Stadium/ sports
promoted 2nd on trump evoke sports heroes when no one else wd endorse, ez/cheap way to ID, crowd yell
see nfl football
see woke corps
aha stadium isa venue for TV thus control media eg sheerin gaza
primary pending on rebec mercer woody johnson ny jets
tickets/ skybox useful bribe? nrg abramoff
sports team owners as proxy for? just glamorous place to park money?
CEC
tax break/public subsidies
BO: cling to guns, bible [and sport teams?]
militarism, pride USA USA! hockey team
also public teat via subsidy, huge TV revenue over public airwaves for free (but big booster of cable tv)
pay no taxes
plantation farm teams NCAA
ggle srch: sport team owner gop donor republican funder
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gaza 9 26 kraft
ed sheeran mclmoore 9 26
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MACHO? LIBTARD?
AN 5 26
Las Vegas has always had a reputation for doing things bigger, louder and glitzier than everyone else. On Sunday, May 24 2026 it continues that tradition when the inaugural Enhanced Games take place at a purpose-built entertainment centre at Resorts World, a giant hotel complex on the city’s famous strip.
A one-day sports competition showcasing just three disciplines, the Enhanced Games openly embrace the use of legal performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) and technological advances that maximise human potential.
Conceived by London-based entrepreneur Aron D’Souza and backed financially by billionaires Peter Thiel, Christian Angermayer and Donald Trump junior, the one-day extravaganza will see 42 athletes competing in swimming, track athletics and weightlifting.
With substantial appearance fees and an unprecedented US$25 million (£18.6 million) in prize money – including US$1 million bonuses for breaking world records – the lucrative payouts have attracted some big names. These include Olympic medallists Cody Miller and Ben Proud for swimming; Olympic medallist Fred Kerley for track; and record-breaking weightlifter Thor Björnsson.
The Enhanced Games has drawn widespread criticism from international and Olympic sport. The World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) has labelled them a “dangerous and irresponsible concept”, threatening to test athletes involved to “protect the integrity of legitimate sport” – despite the majority being retired from traditional sport. Wada also urged US authorities to shut down the games – which evidently didn’t happen.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) also issued a formal statement calling the games “utterly irresponsible and immoral … a betrayal of everything we stand for”. Travis Tygart, CEO of the US Anti-Doping Agency dismissed the Enhanced Games as “a dangerous clown show”.
In response, D’Souza argues that Wada is hypocritical and points to Olympic corruption scandals, claiming the Olympics are no longer fit for purpose. Other supporters have also promoted the idea of self-determination, and the need to break free of the IOC’s rules and regulations.
As sport researchers, we might be tempted to dismiss the event as a publicity stunt. However, based on our ongoing research into Olympic swimmers and coaches’ perceptions of the Enhanced Games (we have spoken to more than 20 so far), we believe the event is symptomatic of bigger issues. It represents a critical inflection point, and a unique opportunity to reflect upon the current shortcomings of traditional sport.
Sport’s ideological war
Deeply entrenched battlelines have been drawn on both sides of this complex debate. Recent events, such as Enhanced Games swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev breaking the former 50m freestyle world record, the games’ filing of an US$800 million anti-trust lawsuit against Wada, World Aquatics and US Swimming, and the Enhanced Group’s recent floating on the New York Stock Exchange are telling. They all appear to be the first shots fired in a potentially long and protracted ideological war over the future of sport.
Proponents argue that permitting PEDs such as testosterone, anabolic steroids, growth hormones, peptide hormones and stimulants could potentially unlock unprecedented human potential, allowing athletes to transcend current biological limits. Here, the Enhanced Games and the Olympic Games share a common goal of maximising human potential; the difference lies in precisely how it should be achieved and the transparency surrounding those methods.Supporters of the Enhanced Games also argue that a regulated approach to using PEDs under strict medical supervision is safer for athletes, transforming what is currently an illicit, underground practice into a controlled medical environment, akin to legalising substances like cannabis.
Conversely, defenders of traditional sport argue that this approach contradicts the fundamental integrity of sport. They assert that Olympism is based on natural talent, dedication and rigorous training, free from artificial advantages. Concerns have also been raised about the long-term health consequences for athletes who use PEDs, and the negative role modelling for young athletes who may see drug use as a shortcut to success.
Threat or revolution for sport?
Another critical battleline relates to whether the Enhanced Games exacerbate or alleviate existing issues of integrity within traditional Olympic sport. Proponents of the Enhanced Games – including many of the Olympians that we interviewed – argue that the current system is fundamentally flawed.
These athletes cite what they see as the rampant and pervasive use of PEDs (meaning it’s an open-secret), the misuse of therapeutic use exemptions, the ineffectiveness and erosion of trust in anti-doping authorities, and the need to better compensate athletes for their contribution to sport.
Many people within traditional sport view the Enhanced Games as a profound existential threat to the moral legitimacy of Olympism. However, far from being a circus sideshow, its emergence is symptomatic of deep-rooted, longstanding issues and continued failings that need to be resolved within traditional sport.
Instead of perceiving the Enhanced Games as a rival or threat to the Olympic Games – which we do not believe it is – its emergence should be viewed as a wake-up call. Traditional sport needs to direct efforts to solve these fundamental problems and reflect upon the true value of sport and its role in society.
In this light, we see the emergence of the inaugural Enhanced Games as a window of opportunity for much-needed conversations within international and Olympic sport.
Mathew Dowling, Senior Lecturer in Sport Management, Loughborough University; Alex Thurston, Lecturer in Sport Management, Loughborough University, and Jinsu Byun, Assistant Professor of Sport Management, Yonsei University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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an 11 23
to be honest, I didn't really care whether the Arizona Diamondbacks or the Texas Rangers won the World Series. Once my two favorite teams—the Dodgers and the Red Sox—were eliminated, I didn’t have a stake in the outcome of the World Series. I just wanted to watch to see first-rate baseball and see interesting games, and the Diamondbacks and Rangers didn't disappoint.
Most of the 30 MLB teams are owned by billionaires. But the owners of the Rangers and the Diamondbacks are particularly disgusting. Ken Kendrick, who owns the Diamondbacks, and Ray Davis—whose Rangers won the World Series in Game 5 on Wednesday night with a 5-0 shutout win—are both billionaires with a history of providing financial support for Republican candidates and right-wing causes.
:{:{According to Forbes magazine, Davis has a personal net worth of $2.9 billion. Before getting into the baseball business, Davis was CEO of two fossil fuel corporations—Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) and Energy Transfer Equity (ETE}:). ETP is a natural gas distributor and pipeline company. Davis stepped down as CEO in 2007 but still owns 2.4% of the company. In 2017, despite protests by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, Energy Transfer finished building the $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline.
The corporation operates over 125,000 miles of pipeline that move approximately 30% of America's oil and natural gas. Davis and a group of investors bought the Texas Rangers for about $600 million in 2010; it's now worth $1.5 billion. Since 2021, Davis has donated at least $225,000 to Texans for Greg Abbott, the state's right-wing Republican governor, according to state campaign finance records. He's also donated to other Republican candidates.}:
In 2003, the Chicago Cubs hosted the first Pride game to celebrate their LGBTQ fans. Since then, all but one of the 30 Major League teams have hosted an annual Pride Day or Pride Night event. The Texas Rangers are the only team without a Pride Night.
Ken Kendrick is only worth $1 billion, according to Forbes, but he's a much bigger donor to politicians and right-wing causes than Davis. He and his wife Randy have made large donations to conservative groups connected with the Koch brothers. According to FEC filings, he has donated to many Republican election deniers, including Arizona U.S. Congressman Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs as well as to conspiracy-theory nutjob Congresswoman Lauren Boebert of Colorado.
Kendrick founded a software company called Data Technology which merged in 1979 with another company called Datatel. General Motors bought the company in 1988 for $511 million, giving Kendrick a big boost in his personal wealth. He made more money by investing early in Woodforest National Bank, which now has more than $1.7 billion in assets. Woodforest National Bank is Walmart’s largest retail partner. Kendrick became part-owner of the Diamondbacks with the team's inception in 1995 and has been the managing general partner (the major owner) since 2004.
