California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

Black Athletes Debunk Hitler's Master Race Theory

by John Lawrence, February 18, 2020

In the lead-up to WW 2, there were two phenomenal black athletes that put the kibosh on Hitler's Aryan supremacy aspirations: Joe Louis and Jesse Owens. In the 1936 Olympics at Munich Jesse Owens became the first athlete to win 4 gold medals in track and field. Hitler had built a new stadium just for the Olympics and had barred Jews from participating. A new airport had been constructed, and it was the first Olympics to be televised. Clearly, Hitler hoped for a propaganda coup for the Third Reich. Jesse Owens demonstrated to the world that when it came to athletics at least, if there was a master race, it surely wasn't the white one.

Later in 1938 boxing heavyweight Joe Louis, considered the best heavyweight of all time, knocked out Germany's Max Schmeling in the first round. Schmeling had been a favorite of Adolf Hitler. They had been buddy buddy, but, after this defeat Hitler dropped him like a hot potato. There was quite a bit of history involved in the Louis-Schmeling rivalry. Schmeling had become the champion of Europe, and then he set his sights on the US. He had won the world heavyweight champion title in 1930 when Jack Sharkey was disqualified because of hitting below the belt. Sharkey won back the title in 1932 on a decision.

So the scene was set for the Louis-Schmeling fight in 1936. Louis was a 10-1 favorite having never lost a fight. Schmeling studied Louis' style looking for any flaw or defect that might give him an advantage. He watched movies of every Louis fight. Schmeling noticed that after Louis delivered a left jab, he brought his left hand back low leaving his head unprotected. That left an opening for Schmeling to return a right to the head. "Louis's one weakness matched perfectly my greatest strength, the one with which I had made my career," the German would later write. Evidently, Joe did not take the fight too seriously playing a lot of golf instead of heavy training. In the second round Schmeling seized his opportunity and, as Joe delivered a left jab, Schmeling countered with a right to the head. This stunned Joe and set the stage for a 12th round knockout, the first loss of Louis' career. Having reviewed the film, I think Schmeling delivered his blow over the top of Louis' left jab and not after he brought his hand back low, but, nevertheless, the results were devastating to Louis.

For Louis, it was much more than a defeat on the canvas. The young boxer had become a symbol of enormous pride among African Americans, since he had taken on whites at their own game and triumphed. Louis's loss was a devastating blow to the black community. The black press lambasted Louis for letting them down. African Americans had cheered as Louis put away one white boxer after another at a time when blacks could not even vote or drink out of the same drinking fountain as whites. Here was one black man at least who could beat the crap out of numerous white guys as blacks cheered all the way.

Naturally der Fuhrer was elated and Schmeling was feted and adulated and paraded around as an example of the superiority of the white race. This was in June 1936. Hitler's festivities were somewhat moderated later that August when Jesse Owens won his 4 gold medals at the Munich Olympics. Be that as it may, there was to be a rematch between Joe and Max in 1938. There was a lot riding on it. Joe took this one more seriously and finished off Schmeling in the first round. This match was seen as not only between a white man and a black man but between America's democracy and Germany's dictatorship. The celebration went on all night in Harlem and in cities around the country as whites and blacks celebrated together. Hitler of course was disappointed and Schmeling became a pariah in Germany. Less than a year later Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and WW 2 was on.

After the war in which Joe Louis fought for America, Max Schmeling made a fortune as a coca cola bottler in Germany. Joe Louis retired in 1949. He had fought 96 exhibition matches during the war and also donated more than $100,000 to Army and Navy relief efforts. But he was hounded by the US government for taxes on the money he had donated. So he had to keep fighting to pay off his taxes even though he had lost many of the qualities that had made him a champion.

In 1951 Louis fought Rocky Marciano for the heavyweight title. Marciano was ten years younger than Louis at this point. He knocked Joe Louis out. Later in the dressing room tears came to Rock’s eyes. Louis was his hero. He hated what he had done to him. The former champion retired again that night for good. He was broke, but almost square with the government now. The U.S. Congress later passed a special bill, forgiving any remainder of the taxes still owed by Joe to the government. It was a nice gesture to an American icon but too little and way too late. 

Joe Louis and Max Schmeling became friends, and Max helped Joe pay his taxes and even paid part of his funeral expenses when Joe died in 1981. After his defeat by Marciano, Joe eked out a living selling autographs at Las Vegas casinos. For 12 years he and FDR had been staples in the American panorama giving comfort and stability to a nation badly in need of such sustenance. In the end Joe deserved a much better lifestyle than the one an ungrateful US government and his promoters forced on him.

Off the Top of My Head

Luck Quits Football. Fans Disappointed

by John Lawrence, September 3, 2019

The football world was shocked that the Indiana Colts star quarterback Andrew Luck would just up and quit the game leaving millions of dollars on the table. Colts owner Jim Irsay estimates Luck could have made as much as $500 million if he lasted as long as Brett Favre, Tom Brady or Peyton Manning, Luck’s predecessor. Of course he had already made millions so it was a trade off between having a healthy life or making millions more. “For the last four years or so, I’ve been in this cycle of injury, pain, rehab — injury, pain, rehab — and it’s been unceasing, unrelenting, both in season and off season,” Luck said following Saturday night’s loss to the Chicago Bears. “I felt stuck in it, and the only way I see out is to no longer play football. It’s taken my joy of this game away.”

As Luck left the fielf for the final time some of the Colts fans booed him. Of course they don't have to face down a couple of 350 pound linemen, who can bench press 500 pounds, dead set on knocking him down with as much force as they can possibly muster. Football is a brutal game, and fans lust over a potentially deadly hit, the kind that removes the quarterback from the game. The Washington Post reported:

One fan in the stands removed his No. 12 jersey while others just looked stunned. It was an ugly response for a player who had given so much physically to play the sport, winning 53 regular season games and four playoff games along the way.

Richard Sherman, the San Francisco 49ers cornerback, called the fans’ reaction “disgraceful.”

“This is a very rough game,” he tweeted. “Most people who have not played at this level will never understand what we put our bodies through season after season. We don’t need the sympathy because this is what we signed up for but to ‘boo’ a man that battled for that city is disgraceful.”

Zak Keefer tweeted:

Physical toll on Andrew Luck through 6 NFL seasons:
» Torn cartilage in 2 ribs
» partially torn abdomen
» a lacerated kidney that left him peeing blood
» at least 1 concussion
» a torn labrum in his throwing shoulder
» and this mysterious calf/ankle issue that led to this

But the fans don't care what pain a football player suffers. They want even more carnage. They are vicarious warriors. They're out for blood. Ryan Diem, a former Colts offensive lineman, called the reaction by fans and “keyboard cowboys” to be “downright disrespectful and mean spirited.” “As a person that has been in his shoes, and had to make that decision to walk away from a game they love, and seen the long term effects the game on people close to them, I 100 percent support his decision and respect it. People that don’t understand need to recognize that we are paid entertainers,” he tweeted.

American football is not played in most of the world. What they call football, we call soccer. Soccer is a lot less brutal sport while being just as athletically and physically demanding. And it can generate just as much excitement without taking its deadly toll.

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 15 from "JUNIOR SEAU: The Life and Death of a Football Icon," by Jim Trotter.

"On March 2, 2012, NFL officials accused the New Orleans Saints of running a program that paid illegal bonuses to their players for injuring or knocking opponents from games. The allegation shook the league to its core. It already was on its heels from being sued for allegedly hiding the long-term dangers of concussions from players, so the notion that Saints coaches and management were directing and sanctioning a "bounty" program that paid out $1,500 for a "knockout" hit and $1,000 for a "cart-off" hit was both a PR nightmare and a potential legal land mine - particularly at a time when Commissioner Roger Goodell was pushing for increased enforcement of player safety rules."

Seau died from suicide by shooting himself in the chest in 2012 at the age of 43. Later studies by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) concluded that Seau suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a disease that has also been found in other deceased former NFL players. The disease is believed to derive from repetitive head trauma, and can lead to conditions like dementia, rage and depression.

So the question must be asked: what price does a football player pay for money and glory. To paraphrase the Bible what does it matter if a football player becomes rich and famous if they lose their physical health and will to live in the process. It really is a question of values. If you value glory and money above all else even your physical and mental health, then by all means become a football player. If you value your quality of life, then by all means don't.

Off the Top of My Head

Winning 28 Olympic Gold Medals Does Not Make You Happy

by John Lawrence

As a testimony to the false gods people worship, consider the case of Michael Phelps, the swimmer, who won 28 Olympic gold medals. Did that make him happy? No, He suffered major bouts of depression and even wanted to kill himself. Is winning at any price what it's all about? Is competition to prove you're the best in the world what makes you happy? I don't think so.

CNN reported:

"You do contemplate suicide," the winner of 28 Olympic medals told a hushed audience at the fourth annual conference of the Kennedy Forum, a behavioral health advocacy group.

Interviewed at the conference by political strategist David Axelrod (who is a senior political commentator for CNN), Phelps' 20-minute discussion highlighted his battle against anxiety, depression. and suicidal thoughts -- and some questions about his athletic prowess.

"Really, after every Olympics I think I fell into a major state of depression," said Phelps when asked to pinpoint when his trouble began. He noticed a pattern of emotion "that just wasn't right" at "a certain time during every year," around the beginning of October or November, he said. "I would say '04 was probably the first depression spell I went through."

That was the same year that Phelps was charged with driving under the influence, Axelrod reminded the spellbound audience.

And there was a photo taken in fall 2008 -- just weeks after he'd won a record eight gold medals at the Beijing Olympics -- that showed Phelps smoking from a bong. He later apologized and called his behavior "regrettable."

Drugs were a way of running from "whatever it was I wanted to run from," he said. "It would be just me self-medicating myself, basically daily, to try to fix whatever it was that I was trying to run from."

The "hardest fall" was after the 2012 Olympics, said Phelps. "I didn't want to be in the sport anymore ... I didn't want to be alive anymore."

What that "all-time low" looked like was Phelps sitting alone for "three to five days" in his bedroom, not eating, barely sleeping and "just not wanting to be alive," he said.

Finally, Phelps knew he needed help.

Phelps got help, and he opened up and talked about what was going on inside his head, stuff he had compartmentalized and repressed. Now he's trying to help others with the same problems. Could it be that the athletic activity itself helped Phelps keep his head above water, and that, when that activity was over like at the end of the Olympics, he sank like a rock? Perhaps exercise is good, but competition is bad. Or the stopping of exercise is bad once you're used to it. I wonder if Phelps swims at all now that he's retired just for the exercise and the salubrious effects it has on the human mind.

