Lockouts: The Empire Strikes Back

Tuesday, February 14, 2012 by Common Dreams
by David Macaray

If you’re looking for evidence of just how confident, militant, and insufferably arrogant companies have become in recent years, look no further than the phenomenon of the lockout. A lockout is where a company closes its doors, refusing to allow its union employees to return to work until they accede to company demands—demands that typically call for staggering cuts in wages and benefits.

Unlike strikes—which, as the ultimate manifestation of employee dissatisfaction with management, are a universally recognized form of protest—lockouts are a form of extortion. A lockout represents an unambiguous threat, an ultimatum. Management figuratively places a gun to the employees’ heads and says, Take it or leave it.

There was a time not long ago when strikes were a regular part of the American economic landscape, and when, conversely, lockouts were about as scarce as hen’s teeth. In fact, lockouts were practically unheard of. But given that the business world has been recalibrated—and given the availability of replacement workers, part-timers and temps, coupled with the weakening of state and federal labor laws—strikes are now relatively uncommon, and, in a reversal, lockouts have become management’s new weapon of choice.

One of the uglier incidents occurred recently at Caterpillars’ London, Ontario, facility. After the membership refused company demands that they accept a whopping 55-percent wage cut, plus the elimination of the pension plan (along with other take-aways), the plant’s 465 production workers were abruptly locked out. No further negotiating, no compromises, no mediation; the company went directly to lockout mode. Then, after a 6-week lockout, Caterpillar announced it was shutting the plant down for good, and that everyone had lost their jobs. That’s what we politely meant by businesses “recalibrating.”

Strikes have always had a distinctly schizoid nature, being both dreaded and embraced, glorified and vilified Traditionally, when workers in a viable facility (i.e., one making a healthy profit) reached the point in contract negotiations where the company refused to budge, they hit the bricks. They shut the place down, walked off the job, thereby depriving the company of the ability to make a profit, and, very importantly, sacrificing their own economic well-being by no longer earning a wage or receiving benefits.

Because the stakes are so high, strikes have always been rightly regarded as spooky, monumental undertakings. While some strikes have been successful, many—perhaps most—have not. But successful or not, strikes need to be recognized as labor’s only real weapon. Depriving management of the opportunity to make money is the only bullet in the chamber; everything else is theatrics. Other than striking, what’s a union going to do to get the management’s attention—threaten to stand on the front lawn and scream insults through a megaphone?

Here’s a true story. In 1983 I was part of a union negotiating team that called a strike against a major manufacturing company, an action that put more than 700 men and women out on the street. It was a chaotic scene. Even though we got a 96-percent strike authorization vote prior to the shutdown, once the real thing happened, and the hammer dropped, people were understandably frightened and anxious. The strike lasted 57 days.

Looking to nip any problems in the bud, we immediately contacted the company’s HR rep and made clear our views regarding people crossing the picket line. Although we were a tight local, and didn’t anticipate scabs, you never know what people will do in a crisis. We told the company that if they allowed scabs to cross, we would be forced to retaliate by taking out full-page ads in local newspapers, exposing the company’s greed and stubbornness, and calling them bad names.

They didn’t take our peremptory salvo well. The strike was barely four hours old, and tensions were already running high. They told us to shut up, mind our own business, and not presume to lecture them on how to run their operation. But they also informed us that they had no intention of allowing people to cross over, believing that allowing people to cross would create more problems than it solved. We believed them.

But within a week or two, a handful of our guys tried to do just that. They approached at night (it was a 24-hour operation) hoping they wouldn’t be observed, and asked to be put to work. When the company refused, it occurred to them that being denied entry might very well constitute a “lockout.” While it was a known fact that strikers weren’t entitled to unemployment benefits, wouldn’t “locked-out” employees be eligible?

They went down to the unemployment office and made their case. They told the duty officer that even though their union had called a strike, they themselves wished to continue working, but the company wouldn’t let them. “Doesn’t that mean that this is a lockout and not a strike?” they asked eagerly. The duty officer seemed puzzled. She thought about it a moment and answered: “What’s a lockout?”

When Sports Loses Its Soul

A League of Fans
By RALPH NADER

Why do many serious readers of newspapers go first to the Sports section? Maybe because they want to read about teams playing fun games by sports journalists and columnists, who have more freedom to use imaginative words and phrases than others in their craft.

