Despite what team owners pretending empty pockets say, new sports arenas benefit only them, not local economies, as study after study has shown. Yet taxpayers keep getting hustled and giving welfare to the wealthy. An excerpt from Patrick Hruby’s seething, spot-on Yahoo! Sports piece about the use of public funds to build a new stadium for the Miami Marlins and their wealthy art-dealer owner Jeffrey Loria:

“Following the financial meltdown of 2008, President Bush diagnosed the deus ex machina of the Great Recession like this: ‘Wall Street got drunk.’ He was wrong. Wall Street did not get drunk. Wall Street got over. Wall Street made billions underwriting crappy mortgagees, repackaging them as Triple-A investments and peddling them to naïve investors (read: your 401(k), state pension plans); made billions more placing side bets on and against the preceding criminal, but not technically criminal practice; made billions on top of that when the whole unsustainable shell game went belly up, thanks to a massive, unprecedented influx of taxpayer cash — again: your money — via TARP and the Federal Reserve’s money-for-nothing “discount window,” which in turn allowed financial houses to keep handing out the kind of outsized salaries and bonuses that had the encamped residents of Zuccotti Park so peeved.

Over in the sports world, the Marlins are running the same basic con.

‘They’re finally spending money? That’s a misnomer,’ says Ken Reed, Sports Policy Director for the League of Fans, a Washington, D.C.-based fan advocacy group affiliated with consumer advocate Ralph Nader. ‘To me, it’s more like taxpayers have funded the entry fee into this high-priced fantasy league, and the Marlins are going off and buying players with our money. I think this will go down as the ultimate case of corporate sports welfare gone bad.’

Sick of corporate bailouts? Occupy the Marlins.”

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“Are you in?”: