Among Henry Abbott's Wednesday Bullets on the ESPN website is this mention of RT II and its keynote speaker:
A conference in New Orleans, with Dave Zirin as keynote speaker. He's a guy who writes stuff like this: "'You can't throw money at the problem.' As a former public school teacher in Washington, I heard this cliche from countless bureaucrats. It was code for 'Stop whining about ancient textbooks and prehistoric classroom materials, because there is no money.' Imagine my shock when the city announced it would be spending more than $500 million on a new baseball stadium. Clearly when it comes to the needs of billionaire sports owners, there always seems to be money available to be thrown. This is hardly a D.C. story. The building of stadiums has become the substitute for anything resembling an urban policy in this country. The stadiums are presented as a microwave-instant solution to the problems of crumbling schools, urban decay and suburban flight. Stadiums are sporting shrines to the dogma of trickle-down economics. In the past 10 years, more than $16 billion of the public's money has been spent for stadium construction and upkeep from coast to coast. Though some cities are beginning to resist paying the full tab, any kind of subsidy is a fool's investment, ending up being little more than monuments to corporate greed: $500 million welfare hotels for America's billionaires built with funds that could have been spent more wisely on just about anything else. The era of big government may be over, but it has been replaced by the Rise of the Domes. Reports from both the right-wing Cato Institute and the more centrist Brookings Institution dismiss stadium funding as an utter financial flop, yet the domes keep coming."
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