wants a stadium, great. Let them pay for it. If the public does, they should get a controlling interest in the team and collect a portion of the profits.
While Boswell and Fisher were given prime column real estate to gush, columnist Sally Jenkins didn't even get a corner of comics page. It's understandable why Jenkins, the 2002 AP sports columnist of the year, didn't get to play. Four years ago, she refused to gush: "While you're celebrating the deal to bring baseball back to Washington, understand just what it is you're getting: a large publicly financed stadium and potential sinkhole to house a team that's not very good, both of which may cost you more than you bargained for and be of questionable benefit to anybody except the wealthy owners and players. But tell that to baseball romantics, or the mayor and his people, and they act like you just called their baby ugly. It's lovely to have baseball in Washington again. But the deal that brings the Montreal Expos to Washington is an ugly baby."
Jenkins words have come to pass. But this isn't just an "ugly baby", it's Rosemary's baby. It's $611 million of tax payer money in a city that has become a ground zero of economic segregation and gentrification. $611 million over majority opposition of taxpayers and even the city council. $611 million in a city set to close down a staggering twenty-four public schools.
That's $611 million, a mere five months after a mayor commissioned study found that the District's poverty rate was the highest it had been in a decade and African-American unemployment was 51 percent.
That's $611 million, in a city where the libraries shut down early and the Metro rusts over. That's a living, throbbing, reminder that the vote-deprived District of Columbia doesn't even rest on the pretense of democracy. This isn't just taxation without representation. It's a monument of avarice that will clear the working poor out of the Southeast corner of the city as surely as if they just dispensed with the baseball and used a bulldozer. This is sports as ethnic and economic cleansing, as Hurricane Katrina, as Shock Doctrine, as Green Zone. Fittingly, Fisher wrote, President George W. Bush came out to throw the first pitch. Fittingly, he was roundly booed. He stood on the mound, proudly oblivious, taking center stage yet again in what can only be described as occupied territory.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080414/zirin
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