Phelps is working to try and raise awareness of depression and other mental health issues by telling others about his own journey. "I'd like to make a difference," he says. "I'd like to be able to save a life if I can. You know for me that's more important than winning a gold medal. "The stuff that I'm doing now is very exciting. It's hard, it's challenging but it's fun for me. That's what drives me to get out of bed every morning."

Off the Top of My Head

Poor Serena Williams: She Got a Code Violation

by John Lawrence, September 10, 2018

Serena Williams thinks it was sexist that she was fined and penalized for her tennis court peccadillos. Boo hooo! She should get down on her knees and thank God or thank the universe for her God given or universe given talent that allows her to make millions of dollars for batting a ball around. Where is the perspective here? Women and children are being bombed and driven from their homes into refugee camps all over the world, and she has the unmitigated gall to complain about her situation?! Here is the skinny:

Serena Williams' claims of sexism in the US Open final have been backed by the governing body of women's tennis.

WTA chief executive Steve Simon said the umpire showed Williams a different level of tolerance over Saturday's outbursts than if she had been a man.

She got a code violation for coaching, a penalty point for racquet abuse and a game penalty for calling the umpire a "thief" in the defeat by Naomi Osaka.

The American said it was "sexist" to have been penalised a game.

"The WTA believes that there should be no difference in the standards of tolerance provided to the emotions expressed by men versus women," Simon said in a statement.

"We do not believe that this was done last night."

These star athletes are privileged characters and they act like spoiled children. And then there was the tennis star that got fined for changing her shirt in public. Big deal! What the fuck difference does it make? She could change her sports bra in public for all I care. The rules enforcers are petty. The tennis stars are petty. So what. Who cares? At least some stars are speaking out about situations that pertain outside their sport. Colin Kaepernick, whom the NFL was hoping would just go away and never be heard from again, has become the poster child for Nike which is sure to piss off a bunch of Trump supporters and red staters. But Nike isn't so dumb. The majority of buyers of its products are black people. So they will all be reminded that Colin "took a knee" to protest how black people are treated in this country. For that he was exiled from football.

I say right on Colin and Nike. You are speaking out and making a statement. As for Serena Williams and all the juvenile rich people that hit a ball around, take your money and go home. Whatever for the rich white men who give you a code violation, who cares? You can laugh all the way to the bank.

Off the Top of My Head

Black Athletes Should Stick Together

by John Lawrence

So Trump wants to fire any NFL or NBA player who takes a knee? I've got news for him. As long as it was just one player like Colin Kaepernick, they could get rid of him which they've already effectively done. But when all the black athletes on a team take a knee, they can't get rid of them all or they would not have much of a team left. Therefore, they should all take a knee together or lock arms or raise fists ... whatever they want to do, and the team owners are powerless to do anything about it.

Of course they (the team owners) were hoping that, if they joined in, it would be a short lived or one time occurence. I hope it's not. I think the fans should also join in with the players and stay seated during the National Anthem. The whole spectacle will bring attention to #BlackLivesMatter and the plight of black people at the hands of the police and the criminal justice system in general.

It will also bring attention to the fact of first slavery and then Jim Crow which black people have had to suffer under for most of American history. It's a mockery that black athletes should be forced to show respect to the flag when they have been persecuted for hundreds of years by what it represents. Sure the black pro athletes make plenty of money. They are the fortunate ones. However, their brothers and sisters are overepresented in jail as a consequence of minor drug violations while white people walk free after doing the same drug violations.

The military-industrial complex conducted a marketing campaign to "sell" patriotism to NFL audiences thus conflating football with the military and patriotism. Thinkprogress reported:

"As recently as 2015, the Department of Defense was doling out millions to the NFL for such things as military flyovers, flag unfurlings, emotional color guard ceremonies, enlistment campaigns, and — interestingly enough — national anthem performances. Additionally, according to Vice, the NFL’s policy on players standing for the national anthem also changed in 2009, with athletes “encouraged” thereafter to participate. Prior to that, teams were not given any specific instructions on the matter; some chose to remain in the locker room until after opening ceremonies were completed. (It’s unclear whether the policy change was implemented as a direct result of any Defense Department contracts.)"

Black athletes and their patrons have every right under the First Amendment to protest this selling of their sport as a vicarious expression of support for the military and a cheap form of patriotism.

 

Off the Top of My Head

Las Vegas Shooter Made $5 Million Gambling in 2015

by John Lawrence

Video poker had been very, very good to him. Money was no problem for Stephen Paddock, the mass murderer who shot into a crowd with automatic weapons killing people like fish in a barrel. The guy was reported as being very wealthy. He had real estate investments, and reportedly had figured out a way to make money gambling in Las Vegas, something of a rarity in itself.

So why does a guy who has a system down to make millions gambling have a grievance against society or against country music fans, a genre he reportedly liked? Evidently, money was no object and no problem. How many people can say that? In addition to having plenty of it, he was comped by gambling casinos wherever he went. Why did casinos treat him so royally when he was fleecing them out of millions of dollars? It seems like he should have been comping them.

The authorities, trying to figure out a motive, don't want to consider that Paddock just wanted to set a record for the thrill of it or for the hell of it. How could a human being be so depraved? In a country where Marines are taught to be killers, it doesn't seem so far fetched. In a country consumed with guns, it doesn't seem far fetched at all. In the Vietnam war, the generals were only concerned with body counts. That was the only relevant statistic. Statistics mattered certainly more than people. The generals had to hit their numbers, improve on their numbers. It didn't really matter if some of those statistics were noncombatants like women and children. Numbers were all important just as they are to Wall Street. Corporations are well advised to hit their quarterly numbers. Else their stock price might go down.

Records consist of numbers and Paddock was out to set a record. He could have lived comfortably on all his money, but that would have been too boring. The emptiness of sin city set the right tone for an act devoid of human empathy or compassion. American life and especially American entertainment is similarly devoid of empathy or compassion. Any movie which is simply a love story is seen as a chick flick. Toxic masculinity demands action and action demands violence. Most men are content with experiencing their violence vicariously, but every so often one slips over the line into actuality.

Violence is most vicariously experienced in spectator sports like football. Millions of dollars are made by people presenting a spectacle in which mostly white men watch mostly black men bashing their heads together. It's been proven that this leads to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. No matter. There is too much money at stake and the black players are also paid millions of dollars. But what happens when these same players also have a twinge of conscience leading to taking a knee? White owners have decided to patronize them ... for now. They can't afford to piss them all off and have a full scale boycott. That would ruin the money machine ... er uh sport.

Political Football

From the San Diego Union:

Political football NFL players, owners show solidarity in response to Trump’s tweets

LONDON:Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shahid Khan links arms with players during the national anthem before Sunday’s game against the Baltimore Ravens at Wembley Stadium in London. Players on both teams either knelt or locked arms. (PAUL CHILDS Reuters ) CHICAGO: Pittsburgh Steelers left tackle and former Army Ranger Alejandro Villanueva stands alone for the anthem outside the tunnel before playing the Chicago Bears. (Nam Y. Huh AP)

By Liz Clarke & Abby Phillip

Some stood. Some knelt. Some remained in the locker room, choosing to speak through their absence from the NFL’s pregame ceremonies in which the American flag is displayed and the national anthem sung.

But from London to Los Angeles, virtually all NFL players on the sidelines prior to kickoff of Sunday’s slate of 14 games locked arms with each other in response to President Donald Trump’s three-day campaign demanding that team owners “fire or suspend” players who kneel during the anthem and calling on fans to boycott games if the form of protest continued.

The silent rebuke to the president, determined independently by each of the 28 NFL teams in action Sunday, represented an unprecedented collective action and show of solidarity.

Some, such as the Jacksonville Jaguars and Philadelphia Eagles, were joined on the sideline by their team owners, Shahid Khan and Jeffrey Lurie, respectively. Most were joined in standing shoulder-to-shoulder by coaches, staff and, in some cases, police officers. Dean Spanos, owner of the Los Angeles Chargers, also stood with his players before Sunday’s Chargers-Chiefs game in Carson.

All but five of the NFL’s 32 team owners and CEOs issued statements Saturday night and into Sunday morning in response to Trump’s objection to protesting NFL players, which began in earnest during a Friday night rally in Alabama.

After making a thinly veiled allusion to former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who sparked a national debate by taking a knee during August 2016 preseason games to protest police violence against minorities, Trump called on NFL coaches to get the “son of a bitch” players off the field if they continued to kneel. The president repeated his call on Twitter on Saturday and Sunday morning.

Calling Kaepernick 'Son of a Bitch,' Trump Urges NFL to Fire All Protesting Players

Published on Saturday, September 23, 2017 by Common Dreams

'This is the President of the United States referring to an American who has exercised his right to protest racial injustice.'

by Jon Queally, staff writer

 

113 Comments

In this Monday, Sept. 12, 2016, file photo, San Francisco 49ers safety Eric Reid (35) and quarterback Colin Kaepernick (7) kneel during the national anthem before an NFL football game against the Los Angeles Rams. (Photo: AP)

Civil libertarians, racial justice advocates, and NFL players from across the league expressed outrage overnight after President Donald Trump called on owners of professional football teams to fire players who express their political views.

In a veiled reference to quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who last season started a wave of protest by kneeling during pre-game National Anthems in protest of police killings of unarmed black men, Trump said during a campaign-style rally in Alabama on Friday night, "Wouldn't you love to see one of the NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say 'Get that son of a bitch off the field right now?'"

Bishop Sankey, running back for the Minnesota Vikings who called the president's behavior a "disgrace," was among the many players in the league who condemned the president for his comments.

Kaepernick remains unsigned to a team this season and though Trump did not mention him specifically by name the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback has remained a key target among right-wingers who express the opinion that black athletes should keep quiet about their political opinions.

When asked by a reporter about the president's insult that appeared to reference her son, Kaepernick's mother reportedly responded by saying, "Guess that makes me a proud bitch!"

Meanwhile, ESPN journalist Jemele Hill, who also became a target of the White House recently after stating publicly she considers Trump a white supremacists (a widely held belief which plenty of evidence supports), took to Twitter and predicted that neither owners nor league officials would speak out against the president's latest statement.

