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The homeless will be kept indoors, bus routes of the city's poorest will be
re-routed. And to the Rolling Stones pre-rehearsed 12 minute
half-time show audience members, there is to be no Sweet Neo
Con performance.
This from Sam Smith's Review, an excerpt from World
Socialist:
SUPER BOWL IN A SAD CITY
DAVID WALSH, WORLD SOCIALIST - The mass media, as it does every year, has been informing the population for weeks that it can hardly wait until "Super Sunday," when "Super Parties" will break out everywhere. . . . Detroit's population has shrunk from some 2 million in 1954 to 900,000 today, although the greater metropolitan area remains one of the country's largest. Flying into the city from the east, an airplane passenger sees mostly green, as so many city blocks have been reduced to one or two houses. Census Bureau figures released last summer ranked Detroit as the poorest city in the US, with one third of its residents living below the federal poverty level, $19,157 for a household of four. Almost one half of the city's children, 47.8 percent, live below the poverty line. In 2004, a study revealed that 39.1 percent of the residents of midtown Detroit earned less than $10,000 a year. Experts in the field estimate the real jobless rate in the city to be somewhere around 30 or 35 percent. Only a few blocks from Ford Field, where Sunday's football game will be played, it would not be difficult to come on scenes of poverty and degradation out of the Third World. . . The hundreds of millions of dollars supposedly pouring into Detroit will find their way primarily into a few large pocketshotels, casinos, expensive restaurants, etc. . . . Social reality asserts itself even in the midst of the preparations. Numerous homeless people (out of an estimated population of 13,000 in Detroit) have been rounded up and taken to shelters or churches, in some cases told not to return to the streets until after the tourists have gone Sunday night. Because the city has laid off so many employees, the authorities are obliging men charged with being "deadbeat dads" (for nonpayment of child support) and unable to pay their court fines to clean streets and freeways. City bus routes have been changed, without their normal riders, lower-paid workers, being informed. . . A columnist in the Seattle Times observed: ". . . This week, the city and the league will shield its visitors from the dark side of the city. Buses and limos, with police escorts, will race past the remaining homeless and past the decaying buildings and to the isolated safety of the Super Bowl parties.". . . A reporter noted with astonishment that the crowd for the half-time show, a 12-minute set by the Rolling Stones, "have to go to several rehearsals for the event." Referring to the audience's "pre-programmed" character, he asked, "Is there anybody on the planet who doesn't know how to attend a concert?" The National Football League has apparently asked Mick Jagger not to sing Sweet Neo Con, viewed as an attack on George Bush, which includes such lines as, "You call yourself a Christian, I call you a hypocrite." A NFL spokesman indicated, "We have certain songs we feel are inappropriate.". . . The Super Bowl is now classified, thanks to the Department of Homeland Security, as a "Level 1 National Security Event." According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, preparations have involved "Two years of planning and $6 million and 3,000 private security personnel and 30 nationally recognized private security experts and 100 law enforcement agencies and 400 community volunteers and lots of secret stuff we can't talk about." . . . No bags larger than a pocketbook will be allowed, and everyone will pass through a magnetometer screening and undergo a pat down. There will be a no-fly zone within a 30-mile radius around the stadium, which means security operations will be multinational, considering that includes Canadian airspace. . http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/feb2006/bowl-f04_prn.shtml All mail scanned by NAV
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