The Washington, D.C. city council is set to cast its final vote on the Commanders stadium deal tomorrow, because D.C. has one of those council systems where stuff has to be voted on twice to be sure that legislators are serious. Given that the council already voted 9-3 last month to approve the deal, nobody expects anything different here, but everyone and their sister is still scrambling to get in some last-minute lobbying:
- Mayor Muriel Bowser called the Commanders deal the “best and fastest way” to redevelop the old RFK Stadium site, saying, “We don’t have a $2.1 billion partner waiting in the wings,” an odd remark given that Bowser specifically chose not to seek competitive bids for the site.
- Leaders of three local unions wrote an op-ed in the Washington Business Journal calling the Commanders stadium deal “a major win for our unions, our members and every other working-class resident of this city” thanks to the Commanders’ guarantee of using union labor to build the stadium and hotels on the site and employing a majority of D.C. residents for building the rest of the project — a guarantee that helped win over the two key swing votes needed to pass the stadium bill.
- Kingman Park residents are pushing for a last-minute deal to change plans for a new parking garage that they say will tower over nearby park space. And also maybe add grocery stores. And a new Metro stop.
Ignoring Bowser, who’s gonna Bowser, these are clear signs that we’re deep into the haggling over the price phase of the Commanders deal, which is all too often the only phase many stakeholders get involved in. If you’re going to hand over $6.6 billion or so in subsidies to a billionaire private equity goon, yes, it is absolutely preferable that at least district residents get some well-paying jobs, and that neighborhood residents get some say in how it affects their immediate surroundings. But when details like these — and not the $6.6 billion or so in subsidies, most of them hidden in the fine print as is standard these days — end up being the main or even the only thing that unions and community members focus on, that’s some serious missing the forest for the trees, not to mention an open invitation for sports billionaires to buy off opposition by throwing some cheap community benefits at the problem.
How we got to the point where advocacy groups are mostly just concerned about getting theirs is a long, long story, and probably needs to start with that time the U.S. government decided to break up unions that took a bigger-picture view of social change by trying to deport their members to countries they weren’t even from. There are definitely exceptions: Some community groups aren’t just NIMBYs, and some unions do try to make the world a better place for more than their own members. But so long as we live in a world where construction workers turn up to testify on behalf of any development project that’ll employ them, even when it means less public resources available for their union and non-union neighbors, stopping rich people from siphoning off tax money is always going to be an even more uphill battle than it would be just from all the other rich people supporting them.
I believe we really need to adopt this type of structured deal to solve the problem of national hunger.
Instead of providing food stamps or free meals, we can solve the hunger crisis by force feeding the fattest and most overfed people in the country even more. Then, when the fattest and most overfed people cannot possibly eat another bite (think Python’s “Meaning of Life”) we will finally have an idea of what our food surplus available for redistribution looks like.
Think about it, there is no other workable way to determine what the food surplus is but to force feed the wealthy and already overfed.
Then, we can allow the excess food to trickle down to those on the lower end of the economic scale who really need it. Not that the wealthy and massively overweight don’t need it. It is important to keep that in mind.
Don’t even talk to me about other ideas. We already know from stadium construction financing and Reagan era economics that nothing else can work. The Trickle Down theory has fixed every problem western democracies have ever had. It’s trickle down all the way.
So, which billionaire will selflessly line up for the force-feeding syringe first?