Kendrick is one of those Republicans who decry "big government," but he's perfectly happy receiving government subsidies for his business from Arizona taxpayers. The Diamondbacks built Bank One Ballpark (later renamed Chase Field), the first retractable roof stadium in MLB with a grass field, in 1995 with the help of $253 million dollars in public financing through an increase in sales tax in Maricopa County. This happened during a huge county budget deficit and lack of funding for other services. The County Supervisors approved the tax increase without asking for voters' approval. In 2016, Kendrick decided that the stadium needed about $65 million worth of repairs, and estimated that it would need a total of $187 million of upkeep costs over the final 12 years of its lease with Maricopa County. And of course, they wanted the taxpayers to pay for it. County officials refused. One of them, Andy Kunasek, described the Diamondbacks as “parasitic enterprise.” When the County wouldn't provide Kendrick with the subsidy, he sued the County in an attempt to get out of the Diamondback's lease, which expires in 2027. Kendrick has hinted that if the County doesn't pay for those improvements, he'd consider moving to the team and building another stadium.
Oh, and in case you're wondering, Kenrick is also a union-buster. In 2020, when the 30 major league owners locked the players out for three months (essentially, an owners' strike), Kendrick was one of the four most reactionary owners who voted against signing a new collective bargaining agreement with the players union.
So it was a win for the Rangers last night, and congrats to all the players. However, no matter which way this series may have gone, it would have been one right-wing billionaire or another holding the trophy in the end.
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nhl fail?
https://www.alternet.org/its-just-ridiculous-gop-strategists-question-desantis-anti-woke-campaign-against-nhl/
pro publ 6 22
4: The Magic of Sports Ownership: Make Money While (Legally) Reporting Losses
The tax code offers business owners a slew of methods to erase income through deductions, none more awesome than buying a sports team, as former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer did with the Los Angeles Clippers. It doesn’t matter whether the team is actually profitable and growing in value. It can still be a write-off. (In some cases, we found, owners could effectively deduct a given player’s contract not once, but twice. They’re allowed to take deductions comparable to those for factory equipment that loses value as it ages, even as teams almost inevitably gain in value.) That’s one reason owners tend to pay far lower tax rates than the athletes they employ, or even the people serving beer in the team’s stadium. In our story, we found a Clippers arena worker who made $45,000 a year and paid a higher tax rate than the billionaire Ballmer. (Ballmer said he pays the taxes he owes.)
5. Build, Drill and Save: The Real Estate and Oil Businesses Can Both Be Tax Havens
In certain industries, like real estate or oil and gas, the tax breaks are so plentiful that billionaires can erase their income entirely even as they grow richer. That’s how real estate developer Stephen Ross (who also happens to own the Miami Dolphins)went 10 years without paying any income tax. Ross said that he followed the law. Another mogul, this one in the oil business, managed to tap a near bottomless well of write-offs via one of the biggest oil spills in history. (The mogul’s representatives did not respond to requests for comment.)
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scathing ad slamming Greg Abbott was pulled from football broadcast at the last minute: report
On Saturday, September 18, a scathing Lincoln Project ad attacking Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was scheduled to air during ESPN's broadcast of a football game between the University...
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Texas House votes to remove state funding from sports teams that don't play national anthem at games
The Texas Tribune May 25, 2021
"Texas House votes to yank state funding from sports teams that don't play national anthem at games" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
Sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.
The Texas House gave preliminary approval on Monday to the so-called “Star Spangled Banner Protection Act," a conservative-backed bill that would require any professional sports teams with contracts with the Texas state government to play the national anthem before the start of a game.
Senate Bill 4 was passed on a voice vote, with no changes by the House. It is expected to receive a record vote and final passage on Tuesday and head to Gov. Greg Abbott's desk.
House Republicans defeated several proposed amendments along partisan lines, signaling more division on the issue in the lower chamber than was seen in the Senate, which passed the bill last month with overwhelming bipartisan support and only two votes against it.
Athletes protesting the national anthem has become a divisive and partisan issue since NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling in 2016 to protest police brutality against Black Americans.
In February, Patrick named the bill one of his legislative priorities after Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, stopped playing the anthem before home games, which went largely unnoticed during the pandemic with no fans in the stands.
That decision quickly drew the ire of conservative lawmakers in the state.
“Sell the franchise & some Texas Patriots will buy it," Patrick said in a tweet at the time. “We ARE the land of free & the home of the brave."
In a public response to the outcry condemning his decision, Cuban expressed support for the anthem, but he said team executives “also loudly hear the voices of those who feel that the anthem does not represent them." The NBA later said all teams would play the anthem before games.
During Monday's debate on the House floor, opponents questioned the constitutionality of a law that they said ties funding to free speech by threatening negative action against sports teams that choose to express their opinions by declining to play the anthem.
“Once again, we're carrying legislation that is openly and aggressively unconstitutional," said state Rep. Gene Wu, a Houston Democrat who unsuccessfully tried to turn the bill into a resolution, allowing the House to take a stand in favor of the anthem without the force of law.
The bill's House sponsor, state Rep. Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, said the bill does not violate free speech because teams can still choose not to play the anthem and forgo the funding and business relationship with the state.
“It's very simple. If they do not want to play the national anthem, they don't take the tax dollars," Burrows said. “If we're going to go ahead and subsidize with hard-earned American dollars the sporting facilities and the teams in the different ways that I think is articulated in this bill, then this would apply."
Attempts by Democrats to require teams to play both the “Star-Spangled Banner" and “Lift Every Voice and Sing," or to choose between them, were shut down along partisan lines.
“Lift Every Voice and Sing" is commonly known as “the Black national anthem," said Rep. Jasmine Felicia Crockett, D-Dallas, who authored one of the amendments.
“I don't even understand why we would feel the need to force someone into singing any song," Crockett said. “But if we are going to force people to sing a song, we should at least be mindful of the people playing on these teams, the people that are actually in the stands supporting these teams."
Burrows opposed the amendments “with the deepest amount of respect to my friend and colleague" because he wanted to avoid any changes to the bill, which would slow its progress to the governor's desk during the final week of the legislative session.
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/24/texas-house-national-anthem/.
The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.
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obama talked nba players out of blm strike?!
Trump's involvement in sports might be the most divisive -- but he isn't the only president who has meddled
President Donald Trump’s comments about sports have been among the most bombastic of his time in office.He called NFL players who kneel during the national anthem in protest of
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Why Trump is so eager to bring back professional sports
President Donald J. Trump waves to the crowd after participating in pre-game ceremonies Saturday, Dec. 8, 2018, at the Army-Navy NCAA College football game at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)]
Written by Robert Lipsyte / TomDispatch April 23, 2020
As controversies about the “reopening” of America loom over our lives, nothing seems as intrinsically irrelevant — yet possibly as critically important — as how soon major spectator sports return.
If sports don’t trump religion as the opiate of the masses, they have, until recently, been at least the background music of most of our lives. So here’s my bet on one possible side effect of the Covid-19 pandemic to put in your scorebook: if the National Football League plays regular season games this fall, President Trump stands a good chance of winning reelection for returning America to business as usual — or, at least, to his twisted version of the same.
That’s why he announced at a recent daily coronavirus briefing-cum-rally his eagerness to bring professional sports back quickly. Though it was Major League Baseball that he mentioned — “We have to get our sports back. I’m tired of watching baseball games that are 14 years old” — thesport that truly matters to him is football, the only major mass entertainment (other than Trumpism) that endorses tribalism and toxic masculinity so flagrantly and keeps violence in vogue. Football supports Trump in its promotion of racial division, the crushing of dissent, and the spread of misinformation, inequality, and brutality.
Whether or not the president can survive the loss of the 2020 baseball season — already poisoned by last year’s Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal — is up for grabs. Certainly, the proposed plan to turn stadiums in the Phoenix, Arizona, area into the sports equivalent of a vast movie set for the games of all 30 major league teams (to be played without fans) seems far-fetched at best.
But football, now the true national pastime, is another matter.
In sports terms, as in so much else in coronaviral America, these are desperately deprived times, even for casual fans. There will be intense pressure — and not only from the president’s base — for that sport’s return. For many people, mostly men, it’s the sustaining soap opera that has always carried them into the next week and the one after that, a porn-ish escape hatch from work and family, a currency of communication with other men, an eternal connection to a non-demanding hive.
Games for Lives?
Without professional (or even college) sports right now or realistically in the near future, fans feel even more unmoored in lives that, for all of us, are distinctly adrift. As they become edgier, it’s a reasonable bet (or at least my hope) that they will also become more open to questioning Trump’s mismanagement — or, to put it more bluntly, sacrifice — of their lives. Recent polls already seem to reflect this, with the latest Gallup Poll showing the steepest approval decline of his presidency.
