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League of Fans Founded by Ralph Nader, League of Fans is a sports reform project working to improve sports by increasing awareness of the sports industry's relationship to society, exposing irresponsible business practices, ensuring accountability to fans, and encouraging the industry to contribute to societal well-being.Alerts is League of Fans' email announcements list. Alerts provides news, information, the actions of League of Fans and/or Ralph Nader regarding sports issues, and calls-to-action for subscribers. All email updates are either selected or written by League of Fans. League of Fans is motivated by people, just like you, who are upset with what has become of our sports and would like to make a difference. We work with concerned citizens, sports fans, civic groups and communities to increase awareness of the sports industry's relationship to society, influence a broad range of issues in sports at all levels and encourage the cooperative capacities that make the "sports powers-that-be" capable of helping, not just dominating, our society and culture. We often think of sports as outside the realm of everyday citizen concern. But the many benefits to society that sports can provide are sometimes undermined by a different set of values, often based on the quest for higher and higher profits at the expense of fans, taxpayers, communities, culture and social justice. Get Involved! Your involvement will improve sports for communities and fans, and encourage the sports industry to better contribute to societal well-being. |
Ralph Nader's statement to D.C. Council members opposing possible taxpayer subsidized baseball stadium July 11, 1999To:
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Anybody reading the materials regarding the proposed Intermodal Transportation Center (ITC) and a possible professional baseball stadium in the Mt. Vernon East Neighborhood knows that the corporate model of development -- big entertainment complex with concentrated traffic density -- is confronting the neighborhood model of sustainable urban revival of housing and mixed commercial activity as if people who live there mattered. So "there they go again" with their disregard of far superior alternative sites such as near Union Station and renovating the existing RFK stadium and their demand for huge taxpayer subsidies all in the context of rejecting full and complete procedural due process and public deliberations.
There are many studies here and from other cities that have rejected this corporate-developer-entertainment-tax subsidized model in the central city as wasteful, environmentally harmful, a drain on the city's tax base and productive of far fewer jobs than the sustainable neighborhoods where people live and work and contribute to the city's revenues rather than deplete them. This experience is reflected in the columns of Rudolph A. Fyatt Jr. of the Washington Post and the writings of Professor Dorn C. McGrath Jr. of George Washington University, J. Kirkwood White and Beth Solomon.
Eminent Domain funded by corporate welfare to further the corporate domain over the people's domain using secretive, fast-track, unsubstantiated and other roughshod modes of unilateral decision-making are not what many District residents expect from their new Mayor and Administration. When thought precedes greed and democracy precedes oligarchy, many good results occur for a breathable living downtown, a truly rational and not disguised intermodal transportation system and an organically vibrant downtown that serves its own people.
Rest assured, council members, that a mobilized citizenry will emerge to set such priorities right. The grease wheels will not be so easy this time. Do not judge the present by the past. Represent the people who live and work in your city. Thank You.
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