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Off the Top of My Head

The Whole NFL Takes a Knee

by John Lawrence

Colin Kaepernick started something. This NFL quarterback, currently a free agent, started going down on one knee during the National Anthem played before every football game. It's played before every football game just to show how much this violent national pastime is so interwound with the USA with its twin themes of violence and competition. So taking a knee in protest of the way black people have been treated since even before America's founding is widely seen as heresy against the national quasi religion.

So no team in the NFL, which pays its football players millions of dollars, bothered to sign Colin up, and he might have quietly disappeared into the good, quiet night except for one thing - President Trump got involved with his tweeting penchant. And he made Colin Kaepernick a hero of the movement for black justice.

As ESPN reported about what happened yesterday:

Dozens of NFL players took a knee during the anthem -- Kaepernick's revised form of protesting police brutality and racial inequities in society -- and at night, around the bend from the White House, a whole procession of Raiders took a seat before playing Washington. The Steelers, Titans and Seahawks declined to take the field for the anthem. Scores of players, coaches and owners stood on two continents with arms locked in a show of unity after President Donald Trump profanely called for the firings of men who had peacefully exercised their First Amendment rights.

Trump has just tweeted himself into oblivion and divided the country between those loyal to the NFL and indeed all professional sports and those loyal to the National Anthem. Indeed he has even pissed off the NBL by disinviting the Golden State Warriors from the White House. Even a baseball player got into the act by taking a knee yesterday.

Pretty soon perhaps the fans will even start taking a knee during the National Anthem, maybe even the refs. How will they sell all the products during commercials if something so antithetic to commercialism takes over the status quo of professional sports - those few moments when everyone waxes patriotic before the ump cries out "Play ball." It's then that people feel they have discharged their patriotic duty and can get down to the true purpose of the game - drinking beer and consuming junk food while watching muscular black men bash their heads together.

The San Diego Convadium - Part 3

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

Section 35.0109 Additional Tax Imposed

 

The Chargers want the City to create a separate Fund, the Convention Center Expansion and Stadium Fund, which will borrow money from Wall Street in the form of Bonds and be firewalled off from the City's General Fund. So it's like a separate entity for which the City is not responsible at all, but the City has to create it. The BIG question is, "Will Wall Street go along with this?" The monies flowing into this fund come solely from an increase in the Tax On Transiency (TOT) of 4% (or is it 6% as stated in the proposal?).

 

If these monies aren't sufficient to make the payments on the $1.15 billion in bonds that this "entity" (not the City mind you) is responsible for, then what happens? Who's left holding the bag? Not the Chargers, that's for sure. The Chargers will not own the Stadium. They will lease it from the City. Will Wall Street want to foreclose on the Stadium? Probably not. So who will be ultimately responsible? You guessed it - the taxpayers. Wall Street would not have it any other way. The taxpayers will be left holding the bag as they've been so often in all the other deals involving Wall Street. Did I mention that the taxpayers are still holding the bag on $50 million still owed on Qualcomm Stadium at the same time the Chargers are demanding that the City borrow $1.15 billion more for a new stadium?

 

In Section 35.0109 it says "The issuance of Bonds or execution of Financing Agreements shall not directly, indirectly, or contingently obligate the City to levy or pledge any form of taxation other than the tax imposed pursuant to Section 35.0109." Who says? Or rather who has the final say - the Chargers or Wall Street? That Section states, "Notwithstanding the tax imposed by any other Section of this Division and in addition thereto, for the privilege of Occupancy in any Hotel, any Recreational Vehicle Park, or any Campground, each Transient is subject to and shall pay an additional tax in the amount of six percent (6%) of the Rent charged by the Operator commencing January 1, 2017."

 

There is some confusion regarding the increase in TOT tax. According to the San Diego County Treasurer-Tax Collector's website, "TOT is currently computed at the rate of 8% of the Rent and must be collected by the Operator from the guest at the time of payment." According to the San Diego Union, "The Chargers will ask San Diego voters in November to raise taxes on hotel stays to 16.5 percent from today’s 12.5 percent rate to help build a $1.8 billion hybrid stadium and convention center...". According to the Chargers proposal the TOT taxes will be raised 6%. If today the TOT tax is 12.5%, TOT taxes would be raised to 18.5% not 16.5%. Wouldn't you think that this would be made absolutely clear by the San Diego media? But then the Chargers are great at obfuscation. Or is the Treasurer-Tax Collector's website out of date?

 

It says that the increase in TOT taxes is "in addition to" taxes imposed by any other section. What they might be I have no idea. Interesting that the tax applies not only to hotels but RV parks and campgrounds as well. And the word "Transient" applies to transients of the high class variety with money to spend, not the transients that sleep on the sidewalks every night. The tax evidently does apply to AirBnB rentals as it applies to all short term rentals.

 

The other thing to make clear about the above quote is that it's the Chargers saying that the City will not be obligated to levy any other form of taxation - it's not Wall Street. They might have a different idea and the contract regarding the bonds might state things differently. That's the only "fine print" that really counts. The Chargers saying that the City shall not be obligated does not make it so!

 

Chargers Could Leave City Still Owing Bond Payments for 10 Years

 

Section 35.0142, item (c): "Bonds authorized by this Section shall be issued and shall mature at such time or times not to exceed forty (40) years, bear interest at such fixed or variable rate or rates approved by the City but not to exceed the maximum rate permitted by law." There are several things wrong with this. First, the Chargers are only committed to staying in San Diego and performing at this Stadium for 30 years according to the proposal. They could leave and the City would still be on the hook for another 10 years. Furthermore, what would the City do with a Stadium they own after the Chargers split? It would be worthless except as a bargaining chip for the Chargers who would be complaining that it wasn't up to snuff and would be demanding that the City build them a new Stadium in just the same way that they're demanding a new stadium with the City still owing money on Qualcomm Stadium at which they don't want to play any more. In fact they are threatening to take their football and move to LA if they don't get their way. Wahhhh!

 

And then regarding those "variable interest rates", a lot of cities have approved them, then gotten into financial trouble and gone bankrupt. And if the City indulges in derivatives like interest rate swaps, like so many other cities have, they could end up owing several times the $1.15 billion they are borrowing. Many other cities have been bankrupted from ending up on the losing end of interest rate swaps. Do the tax payers really need to subject ourselves to the vagaries and whims of the financial markets and the sophisticated machinations of Wall Street financiers. At any rate regardless of what the Chargers' verbiage says, it's only so much hot air. Wall Street's contract with the City is what counts.

 

If the taxpayers of San Diego swallow this hogwash and vote for the Chargers' plan on the November ballot, they are voting for a pig in a poke. They are authorizing the City to go into debt for $1.15 billion without knowing the final terms and the small print in the contract with Wall Street for the bonds. They aren't privy to the negotiations between Wall Street and the City. Despite the fact that the proposal states that there will be a firewall between the City's General Fund and the Fund that pays the interest and principal on the bonds, Wall Street might have a different idea and then the City would have to go along with it or be sued by the Chargers if the voters approve of this proposal.

 

The variable rates on the bonds could come into play in a disastrous way for the City which could be in the position of obligating itself to what amounts to Capital Appreciation Bonds that left Poway and San Ysidro owing huge amounts of money and being in debt far into the future. The TOT taxes might eventually have to be paid ad infinitum long after the Chargers 30 year commitment to San Diego is up, long after present day politicians have gone.

 

What About the Homeless?

 

Finally, what about the homeless? In light of the City's trying to remove them from the proposed area of the Chargers stadium in order that the All-Star game at Petco Park not have them littering up the streets, what would happen to them if a new Stadium was built right in the area where they all congregate? What mitigation is in this proposal for them? They are totally ignored although their impact on another stadium downtown would be crucial. What's in this proposal for them? Nothing. They never even crossed the Chargers' minds.

 

The City would end up owning a white elephant of a stadium potentially long after the Chargers have left town. The hoteliers and the campground operators would be saddled with a huge TOT tax which would be obligated to pay off bonds far into the future; the City would be at the behest of Wall Street variable interest rates and other high finance shenanigans which have bankrupted many other cities including Birmingham, AL, Detroit, MI, San Bernardino, CA, Stockton, CA, Orange County, CA, Milan, Italy and many others.

 

In this proposal the Chargers dictate to the City of San Diego on their terms. The City of San Diego would be better served instead by dictating to the Chargers on its terms. A much more reasonable solution would be to redevelop the site in Mission Valley where Qualcomm Stadium is presently located. That redevelopment could take different approaches depending on whether or not the Chargers decided to stay or leave. The City should not be at the Chargers' behest; the Chargers should be at the City's behest. The City should decide when or how to expand the Convention Center as a separate issue. A contiguous expansion would be preferable by all accounts except the Chargers'. Lastly, any Bond issue should also create affordable housing for the homeless using the Housing First model. Getting the homeless off the streets would do a lot not only for the homeless but would be the most important thing that could be done for tourism as well.

The San Diego Convadium - Part 1

by John Lawrence

Voters Will Be Asked to Decipher 110 Pages of Gobbledygook

On Saturday, April 2, the Chargers published a whole section of the San Diego Union-Tribune devoted to their proposal to build a football stadium for the Chargers combined with a non-contiguous expansion of the Convention Center. The title of this section was "Notice of Intent to Circulate Petition." Right off the bat I found several things wrong with this proposal. But before I go into that I want to discuss the MAJOR thing wrong with this proposal.

You see the Chargers think combining a Convention Center Expansion with a new stadium will make it more palatable to San Diego voters especially if the tax that will be raised to pay for it will be a tax on visitors not on locals.  This will make it possible to wring money out of hotel tax increases to pay for a third of their stadium. But not only that, the $1.15 billion in bonds that the City (actually a subsidiary of the City - a Stadium Authority) will issue will pay the entire cost of the convention center annex. I don't think a better combination of a football stadium with $600 million of affordable housing ever even crossed their minds.

With This Kind of Money You Could Build a Contiguous Convention Center Expansion

However, with this kind of money coming from increased indebtedness by the city, why not go ahead and just build the convention center addition where the Mayor and others want it built - right next to and contiguous to the present Convention Center. This makes a lot more sense than building an architectiral monstrosity of a stadium on top of or next to what amounts to a mini-convention center which is not integrated with the present convention center and has little relationship to a football stadium.

