He will be speaking at 7pm tonight [Wednesday, July 11] at Cody's Books in Berkeley. (Check the end of this post for more details about the reading. )
Not surprisingly, one of subjects he analyzes in this book is public funding for professional sports stadiums. He wrote about the same issue in an article for last Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle.
The entire article — Are stadiums worth the high price? — is worth reading, but here are a few highlights:
Stadiums are sporting shrines to the dogma of trickle-down economics. In the past 10 years, more than $16 billion of the public's money has been spent for stadium construction and upkeep from coast to coast. Though some cities are beginning to resist paying the full tab, any kind of subsidy is a fool's investment, ending up being little more than monuments to corporate greed: $500 million welfare hotels for America's billionaires built with funds that could have been spent more wisely on just about anything else.
. . .
As Neil DeMause, co-author of the book "Field of Schemes" said to me, "The history of the stadium game is the story of how, by slowly refining their blackmail skills, sports owners learned how to turn their industry from one based on selling tickets to one based on extracting public subsidies. It's been a bit like watching a 4-year-old learn how to manipulate his parents into buying him the new toy that he saw on TV; the question now is how long it takes our elected officials to learn to say 'no.' " [emphasis mine]
We've already seen evidence of those refined blackmail skills in Santa Clara. The headline alone — Santa Clara risks losing more than a 49ers stadium: 49ers HQ in play if deal collapses — neatly summarizes the start of a campaign to blackmail the city of Santa Clara into approving this enormous public subsidy for billionaires.
Of course, the fact that the San Francisco 49ers pay the City just $24,000 PER YEAR to lease the 11-acre property should be evidence that the City already provides a significant subsidy to this team. Judging by the numbers presented at Tuesday's City Council meeting, the City should be getting closer to $2,500,000 - $3,100,000 PER YEAR for that land — that's over 100 times more than we're currently getting.
Later in the article, Zirin includes part of a conversation he had with Jim Bouton, a former Major League Baseball All-Star and the author of the memoir Ball Four. Bouton's assessment is even more damning.
It's such a misapplication of the public's money. . . .It's going to be seen historically as an awful folly, and it's starting to be seen that way now, but historically that will go down as one of the real crimes of American government, national and local, to allow the funneling of people's money directly into the pockets of a handful of very wealthy individuals who could build these stadiums on their own if it made financial sense. If they don't make financial sense, then they shouldn't be building them.
If I was a team owner today, asking for public money, I'd be ashamed of myself. Ashamed of myself. But we've gone beyond shame. There's no such thing as shame anymore. People aren't embarrassed to take -- to do these awful things.
Of course, we certainly haven't seen any evidence of shame among the San Francisco 49ers and their supporters.
I've asked Dave Zirin if he could add a Santa Clara stop on his current book tour, and he's hoping to schedule a visit later this fall. But if you'd like to hear him sooner, the trip to Berkeley will be well worth it.The talk starts at 7pm at:
Cody's Books
1730 Fourth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
(510) 559-9500
Click here for the event page.
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