Hooray! Another Sports Team Gets Showered With Public Money!

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The city of Washington DC is investing $100 million in a new stadium for its soccer club. Why? Hard to say, really. The club’s owners say they can’t make a profit playing in aging RFK Stadium, but it’s not really clear why that’s the city’s problem. In any case, what makes the whole deal palatable is that it’s being done via a complicated land swap that includes some goodies for city residents. Matt Yglesias points out just how ridiculous this is:

Note that while we superficially have a story about sports subsidies here, the real devil’s work is being done by accounting. Imagine we had already sold the Reeves Center to a private developer and moved the government offices across the river and had $100 million sitting around in a room somewhere. Now we’re debating what to do with the $100 million. The option “use it to buy land and then give it for free to a soccer team” would probably not seem very appealing to people. But since selling the Reeves Center and moving the offices is a very good idea, including that swap as part of the bundle rather than considering it separately makes the plan look pretty good.

Actually, you never know. It might very well seem like a good idea. America’s love affair with showering money on profit-making sports enterprises is a never-ending source of awe. Why on earth do we do it?1

1Don’t even think of saying that it pays for itself by generating lots of additional business and tax revenues. Just don’t.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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