Sorry, but I thought you were. Clearly you were in the business though.

The use of ED to benefit large corporations is not simply an East Coast problem. The building of the stadium for the Texas Rangers used ED to take something like 270 acres of which 17 went to the Stadium and the rest for a windfall-profit office park because the land was so cheap. Owners who were expropriated sued because the land value was SO downgraded and, last I heard, they had won the first cases. The new owners made millions on the deal.

But we have it here, too. One of the reasons the Brooklyn Dodgers fled to L.A. was that Robert Moses, the Czar of New York building and development, refused to aid Walter O'Malley in his quest to condemn a whole bunch of Brooklyn neighborhoods so he could build his new stadium. Currently, the owner of the New Jersey Nets basketball team is trying to do the same thing so he can move our Nets to Brooklyn.

In fact, sports stadiums across the nation are a frequent use of ED, despite their rather dismal financial history.