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Baseball Stadiums
for Billionaires
on Welfareby Robert Lederman
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net
June 26, 2001(The author lives a few blocks from the stadium. His family have been area residents for three generations)
Yesterday I went to the opening day parade at Brooklyn's new baseball stadium, Keyspan Park. Not that I went inside. Instead I was there as the sole anti-Giuliani protestor amid thousands of baseball fans.
I carried a large painting titled Fooliani depicting a stupidly grinning Rudy Giuliani with Mickey Mouse ears bearing the insignias' of the Yankees and Mets. Stitched on his baseball cap is a gold dollar sign. Emblazoned on his uniform is his team logo, "Corporate Welfare".
I don't have anything against baseball or a team owner using his hard-earned money to build a stadium in Brooklyn. What I am against is billionaires on welfare.
One of the two highlights of the supposed "Giuliani Legacy" (the other is his phony crime statistics) is kicking hundreds of thousands of poor families off welfare, forcing them into the workfare program - and, to quote the Mayor - "teaching them the value of work". Coney Island is home to some of the poorest of these families.
This year NYC baseball's #1 employee, Rudy Giuliani, spent more than 110 million dollars of the money he took away from these welfare families to erect two minor league stadiums, one in Staten Island for billionaire Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, and the other in Brooklyn's Coney Island for billionaire Fred Wilpon.
Too bad Giuliani doesn't want to teach these men the meaning of work.
The team owners get to keep most of the ticket receipts, the millions in expected advertising revenues and actually own the stadiums. If tax dollars totally paid for these stadiums, why are they owned by billionaires and why do we have to pay anything to come inside? As a final insulting touch, Keyspan stadium put up a ten foot-high green fence facing the ocean so poor Brooklynites couldn't view the games for free from the boardwalk.
An interesting incident happened earlier that same day which had a direct bearing on my experience at the parade and explains why the media coverage of this event was so relentlessly upbeat despite many people in the area being very strongly against the new stadium.
A police officer gave my car a summons for double-parking around 8:15 AM. This same officer keeps writing me summonses for the flimsiest of reasons. Every car on the block was double-parked at that same time to make way for the Sanitation Department to clean the street. Only my car got a ticket, so I went to the local precinct to file a complaint of selective enforcement.
The precinct captain asked why I thought the officer would want to target mine out of all the double-parked cars. I explained who I was and my history with the Mayor. He immediately took down my complaint and promised to launch an investigation. Upon leaving the precinct I mentioned that he'd probably see me again in a few hours at the opening day parade.
When I got to the front of the stadium the captain greeted me. The NYPD had a contingent of ten officers and a police van assigned to escort me. Wherever I went they ran alongside. When the parade, led by Giuliani and his girlfriend Judy Nathan, got close to where I was standing, their job (acknowledged in conversations) was to stand between my painting, the Mayor and the media.
Each time Giuliani passed my location along the parade route I'd run a half-block ahead to get a new chance to show him the painting. My police escort would dutifully run along with me and they'd keep positioning the van so the that I'd be completely obstructed from the sight of the press pack surrounding the Mayor. New York's finest used as political censors.
In a sense, next to the Mayor, I was the most protected person at the event. It is rather pathetic to see how Giuliani, who keeps claiming he respects free speech, employs so many police officials at taxpayer expense to keep the media from photographing a cardboard painting he finds embarrassing.
Lately he has a lot to be embarrassed about.
Despite being in a crowd of thousands of Met's fans I was surprised to find so many people in enthusiastic agreement with my sign. As I walked the length of Surf Avenue storeowners who glimpsed the Giuliani painting came out and yelled their encouragement. Many applauded. These are the businesses the stadium is supposedly going to bring so much "economic benefit" to. Those who were critical of my painting turned out without exception to be from other neighborhoods.
The reality is that this corporate welfare will mean the destruction of most local businesses, including many of the current rides, attractions and restaurants. Numerous former street vendors along the avenue who had rented what were once abandoned storefronts, have already been given eviction notices by the City. When the local landlords start raising rents on apartments, thousands of low income tenants, many of them elderly long-time Coney Island residents, will be forced to leave the area as well.
Of course, this will make lots of room for Starbucks, a GAP, a few more McDonalds, Wendys, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Burger Kings. Just what Coney Island needed to spruce up its' image. As the Mayor said in his press conference, he wants to do for Coney Island what he did for Times Square.
That's about as an accurate statement as you'll ever hear from Rudy Giuliani. He wants to take billions in tax dollars and use them as corporate welfare, giving this money not to minority, low-income or immigrant business people who need a boost but to billionaires and the city's wealthiest real estate developers. He wants to sterilize a world-famous part of New York, putting his uniquely bland trademark of decency and deceit on it.
Say goodbye to what was left of the old Coney Island. It just went the way of Times Square, the Chinatown New Year's celebration and public access to City Hall.
It's been Giulianied.
To a Directory of Mr.Lederman's Essays
Robert Lederman is an artist, writer and activist and is also the President of the street artist advocacy group, A.R.T.I.S.T.
Click here for an archive of A.R.T.I.S.T. related news articles on the Freedom Forum websiteHis essays and Op-Eds have appeared in hundreds of alternative publications as well as the Daily News, Penthouse, Africa Sun Times, Street News and The Shadow.
Lederman was falsely arrested 41 times for his anti-Giuliani activities and was never convicted of any of the charges. As a result of the arrests, he's won four Federal lawsuits and overturned three laws.
He is best known for having created hundreds of paintings of Mayor Giuliani as a Hitler like dictator which were carried in demonstrations throughout the eight years of the Giuliani administration. Images of his paintings and articles about his arrests and lawsuits have appeared on all of the major television networks hundreds of times as well as frequently appearing in the NY Times, Daily News, NY Post, Newsday, Newsweek, People, The Washington Post, LA Times and NY Magazine.Robert Lederman,
President of A.R.T.I.S.T.
(Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics)
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net
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