Are you sick of the ads yet? This week we are witnessing the unfolding of the most expensive campaign on behalf of corporate welfare ever waged in the state. Opponents won't be able to spend nearly enough money to counter the distortions and lies we're bound to hear over and over and over. Our only option is to educate each other, and start talking.

Here are 8,000,000,048 reasons to vote "No" on Referendum Bill 48, the June election to fund a new football stadium for Paul Allen & the Seattle Seahawks. Use only one to vote no yourself. Give the others to everyone you know:

Abuse of legislative process. Paul Allen not only bought Olympia (with a succession of donations to both parties, beginning last November); his money enabled his pet project to buy off the Governor, rewrite the state's election rules, censor the ballot title, and repeatedly subvert the legislature's procedures and deadlines for passing legislation. It is blatant bribery.
Abuse of electoral process. Allen's Football Northwest will spent an estimated $3 million in only a few weeks. Money buys elections; that's why incumbents almost always win even though poll after poll suggests the public hates them. After six weeks of media saturation a lot of otherwise sensible people will be bludgeoned into voting "yes." It's a corruption of democracy.
If Paul Allen can simply buy the legislature and buy an election, why can't Boeing? Or Weyerhaueser? Or any other corporation with deep pockets? It's an extraordinarily dangerous precedent for the auctioning of democracy on behalf of corporate welfare.
The Seahawks are already profitable, as is every NFL team. The NFL's corporate sponsorships, TV contracts, and merchandising, along with revenue sharing among teams, means even teams that don't sell a single ticket at all make money. Plus, the team's value continues to appreciate. This stadium is about helping Paul Allen or Ken Behring make more money.
The direct cost of the stadium to taxpayers, as now proposed, is not $325 million. It's $650 million, including the interest and bond charges over the 23 years it will take to repay the bonds.
The additional $100 million that Allen will "contribute" isn't his money, either. It will come from the sale of Personal Seat Licenses (PSLs)- -that is, an auctioning of the right of the public to buy seats in the stadium the public has financed. Allen isn't paying a penny out of his own deep pockets.
Pro sports as an industry has structured itself on the assumption that taxpayers in cities across the country will pick up the tab. Some 64 teams in over 30 North American cities are demanding, or have had built, new publicly-financed stadiums or arenas in the last two years. The best way to support football and other sports is by Seattle and all cities forcing the sports industry to clean up its own act before no fans are left.
Football is male dominated. Shouldn't public money support more gender-balanced ventures?
Football teaches violence, misogyny, militarism, competition as an ultimate moral end, and is (with the exception of state lotteries) the nation's foremost object of gambling.
The benefit goes mostly to Seattle, not the rest of the state.
This proposal sets an ugly precedent of bribing voters with minor gifts irrelevant to the main purpose of a ballot measure. If the public needs soccer facilities or playfields, it should fund them. A "yes" vote encourages the idea of offering what voters really need only if those voters agree to pour far more money into a corporate-sponsored boondoggle instead.
The Kingdome is economically viable for conventions and trade shows, and carries extensive debt. We pick up the cost of demolishing it and the lost revenues from being unable to host major trade shows in the future. Allen's ads tout this vote as a way to retire the Kingdome debt right now...spending $650 million to retire a $150 million debt. Hmmm.
Demolition of the Kingdome--the largest free-standing concrete dome west of the Mississippi--is being done with minimal, fast-tracked environmental review and permitting. As is construction of the new stadium. Of course.
This just encourages the idiots who want Seattle to bid for the Olympics.
They'll want another new one in ten years. That's how long it's taken in some cities for new stadiums to become "obsolete" and no longer sufficiently "state-of-the-art" to satisfy insatiably greedy owners.
If the Kingdome--built with public money--is such a horrible facility, why build another one the same way?
The Seahawks suck! (If the Mariners can get a new stadium after their first-ever pennant race, surely we can point out now that the Seahawks have not had a winning season since 1989. Who wants losers?
Over community objections and with a whole separate boatload of public money, the Seahawks will play for two years in UW's Husky Stadium while the Kingdome is being torn down and the new stadium erected on its site.
Spending hundreds of millions of public dollars on a stadium is morally offensive when the state has refused to find creative financing measures-- or even use the $120 million already allowed under current spending limits--to deal with truly urgent, necessary issues: decaying infrastructure, underfunded schools, access to health care, and a shredded social safety net.
If the revenue sources generated by this proposal don't cover stadium costs, the balance comes directly out of the state's general fund at the expense of these already-budgeted items.
With the elimination of the sports merchandise tax, a big chunk of the funding for this stadium will come out of everyone's pockets--not just sports fans. $101 million is expected to come from King County sales tax credits and deferrals. Hotel/motel taxes and new non-sports-related lottery games have nothing to do with the fan, either.
The stadium will be used for football only ten times a year--and has no uses set for the other 355 days. A $300 million public subsidy is equivalent to the public buying 40,000 tickets for every home game for the lifetime of the stadium. And they'll still charge for parking!
