We’re back for more Wednesday Wizengamot today, with the firm position noted in the headline. Yes, we may be a little emotional on this one as natives of the San Francisco Bay Area—specifically, the Oakland side. The east side of the Bay has lost a team from every major professional sports league in our lifetimes: the California Golden Seals, the Oakland Raiders, the Golden State Warriors, and the Oakland Athletics.

While the NHL left due to lack of interest and success in the mid-1970s, the Raiders left twice after trying to extort money from the city itself, while Warriors moved to San Francisco (where they’d started out, originally) for “greener” pastures. And the A’s left for the same reason the Warriors did, really, despite all the bullshit narratives you’ll read out there about current ownership. In the end, the city just didn’t pay up.

We blame Al Davis for this, really, as he held the city hostage in 1981 before leaving for Los Angeles, and then he got a sweetheart deal to return in 1996. Then his son, Mark, did the same before leaving for Las Vegas himself. Of course, the city of Oakland was not going to let itself be taken to the cleaners again by the Warriors or the A’s—even with the eight combined championships those teams earned repping the city.

How this trend began, of wealthy sports team owners getting public funds to build new stadiums, is a story for another day, but the latest episode is playing out in Washington, DC., with “more than $1 billion in public money that will be put toward the infrastructure and construction to support a new [NFL] stadium and the surrounding entertainment and residential district envisioned under the deal.” It’s pretty horrifying.

Certain political types will stop at nothing to use public funds to energize their business interests and increase profit margins via outright grifting, but heaven forbid student loans get forgiven, right? As sports enthusiasts, we have to consider this every time we set foot in an athletic facility as paying customers: Did we already pay our fair entry free via public taxes? Why are we still being charged an arm and a leg to attend?

We’re going to simplify the Boondoggle piece here, in bite-size proportions, so the cheating, lying, and stealing is clear in language and socioeconomic impact:

  • “An exhaustive amount of economic research shows pro sports stadiums don’t provide a meaningful economic impact to their host cities. Stadiums and arenas mostly just shuffle money around that would have been spent in the local economy anyway.”
  • “Many studies have shown [major] events don’t move the economic needle much, if at all, even for smaller cities with less going for them. Even if they did provide a meaningful impact, there simply aren’t enough of those big events to justify a massive expenditure from the taxpayer.”
  • ” So many neighborhoods without stadiums or other publicly-funded mega-projects have developed just fine that it’s ludicrous to think a stadium (or any public mega-project, to be honest) is necessary.”
  • “… while there would indeed be public spending on the site even without a stadium, it would look very different, and likely be far cheaper, than it will be with a stadium.”
  • “This is like the mob coming to your store and telling you all the other stores on the block got fleeced, but we’ve got a special shakedown price just for you.”

In many ways, we’re very proud that Oakland has learned its lesson and stopped giving freebies away to billionaires. You know how most American billionaires first got rich? Public funding for their private projects, which then reaped them untold profits—and even if they did get a government loan (still public funding at its core) to start their businesses? The loans were forgiven by later government officials. Why?

Do the math. Follow the money. Stop believing the lies. Stop the cheating. Stop the stealing. Now, people.