And the question must be asked if the City can borrow $1.15 billion dollars by raising the TOT taxes, why not use the money half for a convention center annex right next to the present facilities and half for infrastructure including affordable housing? The Chargers then can issue their own bonds of indebtedness for the remaining $350 million they're trying to get from the City really under false pretenses, the false pretenses being taxing visitors for something that will mostly be used by locals. This is tantamount to taxing one constituency for the benefit of another constituency. And when it comes right down to it, the City's General Fund will still be on the hook.

So now on with the "Notice of Intent ..." Right off the bat in Section 2 it states "The people of the City of San Diego Find and Declare the following:" This amounts to outright lying because the People of the City of San Diego had nothing whatsoever to do with this proposal. It was generated and perpetrated entirely by the Chargers organization. It goes on to say "The People of San Diego desire" this and "The people of San Diego" desire that. Nonsense. The proposal is disingenuous from the start. The proposal does not even mention the Chargers. Yet they are the sole initiators of it.

Under item #7 it says "In order for the ... Project to be undertaken in a financially sound manner, the Initiative increases the existing Transient Occupancy Tax [TOT], which is paid for by persons staying in hotels, motels and other lodging establishments in the City, and establishes a ... Fund to pay for the development and construction of the Convention Center Expansion and to pay certain incremental costs of the Stadium resulting from an integrated Convention Center Expansion and Stadium Project ...

Item #7 is a mouthful. Here's the first point: the TOT tax is not only to be paid by persons staying in the high end hotels but persons staying in motels many of which are fairly low end, (that is, that's where poor people stay). Not only that but the TOT tax will be paid by persons staying in "other lodging establishments in the City." Hmmm, wonder what those could be - AirBnB perhaps?

The Perfect Solution: Visitors Not Locals Will Pay for the Stadium

And what could those "certain incremental costs of the Stadium resulting from an integrated Convention Center Expansion and Stadium Project" be? Is this a way to fleece the public ostensibly because a football stadium is being commingled with a mishmash of a convention center? Basically the Chargers propose to create an architectural monstrosity, something which is neither fish nor fowl, and get the public to pay for it out of gratitude for the Chargers including a convention center addition in the mix. Oh, and they promise to stay here for 30 years. Riiiight.

The following item #8 is the clincher though, and I quote: "As provided in this Initiative, the Transient Occupancy Tax is increased by an additional six percent (6%) and the new revenues are dedicated to special trust funds, the Convention Center Expansion and Stadium Fund and the San Diego Tourism and Marketing Fund, as provided by this initiative."

Trying to slip in a fast one on us, are ya? All the publicity on this proposal and I mean all says that the TOT taxes are to be raised 4% not 6 %, from 12.5% to 16.5%. Was this just a typo? If so, a very significant one. My feeling is that there must be a lot more of these "typos" buried in this abstruse document. I'm still on the first page. Crafty lawyering, I presume.

The elephant in the room of this Chargers proposal is the $1.15 billion in bonds that the City is supposed to be on the hook for. Of course, the implication is that they will get the money from Wall Street which must be salivating at the thought because underwriting fees, legal fees and interest will certainly add another couple of billion to the indebtedness of the City of San Diego which will try to sidestep its indebtedness by creating a Fund which is supposedly distinct from the General Fund. Wall Street will get tremendous upfront fees, and this will drain the "collateral" represented by the TOT taxes. The taxpayers will still be holding the bag. Wait till the final legalese is written - especially with Wall Street - regarding the loan.

San Diego Taxpayers Will Still Be on the Hook

But when it comes right down to it, this will not be a non recourse loan. The taxpayers of the City of San Diego will be liable if everything does not go as planned. If there's a downturn in the economy, if the TOT taxes don't come in as planned because Comic-Con and other large conventions go elsewhere, if the managers of this Fund engage in interest rate swaps or other derivatives, the only beneficiary here would be Wall Street, and this looming debacle could make the pension fund shortfall seem like a child's game in comparison.

And the big conventions will go elsewhere where they'll get a better deal on TOT taxes. That leaves the hoteliers in the position of lowering their room rates in order to attract the high rollers. This will decrease their profits, and, I'm sure, this is not what they had in mind when first they considered a Convention Center Expansion.

Finally, it's a travesty that the City should take on over a billion dollars in bonded debt while the homeless are sleeping on the streets, in cars and couch surfing so that a few ultra rich people can have skyboxes in downtown San Diego. Why not use the money or money that's already in other City "Funds" to build affordable housing, repair and replace infrastructure, improve poor neighborhoods, repair potholes and increase teacher and police salaries instead of catering to a concussion producing football team. Let them use private money to build their own stadium for which they will have to pay the operating and maintenance costs, not the City. The City is still paying for Qualcomm stadium. In fact we the taxpayers of San Diego still owe $50 million on improvements to Qualcomm which the Chargers insisted they needed in order to stay competitive.

Better to Build Affordable Housing

Affordable housing bonds can be issued as non-recourse loans because HUD will back them up. In addition to that why give Wall Street 2 or 3 billion dollars in interest on a 30 year loan when the City of San Diego could start a public bank as they have in the state of North Dakota and bring all that interest home to be used on other local projects like infrastructure and affordable housing. And buyer beware of those interest rate swaps Wall Street is sure to sell to whatever hapless bloke ends up managing this Stadium and Convention Expansion agency.

I'll have to get to the rest of this petition/proposal at a later date. But let's not rush to go into debt to build a deformed monstrosity of a convadium, one that would be an architectural blight on the City of San Diego. It would be better to build the Convention Center addition contiguously with the present Convention Center and finance it by creating a public bank rather than going further into debt to Wall Street. With a public bank like the state of North Dakota has, the interest would accrue back to the San Diego General Fund so that infrastructure could be rebuilt. With bonds issued by Wall Street it would be like throwing money out the hotel windows.

Chargers Dilemma: After Screwing the Fans, Now They Want Them Back

by John Lawrence

At Least For a Year

The Romans used to provide Bread and Circuses for their populace to keep them pacified. Nothing much has changed in 2000 years. The San Diego Chargers want taxpayers to spend $350 million to buy them a new Colosseum. And they're not really even the San Diego Chargers. They are the Dean Spanos Chargers. He owns them. The players should all be wearing "Dean Spanos Chargers" on their shirts. The Chargers merchandise should all bear his name. As we've seen recently, the Chargers would think nothing of "Bolt"ing to Los Angeles if the grass were greener there. But their quest for a shiny new stadium in another locale has been stymied at least temporarily.

The only team that can rightfully be called by a city's name is the Green Bay Packers. Although not exactly owned by the City of Green Bay, the Packers have been a publicly owned, non-profit corporation since August 18, 1923. Close enough. If the Mayor wants the Chargers to stay in San Diego (that's questionable after Spanos' quasi-betrayal), why doesn't he offer to have the city buy the team? Oops. That's not possible because NFL rules forbid it. They even made an exception for Green Bay.

But seriously, folks, wouldn't it warm the cockles of your collective hearts more if San Diego made the decision to forego professional, concussion inducing (look what happened to home town hero Junior Seau) NFL football whose goal is to pad the pockets of billionaires and instead spend that money solving the homeless problem and repairing infrastructure in order to indeed become a world class city? Or would it diminish your civic pride to not be able to tune into the "Dean Spanos Chargers" on TV and brag about what a great place San Diego is to live although you have to step over the homeless on your way to the game. Would you be crestfallen if you could not rent or own a skybox in a brand new multibillion dollar Colosseum?

Without Taxpayer Subsidies Professional Football Would Not Exist

NFL football has never been profitable except for the fact that they've gotten (up to now) taxpayers to pay for their stadiums. And like petulant children whose old bicycle is never good enough, they want a new one every few years. Wahhh! I want my new stadium and I want you all to pay for it. The Dean Spanos Chargers will be very angry if you, the taxpayers, don't grant them their entirely justifiable (in their eyes) wish. In fact they will take their marbles (or footballs, deflated or not) and move away. But where? They thought they had a new home, but their new home turned out to be a will 'o the wisp. It turns out that another billionaire got there first.

St. Louis, former home of the LA Rams, was snookered by them according to David Williams writing in the Tulsa World:

What was left out of that announcement [that the Rams were moving to LA] was that taxpayers would still be on the hook paying for the Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis.

St. Louis and Missouri taxpayers paid the full $280 million cost of construction for the Edward Jones Dome in 1995. In an effort to keep the Rams in St. Louis, government officials tried to persuade the team to stay with the promise of $500 million for a new billion-dollar stadium.

Rams owner, and billionaire, Stan Kroenke decided to move despite the generous taxpayer gift. The problem is that Missouri taxpayers aren’t off the hook because they will be paying $12 million [a year] until 2022 on the Edward Jones Dome.

In addition, according to the Salt Lake Tribune, "An effort to persuade the owner of the St. Louis Rams to keep his team in Missouri by building a new riverfront football stadium not only failed, but also left the public on the hook for $16.2 million in expenses."

The article also noted that, "Architecture firm HOK made more than $10.5 million for its work on the stadium plan, while the Dome authority’s attorneys, Blitz, Bardgett & Deutsch, billed almost $900,000. Thompson Coburn bond and financing lawyers charged an additional $760,000."

Taxpayers have funded all but two of the NFL stadiums to the tune of $7 billion in subsidies. And people wonder why there is such an inequality gap between the 1% and the 99%. It's at least partly because the 99% have voted to give their money away to the 1%! Politicians claim that building new stadiums, er Colosseums, where present day gladiators do battle while sustaining concussions, creates jobs and helps the economy. Nothing could be further from the truth. The main result of taxpayer financed Colosseums is to line the pockets of billionaires who don't always use their money for philanthropic and charitable purposes:

A study released in September 2015 by the Taxpayers Protection Alliance measured poverty rates and median household income for the areas in which the stadiums were located. In 60 percent of the cases studied, poverty rates increased and median household incomes decreased. In only 20 percent of the case studies was there an improvement in poverty rates and median household income.

The most expensive stadium for taxpayers is Lucas Oil Stadium (home of the Indianapolis Colts) with an astounding $619 million in taxpayer funds used.

Taxpayers’ massive investment in building a stadium for Colts billionaire team owner Jim Irsay proved disastrous for the Indianapolis economy. Since the construction of the stadium, the poverty rate in Marion County, the county in which Indianapolis is located, skyrocketed from 12.7 percent to 21.3 percent and the median household income dropped more than $10,000, from $51,553 to $41,478.