The president, I suspect, fears just this, though perhaps, in the end, the hole in everyday life where sports once was may only reinforce fans’ sense (like the president’s) that the games are too important not to bring back, safety be damned. Certainly, Trump and other Republican politicians have already been willing enough to forfeit lives to boost their reelection chances.
The values and sensibilities of football are, of course, Trumpist in nature. That’s why former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s demonstration against racism — performed in a kind of public isolation — elicited such a harsh reaction from the president in the now-distant pre-pandemic era. That’s why the sport’s billionaire owners, predominantly Trump donors, shunned Kaepernick (although some of their teams could have used his skills). They didn’t dare to, or care to, give him another platform, not in an era when “president” and “racism” were becoming synonymous.
Even more tellingly, in an understandable but still disappointing me-first display, few of Kaepernick’s fellow players, most of whom are also African-American, supported him publicly. After years of being celebrated as America’s “warriors” and “role models,” they came up desperately short when it counted. Compare them to healthcare workers and other front-line heroes of this pandemic and you’ll realize just how far short they fell of even the most modest form of everyday bravery.
Not that, when it comes to pro sports, football was such an outlier. As activism goes, baseball, a sport that once produced transcendent progressive heroes like Jackie Robinson, Jim Bouton, and Curt Flood, has been eerily quiet in recent years. It’s a sport that the president has paid relatively little attention to — except for suggesting recently that Pete Rose, banned from baseball for life for betting on the Cincinnati Reds while he was that team’s manager, should be allowed into its Hall of Fame.
How Trumpian was that? Such betting is, of course, strictly forbidden for active players and managers who are obviously privy to inside information. But, hey, does disregarding inconvenient rules to profit from a privileged position ring any bells these days in Washington?
Trump has, in fact, been uncharacteristically silent on the recent revelation that during the 2017 season, the World Series winners, the Houston Astros, concealed a video camera in center field to steal the pitching signs of opposing teams. That’s also illegal. Major League baseball punished the team by suspending its manager and general manager for a year, imposing a $5 million fine on its owners, and taking away its first- and second-round draft picks in 2020 and 2021.
For some fans and commentators, the Astros’ punishment was too severe or too mild. Opposing players, feeling victimized by the scheme, thought specific Astros should have been penalized, too. Yet such cheating is hardly new. In 1951, the “shot heard round the world,” a famed home-run that won the National League pennant for the New York Giants and sent them to the World Series, was linked to the stealing of signs from the Brooklyn Dodgers through a hand-held telescope. Only the technology has improved.
A Changing National Pastime
Once baseball’s opening day passed without a pitch this April, proof that the plague was winning, the Phoenix Plan was floated. It would require all major league players and employees to be sequestered in that area and continually tested at a moment when tests might still not be universally available. But, hey, haven’t VIP Jocks always gone to the head of the line? (Actually, a massive study of 10,000 Major League Baseball employees, from players to popcorn vendors, being conducted by Stanford University and the Sports Medicine Research and Testing Laboratory to find out how many contracted and may have recovered from the virus has already gotten access to such testing kits at a time when even some front-line workers can’t get them!)
For those who think this country needs baseball now to raise its depressed spirits, you might consider a cautionary historical precedent, the Summer of Swat of 1998. As the country reeled from the revelation of President Bill Clinton’s sexual liaison with a White House intern and with his impeachment just around the corner, a feel-good legend was born. A white man and a brown man rose in friendly rivalry to break the 37-year-old record of 61 home runs by Roger Maris, who, in turn, had bested Babe Ruth’s famed 60 in 1927.
The good-natured competition between Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals (who won with 70 homers) and Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs (66) was, at the time, celebrated as a balm that should soothe the country. And perhaps for many fans it did indeed serve as a comforting distraction in a difficult political moment.
But that summer’s golden glow soon faded as both players were reported to have taken steroids to muscle up. McGwire would admit it years later; Sosa would not. (A dark-skinned Dominican, he further complicated his legend by bleaching his skin to whiten himself, as if in anticipation of the Trumpian racial preferences to come.) Their contemporary, Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants, would eventually become the single-season home run leader with 73, but has never shaken rumors that he, too, used steroids.
Nor did baseball ever fully recover its sense of primacy as the national pastime or its sense of righteousness as one of America’s first major institutions to integrate. In fact, the sport is still overwhelmingly white and skewed toward an older audience, as well as slow and outdated in an era of tweeting speed.
Which is why, whether or not baseball opens this season in a vast sports self-isolation experiment, the key to President Trump’s future lies in his perverse relationship with the National Football League. That goes back more than 30 years to the moment he tried unsuccessfully (as with so many other business ventures) to elbow his way into the sport. Give him credit, though: ever attuned to the public mood, he did sense the rise of a new national pastime.
Bet On This
One reason for the NFL’s growing popularity is the way it uses college football as its minor leagues and early showcase for pro players (though possibly not this fall). For a passionate pro football fan, it’s a pleasure to see the stars of tomorrow in the making. Of course, the famously corrupted higher education sports market is a happy NFL partner and crime may pay after all, as it often does in the Trump league. In a recent commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Nathan Kalman-Lamb of Duke opines that high-revenue men’s football and basketball “will become more valuable than ever as an enticement to lure steep tuition from students.”
And here’s an innovation that the president would glory in, one that would make post-pandemic football an even greater success: the addition of real-time nationwide legal gambling on games. Just imagine the sort of Trump-donor dollars that would be stacked up to support such a future industry. After all, estimations are that illegal gambling on pro and college football is already a $93 billion business. Legal or not, it’s an integral part of the fan experience (though in the post-pandemic world there will be a lot less money in so many pockets to gamble with).
The dream of easily accessible, high-tech legal gambling has been lurking on the sidelines for years. All that’s necessary to make it come true is for Congress to reverse the 1992 Professional & Amateur Sports Protection Act, the federal law that bans it in most states. And the pandemic moment may prove perfect for just that, for “reopening” football in a new and even more Trumpian way, allowing fans to sit at home and bet what money they have left on games in progress: Will that field goal attempt split the uprights? Will Tom Brady in his new Tampa Bay Buccaneers uniform make that crucial third-down conversion?
However, to reopen pro football, as the president would wish, to make life seem “normal” again, stadiums might have to remain empty (or partially empty). Imagine, for instance, if San Francisco had actually beaten Kansas City (which it didn’t) in the Super Bowl on the first Sunday in February and the expected championship parade had followed a few days later, drawing a million people to that city’s streets. It might have proved an early version of Mardi Gras (a 2020 coronaviral disaster of a get-together).
Of course, social distancing will be inconceivable for football players and the results all too predictable in a world in which Covid-19 is likely to hang around for a long, long time. From the huddle to tackling, the game is, in every way, a potential disease transmitter. The only example of social distancing (besides Kaepernick kneeling alone) I can even remember might have been the 1958 West Point football team, which fielded a “lonesome end,” Bill Carpenter. On every play, he set himself up near the far sideline in an innovative formation. He never even joined the huddle and that team went undefeated.
If it proves impossible to stage football games, given social-distancing rules, the inevitable sport of the future is already waiting in the wings. Just under the radar of most of the middle-aged and elderly, especially those without access to children, is a fiercely contested, already commodified, fan-friendly industry with championships, heroes, endorsement contracts, and a ready market for expensive gear. I’m thinking, as you may have guessed, of competitive online video games, or esports. (Think of it as the revenge of the nerds.) No matter what Donald Trump does, sooner rather than later they’re likely to replace the old up-close-and-contagious live games.
It’s not hard to imagine a future in which individual competitors, regional and national teams, leagues, or even some version of the Olympics, would be watched by millions on streaming platforms on home screens and, once social distancing becomes a historical footnote, on the screens of sports bars as well, if not theaters and arenas. While combat games like Fortnite and Call of Duty, along with sports knock-offs like Madden and NBA Live, currently dominate esports, the future will undoubtedly include brainier fare that will turn art, architecture, banking, diplomacy, music, and maybe even poetry into online competitions even Nike and Google could sponsor.
Esports already supports ESPN-style commentary. There might even be room someday for a new reality show about them hosted by a motor-mouthed, pumpkin-headed former one-term president.
Who needs football after all? It would, in fact, be the definition of madness to launch a football season in a coronaviral world. But that doesn’t mean Donald Trump won’t push for just that. The advisory board he appointed for the reopening of sports includes, as my colleague Dave Zirin points out, “a group of brigands defined by their lack of care in normal times for the safety and well-being of their employees.”