The trouble is that ever-more organized and commercialized sports are squeezing the fun out of the games. I'm not just referring to struggles between multimillionaire players against billionaire owners--as in the current NFL lockout and the looming NBA imbroglio. I am referring to what our League of Fans Sports Policy Director, Ken Reed, calls the "win-at-all-costs (WAAC) and profit-at-all-costs (PAAC) mentalities, policies and decisions that are resulting in a variety of abuses from the pros all the way to Little League." When WAAC and PAAC run amok--and what's best for the players, the fans and the game are shoved aside--"sport begins to lose its soul."

In his first of ten "League of Fans" reports, Reed makes the case against this "soul sickness" in a 27 page Sports Manifesto (www.leagueoffans.org). The range of endemic and often worsening problems is startling for how often they have been exposed without anything significantly being done about them.

Here is a list of Reed's choices for civic action:

• Academic corruption in college and high school athletic programs.

• Rampant commercialization from the pros to our little leagues.

• Publicly-financed stadiums for wealthy owners.

• The perversity of forcing loyal fans to purchase personal seat licenses (PSLs) in pro and college football just to have the right to buy season tickets.

• The sports cartel in Division I football known as the Bowl Championship Series (BCS)--which limits revenues and opportunities (e.g., a legitimate chance at a national championship) for the conferences and schools left on the outside.

• Work stoppages in the professional sports leagues in which fans have no voice.

• Exorbitant ticket and concession prices at taxpayer-funded stadiums (where most, if not all, ticket, concession, merchandise and parking revenues typically go to the franchise owners). In addition, there are also television blackouts from these taxpayer-financed stadiums.

• A focus on elite athletic teams in high schools and middle schools at the expense of diminishing intramural programs and physical education classes for all students.

• The practice of requiring college athletes to pay their own medical bills, even though they were injured while playing for their university.

• Disparities in opportunities for females, disabled individuals, and people of color despite Title IX and other civil rights advances.

• The proliferation of youth club sports organizations that have a financial vs. an educational mission.

• The specialization and professionalization of young athletes at earlier and earlier ages.

• The increasing use of performance-enhancing drugs at all ages, by both males and females.

• The erosion of the core ideals, values and ethics of sports, resulting in escalating incidents of poor sportsmanship.

• An increase in sports injuries, most alarmingly concussions.

• A shocking increase in obesity, accompanied by a decline in physical fitness--especially among our youth.

• Dehumanizing coaches at all levels, most disturbingly, at the youth level.

As a college varsity player, a coach, marketer, teacher and author, Reed is in touch with many worried and upset sports lovers. They include parents, current and retired players, leading analysts, academics, educators, physicians, reporters and civil rights advocates. League of Fans, which I started, wants to build a strong and growing reform movement not just to curb the "excesses of the monied interests," to use a Jeffersonian phrase, but to open up opportunities for more participatory sports right down to the neighborhood levels. We have too few players and too many spectators--a reality that sports journalism should pay more attention to regularly.

There is a problem afflicting sports journalism and its comparatively immense space and time devoted to professional sports. It goes beyond a largely indifferent attitude toward this imbalance between spectators and participatory sports. Even though the concerns of many sports-lovers are based on the occasional investigatory reports or columns documenting abuses, when people acting as citizens try to do something about them, their efforts receive little, if any media coverage.

So what's the point to these exposes other than to make readers and viewers angry, cynical or frustrated, if when the readers use this information to follow up and sound the alarm to do something, the sports media looks the other way and gives the space to some athlete who is pouting or showing up late for practice?

Sports journalism has to introspect a little about a larger view of newsworthiness. Otherwise they continue to uncritically cover the big league sports business that, with few exceptions, knows few restraints to its greed and insensitivity toward fans whom they are increasingly turning off.

Taking the Side of the Billionaires

Friday, May 27, 2011 by Consortiumnews.com
America’s Right – from the NFL lockout to Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget – side with the billionaires in what amounts to an escalating class war against the middle class and the poor
by Robert Parry

If American football fans end up facing a fall without NFL games, they probably won’t blame George W. Bush and other Republican presidents for packing the federal courts with right-wing judges, but it was two Bush appointees who reversed a District Court ruling that would have ended the lockout of players.

The Appeals Court judgment encouraged the NFL’s hardline billionaire owners to resist making the kinds of compromises that a few less intransigent owners recognize could easily resolve the impasse.

