The MAC continues to serve as a massive corporate welfare agency for NWA even as NWA and the airlines industry disintegrates through typical criminal corporate management practices: ignoring reality (planes need fossil fuel, etc); whining about reality when it impinges on the "business plan;" laying off real workers and endangering everyone with sloppier maintenance. Most importantly, top executives are busy extracting dollars from the corporation before it is revealed to be a hollowed-out husk.
The Twins also try to extract maximum wealth from Minneapolis with another corporate con-job that is wearing very thin. The poor and destitute owners and the National Baseball Monopoly cannot survive on the many billions of dollars they have and generate through the pseudo-sports circus. They need tax dollars to support them while they simply cause a big chunk of people's entertainment dollars to slosh from one part of town to another.
Huge consumption of energy and economic resources to develop what??? The economy??? Corporatist CEOs love to tout this "economic development" line, which media and politicians can parrot. It is a big, sweet, and simple lie. The easiest kind to distract the masses with while their pockets are being picked. There are good and studies books written on the economics of professional sports -- see Britt Robson's City Pages article "Fine Print, Huge Profits" here:
http://citypages.com/databank/26/1275/article13266.asp
With MAC and the Twins our enormous resources are not being used for economic development at all. Economic development has to do with learning to generate energy and food in clean and sustainable ways. It is not about going into massive, unsupportable debt to fund the transfer of wealth (dollars, anyway) into the pockets of the already wealthy.
Two articles from Counterpunch provide good background for the bigger picture:
http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney04082005.html "Coming Sooner Than You Think: The Economic Tsunami" (Mike Whitney)
http://www.counterpunch.org/ -- "Out through the In Door: The Politics and Economics of Outsourcing" (Paul Craig Roberts)
Listen to the Greens who offer real vision for economic development, while the local Dems act as the political arm of the corporatist PR con job.
-- pedaling for peace and ecojustice -- from Lynnhurst -- Gary Hoover
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