It’s Trump’s dream team because, to win in November, he needs an America in which the National Football League is back in business big time. For him it’s open arms for the NFL, which could mean open season on the rest of us.
Robert Lipsyte, a TomDispatch regular, was a sports and city columnist for the New York Times. He is the author, among other works, of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Copyright 2020 Robert Lipsyte
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aha, subsidies not just federal; local tax incentive trying to lure biz/factory is a kind of extraction/extortion?! // sports arena: we'll take your team if you don't buy us luxury boxes. a kind of privatization? moreover, in a city demoralized for other reasons, economy, sports team is a source of pride/identity/ commonality
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The Everything Store: The growing share of online shoppers who start their search on Amazon
Today, using large-scale statistical techniques, sociologists have confirmed Mills and Ulmer’s broad conclusions, finding, for example, that communities that possess more local economic power are better able to solve problems. But these ideas are no longer reflected in policy. Now, instead of actively seeking to disperse economic power, policy-makers encourage its concentration. Many elected officials are as enthralled with Bezos as his investors are, and they’ve been equally willing to fund Amazon’s growth. Congress has repeatedly declined to pass legislation that would allow states to require out-of-state retailers to collect sales taxes. This allowed Amazon to largely avoid collecting sales taxes for nearly two decades, giving it a price advantage that research shows helped drive shoppers to its site. Then, as Amazon’s warehouse expansion began to compel its compliance with sales taxes, the company started angling for local development incentives. It’s raked in more than $1.1 billionthrough these deals, according to Good Jobs First, and more than half of the warehouses that Amazon built between 2005 and 2015 received public subsidies....
// race to the bottom on outsourcing? the most desperate cities are willing to go deeper into debt, make a bigger bet?
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origin of avis of evil: mercer, trump, bannon, CU
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https://www.alternet.org/heres-how-professional-sports-have-come-sell-militarized-form-patriotism
...What kid of that era and those that followed, like *TomDispatch* regular William Astore, can’t tell such tales of imagined prowess in the world of fandom versus real life on the field. But as Astore points out today, the very nature of the sports experience is now changing. Though professional sports in my childhood (the Korean War years) and my youth (the Vietnam War years) had next to nothing to do with the U.S. military, today, in a country that I’ve regularly described as being “unmade by war,” the worlds of professional sports and youthful dreams about it are both being eerily militarized. Stranger yet, as with our forever (yet curiously forgotten) wars of this century, that process of militarization is getting next to no attention here, even as sports hits the political headlines almost daily and is a constant focus of attention from the White House on down. Football, in particular, is regularly in those headlines as (mostly black) players are endlessly accused of taking a knee to diss the flag, the National Anthem, and the troops (none of which is actually true), while that flag, that anthem, and those troops are, in fact, being grotesquely misused to create a miasma of kneejerk patriotism. But let Astore tell you more. Tom
These days, you can hardly miss moments when, for instance, playing fields are covered with gigantic American flags, often unfurled and held either by scores of military personnel or civilian defense contractors. Such ceremonies are invariably touted as natural expressions of patriotism, part of a continual public expression of gratitude for America’s “warfighters” and “heroes.” These are, in other words, uncontroversial displays of pride, even though a study ordered by Republican Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake revealed that the U.S. taxpayer, via the Pentagon, has regularly forked over tens of millions of dollars ($53 million between 2012 and 2015 alone) to corporate-owned teams to put on just such displays.
Paid patriotism should, of course, be an oxymoron. These days, however, it’s anything but and even when the American taxpayer isn’t covering displays like these, the melding of sports and the military should be seen as inappropriate, if not insidious. And I say that as both a lover of sports and a veteran.
I Went to a Military Parade and a Tennis Match Broke Out
Maybe you’ve heard the joke: I went to the fights and a hockey game broke out. It was meant to poke fun at the fisticuffs in National Hockey League games, though these days there are fewer of them than in the “glory days” of the 1970s. An updated version would, however, fit today’s increasingly militarized sports events to a T: I went to a military parade and a baseball (football, hockey) game broke out.
Nowadays, it seems as if professional sports simply couldn’t occur without some notice of and celebration of the U.S. military, each game being transformed in some way into yet another Memorial Day or Veterans Day lite.
Consider the pro-military hype that surrounded this year’s Major League Baseball All-Star Game. Not so very long ago, when I watched such games I would be transported to my childhood and my fantasies of becoming the next Nolan Ryan or Carl Yastrzemski.
When I watched this year’s version of the game, however, I didn’t relive my youth; I relived my military career. As a start, the previous night featured a televised home-run derby. Before it even began, about 50 airmen paraded out in camouflage uniforms, setting the stage for everything that would follow. (As they weren’t on duty, I couldn’t help wondering why they found it appropriate to don such outfits.) Part of T-Mobile's "HatsOff4Heroes” campaign, this mini-parade was justified in the name of raising money to support veterans, but T-Mobile could have simply given the money to charity without any of the militarized hoopla that this involved.
Highlighting the other pre-game ceremonies the next night was a celebration of Medal of Honor recipients. I have deep respect for such heroes, but what were they doing on a baseball diamond? The ceremony would have been appropriate on, say, Veterans Day in November.
Those same pre-game festivities included a militaristic montage narrated by Bradley Cooper (star of "American Sniper"), featuring war scenes and war monuments while highlighting the popular catchphrase "freedom isn't free." Martial music accompanied the montage along with a bevy of flag-waving images. It felt like watching a twisted version of the film Field of Dreams reshot so that soldiers, not baseball players, emerged early on from those rows of Iowa corn stalks and stepped onto the playing field.
What followed was a "surprise"
of an airman, Staff Sergeant Cole Condiff, and his wife and family. Such staged reunions have become a regular aspect of major sporting events -- consider this “heart-melting” example from a Milwaukee Brewers game -- and are obviously meant to tug at the heartstrings. They are, as retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich wrote at TomDispatchback in 2011, propagandistic versions of "cheap grace."
In addition, Budweiser used this year’s game to promote "freedom" beer, again to raise money for veterans and, of course, to burnish its own rep. (Last year, the company was hyping "America" beer.)
And the All-Star game is hardly alone in its militarized celebrations and hoopla. Take the 2017 U.S. Open tennis tournament in New York City, which I happened to watch. With John McEnroe in retirement, tennis is, generally speaking, a quieter sport. Yet before the men’s final, a Marine Corps color guard joined a contingent of West Point cadets in a ceremony to remember the victims of 9/11. Naturally, a by-now-obligatory oversized American flag set the scene -- here’s a comparable ceremony
-- capped by a performance of “God Bless America” and a loud flyover by four combat jets. Admittedly, it was a dramatic way to begin anything, but why exactly an international tennis match that happened to feature finalists from Spain and South Africa?
Blending Sports With the Military Weakens Democracy
I’m hardly the first to warn about the dangers of mixing sports with the military, especially in corporate-controlled blenders. Early in 2003, prior to the kick off for the Iraq War (sports metaphor intended), the writer Norman Mailer issued this warning:
“The dire prospect that opens, therefore, is that America is going to become a mega-banana republic where the army will have more and more importance in Americans' lives... [D]emocracy is the special condition -- a condition we will be called upon to defend in the coming years. That will be enormously difficult because the combination of the corporation, the military, and the complete investiture of the flag with mass spectator sports has set up a pre-fascistic atmosphere in America already.”
More than 14 years later, that combination -- corporations, the military, and mass spectator sports, all wrapped in a gigantic version of the stars and stripes -- has increasingly come to define what it means to be an American. Now that the country also has its own self-styled strongman president, enabled by a spineless Congress and an increasingly reactionary judiciary, Mailer’s mention of a “pre-fascistic atmosphere” seems prescient.
What started as a post-9/11 drive to get an American public to “thank” the troops endlessly for their service in distant conflicts -- stifling criticism of those wars by linking it to ingratitude -- has morphed into a new form of national reverence. And much credit goes to professional sports for that transformation. In conjunction with the military and marketed by corporations, they have reshaped the very practice of patriotism in America.
Today, thanks in part to taxpayer funding, Americans regularly salute grossly oversized flags, celebrate or otherwise “appreciate” the troops (without making the slightest meaningful sacrifice themselves), and applaud the corporate sponsors that pull it all together (and profit from it). Meanwhile, taking a stand (or a knee), being an agent of dissent, protesting against injustice, is increasingly seen as the very definition of what it means to be unpatriotic. Indeed, players with the guts to protest American life as it is are regularly castigated as SOBs by our sports- and military-loving president.