Now, the hardliners simply assume that Republican judges will keep siding with the NFL owners and thus enable them to beat down the players, eventually assuring the billionaire owners a bigger piece of the revenue pie – even if that means losing some or all of the 2011 season.

What many average Americans, especially white guys, don’t seem to understand is that whatever the populist-styled rhetoric of Fox News or Rush Limbaugh, the Right’s default position is to side with the billionaires – and to show little or no regard for the fate of anyone else, whether NFL players or sick senior citizens.

Still, one must give the Right credit for having worked hard refining how to phrase its arguments. Right-wingers even have turned the term “class warfare” against the Left by shouting the phrase in a mocking fashion whenever anyone tries to blunt the “class warfare” that the billionaires have been waging against the middle class and the poor for decades.

On right-wing TV and talk radio across the country, there are tag teams of macho men pretending that ”class warfare” exists only in the fevered imagination of the Left. But billionaire investor Warren Buffett has acknowledged the truth: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

The right-wing propagandists further earn their keep by disparaging science as “elitist.” So, even as the dire predictions from climate-change experts that global warming will generate more extreme weather seem to be coming true, many Americans who have listened to the “climate-change-deniers” for years still reject the scientific warnings.

While no single weather event can be connected to the broader trend of climate change, the warnings about what might happen when the earth’s atmosphere heats up and absorbs more moisture seem to be applicable to the historic flooding in some parts of the world, droughts in others, and the outbreak of particularly violent storms.

Heat and moisture are especially dangerous ingredients for hurricanes and tornados.

Ironically, the parts of the United States hardest hit by this severe weather are those represented predominately by Republicans who have been at the forefront of obstructing government efforts to address the global-warming crisis.

Flooding, hurricanes and tornados have inflicted horrendous damage on Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee, Missouri and Oklahoma – all part of the Republican base.

God’s Punishment?

If televangelist Pat Robertson were a left-winger instead of a right-winger, he might be saying that God is punishing these “red states” for doubting the science of global warming.

However, even as the U.S. news obsesses over the violent weather, mainstream media stars have steered clear of whether global warming might be a factor. It’s as if they know that they’d only be inviting career-damaging attacks from the Right if they did anything to connect the dots.

The Right also is not eager to explain how these catastrophes will require emergency funding and rebuilding assistance from the federal government. After all, you don’t want Republican voters to understand that sometimes “self-reliance” alone doesn’t cut it; sometimes, we all need help and the government must be part of that assistance.

In the case of the killer tornado that devastated Joplin, Missouri, House Republicans, without a hint of irony, are extracting the funds for disaster relief from green energy programs, which remain a favorite GOP target since many Republicans still insist there is no such thing as global warming.

At both state and national levels, Republican leaders have lined up behind climate-change deniers, with former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty just the latest GOP presidential hopeful to apologize for his past support of a cap-and-trade system aimed at reducing global-warming gases.

Any serious move toward alternative energies would, of course, be costly to the giant oil companies and their billionaire owners, like David Koch of Koch Industries who has spent millions of dollars funding right-wing organizations, such as the Tea Party. The Right’s media/political operatives know better than to bite the hand that feeds them.

GOP orthodoxy also disdains tax increases on the rich or even elimination of tax breaks for the oil industry. The Republican insistence on low tax rates for the wealthy, in turn, has forced consideration of other policy proposals to achieve savings from services for average Americans.

That is why congressional Republicans have targeted Medicare with a plan that would end the current health program for the elderly and replace it with a scheme that would give subsidies to senior citizens who would then have to sign up for health insurance from private industry, which has proven itself far less efficient in providing health care than the government.

The GOP budget, drafted by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, would impose the Medicare changes on seniors beginning in 10 years.

Most attention on the Ryan plan has focused on estimates that it would cost the average senior citizen more than $6,000 extra per year, but the proposal also has the effect of privatizing Medicare, meaning that the government would make direct “premium support” payments to profit-making insurance companies whose interest is in maximizing profits, not providing the best possible care for old people.

While the Ryan plan would achieve budget “savings” by shifting the burden of health-care costs onto the elderly, Ryan’s budget also would lower tax rates for the wealthiest Americans even more, from 35 percent to 25 percent. Partly because of that tax cut, Ryan’s budget would still not be balanced for almost three decades.

Class Warfare

Thus, the battle lines of America’s “class warfare” are getting more sharply drawn. The conflict is now over the Right’s determination to concentrate even more money and power in the hands of the rich by hobbling any government capability to protect the people’s general welfare.

