DETROIT March Madness. Win or go home. It’s that simple. 65 teams started two weeks ago. 4 remain and the financially battered city of Detroit will host one of its own (Michigan State) plus Connecticut, Villanova and perennial (and President Obama bracket) favourite North Carolina to play next weekend and determine the national champion of collegiate basketball. This tournament has been bereft of Cinderellas as only three big upsets occurred early in the 1st round. Everything else has gone to plan as none of the Final Four remaining teams hugely surprises.

The irony? Will anyone be there to welcome the teams and the game’s 50,000 fans? Most will have paid much more for scalped tickets than the $500 per seat (face value) to watch the three games in the Pontiac Silver Dome sold out years in advance. Thus far though, each tournament venue has been notable for vast numbers of people disguised as empty seats.

Cameras have had to work hard in many large stadiums (the Minneapolis Superdome comes first to mind) where vast swaths of seats were conspicuously empty throughout the early rounds of the Tournament. I remember going to the first round and second rounds in Landover MD and Miami in 1994 followingmy university and every seat was packed for 9 games and sessions as long as 12 straight hours. It was a basketball feast!

The irony? Pontiac is the city where the stadium resides and the division GM will soon shed as it did its Chairman last night, the very tone deaf, Rick Wagoner. The US Treasury Department, overseeing auto bailout and Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds, ordered him gone for lack of movement and condition for future bailout funds. Wagoner remained the poster child for corporate excess flying to hearings (along with the CEOs of Ford and Chrysler) last year in a corporate jet.

So tone-deaf are TARP and bailout recipients that daily their centre cut meat, cushions on their seat excesses appear ludicrously out-of-touch to a frustrated and angry populace. Now the government is taking action, also demanding yesterday that life-support system candidate Chrysler merge with Italian automaker Fiat to save both. While the already edgy stock market fearful of government intervention is not likely to like this move… they brought it on themselves.

So as the rich and corporate famous jet-set in for private country club dinners and sales junkets before settling in courtside for a corporate sponsored orgy of greed and sport, most bloggers will be busy watching to see who is there and in the company of whom in the gallery? Only when the worst offenders are appropriately named and shamed by the blogosphere will the timid corporately owned MSM media (worrying about upsetting its advertisers) join the bandwagon asking why?

Late Friday, NBC grew a spine and revealed that TARP recipient banks spent $250,000 of taxpayer bailout money contributing Political Action Committee funds of senior managers to the campaign war-chests of the very Congressional leaders sitting on the House Financial Services Committee that were regulating it and dealing our TARP funds! So as the taxpayer owners, we were subsidising political campaigns and influence peddling.

And for some reason no one was surprised the revolving door of cash continued unabated, even after banks had been called out for expensive sport sponsorships and reckless travel junkets.

Now they’re all headed to Detroit, a city with record numbers of homeless and an average home price of just $18,000 (no there is not a zero missing in that figure, $2,000 less than my parents paid for a 3-bedroom home in 1965!).

The fallout from the decline and fall of the auto industry? What the multiple closing of plants and jobs moved to Mexico did not kill, the recession has. Tent cities are springing up along the Detroit River and under downtown overpasses. The same people who sped to and from their offices in the Renaissance Center fortress in locked cars with loaded guns under the seat to the safety of their suburban homes, now find them themselves fighting for their very lives living next to the very same criminals, addicts and junkies they were fleeing.

Now that’s ironic. Enjoy the games.