DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

We have seen the future, and it sucks.

Officials Behind $500 Million Vikings’ Stadium Subsidy Get Free Luxury Box Tickets for Family and Friends

28th November 2016

Read it.

Six government appointees, including the son of a vice president, who negotiated how much public money would be spent building the Minnesota Vikings’ new football stadium get free access to luxury boxes for all events in the stadium.

Which, you know, might call into question how hard they really negotiated for the taxpayers on that one.

Bet they were Democrats.

Maybe the best part of the story is the moment when two members of the MSFA board (chairwoman Michele Kelm-Helgen and executive director Ted Mondale) try to justify their sweet, free, and secret perk by arguing that they “work long hours on game days and spent long nights negotiating on behalf of taxpayers during construction of the building, so having friends and family there is reasonable.”

Mondale, by the way, is the son of former U.S. vice president Walter Mondale and he has lived the life of a vice president’s son. After a brief stint in elected office during the 1990s, he’s settled into a rotating set of political appointments. He was appointed to the Twin Cities’ Metropolitan Council by Gov. Jesse Ventura in 1999, and he used that post to push for the approval of a pair of ridiculously expensive light rail lines. With that public boondoggle in his resume, he was probably a natural fit on the MSFA board, to which he was named CEO by Gov. Mark Dayton in 2012, just as the new stadium deal was in the works.

Looks perfectly Crustian to me. What’s the use of having power if you can’t abuse it?

2 Responses to “Officials Behind $500 Million Vikings’ Stadium Subsidy Get Free Luxury Box Tickets for Family and Friends”

  1. Elganned Says:

    It only shows you that even Democrats believe in crony capitalism. What, you thought it was only Republicans? Oh, foolish child…

  2. Tim of Angle Says:

    No, YOU thought it was only Republicans. The rest of us have known it was mostly Democrats all along. After all, they are the inventors of the Big City Corrupt Political Machine.