Pushing off 86 percent of the cost of stadium construction on to the backs of taxpayers freed up plenty of spending money for the Colts. Some of that money was used to buy a condo for Kimberly Wundrum, Irsay’s mistress. Wundrum later died of an overdose in the Colts-owned home. Soon thereafter, Irsay was arrested for DUI and drug possession, was suspended six games by the NFL and attended rehab in several facilities around the country.

Dean Spanos and Chargers Face Greek Tragedy

Be that as it may, Chargers owner Dean Spanos is in a dilemma of mythic proportions, a veritable Greek tragedy. Taxpayers are hip to the fact that they've been bamboozled and hornswoggled by the non-profit NFL which is owned by 18 billionaires (non-profit?) and by the Big Daddy of the NFL universe, Commissioner Roger (front man) Goodell. Actually, the NFL gave up its tax exempt status in 2015 following public criticism. Commissioner Roger Goodell labeled it a "distraction". You think? Billionaires getting away with not paying taxes - what else is new?

But getting back to Spanos. He is left in the position of playing second fiddle to Kroenke if he moves to LA or staying in San Diego among the fans who have been betrayed by his shananigans and those of his henchman, Fabiani, whose arrogance is beyond the pale. “If it’s a plan that’s just thrown out there to provide political cover for elected officials so that people can say, ‘Hey, we tried’ then we probably wouldn’t wait around to watch the thing go down in defeat in 2016,” Fabiani said. Oh, but Roger Goodell and the NFL told him to do just that - wait around! And now that they are stuck in San Diego waiting around for another year, Fabiani and Spanos are singing a different tune. It looks like he may have to have his Chargers play in that icky piece of shit - Qualcomm Stadium - for another year at least. Now they want the fans back. Good luck with that.

Spanos: "My Focus is on San Diego"

“We have an option and an agreement with the Los Angeles Rams to go to Inglewood in the next year, but my focus is on San Diego,” Spanos wrote in a letter to Chargers fans. Spanos' "My focus is on San Diego" didn't add the words "for now" but that's what it amounts to. He didn't say "My commitment is to San Diego." Since he's building a headquarters and a training facility in Santa Ana, it definitely doesn't sound like he's committed to the Chargers staying in San Diego.

In a supposedly conciliatory letter to San Diego Chargers fans, Spanos talks about the "world class stadium experience San Diego fans deserve." What about the world class football experience San Diego fans deserve? Why don't you concentrate on that first? Spanos can't get two words out of his mouth without talking about a "new stadium" with the same exuberance and exultation that someone on the Price is Right makes over a "new car"! Maybe if Spanos provided Chargers' fans with a world class football team, they would build him a world class stadium.

Of course, if San Diego voters are foolish enough to build Spanos a world class stadium so that they get the "world class stadium experience they deserve", Spanos might reconsider moving. Spanos has hardcore Chargers' fans genuflecting and kissing his butt over the fact that the Chargers are staying probably just one more year. Note to Chargers fans: you're being played like a fiddle. Most of you won't be able to afford seats in the "world class stadium" so relax and watch the game on your 65 inch world class TV like you would do anyway wherever the Chargers play.

Spanos wants San Diegans to pony up hundreds of millions in tax money or else he's going to take his marbles or football, as the case may be, and go home except for the fact that he has no home and Kroenke is an abusive parent. Mayor Faulconer is a willing patsy because it's in his interest to keep an NFL team in San Diego in a brand new stadium that the majority of fans will never be able to afford to see the insides of. And as for Fabiani, Spanos' lawyer, he's already pissed off most of San Diego with his arrogant, self serving bullshit.

David Cay Johnston in his book Free Lunch nails the NFL con game:

The huge gifts of money that wealthy owners of sports teams wheedle out of taxpayers are a free lunch that someone must fund. Often that burden falls on poor children and the ambitious among the poor. Sports-team subsidies undermine a century of effort to build up the nation's intellectual capacity and, thus, its wealth. Andrew Carnegie poured money from his nineteenth-century steel fortune into local libraries across America because he was certain it would build a better and more prosperous nation which indeed it did. These libraries imposed costs on taxpayers, but they also returned benefits as the nation's store of knowledge grew. That is library spending is a prime example of a subsidy adding value.

Many people born into modest circumstances have risen to great heights because they could educate themselves for free, and stay out of trouble at the public library. ...

But today library hours, as well as budgets to buy books, have been slashed in Los Angeles, Detroit, Baltimore, and other cities, yet there is plenty of money to give away to sports-team owners.

Art Modell, who pitted Cleveland and Baltimore against each other in a bidding war for his football team, was asked in 1996 about tax money going into his pocket at a time when libraries were being closed. It was a well-framed question. His Baltimore Ravens is the only major sports team whose name is a literary allusion, to the haunting poem by Edgar Allen Poe for his lost love Lenore.

"The pride and the presence of a professional football team is far more important than 30 libraries," Modell said. He spoke without a hint of irony or any indication that he had ever upon a midnight dreary, pondered weak and weary the effect of his greed on the human condition. How many Baltimore children who might have become [successful]  will instead end up on the other side of the law? That may not be measurable but that some will because of Modell's greed is as certain as the sun rising in the east. ...

We starve libraries—and parks, bridge safety, and schools—to enrich sports-team owners. ...

The value of the leagues' exemption from the laws of competition is illustrated by the odd fact that Los Angeles, the nation's second-largest city, has no football team. So long as that city remains teamless, the owners of football franchises use the threat of moving to the nation's second largest market to extract money through public financing of new stadiums, rent rebates, and other official favors. Surely this would seem incongruous to the settlers who called their community El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora de los Angeles de la Porciuncula, [in honor of Saint Francis of Assisi who was devoted to serving the poor].

Taxpayers Should Just Say No to Building Billionaires New Stadiums

We taxpayers can no longer afford to subsidize these 'welfare queen' billionaires who live off of government handouts. They need to learn to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps instead. That's the American way instead of sucking off the government teat. Furthermore, they ought to not be let off the hook by discharging their debts in bankruptcy court. Students can't get rid of their debts that way; neither should billionaires be able to. We need to keep government taxing and spending down, and that means no more subsidies for billionaires and their sports teams. At the same time we need to show compassion for the less fortunate as Jesus preached: "Insofar as you've helped the least of these, my brethren, it is as if you've done it unto me."

Will San Diego become a world class city by enacting its Climate Action Plan, repairing infrastructure, creating a world class transit system and housing the homeless or will it continue down the American Road of worshiping billionaire owners and millionaire players by giving them gargantuan stadiums at taxpayer expense? I, for one, would take more civic pride in the former accomplishment.

Qualcomm Stadium: a Boondoggle from the Get-Go?

From the original San Diego Free Press circa 1968, we reprint the rundown on Qualcomm Stadium

Transcribed by John Lawrence

Hi, sports fans. Big Jim here.

Well, fans, there is a big spat brewing in major league San Diego and from this experienced observer's view the losers in this main event are going to be the city's middle- and lower-income taxpayers.

This whole new controversy is revolving around that great concrete muskmelon in Mission Valley, the San Diego Stadium.

As the Free Press goes to the printers, the news is out that the City of San Diego is suing the San Diego Chargers for one year's back rent (more than $200,000). The Chargers apparently have decided that they don't want to pay rent, at least not for the next seven years.

But that is just one of a long series of rubs - one of the first rubs in how that stadium got there in the first place.

Who Wants It?

The San Diego Stadium holds 50,000 people. The city of San Diego holds nearly 800,000 people. This means that 750,000 people in San Diego couldn't use the stadium on a day that everyone decided to see a ball game. But that doesn't mean that these 750,000 squabbling over a knot hole in the stadium's wall, are not paying for the place.

The stadium and its accoutrements cost $27.75 million, ostensibly. Actually, after interest is paid on the stadium's bonds, the total cost of it is at least $52.4 million.

The stadium is the brain child of local millionaires, who euphemistically call themselves "sportsmen," who emphatically pointed out to the public that property taxes would never be used to pay back the principle and interest on a the stadium bonds.

Instead of using property tax, these sports czars explained, the City would pick up the tab with the sales tax it received back from the state, along with some other revenues (which ultimately proved to have originated as sales tax, too).

The local media played the sports czars' tune with feeling, assuring the public that the stadium would cost little more than a "Yes" vote on the Stadium proposal on the November, 1965, general election ballot. And 100,000 of the 140,000 voters that turned out swallowed the bait.

No economist would argue against the notion that sales taxes are the most regressive form of tax we have. That means that the middle- and lower-income families are the hardest hit and carry the heaviest burden of sales taxes, while the wealthy are hardly scathed.

On the other hand, equitably administered property taxes put the brunt of the cost on the people most capable of bearing it and who ultimately benefit most from projects like sports stadiums - the wealthy.

(Even though equitably administered property taxes only exist in Camelot, they are still less burden on the middle-and lower-income families than are sales taxes. Dubious homeowners should sit down one day and figure how much they pay in sales tax compared to property tax each year.)

But the people have been conditioned to believe (by corporate media and those corporations who exercise control over them through advertising) that property tax is their ultimate bugaboo — and 100,000 of more than 600,000 San Diegans voted "Yes" on the stadium proposal.

So let's take a look at the old score board and see who's winning in the final quarter.

Sports czars ahead!

This far in the game, the middle- and lower- classes seem to be trailing. About 17 percent of San Diego's 1965 population committed the people of San Diego to pay $144 million annually for the next 35 years. People's score: minus $52,4 million.

Local and out- of- state contractors, architects and building suppliers hauled in $15.5 million on the stadium's construction and about another $12.3 million in trimmings. Construction companies' score: $27.8 million.

Two Chicago bond houses won the stadium bond issue at 3.94126 percent interest. Chicago financiers' score: $24.7 million of tax-free profit.

Motel and restaurant interests in San Diego anticipated an increased annual take of $24.9 million because of stadium visitors. Motel and restaurant interests score: $24.9 million annually.

The San Diego Chargers, whose annual revenue has risen from $660,000 in 1962 to $2.1 million last year, are demanding that they be allowed the use of the stadium rent tree for the next seven years. If they get away with this, they will augment their already mounting earnings by an estimated $2 million for those years. A great deal of their earning power was directly a result of the stadium. Chargers' score is difficult to determine but in the neighborhood of $3 million annually.

The San Diego Padres baseball team has worked out a [indecipherable] deal with the City administration. For the next seven years they will pay eight percent of their ticket sales to the City as rent.