Professional sports owners certainly know that this militarized brand of patriotism sells, while the version embodied in the kinds of controversial stances taken by athletes like former National Football League quarterback Colin Kaepernick (cashiered by his own league) angers and alienates many fans, ultimately threatening profits.
Meanwhile, the military’s bottom line is recruiting new bodies for that all-volunteer force while keeping those taxpayer dollars flowing into the Pentagon at increasingly staggering levels. For corporations, you won’t be surprised to learn, it's all about profits and reputation.
In the end, it comes down to one thing: who controls the national narrative.
Think about it. A set of corporate-military partnerships or, if you prefer, some version of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s old military-industrial complex has enlisted sports to make militarism look good and normal and even cool. In other words, sports teams now have a powerful set of incentives to appear patriotic, which increasingly means slavishly pro-military. It’s getting hard to remember that this country ever had a citizen-soldier tradition as well as sports teams whose athletes actually went almost en masseto serve in war. Consider it paradoxical that militarism is today becoming as American as baseball and apple pie, even as, like so many other citizens, today’s athletes vote with their feet to stay out of the military. (The NFL’s Pat Tillman was a noble post-9/11 exception.) Indeed, the widespread (if shallow) support of the military by so many athletes may, in some cases, be driven by a kind of guilt.
“Collusion” is a key word in this Trumpian moment. Even though Robert Mueller isn’t investigating them, corporate-owned sports teams are now actively colluding with the military to redefine patriotism in ways that work to their mutual advantage. They are complicit in taking a select, jingoistic form of patriotism and weaponizing it to suppress dissent, including against the military-industrial complex and America’s never-ending wars.
Driven by corporate agendas and featuring exaggerated military displays, mass-spectator sports are helping to shape what Americans perceive and believe. In stadiums across the nation, on screens held in our hands or dominating our living rooms, we witness fine young men and women in uniform unfurling massive flags on football fields and baseball diamonds, even on tennis courts, as combat jets scream overhead. What we don’t see -- what is largely kept from us -- are the murderous costs of empire: the dead and maimed soldiers, the innocents slaughtered by those same combat jets.
The images we do absorb and the narrative we’re encouraged to embrace, immersed as we are in an endless round of militarized sporting events, support the idea that massive “national security” investments (to the tune of roughly a trillion dollars annually) are good and right and patriotic. Questioning the same -- indeed, questioning authority in any form -- is, of course, bad and wrong and unpatriotic.
For all the appreciation of the military at sporting events, here’s what you’re not supposed to appreciate: why we’re in our forever wars; the extent to which they've been mismanaged for the last 17 years; how much people, especially in distant lands, have suffered thanks to them; and who’s really profiting from them.
Sports should be about having fun; about joy, passion, and sharing; about the thrill of competition, the splendor of the human condition; and so much more. I still remember the few home runs I hit in softball. I still remember breaking 200 for the first time in bowling. I still remember the faces of my teammates in softball and the fun times I had with good people.
But let’s be clear: this is not what war is all about. War is horrific. War features the worst of the human condition. When we blur sports and the military, adding corporate agendas into the mix, we're not just doing a disservice to our troops and our athletes; we’re doing a disservice to ourselves. We're weakening the integrity of democracy in America.
We can afford to lose a ballgame. We can’t afford to lose our country.
TomDispatch regular, William Astore is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and history professor who blogs at Bracing Views.
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Although the Mercers had initially been persuaded to back Texas senator Ted Cruz in the Republican primary, Bannon preferred Trump, and by the time of the Republican National Convention the Mercers were with him. Rebekah made her move last August, at a fundraiser at theEast Hampton estate of Woody Johnson, the owner of the New York Jets. According to two sources, one who strategized with the Mercers and another who worked closely with Trump, Rebekah insisted on a 30-minute face-to-face meeting with Trump, in which she informed him that his campaign was a disaster. (Her family had pledged $2 million to the effort about a month earlier, so she felt comfortable being frank.) Trump, who knew her slightly, was willing to listen. He had been disturbed by recent stories detailing disorganization in his campaign and alleging ties between Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and pro-Russia officials in Ukraine. Rebekah knew of this and arrived at her meeting with “props,” says the source who strategized with the Mercers: printouts of news articles about Manafort and Russia that she brandished as evidence that he had to go. And she also had a solution in mind:Trump should put Bannon in charge of the campaign and hire the pollster Kellyanne Conway.[3]
3.
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32 millionaires/billionaires own nfl teams, plan to end knee?
https://kpfa.org/episode/the-collision-sports-and-politics-etan-thomas-dave-zirin-december-1-2017/
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/06/among-nba-owners-betsy-devoss-father-law-tops-donors/
There’s big money to be made—for players, agents, and networks—in the NBA Finals currently underway. But while the Golden State Warriors battle the Cleveland Cavaliers on the court, off court, NBA team owners have been making some sizable political contributions.
In fact, the generous and deep-pocketed NBA owners gave just under $12 million in 2016, with Democrat Hillary Clinton the favored presidential candidate. She drew nearly $77,000 in direct contributions, while her joint fundraising committees secured $1.2 million from at least 22 individuals, including owners and their spouses. By contrast, just three owner pairs gave a total of $10,800 to President Donald Trump directly; his joint fundraising committee drew just over $869,000. That bucks a general historical trend—since 1989, NBA owners have donated just under $21.6 million to Republicans and $10.4 million to Democrats in congressional and presidential elections.
It was Richard DeVos, founder of Amway and owner of the Orlando Magic, who led the pack in spending among NBA owners in 2016. He and his wife, Helen, donated $3.9 million to Republican election efforts. They skirted Trump in the primary, giving $250,000 each to super PACs supporting Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, and Carly Fiorina. (They also donated directly to Cruz, Bush and Scott Walker.) DeVos added another $750,000 to a super PAC started by the Trump-averse conservative Koch network, Freedom Partners Action Fund. But DeVos came around to Trump in the general election with a $70,000 check to his joint fundraising committee, Trump Victory. His daughter-in-law, Betsy DeVos, now serves as Trump’s education secretary.
DeVos and his wife have been the biggest spenders among NBA owners for years. Since 1989, they’ve doled out $7.3 million to federal candidates, party committees, and outside spending groups.
Cavs majority owner Dan Gilbert and his wife, Jennifer, came in second of the lot in 2016. They shelled out $2.1 million that cycle, with just over half of that landing in the coffers of a super PAC backing GOP candidate Chris Christie, America Leads ($1.3 million.) Another $350,000 went to a super PAC behind Republican John Kasich, New Day for America. In the general election, Gilbert veered left, donating $150,000 to Clinton’s joint fundraising committee, Hillary Victory Fund.
Cavs minority owner Gordon Gund and his wife Llura claimed the number three spot among NBA owner-donors. Of their $1.4 million in campaign contributions in 2016, $750,000 went to super PACs affiliated with Kasich. But the Gunds went for Clinton in the general election, giving $30,000 to her joint fundraising committee.
Contributions to Trump’s election effort came from just three team owner pairs: Peter and Julianna Holtof the San Antonio Spurs, James Dolan of the New York Knicks, and DeVos. Holt was the biggest Trump booster; he and his wife donated just under $500,000 to Trump’s joint fundraising committee, of which Trump received $5,400; the rest went to GOP party committees. Not far behind was Dolan, who gave $300,000, $2,700 going into Trump’s coffers.
Among Clinton’s top donors was Marc and Cathy Lasry of the Philadelphia 76ers, who gave just under $178,000 to her joint fundraising committee. Trailing behind were Ted and Lynn Leonsis of the Washington Wizards (just over $158,000), Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, who are minority stakeholders of the 76ers ($150,000), Stan Kroenke of the Denver Nuggets ($100,000) and Herbert and Bui Simon of the Pacers ($100,000.)
While owners contributed generously in 2016, players and coaches tend to sit on the sidelines when it comes to political giving. Of those competing in the finals, neither Warriors nor Cavs players donated.
Whether 2018 will have owners opening their wallets as wide remains to be seen. So far, they’ve put just over $142,000 into the midterms.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/19/sports/-new-england-patriots-visit-white-house-donald-trump.html
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many trump inaug slush funds
227 676 IND KROENKE, E. STANLEY $1,000,000 1/6/2017
211 NORTH STADIUM BOULEVARD
COLUMBIA MO 65203 - The Kroenke Group owns and develops real estate properties including shopping centers and apartments.
https://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapid=115980480
His family also owns the entertainment group that is owner of the Denver Nuggets, the Colorado Rapids and Colorado Avalanche.
