If you watch NFL games you’ll likely hear commentary about the nomadic characteristics of NFL owners such as Art Modell of the Browns and Al Davis of the Raiders.

Sports owners regularly pit city against city, and demand that tax dollars pay for new, state-of-the-art stadiums, provide massive amounts of land rent-free, and allow the sports team to keep all the profits. In exchange for a few jobs, city governments get on their hands and knees for the owners and say: “We’ll give you this, we’ll give you that, just please locate in our city.”

During the football season last year, on “This Week With David Brinkley,” George Will, Sam Donaldson, and others criticized the mayor of Baltimore about using tax dollars to provide luxury boxes for rich people in plush new stadiums. Then, they dialogued with Senator Michael Dewine (R., Ohio), who introduced legislation to curb NFL team flight and owner extortion.

Now, if these pundits had criticized the governments for taxpayer subsidies to Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), sugar growers in Florida, or AT&T, for example, they would probably get fired. And if a senator offered legislation to stop the free movement of corporations (which get their charters in one state) to whatever point on the globe they want, he or she would have to be something other than a Republican or Democrat in today’s Congress.

Corporate welfare costs the federal treasury about four times as much as poverty welfare, yet we hear preciously little about it in the corporate-owned media.

Independent media such as The Drummer, The Nation, Z Magazine, and the like have been writing about corporate welfare for years. Every once in a while, the corporate media has to report on issues like corporate welfare to maintain its credibility. I mean, they can’t paint a picture of the world in colors the economic elite wants you to see all the time, that would make the media’s propaganda function too obvious.

For the most part, when corporate welfare is discussed, the corporate media are more critical of NFL organizations than they are of big business in general.

We here criticisms of Davis and Modell, but what about AT&T, which New York City gave $20 million in tax relief in the 1980s, only to see the company move the majority of its staff to New Jersey? What about Mcdonnel Douglas, which threatened to shift production out of California until state legislators handed out $80 billion of taxpayer money? Why is media dialogue more critical of NFL organizations than big business in general?

Maybe it’s because with sports coverage and most of the entertainment industry, anything goes. As much as I like spectator sports, we also have to realize there is a very important role that spectator sports play for the economic and political elite in our society. They diverts people from public life so the elite can rule without interference.

With new interactive technology, the average Joe six-pack, if he buys a computer, in the future will likely be able to call plays during a football game. It won’t have any effect on what the quarterback actually does, but after the play a TV channel will put up numbers, sixty-three percent say he should have passed. Now you’re really participating in the world. Forget all this business about deciding what to do about skyrocketing health care costs, now you’re doing something really important: deciding what play the quarterback should have called. Just one more way to make people passive, atomized, obedient, non-participatory, non-questioning, isolated and easily controlled and disciplined.

Gambling casinos and theme parks are two of the fastest growing industries in the United States. If the elite can feed us the Roman circus day after day (can you say O.J. Simpson trial?), maybe we won’t notice that CEOs in the United States make 141 times the wages of the average worker, or that people my age face a less promising economic future than their parents did, or that this country has a 23 percent child-poverty rate.

Speaking of poverty, here in the richest country in the world, most poor people aren’t on welfare, they work every day. They’re poor because of the enormous amounts of surplus value the capitalists extract from their checks.

In any case, the sports world shows how certain parts of our economic system work. Corporate welfare drains money for public needs such as schools, transportation and the like, and give certain businesses an unfair advantage over other businesses. Maybe corporate welfare is a good thing, who knows? But shouldn’t our governments conduct economic impact studies to evaluate the purported effectiveness and efficiency of all corporate welfare programs? After all, corporate lobbyists always want a cost-benefit analysis done for health, safety, and environmental regulations but rarely want the same analysis for their raids of taxpayer money.

Maybe it’s time for some of these corporations to start living up to their free market rhetoric and “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” and end their “cycle of dependency.”

After an attempt in 1995 to get rid of the Market Promotion Program, which subsidizes advertising budgets of corporations selling abroad, failed 61 to 37 in the Senate and 261 to 154 in the House, House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R., Texas) said, “I wonder about our commitment to deficit reduction if we cannot take Betty Crocker, Ronald McDonald and the Pillsbury Doughboy off the dole.”

Drew Chebuhar is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Muscatine.