The City estimates that this will amount to $500,000 annually. But then the City turns around and pays the Padres (going under the name of the San Diego Stadium Management Company) $306,000 each year to manage the stadium.

This will make the Padres actual rent about $194,000 per year. The Padres score, by the City's own figures: slightly over $6 million gross.

How does that grab you, sports fans? It looks like San Diego's "sportsmen" have learned something from San Diego's defense industries about government subsidy.

Welfare for the Rich

In 1965, when the designs were laid for the San Diego Stadium, the city manager, then Tom Fletcher, admitted that the stadium would not be an earning proposition. He estimated that with just a major league football team the stadium would make about $120,000 annually. If the City were to pick a Major league baseball franchise, the figure might be boosted to $340,000.

This amount, he explained, would go toward retiring the  interest and principle on the stadium bonds, about $1.5 million yearly.

What Fletcher forgot to tell us was that the City would lose property tax revenues on the 166 acres on which the stadium stands. In 1965, the land was valued at $4.1 million. At present property tax rates, the City is losing between $100 000 and $120,000 each year. As Mission Valley property values soar in the next decade, these losses will be compounded. 

Defenders of the stadium argue that in 35 years the stadium will be all paid off and be a "real moneymaker" for the people of San Diego.

In 35 years- - considering our present rate of architectural and technological growth -- the San Diego Stadium will look to us like the Whaley house looks to us now.

There will be groups of "sportsmen" wanting to tear it down and set out on another publicly subsidized project (unless, of course, today's revolutionary groups haven't changed all that by then), and there will be groups of monument minders who will want to preserve the structure for historical reasons.

Who Let the White Elephant in?

Why did such a beast ever get by the voters? Because there was no critical media. There was no scrappy little newspaper like the San Diego Free Press. There were only corporate mass media intent on getting a piece of the action.

James Copley, owner-publisher of the San Diego Union-Evening Tribune, certainly wasn't going to torpedo the stadium. He owns about a million dollars worth of the Chargers.

That's about all for this issue, sports fans. Next issue Big Jim will really lay some heavy facts on you about who, how and how much on that concrete muskmelon. There should be some really interesting playbacks on the San Diego sport czars.

In the meantime, Big Jim is going to see about opening up a jock strap factory and having the City of San Diego subsidize me, because, after all, "It's not whether you win or lose that counts; it's how your capital gains!"

How Our Stadium Saved Hilton's Ego & Other Chuckles To Cry Over

by Jim Knastick   (Part 2 of a 3 part Article)

Hi sports fans. Big Jim, again.

Well, fans, last issue - - when we looked into that great muskmelon in Mission Valley - - we found a bill for $52 million addressed for the little taxpayer in San Diego and nothing but profits for local sports czars (your druggist knows them as merchants, financiers and industrialists).

Current vignette, fans: Taking Care of Barron.

The Boys Club

The story of our stadium goes back to late 1959 when Lamar Hunt, son of the right-wing zealot billionaire H.L. Hunt, Bud Adams, Jr., son of the chairman of the Phillips Petroleum company, and Barron Hilton, son of the hotel magnate Conrad, pitched together several million dollars to create the American Football League.

Hunt was suffering a rebuff by the National Football League that had just refused to grant him an NFL franchise for Dallas. So he threw in with Adams to form his own league.

Hunt took a Dallas franchise, Adams took one for Houston and they set up six others. The Los Angeles franchise went to Barron Hilton.

As head of the Carte Blanche credit card company, Hilton decided to call his team the Los Angeles Chargers in hope of stimulating business.

In its first year of operation the AFL had a combined loss of $4.5 million. Hunt bore the heaviest losses - - $1 million, and Hilton ran a close second at $900,000.

It took Hilton less than a sing [?] to draw only 11,000 people in the LA Coliseum, which holds 101,000. The day they won the AFL’s Western Divisional Championship they drew 9,900.

It took Hilton less than that year to decide that his AFL Chargers were no competition for the LA Rams. He found it very embarrassing to draw only 11,000.

Hilton knew he had to do something. His old man couldn't bail him out; he was too busy trying to keep Castro from taking over the Havana Hilton.

Then young Hilton smelled a fish to the south: San Diego. The local sports czars (though still would-be) also smelled a fish: the public. The "civic leaders" of San Diego fell all over themselves to get the Chargers to move to San Diego, which they eventually did - - but not before Hilton got a promise from the City government to make some improvements in the Chargers' future home, the Balboa Stadium.

Hilton wanted the Balboa Stadium's seating accommodations increased from 22,000 to 34,500 seats at the City's expense.

The City followed Hilton's bidding. The cost was estimated at $800,000 originally. By the time the work was done the cost was $1.5 million. Then the Chargers' rent was waived for the first year and only a pittance was paid in successive years.

During a series of preseason exhibition games, the largest audience the Chargers could draw was 13,000 paid admissions. Charger stock, which had sold at $3 a share when the team first moved to San Diego, dropped to $2.25. It slowly inched back up to its original price after the Chargers had a winning streak during the regular season. Even then their games did little better than draw an average of 30,000 spectators, and Hilton began to feverishly look for buyers.

Enter Sports Czars

As Hilton was trying to find himself (or whatever else he was trying to find in San Diego), a group of 200 San Diego "sportsmen" organized the Greater San Diego Sports Association (GSDSA).

These men, heads of banks, bottling companies, contracting and construction firms, stated the aims of the Association as: 1. seeking a major league baseball franchise for San Diego. 2. boosting the Chargers, and 3. getting an all-purpose stadium built.

George Kirksey, the man who ramrodded a $22 million bond issue in Houston for the Astrodome, was the keynote speaker at the GSDSA organizational meeting. A. B. Polinsky, the head of the San Diego Coca- Cola Bottling Company was named as the acting president.

From the time of its inception the GSDSA had been bucking for a multi-purpose stadium. It came as no surprise in December, 1963, when Mayor Curran appointed GSDSA president, Paul Carter, to preside over The Mayor's All-American Stadium Committee, another group of "sportsmen" that was delegated the responsibility of determining the feasibility of the stadium.

The Committee was authorized by the City to spend $100,000 on the study. When the announcement was made, City officials said that they hoped private funds would be used. Apparently almost the whole amount came from the public's purse.

Other members of the All-American Stadium Committee included William Black, president of the Bank of La Jolla; William Elser, president of the Elser Elevator Company; Kenneth H. Golden, head of the Kenneth H. Golden Construction Company and a director of the City Bank of San Diego; A. B. Polinsky, head of Coca-Cola here; and Harry Sugarman who ran his own investment company. (These are among others about whose sports interests Big Jim wonders.)

Bailing Out Barron

Rumors have it that by 1964, Barron Hilton was spending more time knocking on the doors of prospective buyers for his team and franchise than he was with his team. He was also threatening to move the team to another city.

Should he actually move the team to another city, all justification for building a stadium (replete with lots of tasty profits for the czars) would be lost. So once more Paul Carter made another unsurprising entrance. This time it was before the City Council in August, 1964.

Carter pleaded with the Council to put a $25 million "general obligation" bond issue on the November, 1964, general election ballot.

The deadline for putting issues on the ballot was drawing near, and Carter told the Council, "We have to place something on the ballot now or we are cooked for another year." That Carter's committee was still waiting on the $35,000 stadium feasibility study that wasn't due until October, might make Big Jim think that Carter was in something of a hurry.

But the cooler heads prevailed, to both the chagrin of Paul Carter and Barron Hilton. A general obligation bond issue would have required approval by 2/3's of San Diego's registered voters.

William Quirk, president of the San Diego Chamber of Commerce at the time, told the Council that Carter's proposal "reflected poor timing" because there wasn't sufficient time to "mount a campaign that will guarantee passage of the bond issue." If the bonds lost November, 1964, Quirk explained, the stadium measure would be set back for years. Besides, he added, the bond issue could jeopardize other ballot issues. (Other ballot issues included pay raises for Council members and the Mayor.)

Hilton was dejected when the Council announced that it wou1d not act to put the bond issue on the November ballot.

It was about then that Hilton, who knew little about the odd machinations of San Diego's fine establishment, started to sell his team to C. Arnholt Smith, a local industrialist (and owner of the San Diego Padres) who knows plenty about the machinations of San Diego's establishment. The sale price was set at a pitiful $750,000, which would just start to cover his first year losses in Los Angeles.

Then, apparently, someone put a bug in Hilton's ear, and he dropped the idea like a hot football.

Super Campaign

All through 1965, San Diego "sportsmen" waged a super campaign. Their theme was that the stadium would be a boon for local tourism, which they stressed was some kind of panacea for the San Diego economy.

Tourism's appeal is based on the remembrances of the '50s and the defense layoffs. Obviously, explained the "sportsmen," the stadium would bolster tourism and take San Diego's economic emphasis away from defense. (Well, fans, tourism accounted for about 6 percent of San Diego' s gross income last year, while the 11th Naval District made up 25 percent. San Diego's 5 largest corporations are General Dynamics Convair, Ryan, Rohr, Solar and National Steel and Shipbuilding Company. San Diego is the same old war baby it has always been.)

Despite the chest beating of stadium boosters, public support wasn't really very strong during the campaign (or at the polling places for that matter).

The Citizens for a Stadium, the only campaign committee for the stadium, reported only receiving $932.25 in contributions of $10 or less (if each, of all those contributions in this category, gave only $1, that's only 932 and 1/4 people.

The $11 to $25 contribution category amounted to $660. Considering that the total contributions were $39,617.09, small contributions only accounted for 4% of the committee's backing.

All contributions over $25 were listed by the contributor at the City Clerk’s office, and, fans, let Big Jim tell you that they're interesting. Surprisingly, the GSDSA was the second largest contributor. They only contributed $10,000. But what's more interesting is the first and third highest contributors, The Associated General Contractors of San Diego County and The San Diego County Rock Producers Association, respectively.

The General Contractors describe their Association as an organization of local "heavy construction contractors, the builders of freeways, airports, dams and high rise structures." They contributed $12,500.

The Rock Producers Association is an organization of 18 local transit mix concrete companies, cement and sand and gravel companies. They donated $4,000. Rancho Bernardo, Inc. contributed almost $3,000, and the San Diego Pepsi-Cola Bottling Company (then headed by the late Frank Alessio) put $500 on the line. A Schlitz-Burgie and Lucky Lager distributor put up $1,000. And the list goes on, with many $50 contributions from all sections of the White-Power-Structure.