This is a shopping center owned by Stan Kroenke. Boone County, MO tax records confirm this: https://www.showmeboone.com/collector/BillSummary.Asp?FN=20170421-114902&ID=0:{ }:
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hunting pres
tx mo
The best way to eliminate Clinton from the 1992 presidential race would be to defeat him in the 1990 governor’s race. Unfortunately for the Republicans, their nominee, Sheffield Nelson, had used his influence as a top state bureaucrat to sell one of the richest natural gas fields in North America to one of his pals, Jerry Jones, for the give-away price of $15 million; ultimately, Arkansas had to buy it back for $175 million. (Jones spent part of his enormous profits to buy the Dallas Cowboys.) For some reason, voters got the impression the state had been screwed.
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Those bread-and-butter issues have recently included predatory lending and mortgages. Not long ago,ACORN forced Countrywide Financial into an agreement to help homeowners trapped in their subprime loans. In 1996, it led a campaign in Philadelphia to stop Pennsylvania from selling liquor stores to raise money for sports arenas.
LOS ANGELES, Jan. 23, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- AXS, AEG's digital ticketing and media platform, has acquired Examiner.com, a top content destination, it was announced today by Bryan Perez, President of AEG Digital, Ticketing and Media.
Launched in 2008, Examiner.com is the leading content creation network, connecting consumers to effective online influencers, known as Examiners; and creating meaningful and authentic interactions through compelling stories. Garnering more than 40 million unique visitors every month, Examiner.com is the 37th largest website in the U.S. and the 10th largest mobile website according to Quantcast.
With the resources and content created by the thousands of affiliated, established writers, AXS.com will now have the ability to populate original content directly into the AXS.com platform. The end result will be a new immersive experience for AXS.com users around live events. The experience will couple the power of the thousands of 'Examiners' writing each day about live events, with AXS.com's ticketing platform and AEG's insider access to events to create a one of a kind destination – uniquely focused on the live experience – both the content and the commerce.
"Fans have told us they don't see the populated social media feeds of other event focused websites as truly engaging content; instead they are craving content with a deeper, authentic and editorial connection, curated for their live entertainment interests," said Mr. Perez. "The Examiner platform allows AXS to do this at scale immediately."
"We have created a large scale content platform and we are truly excited about the integration with AXS.com. With this merger, AXS will now have the opportunity to tap into our contributors who are passionate about live events and direct them towards bringing consumers great stories around live entertainment," said Ashish Kapur, CEO ofExaminer.com, who will now be joining the AXS team as the Senior Vice President of Content.
Existing content not related to live entertainment will continue to live on Examiner.com.
About Examiner.com
Examiner.com is an enterprise-quality publishing and community platform where independent, self-motivated contributors write on topics that matter to them and share content with like-minded audiences around the world. Every month over 10,000 Examiners create more than 70,000 articles adding to a growing library of over 4 million articles. The site averages 40M unique visitors per month and is ranked #37 according to Quantcast and #89 by comScore.
About AXS
Developed and operated by AEG, one of the leading sports and entertainment presenters in the world, and a wholly owned subsidiary of the Anschutz Company, AXS is a new entertainment platform that also serves as AEG's primary consumer brand. AXS provides fans the opportunity to purchase tickets directly from their favorite venues via a user-friendly ticketing interface. AXS serves all phases of the event life-cycle beyond just ticketing, through its consumer facing website, AXS.com and the AXS App, as well as its portfolio of investment companies, including Carbonhouse, a leading website developer for venues, Frontgate Ticketing, a festival oriented ticketing platform owned in partnership with C3 Presents, and Bypass, the venue industry's leading supplier of cloud-based food and beverage point-of-sale systems. For more information on AXS, please visit AXS.com.
About AEG
AEG is one of the leading sports and entertainment presenters in the world. AEG, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Anschutz Company, owns or is affiliated with a collection of companies including over 100 of the world's preeminent facilities such as STAPLES Center (Los Angeles, CA), StubHub Center (Carson, CA), Best Buy Theater (Times Square, New York), Sprint Center (Kansas City), Rose Garden Arena (Portland, OR), Target Center (Minneapolis, MN), Mercedes-Benz Arena (Shanghai, China), MasterCard Center (Beijing, China), Allphones Arena (Sydney, Australia), Stockholm Globe Arenas (Stockholm, Sweden), O2 World arena (Berlin, Germany), O2 World Hamburg, Indigo2 and The O2 arena and entertainment district (London, England) which are all part of the portfolio of AEG Facilities. Developed by AEG, L.A. LIVE is a 4 million square foot / multi-million dollar downtown Los Angelessports, residential & entertainment district featuring Nokia Theatre L.A. LIVE and Club Nokia, a 54-story, 1001-room convention "headquarters" destination along with entertainment, restaurant and office space that "officially" opened in 2010. In addition to overseeing privately held management shares of the Los Angeles Lakers (NBA), assets of AEG Sports include franchises and properties such as the Los Angeles Kings (NHL), Los Angeles Galaxy and Houston Dynamo (MLS), two hockey franchises in Europe and the Amgen Tour of California cycling race. AEG Live, the company's live-entertainment division, is the world's second largest concert promotion and touring companies and is comprised of touring, festival, exhibition, broadcast, merchandise and special event divisions with fifteen regional offices. AEG Global Partnerships, a division responsible for worldwide sales and servicing of sponsorships naming rights and other strategic partnerships and AEG Merchandising, a multi-faceted merchandising company are also core business units of AEG. In 2010, AEG launched its AEG 1EARTH environmental program with the announcement of 2020 environmental goals and the release of the industry's first sustainability report while in 2011, AEG introduced AXS Ticketing, the first phase of its new entertainment platform serving as the company's primary consumer brand. For additional information: aegworldwide.com
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http://thehill.com/policy/finance/252123-politicians-show-sports-teams-the-money-on-stadiums
Liberals and conservatives don't agree on much when it comes to tax policy, but they mostly agree on this: Professional sports owners are relying far too much on taxpayer subsidies to build new stadiums.
But as Gov. Scott Walker's recent decision to approve $250 million in public funding for a new arena in Milwaukee, Wis., shows, state and local officials are still having a hard time saying no to the local team.
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That’s despite a growing consensus among economists that big stadiums for National Football League or Major League Baseball teams and smaller arenas for National Basketball Association and National Hockey League teams don’t give the economy much of a jolt or create many jobs.}:
Liberal groups and free-market organizations like the Cato Institute oppose the use of taxpayer money for arenas for similar reasons, arguing that there’s no reason that wealthy sports team owners need the help from the public. But more business-friendly conservatives, like the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, also believe that too many owners are getting sweetheart deals out of taxpayers.
“It’s better to have the billionaires who own these teams to pay for this themselves,” said Norquist.
Under the deal Walker announced this month, Wisconsin taxpayers would front roughly half of the $500 million cost of building a new arena for the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks. The team’s current and former owners would cover the rest.
Walker, who’s currently seeking the GOP nomination for president, defended a deal that he said would save millions in tax revenue, help the economy and keep one of the just 30 high-profile professional basketball teams from skipping town.
“We have protected our hard-working taxpayers against the major loss in tax revenue that was inevitable had we failed to reach an agreement,” said Walker, whose office said the new arena would be a key cog in economic development projects creating or keeping 15,000 construction jobs in Milwaukee.
He’s hardly the only current or former GOP governor seeking the White House who’s negotiated to keep a professional team from leaving.
Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.) struck a deal in 2012 to rehabilitate the New Orleans Arena – now called the Smoothie King Center – that ensured the city would have an NBA team for at least the next dozen years.
That deal required public money to finance the arena improvements, but also cut annual state subsidies – meaning it was projected to save taxpayer money in the long run.
A wide range of economic studies have questioned the wisdom of putting public money into stadiums.
“The claim that this somehow boosts local economy is pretty lame,” said Howard Gleckman of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
That’s because, Gleckman said, sports fans would find other ways to contribute to the economy – like by going to a bar or out to dinner – if they weren’t going to the arena. He added that the stadiums “do create jobs. But the jobs they create are generally pretty bad jobs.”
Analysts have also argued that there are more hidden costs that drive up what taxpayers end up paying on stadiums, above stated figures like the $250 million for the Milwaukee arena.
