When reading this article, it made me think about the USCF fans in the upper deck seat not being allowed to come down to the lower levels...Gold Coast tickets area, corporate luxury suites, etc.

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/opinion/...thomaslfriedman

 

 

I knew that stadiums are now named for corporations, but had no idea that now “even sliding into home is a corporate-sponsored event,” writes Sandel. “New York Life Insurance Company has a deal with 10 Major League Baseball teams that triggers a promotional plug every time a player slides safely into base. When the umpire calls the runner safe at home plate, a corporate logo appears on the television screen, and the play-by-play announcer must say, ‘Safe at home. Safe and secure. New York Life.’ ”

 

And while I knew that retired baseball players sell their autographs for $15 a pop, I had no idea that Pete Rose, who was banished from baseball for life for betting, has a Web site that, Sandel writes, “sells memorabilia related to his banishment. For $299, plus shipping and handling, you can buy a baseball autographed by Rose and inscribed with an apology: ‘I’m sorry I bet on baseball.’ For $500, Rose will send you an autographed copy of the document banishing him from the game.”

 

Sandel is now a renowned professor at Harvard, but we first became friends when we grew up together in Minneapolis in the 1960s. Both our fathers took us to the 1965 World Series, when the Dodgers beat the Twins in seven games. In 1965, the best tickets in Metropolitan Stadium cost $3; bleachers were $1.50. Sandel’s third-deck seat to the World Series cost $8. Today, alas, not only are most stadiums named for companies, but the wealthy now sit in skyboxes — even at college games — that cost tens of thousands of dollars a season, and hoi polloi sit out in the rain.

 

Throughout our society, we are losing the places and institutions that used to bring people together from different walks of life. Sandel calls this the “skyboxification of American life,” and it is troubling. Unless the rich and poor encounter one another in everyday life, it is hard to think of ourselves as engaged in a common project. At a time when to fix our society we need to do big, hard things together, the marketization of public life becomes one more thing pulling us apart. “The great missing debate in contemporary politics,” Sandel writes, “is about the role and reach of markets.” We should be asking where markets serve the public good, and where they don’t belong, he argues. And we should be asking how to rebuild class-mixing institutions.

 

“Democracy does not require perfect equality,” he concludes, “but it does require that citizens share in a common life. ... For this is how we learn to negotiate and abide our differences, and how we come to care for the common good.”

You have to understand...they're better than you or I. They were born into the right family.

Oh, Doctor Balta! We have a seat right up front for you! What is your specialty?

Rocks

You mean like David Crosby?

No, rocks

Oops, I mean we have a seat in the back for you . . .

Oh, Doctor Balta! We have a seat right up front for you! What is your specialty?

Rocks

You mean like David Crosby?

No, rocks

Oops, I mean we have a seat in the back for you . . .

Really...you think we're not useful?

 

Now about that good seat...

Balta is turning to the darkside of petroleum geology

Welcome to the Lone Star State Balta

Balta is turning to the darkside of petroleum geology

 

he'll be a reasonable Romney voter in no time.