Bad Sports - Bad Priorities (The Food & Games Society)

Give the masses a full stomach and fill their eyes with games and the consequential battle of ideas and politics will be fought by the few. Exhaust them with mindless work during the week and distract them with trivial games on their time off and you have an apathetic citizenry.
The political and business giants fleece an entertained and impotent flock. Either by distraction or by exhaustion the mass of men are not able to engage in the commanding heights of economics, politics and philosophy.

“During the economic boom of the 1990s, the longest period of economic expansion in U.S. history, publicly funded stadiums became the substitute for anything resembling an urban policy in this country. These stadiums, ballparks, arenas, and domes were presented as a microwave-instant solution to the problems of crumbling schools, urban decay, and suburban flight. They are now the excrement of the urban neoliberalism of the 1990s, sporting shrines to the dogma of trickle-down economics. In the past twenty-five years, more than $30 billion of the public’s money has been spent for stadium construction and upkeep from coast to coast... in the service jobs created not only by the gentrification that surrounds Camden Yards but the stadium jobs themselves. They are poverty-wage occupations where $7.00 an hour is the going rate."

Dave Zirin, Bad Sports – How Owners Are Ruining The Games We Love

"Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses."
Juvenal, the Roman poet Juvenal (circa 100 AD )