Judith Grant Long, now a professor at Michigan, has pointed to lost property taxes and added infrastructure costs as just a couple of the culprits that drive up taxpayer costs by, on average, another 25 percent. In all, Long wrote in a 2012 book that taxpayer end up paying about four out of every five dollars in public-private partnerships for stadiums.
In looking at the Milwaukee deal, Gleckman has noted that taxpayers would owe another $170 million on interest payments on the bonds used to build the arena.
Norquist has argued that the federal government might need to step in to essentially save state and local officials from themselves when it comes to arenas and stadiums.
“I understand the pressures on mayors and governors on this – you become the guy that lost our team,” Norquist said.
But lawmakers have tried to limit state and local governments’ ability to fund stadiums with taxpayer money in the past – and proceeded to only make matters worse.
The 1986 overhaul of the tax code sought to make it easier to tax municipal bonds if they were used to build arenas. But in the end, that just pushed local authorities to give even better deals to owners.
President Obama took another crack at that idea in his latest budget, with a new proposal to end the use of tax-exempt bonds for stadiums.
The effort has gained little traction on Capitol Hill, but could easily get into the mix if Congress made progress on the sort of comprehensive tax reform that has eluded them for the past three decades
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http://www.alternet.org/story/152420/6_right-wing_sports_team_owners_bankrolling_their_radical_agenda_with_your_tax_dollars
Chances are that basketball fans cheering on the Orlando Magic’s star center Dwight Howard haven’t a clue they’re also supporting the radical right-wing ideology of the team’s billionaire owner, Richard DeVos. And when hockey fans root for the Philadelphia Flyers, they are likely unaware that the team’swar-mongering owner, Ed Snider, is profiting off of their support.
While establishment pundits often claim that sports and politics don’t mix, David Zirin [3], author of Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love [4] and sports editor for the Nation, argues just the opposite. He recently told AlterNet that, “The ability to manipulate politics, the ability to pull strings, and the ability to do so without an ounce of public scrutiny -- that is your typical major sports owner.”
The exploitation of professional sports by the powerful is most evident in the hyperpatriotism that saturates almost every major sporting event. The aftermath of 9/11 has seen professional sports, particularly the National Football League and Major League Baseball, co-opted to promote a culture of war under the guise of patriotism and “supporting the troops." The military is more visible than ever in professional sports with fighter jet flyovers that follow the national anthem, the NFL’s military recruitment stations [5] at preseason games, and soldiers returned from war surprising their families for all to see.
Andrew Bacevich [6] recently wrote about the spectacle he witnessed at a Red Sox game on the 4th of July. The Navy and the Red Sox teamed up to perform a “public relations triumph” by reuniting Bridget Lydon, a sailor “serving aboard the carrier USSRonald Reagan”to aid in the Afghanistan war, with her family for the entire ballpark to see. The crowd went wild, erupting in cheers and applause to “honor the families whose sons and daughters are serving our country,” just as the voice from the loudspeaker had requested.
While the ever-increasing patriotic fervor is easy to recognize, there are less visible connections between politics and sports on the part of professional sports team owners, who are among the wealthiest people in the world. They’re also some of the most influential right-wing ideologues in the country.
The intermingling of professional sports ownership and right-wing politics is no more apparent than in the case of President George W. Bush. Long before Bush entered the world of politics, he was part owner of the MLB's Texas Rangers beginning in 1990. The connections he made during his time with the Rangers helped propel him to White House. In 2004, the Associated Press [7] reported that "More than a dozen current and former owners and family members are among the president's top re-election fundraisers.” The report added, “The Bush campaign has also received direct contributions from owners and executives of more than half of the sport's 30 teams.”
During his years as part team owner, Bush and his ownership crew pressured the Texas government into building them a new taxpayer-funded stadium by threatening to relocate the team. In the end, the owners succeeded in securing $135 million from the local government to build a $190 million ballpark. Meanwhile, Bush’s investment in the Rangers skyrocketed. According to Zirin, by the time Bush “cashed out in 1998, the return on his original $600,000 investment in the Rangers was 2,400 percent, upping his takeaway to a cool $14.4 million.”
While all team owners take advantage of their power and the taxpayer subsidies that often finance their stadiums, six go even further by using their ownership power and privilege to push their radical right-wing ideology onto an unsuspecting fan base.
1. Richard ‘Dick’ DeVos
The 85-year-old multibillionaire, Richard DeVos, is the 62nd richest person in America and 254th wealthiest in the world, according to Forbes [8]. He amassed much of his $4.2 billion fortune as cofounder of the Amway Corporation. Along the way, he purchased the NBA’s Orlando Magic for $85 million. That was back in 1991. Today, Forbes values the team at $385 million [9], a number that could rise now that the team’s brand new Amway Center is complete and expected to host the NBA All-Star game in 2012.
DeVos spent years insisting that Florida’s residents build him a new arena, even threatening, as most owners do, to uproot the team if Orlando didn’t heed his demands. Ultimately, his request was granted and last October the Orlando Magic’s new home was unveiled along with a $480 million [10] price tag. State and local taxpayers picked up most of the tab, while the team pitched in a puny 12 percent, according to the Orlando Sentinel [11].
But DeVos is more than just a billionaire owner soaked in hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate welfare. David Zirin has dubbed him “the top chef of every religious-right cause on Pat Robertson’s buffet table.” DeVos funnels millions of dollars through his nonprofit Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation to fund conservative Christian groups championing such causes as discredited reparative gay therapy designed to turn gay and lesbian people into heterosexuals, the teaching of creationism in schools, and the privatization of all things public, to name just a few.
Among his favorite funding projects are Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, and the Traditional Values Coalition, all of which made it onto the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list [12] of groups that “help drive the religious right's anti-gay crusade.” DeVos has also backed the Christian Dominionist movement, which believes in instituting a Christian theocracy governed by Biblical law in place of the constitution. He is also a member of the Council for National Policy [13] (CNP), a secretive group created by the radical John Birch Society in the early 1980s.
Rachel Tabachnick [14], writing for AlterNet, recently exposed another layer of DeVos' agenda—his relentless support for the decades-long conservative effort to privatize public education, most recently with public school vouchers under the guise of “school choice.”
Dick DeVos also had a close relationship with the late Michigan billionaire Edgar Prince, whose daughter Betsy Prince married Dick DeVos’ son, Dick Jr., in what Zirin describes as a “royal coupling” reminiscent of “feudal Europe.” Edgar Prince’s son is the infamous Erik Prince, founder of Xe Services (formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide), a private army of mercenaries that has received over $1 billion in government contracts over the last decade to help occupy Iraq, Afghanistan and even post-Katrina New Orleans.
The forces of the Prince and DeVos families have combined to manipulate the country’s political landscape by heavily funding organizations of the religious right, free-market fundamentalism and Republican interest groups. According to ABC News [15], the Dick & Betsy DeVos Foundation helped fund the group Citizens United, which filed the lawsuit that led to last year's Supreme Court decision enabling corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money influencing elections, without disclosure.
2. Philip Anschutz: The Invisible Billionaire
Phil Anschutz is a 71-years-old business tycoon worth $7.1 billion, making him the 34th richest American on the Forbes [16] 400. He is minority owner of the NBA’s L.A. Lakers and the NHL’s L.A. Kings. He also owns Staples Center in L.A., which is among 120 entertainment venues controlled by his privately held Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG). AEG promotes tours for the top names in music, like the Black Eyed Peas, Cher, Jon Bon Jovi and Justin Bieber.
Despite his enormous wealth and colossal empire stretching from energy and telecommunications to cinemas and railways, most people have never heard of Phil Anschutz. His utter invisibility may be due in part to a dearth of media appearances. According to Forbes, Anschutz has given just three interviews over the last four decades, which his spokesperson said was “three interviews too many [17].”
Anschutz epitomizes what Zirin calls “the Keyser Soze principle,” which is based on the movie The Usual Suspects,when Kevin Spacey’s character says, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” The title of a Forbes cover story that profiled Anschutz last year agreed, calling him “The Man Behind the Curtain [18].”
Zirin describes Anchutz as “someboday who preaches an Ayn Randian ideology to his various underlings about the genius and wonderment of the free-market,” which explains why he subsidizes two money-losing conservative publications, the Weekly Standard and the Examiner, both of which he uses to amplify conservative propaganda.
