Should We Call it Bailout Stadium?

If you’ve ever yearned to see your favorite sports team play at a ballpark not named after a bank, the phone company, or a purveyor of dog food, relief may be in sight. At the very least, two Congressmen have, shall we say, started the ball rolling. Ohio Democratic Representative Dennis Kucinich and Republican Texas Rep. Ted Poe have asked the Obama Administration to require Citigroup to cancel its arrangements to pay the New York Mets $400 million over twenty years for the right to call their new stadium Citi Field.

Now, annoying as the practice may be to some sports fans, naming rights deals have become pretty routine these days. San Diego fans, for instance, have to go to Petco Park to see the Padres and for two years the Houston Astros played at Enron Field (and no, it wasn’t renamed Felons Field, it’s Minute Maid Park now.) But what separates this deal from the routine, of course, is just how famously short of cash Citigroup is. So short that the Bush Administration ponied up $25 billion of taxpayer money to bail the bank out last October followed by another $20 billion in November. All of this while the bank released a plan to drop 52,000 employees – the nation’s largest layoff announcement in fifteen years – on top of a lay off of 17,000 earlier in the year.

So now that it’s become a ward of the state, does Citigroup have any plans to reconsider its spending priorities and save the $40 million for something maybe more central to its corporate mission like, say, banking? Not on your life. Eric Eve, Citigroup’s senior VP of global community relations assures us that the Citi Field deal “is a smart business decision,” and while acknowledging that “these are trying times for everyone,” he remained enthusiastic about being “able to see all of the nonprofit that we’re going to be able to bring to this field and enjoy these games” and “build and strengthen community relationships.”

The Congressmen saw it differently. Noting that the Treasury Department “forced Citigroup corporate executives to give up their private jet,” Kucinich suggested that it “also demand that Citigroup cancel its $400 million advertisement at the Mets field and instead begin to repay their debt to the taxpayers.”

If every cloud really does have a silver lining, then maybe a silvery glint in the current recession, depression, or whatever we wind up calling the situation is that in times like this it suddenly becomes much easier to recognize the fact that is we the people who are the ultimate source of corporate wealth. And with that recognition comes the idea that we ought to have some say in how corporate executives use that wealth. A year ago, the idea of limiting executive compensation was wild eyed radicalism; today it merits but a passing headline.

There aren’t a lot of corporations that have provided a stronger case for limiting executive compensation than Citigroup. According to the New York Times, when the bank brought Vikram Pandit on as its chief executive earlier in 2008, his total compensation package amounted “to at least $216 million.” The bank’s compensation committee explained its generosity as “recognizing that difficult economic conditions make rewarding key talent especially important.” (The Herald Tribune also noted that Robert Rubin, Treasury Secretary under Clinton and adviser to Obama, “had been paid $17.3 million [by Citigroup] in 2006 and collected more than $150 million in the last eight years.”)

The Obama Administration’s $500,000 cap on executive compensation for bailed out companies is not retroactive, by the way, so a $20 million dollar a year naming deal may still seem like relatively small change for the top guys at Citigroup. Likewise, in the sporting world, it wouldn’t even match the annual salary the Mets’d have to pay for a top-of-the line hitter like Alex Rodriguez or Manny Ramirez. But for the rest of us, it’s still quite a bit of money. It’s four hundred $50,000-a-year jobs, for instance.  Citigroup employees who kept their $50,000-a-year jobs could probably afford to buy their kids tickets to see games at Citi Field instead of having to perhaps try to get them through the nonprofit organizations Citigroup looks forward to bringing to the ballpark and building relationships with.

The bottom line on all of this that a publicly subsidized corporation obviously has no business giving a sports franchise $400 million so that they can continue to pay athletes salaries as outrageous as the ones that corporate executives pay themselves. Of course, these salaries were just as absurd last year, but last year an argument that this type of splurging demonstrated that there was simply too much wealth in corporate coffers had no place in mainstream American political discussion. Things are different today.

Kucinich and Poe are not the first to try to buck the corporate naming wave. The entire city of San Francisco has already weighed in on the question. In 1996, the naming rights to the city’s Candlestick Park, home to the baseball Giants and football 49ers, were leased to a computer networking company called 3Com. However, when the contract expired in 2001, 3Com Park reverted to Candlestick and in 2004 four members of the city’s Board of Supervisors, led by Board President Matt Gonzalez, decided to try to keep this from happening again. They placed a proposition before the voters to declare that “the City-owned sports stadium located at Candlestick Point … is hereby named and shall be referred to as ‘Candlestick Park.’” This, they said in the city’s voting guide, would be “an opportunity to send a signal that San Francisco remains on the front lines against the increased corporatization and commercialization of everyday life.”

On election day, 55% of the city’s voters sided with them, but by this time, the administration of Mayor Gavin Newsom, who had narrowly defeated Gonzalez for that office the prior year, had already acquiesced to a deal in which the 49ers leased the name of the publicly owned stadium and split the proceeds with the city. The 49ers did not reveal the exact terms, but said the city would net more than $3 million a year. Newsom characterized arguments that the naming deal represented a corporate sellout as “extreme and absurd.”

So the will of the voters notwithstanding, the City by the Bay is now the proud owner of a stadium called, for the moment, Monster Park. Newsom is, not surprisingly, unrepentant about his course of action. In fact, in a year when even corporate chieftains like Citigroup’s Vikram Pandit thought it politic to stay away from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Newsom attended the international corporate lovefest for the third year in a row. But given what’s going on in Washington, Newsom, who is known to be contemplating a run for governor of California, and all of the other politicians still looking for love from the Fortune 500 might just want to reconsider just what kind of, um, monster they could be creating for themselves.