Who will make the money from Indianapolis’s hosting of the Super Bowl®?

   1) The number of locally-owned businesses downtown (or anyplace, for that matter) has declined significantly over the past decade. The hotels are national chains—Marriott, Hilton, Westin, or spin-offs. The bellpeople, housekeeping staff, and other personnel will earn their paychecks and maybe receive some well-deserved tips. The Slippery Noodle Inn and St. Elmo’s, the last I checked, are locally-owned. The reason I make this distinction is that the profits from the chains will leave Indy. And let’s not forget parking! The whole deal with parking was done just in time for the Super Bowl®. At least one of the corporations that partnered on the parking meters owns parking garages. Prices of meters have gone up and frequency of tickets being written increased such that some find it more prudent to park in one of the garages. Maybe those corporations are locally-owned. I am not sure. But that’s like a person in New Jersey taking comfort that his trash pick-up is being done by one of Tony Soprano’s companies: local but not likeable. We cannot overlook the towing companies, either. They will make some coin. But not a lot of locals will enjoy economic advantage from the event.

   2) With the Super Bowl® will come drunkenness and with drunkenness will come arrests related to behavior thereto. There will be fines (nominal) and court costs ($169.50 at present, I think, and mandatory). Some lawyers will make not outrageously high fees. (Fees from public intox cases might be five-figure, but two of those figures are behind decimal points.)

   3) Vendors of various NFL® related wear will derive income. The NFL®, of course, will receive its cut.

   4) Cabbies will make some money. Of course, a lot of them have to pay for the cab for the day (I think it’s called check-in fee at one company) and then they start making money.

   But what have we paid? There are a lot of extra hours various officers of the county’s law enforcement agencies will work. If there is a fly-over of Lucas Oil Stadium (and I have not heard whether there will or will not be one), that costs about half a million bucks. The Consolidated City of Indianapolis and Marion County will pay for that, if it occurs. A fly-over would not make much sense as February weather here usually is nasty and cold, so the dome would (presumably) be closed. There has not been much "sense" exercised in this production to date, however, so why would there be when it comes to a fly-over no one in the stadium can see except on the big screen? There were a bunch of "improvements" made.

   Georgia Street likely will be as much of a success as Union Station.

   Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller has described the Super Bowl® as the largest single sex-trafficking event in the country. So there will be hookers here. Indy has local hookers, but there will be hookers from out-of-town. Will they have to wear NFL® official night wear (upscale and in hotels) or hot pants and short leather jackets (econo-class and working the streets)? Of course, they do not make the profits. Their pimps make the profits.

   And that brings me back to the NFL®.    

   Does one call it "irony" that Jim Irsay criticized Peyton Manning for talking to the press about Manning’s future with the team? Irsay bought the original, scrolled manuscript of On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Kerouac is seen by many as having launched the era of free spirits of the 1960s and 1970s. (In reality, he was an uptight Catholic who hated his mother, but the fiction he wrote was about the prototypical free spirits Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarity.) Jim Irsay became a billionaire from the largesse of Indianapolis and his ownership of 1/32 of a monopoly or oligopoly; one or the other). Presumably, if he had followed in his father’s footsteps and been a heating and ventilating contractor, he would not have been able to afford the manuscript.

   So let us again address the topic of freedom. 

  Chapter 986 of the Revised Code of the Consolidated City of Indianapolis, under "LDL-3-Signs," passed this last August, requires a Limited Duration License ("LDL") for "temporary" signs. One must apply for a license, pay a fee, and obtain the license before she or he can display a sign PLUS twenty percent (20%) of the area of the sign must include THEIR (a/k/a the NFL®/Super Bowl’s ®) official logo. That only is for the Special Event Zones of Broad Ripple, Massachusetts Avenue, and Fountain Square. Downtown, the sign must devote sixty percent (60%)—that’s right SIXTY PERCENT—of its surface area to the Super Bowl® logo.

   Again: Saturday, January 28, 2012, at 11:00 a.m., "Civil Discourse Now" will film one or more acts of civil disobedience. The conduct will address corporate greed and oppression in its campaign to extract as much money as possible from the people of this County and State while Super Bowl® personnel try to quash free speech.

   Mark 01/28/12 on your calendars. And watch this web site. Saturday, January 21, 2012, at 11:00 a.m.

   And here I can remember the first game, between Green Bay and Kansas City. Kick-off was at 1p.m. (as I recall) and the game was kind of a novelty. It wasn’t even called "Super Bowl."®