By the registration deadline, September, 1965 there were over 244,000 registered voters in San Diego. Only 140,000 voters showed at the polls in November. According to Big Jim's slide rule, that’s about 58 percent of the registered, and only 100,000 voted "Yes" on the stadium proposal – that’s 41 percent of the city’s registered voters.

But, then, the average fan is asking himself, how did the stadium get built?

Well, fans, the City wanted to simplify the administration of the bonds, according to the City. So it did an appendectomy on the "general obligation" bond (like Big Jim said, that would have required a 2/3’s vote of all registered voters) and changed it into a City charter amendment (which requires only a simple majority of people voting).

The charter amendment proposed to form a "joint power agreement" between the City and the County governments to administer the stadium, hold title to it and to issue bonds for its construction.

Magic Tally

After the election, all the City’s czars were beating their chests, bragging about the "72 percent landslide victory". Home safe, a local sportswriter said that he wanted to "make it clear once and for all" that what the public voted on wasn't a general obligation bond issue, but a charter amendment. Big Jim felt badly that the sportswriter (who has been described as the richest small town sportswriter in the country and was a member of the GSDSA) didn't tell his readers that before the election.

The charter amendment's bond wording leaves the so-called Stadium Authority an open-ended power to issue bonds. So the idea that they will only issue $27 million of bonds ain't necessarily so. If  they wanted to, they could issue bonds from now through the next 50 years.

Barron Is Back In The Saddle

After the new stadium was approved, Barron Hilton was a new man. During a half-time ceremony in Balboa Stadium, Hilton walked onto a platform before thousands of San Diegans and signed a ten-year occupancy agreement, saying that the Chargers would pay 10 per-cent gross of all ticket sales at the new stadium and receive a third of all concession and parking profits.

Less than a year later (to show his gratitude to San Diego), he sold the controlling interest of the Chargers to two Los Angeles tycoons for $10 million. Quite an improvement over $750,000 eh, fans? Well, fans, Big Jim is running out of newspaper faster than he's running out of facts and other historical curiosities. So I guess Big Jim will stretch this out one more issue after this one so we can take a look at how the contracts were awarded and where those profitable bonds went.

Until next time, fans, this is Big Jim with a few late scores off the sports wire: $3.5 million to $329,000; $275,000 to $578,000; and $20.1 million to $1.95.

Big Jim Says: ‘Let’s Put the Lid on Her, Sportsfans.’

Part Three of a Two Part Series

Hi, sports fans. Big Jim, King of the Sport Freaks, here.

Everybody in the press box is getting upset with Big Jim taking up so much newspaper, so I’m going to wrap up the stadium thing, PDQ.

When construction bids were open for the stadium, the lowest bidder was from a group of three companies: Alex Robertson and W. D. Larsen companies of San Diego and the Donovan Construction Company of St. Paul.

Their bid was $14,082,240. The other two bids were about $15.4 million and $15.8 million, therefore the Robertson, Larsen and Donovan bid was accepted.

But, alas, the City Manager of that day, Tom Fletcher, exclaimed at what a bargain that was -- such a bargain that he and the City Council approved an additional $1.5 million worth of keen 'additions,' including some extra elevators, escalators, a restaurant and such.

That put the final cost above the bid of the next highest bidder.

Not that the costs stopped there, either.

By the time the actual edifice was completed, the Robertson, Larsen and Donovan people had submitted about 50 changes in cost to the City Council for approval. The City was free with its approval. The cost changes amounted to $620,433 above the $15,546,891 figure - - totaling $16,167,324.

That is more than $2 million above the original bid and almost $400,000 above the highest of the three original bids. How does that grab you, sales tax fans?

Robertson-Larsen-Donovan wasn't the only company submitting price changes. All in all there were probably several hundred cost changes by people who had one kind of contract or other on that silly stadium.

Then there is the question of the bonds that were issued to pay for the stadium.

The latter part of 1965 and early 1966 were excellent times for selling municipal bonds. People were looking around to jump on the next issuance of bonds and interest rates were low.

Today, tax-free municipal bonds are getting interest rates as high as 5.1 per cent. In the days of the stadium bonds, they were only getting about 4 per cent -- that means there were a lot of people interested in getting hold of the bonds. So one might ask, "How do we assure ourselves that insiders involved in the issuance of the bonds don't take unfair advantage of their knowledge in making a bid?"

Two Chicago bond houses submitted the lowest bid on the bonds: 3.969847 percent. That amounts to $24,672,203.74 of tax-free profit over a period of 35 years.

There are a lot of Chicago interests in San Diego and vice versa. So, Big Jim asked himself, "Where did that money go?"

Big Jim called the City Treasurer’s office and asked who received the bonds. The people there said they didn't know. They thought it went to two Chicago bond houses. "Sure," said Big Jim, "but they are only middle-men. Do you know where they went after that?"

"No," said the City, "All we care about is that we got the money."

Big Jim then learned that Southern California First National Bank (SCFN) was the trustee for the stadium authority. So Big Jim called their trust department and they were unaware (or so they said) as to where the bonds went.

(Little vignette, fans: You may already know that the Foodmaker Company - -Jack-in-the-Box - - owns a controlling interest in Southern California First National. According to the recent Patman report on bank trust departments, SCFN has 73 percent of all San Diego's trust funds and one of its directors, Richard T. Silberman, is head of the Stadium Authority, the people authorized to spend stadium money.

Rumor has it that SCFN branch drive-thru windows are serving Bonusburgers to anyone with one hundred or more dollars in their checking accounts.

That's enough for now, sports fans. But remember, this week is International Eat the Rich Week, paying tribute to one of the fastest growing indoor sports in the world.

Arena Names Can Spell Embarrassment

By RICHARD SANDOMIR

Published: July 4, 2012 by the New York Times

Barclays is paying $200 million over 20 years for the Brooklyn arena’s naming rights.

In less than three months, Barclays Center in Brooklyn will open with a concert by Jay-Z, a minority owner of the Nets. That will be followed a couple of weeks later by two nights of music from the high priestess of the borough, Barbra Streisand. Soon after the buttah melts, the Brooklyn Nets will open their season.

And so while a lot has gone right for the Nets in the last 72 hours — agreements for a big trade and the re-signing of Deron Williams — the Barclays episode feels right out of the team’s haunted past.

After all, the Nets traded Julius Erving, the franchise’s original sin; they moved nomadically between New York and New Jersey; they played lousy basketball; they waited patiently through legal challenges to the building of their new arena, and then Barclays gets itself into a world of trouble for trying to manipulate interest rates for its own benefit and winds up paying $450 million to settle the accusations against it.

Which, while we’re on the topic of ill-fated choices, brings us to ask: can teams really trust the companies buying the names to their arenas and stadiums? Maybe teams should simply confer with the F.B.I. and bank regulators before closing on their naming rights deals.

The $200 million that Barclays is paying over 20 years for the arena’s naming rights would have been hard for any team to turn down.

Naming rights, in the end, inhabit a quirky corner of the sports universe. Stadium and arena names change as companies go out of business, merge, are acquired or land in legal trouble.

On the more benign side, what is now called Wells Fargo Center, home to the Philadelphia Flyers and the 76ers, has had three previous names: CoreStates, First Union and Wachovia. All of them banks, all of them involved in some way with swallowing each other whole.

In San Francisco, the Giants have played in one ballpark with three names in 12 years: Pacific Bell, SBC and AT&T Park.

Probably the most unfortunate tale in naming rights history occurred in Houston when the Astros named their new stadium Enron Field in 2000. The Astros weren’t at fault. For all they knew, Enron was as solid as Microsoft. Unbeknown to them, Enron was finagling its finances and hugely overstating its profits. It went bankrupt in 2001. The team stripped Enron’s name off the field and quickly found a new buyer with a sweet name and reputation about as far as possible from a corrupt energy trader: Minute Maid.

Once upon a name, Adelphia Communications owned cable television systems and put its moniker on the home of the Tennessee Titans in Nashville. But after members of Adelphia’s controlling family were convicted of charges related to the looting of the company, the stadium’s tainted name was shed and it came to be known as the Coliseum — you could regard this period as a stadium in a witness protection program — before becoming the rather anonymous, but untarnished, LP Field.

Then there is the story of Allianz Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. We know it as MetLife Stadium, where the Jets and the Giants play. Allianz, a Munich-based insurer, was close to striking a deal in 2008 by offering the teams about $25 million a year. But because one’s past matters — even a distant, disavowed past — the insurance company lost any chance of watching a crane hoist giant A-L-L-I-A-N-Z letters to the top of the stadium when it became widely known that Allianz insured the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps and that a former chief executive served as Hitler’s economics minister.

MetLife, an insurance company known for marketing itself with “Peanuts” characters, came along last year before the start of the stadium’s second season, with a deal worth $17 million to $20 million a year. Snoopy’s football joint has, as yet, not been tainted.

Sometimes the taint is not quite so black and white as that involving Allianz.

Several years back, after the economy cratered and banks accepted billions of dollars in bailout cash from the federal Troubled Asset Relief Program, Citi’s 20-year, $400 million agreement with the Mets took on a different kind of taint.

Banks, many felt at the time, were being rewarded for years of risky behavior, or worse. Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio, petitioned the Treasury Department to force banks with naming rights deals that accepted TARP money to rip up their stadium deals, pronto, no matter how old they were.

Maybe the lesson for teams is just not to sell naming rights. You lose some money, but maybe avoid some embarrassments.

Yankee Stadium, Wrigley Field and Fenway Park retain their storied names. Cleveland Browns Stadium is unsullied by the accounting tricks or rate manipulations of a naming rights partner.

And Lambeau Field in Green Bay still evokes a coach named Curly. Please, don’t tell me there is a dark side to Curly.

E-mail: [email protected]

Taking the Side of the Billionaires

Published on Friday, May 27, 2011 by Consortiumnews.com

by Robert Parry

America’s Right – from the NFL lockout to Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget – side with the billionaires in what amounts to an escalating class war against the middle class and the poor

If American football fans end up facing a fall without NFL games, they probably won’t blame George W. Bush and other Republican presidents for packing the federal courts with right-wing judges, but it was two Bush appointees who reversed a District Court ruling that would have ended the lockout of players.

The Appeals Court judgment encouraged the NFL’s hardline billionaire owners to resist making the kinds of compromises that a few less intransigent owners recognize could easily resolve the impasse.

Now, the hardliners simply assume that Republican judges will keep siding with the NFL owners and thus enable them to beat down the players, eventually assuring the billionaire owners a bigger piece of the revenue pie – even if that means losing some or all of the 2011 season.

What many average Americans, especially white guys, don’t seem to understand is that whatever the populist-styled rhetoric of Fox News or Rush Limbaugh, the Right’s default position is to side with the billionaires – and to show little or no regard for the fate of anyone else, whether NFL players or sick senior citizens.

Still, one must give the Right credit for having worked hard refining how to phrase its arguments. Right-wingers even have turned the term “class warfare” against the Left by shouting the phrase in a mocking fashion whenever anyone tries to blunt the “class warfare” that the billionaires have been waging against the middle class and the poor for decades.

On right-wing TV and talk radio across the country, there are tag teams of macho men pretending that ”class warfare” exists only in the fevered imagination of the Left. But billionaire investor Warren Buffett has acknowledged the truth: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

The right-wing propagandists further earn their keep by disparaging science as “elitist.” So, even as the dire predictions from climate-change experts that global warming will generate more extreme weather seem to be coming true, many Americans who have listened to the “climate-change-deniers” for years still reject the scientific warnings.

While no single weather event can be connected to the broader trend of climate change, the warnings about what might happen when the earth’s atmosphere heats up and absorbs more moisture seem to be applicable to the historic flooding in some parts of the world, droughts in others, and the outbreak of particularly violent storms.

Heat and moisture are especially dangerous ingredients for hurricanes and tornados.

Ironically, the parts of the United States hardest hit by this severe weather are those represented predominately by Republicans who have been at the forefront of obstructing government efforts to address the global-warming crisis.

Flooding, hurricanes and tornados have inflicted horrendous damage on Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee, Missouri and Oklahoma – all part of the Republican base.

God’s Punishment?

If televangelist Pat Robertson were a left-winger instead of a right-winger, he might be saying that God is punishing these “red states” for doubting the science of global warming.

However, even as the U.S. news obsesses over the violent weather, mainstream media stars have steered clear of whether global warming might be a factor. It’s as if they know that they’d only be inviting career-damaging attacks from the Right if they did anything to connect the dots.

The Right also is not eager to explain how these catastrophes will require emergency funding and rebuilding assistance from the federal government. After all, you don’t want Republican voters to understand that sometimes “self-reliance” alone doesn’t cut it; sometimes, we all need help and the government must be part of that assistance.

In the case of the killer tornado that devastated Joplin, Missouri, House Republicans, without a hint of irony, are extracting the funds for disaster relief from green energy programs, which remain a favorite GOP target since many Republicans still insist there is no such thing as global warming.

At both state and national levels, Republican leaders have lined up behind climate-change deniers, with former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty just the latest GOP presidential hopeful to apologize for his past support of a cap-and-trade system aimed at reducing global-warming gases.

Any serious move toward alternative energies would, of course, be costly to the giant oil companies and their billionaire owners, like David Koch of Koch Industries who has spent millions of dollars funding right-wing organizations, such as the Tea Party. The Right’s media/political operatives know better than to bite the hand that feeds them.

GOP orthodoxy also disdains tax increases on the rich or even elimination of tax breaks for the oil industry. The Republican insistence on low tax rates for the wealthy, in turn, has forced consideration of other policy proposals to achieve savings from services for average Americans.

That is why congressional Republicans have targeted Medicare with a plan that would end the current health program for the elderly and replace it with a scheme that would give subsidies to senior citizens who would then have to sign up for health insurance from private industry, which has proven itself far less efficient in providing health care than the government.

The GOP budget, drafted by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, would impose the Medicare changes on seniors beginning in 10 years.

Most attention on the Ryan plan has focused on estimates that it would cost the average senior citizen more than $6,000 extra per year, but the proposal also has the effect of privatizing Medicare, meaning that the government would make direct “premium support” payments to profit-making insurance companies whose interest is in maximizing profits, not providing the best possible care for old people.

While the Ryan plan would achieve budget “savings” by shifting the burden of health-care costs onto the elderly, Ryan’s budget also would lower tax rates for the wealthiest Americans even more, from 35 percent to 25 percent. Partly because of that tax cut, Ryan’s budget would still not be balanced for almost three decades.

Class Warfare

Thus, the battle lines of America’s “class warfare” are getting more sharply drawn. The conflict is now over the Right’s determination to concentrate even more money and power in the hands of the rich by hobbling any government capability to protect the people’s general welfare.

If the Right wins, individual Americans will be left essentially defenseless in the face of unbridled corporate power.

Ryan’s Medicare plan may be just the most striking example because it envisions sick old people trying to pick their way through a thicket of private insurance plans with all their confusing language designed to create excuses for denying coverage. It is not an exaggeration to say that Ryan’s tight-fisted Medicare plan could consign millions of Americans to a premature death.

The Right’s priorities hit home at a town hall meeting held by Rep. Rob Woodall, R-Georgia, when he chastised one of his constituents who worried that Ryan’s plan would leave Americans like her, whose employer doesn’t extend health benefits to retirees, out of luck.

“Hear yourself, ma’am. Hear yourself,” Woodall lectured the woman. “You want the government to take care of you, because your employer decided not to take care of you. My question is, ‘When do I decide I’m going to take care of me?’”

However, another constituent noted that Woodall accepted government-paid-for health insurance for himself.

“You are not obligated to take that if you don’t want to,” the woman said. “Why aren’t you going out on the free market in the state where you’re a resident and buy your own health care? Be an example. …

“Go and get it in a single-subscriber plan, like you want everybody else to have, because you want to end employer-sponsored health plans and government-sponsored health plans. … Decline the government health plan and go to Blue Cross/Blue Shield or whoever, and get one for yourself and see how tough it is.”

Woodall answered that he was taking his government health insurance “because it’s free. It’s because it’s free.”

Self-reliance, it seems, is easier to preach to others than to practice yourself.

Woodall’s explanation recalled the hypocrisy of free-market heroine Ayn Rand, whom Rep. Ryan has cited as his political inspiration. In her influential writings, Rand ranted against social programs that enabled the “parasites” among the middle-class and the poor to sap the strength from the admirable rich, but she secretly accepted the benefits of Medicare after she was diagnosed with lung cancer.

A two-pack-a-day smoker, Rand had denied the medical science about the dangers of cigarettes, much as her acolytes today reject the science of global warming. However, when she developed lung cancer, she connived to have Evva Pryor, an employee of Rand’s law firm, arrange Social Security and Medicare benefits for Ann O’Connor, Ayn Rand using her husband’s last name.

In 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand, Scott McConnell, founder of the Ayn Rand Institute’s media department, quoted Pryor as saying: “Doctors cost a lot more money than books earn and she could be totally wiped out.”

So, when push came to shove, even Ayn Rand wasn’t above getting help from the “despised government.” However, her followers, including Rep. Ryan, now want to strip those guaranteed benefits from other Americans of more modest means than Ayn Rand.

It seems it’s okay for average Americans to be wiped out.

Hypocrisy, Hypocrisy

While the Right’s penchant for hypocrisy is well-known (note how many Republicans involved in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton had their own extra-marital affairs), the bigger mystery is why so many average-guy Americans volunteer to fight for the rich in the trenches of the Right’s class warfare.

Clearly, the Right’s propaganda with its endless repetition is very effective, especially given the failure of the American Left to invest significantly in a competing message machine. The Right also has adopted the tone of populism, albeit in support of a well-to-do economic elite.

Yet, perhaps most importantly, the Right has stuck with its battle plan for rallying a significant percentage of middle-class Americans against their own interests.

Four decades ago, President Richard Nixon and his subordinates won elections by demonizing “hippies,” “welfare queens” and the “liberal media.”

Then, in the late 1970s, a tripartite coalition took shape consisting of the Republican Establishment, neoconservatives and the leaders of the Christian Right. Each group had its priorities.

The rich Republicans wanted deep tax cuts and less business regulation; the neocons wanted big increases in military spending and a freer hand to wage wars; and the Christian Right agreed to supply political foot soldiers in exchange for concessions on social issues, such as abortion and gay rights. Ultimately, each part of the coalition got a chunk of what it wanted.

From Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, the rich got their taxes slashed, saw regulations rolled back and gained a larger share of the nation’s wealth and political power. The neocons got massive military spending and the chance to dispatch U.S. soldiers to kill Israel’s Muslim enemies. The Christian Right got help in restricting abortions and punishing gays.

But what did the American middle-class get?

Over those three decades, the middle-class has stagnated or slipped backward. Labor unions were busted; jobs were shipped overseas; personal debt soared; education grew more expensive, along with medical care. People were working harder and longer – for less. Or they couldn’t find jobs at all.

With today’s Tea Party and the Ryan budget, the Right’s coalition is staying on the offensive. If the House budget were passed in total, tax rates for the rich would be reduced another 10 percentage points; military spending would remain high to please the neocons (who foresee a possible war with Iran); and Planned Parenthood and other pet targets of the Christian Right would be zeroed out.

Yet, with the proposed elimination of traditional Medicare, the Ryan budget has lifted the curtain on what the Right’s “free market” has in mind for most average Americans, who could expect to find their lives not only more brutish but shorter.

The real-life-and-death consequences of the Right’s tax cuts, military spending and culture wars are finally coming into focus. If you’re not rich – and can’t afford to pick up the higher tab on health care – you’re likely to die younger. Or your kids might have to dig into their pockets to help you out.

Less extreme but still troubling, another consequence of the Right’s remarkable success over the past three decades might become apparent on your TV screens this fall.

Thanks to all those right-wing judges packed onto federal appeals courts by Reagan and the two Bushes, American football fans might not have the NFL to watch.

The NFL’s lockout of its players seemed to be ending several weeks ago when a lower-court judge ruled against the billionaire owners, but the NFL’s lawyers confidently filed an appeal to a three-judge panel on the Eighth Circuit, knowing that they would surely get one dominated by Republican judges.

They did. Steven Colloton and Duane Benton, two Republicans appointed by George W. Bush, constituted the majority on the panel and reflexively sided with the NFL’s owners.

The ruling should have surprised no one. After all, the Right’s default position is almost always to side with the billionaires.

© 2011 Consortiumnews.com

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat. His two previous books are Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'.

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