In his free time, Anschutz keeps busy with Christian conservatism and opposition to gay marriage. According to the Independent [19], he bankrolled the conservative group Colorado for Family Values, which was behind Colorado’s Amendment 2, a ballot initiative that sought to eliminate state laws protecting gay rights. He also donates to the Discovery institute, a “think-tank” that criticizes evolution and promotes “a new spin on creationism.”
3. Ed Snider hearts Ayn Rand and War
Ed Snider, CEO of the Philadelphia-based sports and entertainment firm Comcast Spectator, owns two sports teams: the Philadelphia Flyers (NHL) and the Philadelphia 76ers (NBA). Along with hockey and basketball, Snider is an admirer of Ayn Rand, so much so that he co-founded the Ayn Rand Institute in the mid-1980s. He was also theexecutive producer [20]of a movie based on his all-time favorite book, Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
Besides funding the Institute, Snider remained largely passive in the political arena until the 2001 terrorist attacks. It was after 9/11 that Snider aggressively engaged in politics by becoming the number one donor to Freedom’s Watch, a group that pushed for war with Iraq in support of George W. Bush’s war on terror.
According to Politico [21], one of the organization's first projects involved a $15 million propaganda campaign that pushed for atroop surge in Iraq by conflating the war with 9/11. For five weeks radio, web and television ads featuring military veterans filled the airwaves. In the opening ad, a military veteran said:
I re-enlisted after Sept. 11 because I don’t want my sons to see what I saw. I want them to be free and safe. I know what I lost. I also know that if we pull out now, everything I’ve given and the sacrifices will mean nothing. They attacked us, and they will again. They won’t stop in Iraq. We are winning on the ground and making real progress. It’s no time to quit. It’s no time for politics.
When John McCain chose the self-described hockey mom Sarah Palin as his running mate in the 2008 election, Snider jumped at the opportunity to continue his push for endless war by supporting the pro-war duo. He used his hockey stadium, along with its audience, to play PR agent for Sarah Palin by inviting her to drop the puck at the Flyers' season opener.
In the Flyers' press release [22], Snider is quoted as saying, “Because of the tremendous amount of publicity she has brought to our sport, we invited the most popular hockey mom in North America to our home opener to help us get our season started."
Snider was doing nothing illegal in his position as team owner, but as Will Bunch [22] of the Philidelphia Daily News put it prior to the event, "he's making a huge in-kind donation to the McCain-Palin campaign in the arena that we taxpayers kicked in for, giving her a chance to skate her stuff in front of 19,500 mostly upscale male hockey fans from the swing suburbs outside Philly,” adding that “Flyers fans should be outraged -- even conservative ones, because this misuse of a hockey game for his political agenda is flat-out wrong.”
Snider's plan ultimately backfired when fans at Philidelphia's WachoviaCenter
“The problem,” Zirin argues, “is when owners use the platform handed to them by taxpayers to play propagandist,” in which case Ed Snider is guilty.
4. Ken Kendrick Says Yes to Racial Profiling!
In April of 2010, Arizona’s Republican governor Jan Brewer signed into law the anti-immigrant Senate Bill 1070 (SB 1070), which gave law enforcement the power to search and arrest individuals they suspected were undocumented, effectively institutionalizing racial profiling. Almost immediately, a giant backlash erupted across the country as businesses, civil rights groups, religious organizations, and members of Congress demanded the law be overturned.
Democracy Now reported [24] that baseball fans throughout the country were demanding that the MLB’s owner's move the 2011 All-Star game out of the Chase Field in Phoenix, Arizona. Fans also threatened to boycott the Arizona Diamondbacks if the team’s owner, Ken Kendrick, didn’t end his support for SB 1070.
Despite deep financial ties to the Arizona Republicans supporting the bill, Diamondbacks CEO Derrick Hall stressed that the organization was not politically affiliated while Kendrick insisted in a press release [25] that he was opposed to the law.
But, according to an investigation [26] by the Center for Responsive Politics, “no team in Major League Baseball is more politically active [27], or overwhelmingly supportive of GOP political interests, than the D-backs.” Since 2004, Diamondbacks’ officials have donated $790,000 to Republicans, and most of that has come from the Kendrick family. Kendrick’s recipients included Republican “Sens. John McCain [28] ($44,100) and John Kyl [29] ($34,350),” both ardent supporters of SB 1070.
As Kendrick and Hall were telling the country that the Diamondbacks did not support SB 1070 and that politics and sports did not mix, Zirin reported [30] in the Nation that Kendrick was hosting "a private fundraiser inside his owners box at Chase Field for SB 1070 supporter State Senator Jonathan Paton” set to take place “during the D-backs game against the San Francisco Giants.”
While Kendrick's actions were legal, they should put to rest the notion that politics and sports have no connection.
5. Alex Spanos: Dubya’s BFF
Alex Spanos, of the NFL’s San Diego Chargers, is an 85-year-old self-made real estate tycoon coming in at number 365 on Forbes 400 [31], with a net worth of $1.1 billion. Unlike other sports owners, Spanos is not media-shy about his political leanings.
In 2005, Spanos bragged [32] to the local press of his hometown, Stockton, California, that he has “been friends with every Republican president since Gerald Ford.” Those bragging rights were well earned. During the 2004 presidential election, he lent his private jet to his close and personal friend George W. Bush, who used it to fly around the country during his 2004 presidential campaign.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics [33], from 1989 to 2009 political contributions from the Chargers' executives, coaches and players were the highest in the league at $2.4 million, 98 percent of which went to Republicans. The CRP describes Spanos as "professional football's most prolific political bankroller" whose contributions alone totaled $2 million.
This doesn't include his $5 million 2004 contribution to the Progress for America Voter Fund [34], a conservative 527 group that funnels money into Republican campaigns. According to the Center for Media and Democracy's SourceWatch [35], Spanos was a Bush Ranger in 2004, meaning he contributed more than $200,000 directly to his and Cheney's re-election campaign.
In the 2000 presidential election, the New York Times [36] counted Spanos as part of the Republican Regents, a group of individual and corporate donors who contributed no less than $250,000 to Bush's election.
According to California Watch [37], a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting, Spanos also contributed $15,000 to Rick Perry’s 2008 reelection bid for Texas Governor.
6. Charlie Monfort: Pitching for Jesus
Charlie Monfort owns the Colorado Rockies Major League Baseball team, which he was able to purchase with the fortune he inherited from his father’s slaughterhouse business in Greeley, Colorado. According to Dave Zirin, Monfort is also a supporter of several right-wing politicians, including:
…former Colorado representative Tom Tancredo(who once suggested the bombing of Mecca as a sound foreign policy alternative and lambasted the Denver Public Library system for supplying books and Magazines written in Spanish) and former Pennsylvania senator RickSantorum, who has been a stalwart opponent of “the gay agenda” and its connection to bestiality—specifically, in Santorum’s words, the rise of “man-dog love.”
In addition to being a diehard Republican, Monfort has injected his religious beliefs into every aspect of the Colorodo Rockies franchise. In 2006, Monfort went public with his team's Christian strategy in USA Today [38], admitting to the world that the Rockies embrace a "Christian-based code of conduct" by recruiting players that have "character." Monfort defined "character" in the following words: "I don't want to offend anyone, but I think character-wise we're stronger than anyone in baseball. Christians, and what they've endured, are some of the strongest people in baseball. I believe God sends signs, and we're seeing those."
Monfort also uses his publicly funded stadium as a platform to push his evangelical Christian agenda in the form of "Faith Days" (originally called "Christian Family Day"). The Rockies “Faith Day 2011 [39]” is described on the team’s Web site as “a great opportunity for Colorado churches and Christians from all over the state to come together and worship at the ballpark!”
According to the New York Times [40], Faith Nights, introduced by the Christian Marketing organization Third Coast Sports, provide fans who pay an extra $10 with a Christian rock concert either before or after games, followed by testimonials from players about their faith in Jesus Christ.
Third Coast Sports is sponsored by a handful of Christian groups, including the fundamentalist Christian organization Focus on the Family. According to the Washington Post [41], the Atlanta Braves disinvited Focus on the Family from Faith Nights in 2008, "because it had used the occasion to distribute literature comparing homosexuality to alcoholism."
Sports columnist Michael O'Keefe argues in the New York Daily News [42] that sports are supposed to be inclusive of people from different backgrounds, but with owners like Monfort in charge, "sports are used to promote their brand of conservative politics and fundamentalist Christianity -- gays, Jews, Muslims and atheists be damned."
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