Our Politicians' Trance State: Darryl Steinberg & Roberta MacGlashan

 (c) by Mark Dempsey

"You Yanks don't consult the wisdom of democracy, you enable mobs" - Australian planner

Our politicians must be in a hypnotic trance to campaign for office. How else can we explain their obviously false assertions?

When Sacramento mayor Darryl Steinberg was campaigning for his first term, he boasted that he had been instrumental in insuring the "asset" of a professional basketball team--the "Kings"--remained in Sacramento. As a leader in the state Senate, he had moved heaven and earth to make sure the City of Sacramento could build the Kings a stadium without those pesky delays demanded by California's CEQA law.

But are the Kings really an "asset"? All the economists' say professional sports is as big a liability as an asset--so economically it's a wash.

And the transaction to build the stadium was certainly not in the City's favor. The City owns the stadium, so it generates no property tax, and it's a white elephant if the Kings decide to move (again). The threat of moving is what generated the urgency to build a quarter-billion-dollar stadium.

The City got no stake in the team, which Forbes says was then worth double what the owners (Vivek Ranadive and his merry band of plutocrats) paid. So profit to the City is doubtful, and the plutocrats got 100% return on their investment. 

Polling said roughly 70% of the population did not want to subsidize a basketball team. The NBA league's legal exemption from antitrust prosecution means the City can't form its own team if the Kings leave, too. 

This transaction structure also means the threat to leave can extort additional subsidies. Seventy-five percent of George W. Bush's net worth apparently came from the Texas Ranger's threat to leave (Arlington) Texas. Al Davis and his successors have extorted subsidies from Oakland, Anaheim, Oakland again, and finally Las Vegas to keep the team in these various locations. From the business end of things, these are not so much professional sports as extortion rackets.

Steinberg is intelligent, but how can his boast about keeping this "asset" be anything but post-hypnotic suggestion?

One other example comes from former Sacramento County Supervisor, Roberta MacGlashan. In an Orangevale community meeting, she listened to constituents concerns then had everyone in the room vote on specific principles of governance. This sounds sensible, just as "you're feeling very sleepy" sounds persuasive, but here are the principles of governance she got from that meeting:

• Keep tax revenue local.
• Get better commerce
• Keep Orangevale rural

She even repeated these at subsequent meetings.

But in California, residential areas like Orangevale don't pay enough taxes to cover the expenses of infrastructure and schools, and sales tax is the only source of discretionary spending for local governments. "Keeping tax revenue local" is tantamount to saying "Keep the pope Catholic."

And here's a news flash: sparsely populated rural areas don't get better commerce. If you want a fancy store like Nieman-Marcus, you need to go to Union Square in San Francisco--a commercial center surrounded by apartments and hotels.

Obviously the crowd assembled at that initial meeting, and Ms. McGlashan herself, believed they knew enough of the costs and consequences of governing to endorse the arrant nonsense of those principles. These "listening" sessions politicians sponsor are reminders that costs and consequences need to be exposed before people choose, otherwise we get Supervisors who are "little queens" who can do whatever they want because the public is uninformed.

The big question is "When are our leaders going to snap out of it?"