Super (Bowl) Sucks

Hope you all enjoyed the game. I know a lot of people in San Francisco who didn't.

Every year the billionaires of the National Football League take over a metropolitan area for two weeks in the winter. Here in the Bay Area that meant:

-- homeless evicted from the downtown area and around Levi Stadium which is in Santa Clara 40 miles South of San Francisco.

When homeless advocates suggested the "tent city" set up for the homeless could be made permanent, they were met with silence from the city and county officials. When they attempted to march on Super Bowl City in protest, suddenly hundreds of riot geared police were marshaled from some hidden National Guard armory.

-- Super Bowl City is in San Francisco, not Santa Clara. Six blocks of downtown are closed off for the better part of two weeks. Kind of okay for the restaurants but the regular shops, dry cleaners and postal box places are basically out of business for the big game. No parking and everyone coming anywhere near Super Bowl City is subject to search, not just those entering the fenced off SBC.

To celebrate the big event, a dozen or more Super Bowl idols were erected throughout the City.

Several had to be removed after they were repeatedly defaced by residents who apparently are not all in on the Super Spew of the NFL invading their neighborhood.

-- But the darkest side of the Super Bowl is sex trafficking. The media has been saturated with a NFL led blitz of "news" pieces that seek to demonstrate that Super Sex is an urban myth. Yet studies have shown as much as a 300% increase in online sex services in the cities that have previously hosted the Super Bowl. 

-- Ticket prices for the game have now reach $4,000 but those in the know tell us that if you waited until the day before the game, you could score decent seats for less than three grand.

Did I mention the private airports around the Bay Area added acres of tarmac to park the influx of private jets for the weekend?

But weren't those puppy commercials cute?

For more see: The Super Bowl and a Broken San Francisco in The Atlantic and

The Host City Always Loses the Super Bowl.

Finally, a really brilliant summary of how most of the Bay Area residents felt about the Super Invasion.

" . . . the Super Bowl did not serve SF at all well. And if all reports are accurate, San Francisco did not serve the event well. We were, apparently a lousy host; the City failed in numbers ways to make space for all the ridiculousness the NFL's cavalcade of orchestrated brutality hurls forth."

Full article here from SGate.

So You Believe This is a Free Country

I am reluctant to say it, but if you are shocked by this story you must still be living under the impression that the government is on your side and that the USA is a free country. 

Early this week the space occupied by Global Revolution was raided by the NYPD. The group for months has been aggregating live streams from the Occupy Wall Street movement and putting them out on the web. They operated for several months under a tarp at Zuccotti Park and recently moved to an indoor space in Brooklyn. A space that had been occupied (lived in, paying rent) for the last year by one of the GR members. 

Suddenly on Monday the premises became "imminently perilous to life" according to the notice posted. On Tuesday the NYPD raided the site and arrested the members of GR who ran the video operation. Now if you have been to Brooklyn in the last twenty years you know there clearly are spaces perilous to life, probably scores of them within a block or two of the raided studio, but none of them were deemed so dangerous as to provoke a NYPD raid.

Could it have been a coincidence that the Occupy Wall Street live streaming team was operating from that location? Surely they weren't targeted by the NYPD on orders from the mayor, the governor or homeland security. No that could never happen here in the land of the free. 

Move along folks, nothing to see here; which is why the NYTimes has yet to report this story even though they have done pieces in the past on the video team from Global Revolution.