Sports
"Sports is to war as pornography is to sex."
Jonathan Haidt
America's
Bread and Circus Society
Balls,
Blows and NFL Eunuchs (March 2010)
Guide
to Golf in Connecticut (Ct Magazine.)
...the big four commercial sports make operating profits of
$1.6 billion, Forbes has calculated - but their taxpayer
subsidies exceed $2 billion a year (and that's before the estimated
$864 million Mayor Bloomberg and Uncle Sam just handed to the New York
Yankees) according to Neil deMause, coauthor of a book on sports
subsidies. In other words, taxpayers literally provide all the profits
of MLB, the NFL, NBA, and NHL combined. David
Cay Johnston in Mother Jones January/February 2009
Playing Ball With the Pentagon: Andrew Bacevich (7/28/2011)
Bush Administration’s Tourist Visa Policy May Have Cost America The
2016 Olympics (10/2/2009)
(from Public Citizen)
$10 million. This is the amount of money Bank of America -
currently receiving $45 billion in bailout funds - spent on a five-day
Super Bowl promotional blitz.
Just think what even a portion of that $10 million could mean to
citizens like you and me. It could mean the difference between
foreclosure and keeping a home, between unemployment and keeping a job,
between skimping on prescriptions and affording health insurance.
Yesterday, we told you about Public Citizen's new campaign, Operation
Accountability, and our goal to gather 100,000 signatures in favor of
giving Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis a pink slip. Thousands of
activists have already signed, calling for an end to irresponsible
corporate spending before one more penny of taxpayer money is spent on
a bailout.
Will you join us in taking action?
http://action.citizen.org/t/6693/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=1823
(From a
Democracy
Now interview of January, 2008. David Cay Johnston talks about his
new book Free
Lunch.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON:... George Steinbrenner is getting over $600
million for the new Yankee Stadium in New York. The New York Mets are
getting over $600 million. In fact, the City of New York gave them
money to lobby against the taxpayers to get more money. Rudy Giuliani
gave $50 million to the two teams for that purpose.
The new owners of the Washington Nationals baseball team in
Washington, D.C., paid $450 million for the team. But, in fact, they
got the team for free, because the subsidy they’re getting for the new
stadium is worth $611 million. We actually paid these people to buy the
team.
Now, in this country right now, we are spending $2 billion a
year subsidizing the big four sports: baseball, basketball, football
and hockey. It accounts for all of the profits of that industry and
more. Now, there may be individual teams that make money, but the
industry as a whole is not profitable. And that’s astonishing because
the big four leagues are exempt from the laws of competition. By the
way, irony is not dead, because here are people who are in the business
of competition on the field who are exempted by law from the rules of
economic competition.
(read
more of this) to find out how George W. Bush
became wealthy. It is an amazing sports story.
Congress
Probes How New Sports Stadiums Turn Public Money into Private Profit
Casinos
Paid Politicians Big Bucks to Keep Gambling on College Sports Legal
(2001)
Ten
Biggest Naming Rights Deals
Top Ten Dumbest
reasons to build a new Stadium
Field of Schemes
Chavez
Loyalists push to close Golf Courses
(8/12/2009)
Connecticut
Golf Courses
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