Allen's red herring of a "professional soccer team" for the stadium promises a team that does not exist in a money-losing league that has only been in existence for one year and may be out of business long before the stadium is ready.
A stadium that is unused and empty most of the time denegrates, rather than enhances, the business climate of Pioneer Square.
The new stadium creates few jobs for the amount of money being spent. The jobs it does create are temporary (construction) or mostly seasonal, part-time, unskilled, and low-paying.
Pro football is quite conceivably the worst possible industry for providing public role models for youth. In the last two years, Seahawks stars include Chris Warren (acquitted of assaulting a woman); Brian Blades (overturned manslaughter conviction); Lamar Smith (drunk driving accident permanently paralyzed a teammate); and newly acquired free agent and UW grad Warren Moon, a future Hall of Famer, who leaves Minnesota after two highly publicized incidents: a trial for assault against his wife, and civil suits (settled out of court) alleging sexual harassment against his team's cheerleaders. Even for pro athletes, an uncommonly high percentage of football players seem to be sociopathic assholes.
You can still see all the fucking games on TV.
The blatant purchase of the political process despite strong public opposition, breeds cynicism and contempt toward government and democracy.
The actual terms of the financial agreement between the state, county, city, and the Seahawks places all of the financial risk with the taxpayers. However, as the contract is written, Allen retains control of all budget and financial matters.
While the public takes the risk, the Seahawks also take an enormous chunk of the revenues--revenues the city, county, and state could use for other desperately needed purposes. Allen keeps all revenue from subleases, concessions, suite and set licenses, advertising, naming rights, and parking, plus 80% of exhibition hall income--worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The public takes all the risk on this project, and Allen gets all the profit.
Unlike the usual "public-private partnership" (smirk), Allen is subject to no financial disclosure requirements.
The city will still have to pay costs for clean-up, police overtime, and so forth for Seahawks games.
Seagals (Seahawk cheerleaders). Barf-o-rama!!
A strong no vote will teach the Governor and legislature to use their limited and valuable time to deal with meaningful issues.
Similarly, no pro football team will free up large portions of local newscasts and newspapers.
The stadium, and the Seahawks, are of no significant economic benefit to the state. Numerous studies show that pro sports do not generate new income or sales for local economies; they simply reshuffle money from other entertainment choices.
Football relies for its profitability on its tie-ins (through sponsorships, merchandising tie-ins, luxury boxes, and ownership) with a host of morally offensive corporations (e.g., Nike).
Do you really want to be known as the state stupid enough to authorize billion-dollar sports boondoggles not once but twice?
Paul Allen could still refuse to buy the team. Either Allen or Behring could move the team in the future, leaving Seattle with a useless stadium and no team. (As Cleveland now faces after approving a stadium and having the football team move anyway.)
Washington's state constitution specifically prohibits the use of public money to benefit a private enterprise.
The proposal may also violate the U.S. Constitution. A similar corporate welfare-style vote for developers in Hawaii was challenged earlier this decade under the equal protection clause as "an illegal allocation of political opportunity based on wealth." The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (which also includes Washington State) didn't decide the case on its constitutional merits, leaving the question open.
Maybe when the Seahawks leave, their fans will go, too.
Since Fall 1995, the cost of the Mariners' new stadium has risen from $180 million to over $400 million. What's to prevent the cost of the Seahawks' project (already up to $425 million) from skyrocketing?
The more people that vote "no," the harder it will be for politicians to find a way to fund it anyway while insisting that the public really meant "yes." (Remember, this is, according to the bill passed in Olympia, a non-binding referendum.)
You can't afford the tickets anyway. The stadium is designed as a playpen for the rich. Only 10 percent of the seats in the stadium--down from 20 percent in the original bill--will be designated as "affordable." The real money for Allen will be in the corporate luxury suites the public will never see. This stadium may be the most inherently classist edifice built with public money since Versailles.
Public anger toward these unnecessary "new taxes" will carry over and make it that much more difficult to fund legitimately needed taxes, such as the upcoming school levy in Seattle.
Football Northwest will deserve a no vote simply for subjecting so many people to so many goddamn commercials in the next several weeks.
8,000,000,048: Each dollar of Paul Allen's net worth that he'd miss less than anyone else in the state (excepting Bill). On a good day at the stock market, this stadium represents about 20 minutes of not- very-hard work for the guy. Wouldn't it make more sense to give the money, in tax-free $100,000 checks, to 3,000 or so of us who need it more? Think of the publicity! The jobs created! The unifying civic pride! Hell, why not just pack the money in bundles and throw it out of an airplane?

The groups working to oppose 48 urgently need your help. Don't be misled by polls showing that the stadium is trailing by up to 20 percentage points. Similar stadium votes last year in Cincinnati and Houston had similar polling results 4-6 weeks before the vote. Both measures passed, in large part due to the enormous spending advantage held by stadium advocates--an advantage, of course, that Paul Allen will use to obscene levels. Contact: Stop Stadium Madness, 206-528-8457 or 509-323-9902, web: www.no48.wa.net; or No Sports Tax, 378-0439 in Seattle, or toll-free 1-888-740-8400.