If the Right wins, individual Americans will be left essentially defenseless in the face of unbridled corporate power.

Ryan’s Medicare plan may be just the most striking example because it envisions sick old people trying to pick their way through a thicket of private insurance plans with all their confusing language designed to create excuses for denying coverage. It is not an exaggeration to say that Ryan’s tight-fisted Medicare plan could consign millions of Americans to a premature death.

The Right’s priorities hit home at a town hall meeting held by Rep. Rob Woodall, R-Georgia, when he chastised one of his constituents who worried that Ryan’s plan would leave Americans like her, whose employer doesn’t extend health benefits to retirees, out of luck.

“Hear yourself, ma’am. Hear yourself,” Woodall lectured the woman. “You want the government to take care of you, because your employer decided not to take care of you. My question is, ‘When do I decide I’m going to take care of me?’”

However, another constituent noted that Woodall accepted government-paid-for health insurance for himself.

“You are not obligated to take that if you don’t want to,” the woman said. “Why aren’t you going out on the free market in the state where you’re a resident and buy your own health care? Be an example. …

“Go and get it in a single-subscriber plan, like you want everybody else to have, because you want to end employer-sponsored health plans and government-sponsored health plans. … Decline the government health plan and go to Blue Cross/Blue Shield or whoever, and get one for yourself and see how tough it is.”

Woodall answered that he was taking his government health insurance “because it’s free. It’s because it’s free.”

Self-reliance, it seems, is easier to preach to others than to practice yourself.

Woodall’s explanation recalled the hypocrisy of free-market heroine Ayn Rand, whom Rep. Ryan has cited as his political inspiration. In her influential writings, Rand ranted against social programs that enabled the “parasites” among the middle-class and the poor to sap the strength from the admirable rich, but she secretly accepted the benefits of Medicare after she was diagnosed with lung cancer.

A two-pack-a-day smoker, Rand had denied the medical science about the dangers of cigarettes, much as her acolytes today reject the science of global warming. However, when she developed lung cancer, she connived to have Evva Pryor, an employee of Rand’s law firm, arrange Social Security and Medicare benefits for Ann O’Connor, Ayn Rand using her husband’s last name.

In 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand, Scott McConnell, founder of the Ayn Rand Institute’s media department, quoted Pryor as saying: “Doctors cost a lot more money than books earn and she could be totally wiped out.”

So, when push came to shove, even Ayn Rand wasn’t above getting help from the “despised government.” However, her followers, including Rep. Ryan, now want to strip those guaranteed benefits from other Americans of more modest means than Ayn Rand.

It seems it’s okay for average Americans to be wiped out.

Hypocrisy, Hypocrisy

While the Right’s penchant for hypocrisy is well-known (note how many Republicans involved in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton had their own extra-marital affairs), the bigger mystery is why so many average-guy Americans volunteer to fight for the rich in the trenches of the Right’s class warfare.

Clearly, the Right’s propaganda with its endless repetition is very effective, especially given the failure of the American Left to invest significantly in a competing message machine. The Right also has adopted the tone of populism, albeit in support of a well-to-do economic elite.

Yet, perhaps most importantly, the Right has stuck with its battle plan for rallying a significant percentage of middle-class Americans against their own interests.

Four decades ago, President Richard Nixon and his subordinates won elections by demonizing “hippies,” “welfare queens” and the “liberal media.”

Then, in the late 1970s, a tripartite coalition took shape consisting of the Republican Establishment, neoconservatives and the leaders of the Christian Right. Each group had its priorities.

The rich Republicans wanted deep tax cuts and less business regulation; the neocons wanted big increases in military spending and a freer hand to wage wars; and the Christian Right agreed to supply political foot soldiers in exchange for concessions on social issues, such as abortion and gay rights. Ultimately, each part of the coalition got a chunk of what it wanted.

From Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, the rich got their taxes slashed, saw regulations rolled back and gained a larger share of the nation’s wealth and political power. The neocons got massive military spending and the chance to dispatch U.S. soldiers to kill Israel’s Muslim enemies. The Christian Right got help in restricting abortions and punishing gays.

But what did the American middle-class get?

Over those three decades, the middle-class has stagnated or slipped backward. Labor unions were busted; jobs were shipped overseas; personal debt soared; education grew more expensive, along with medical care. People were working harder and longer – for less. Or they couldn’t find jobs at all.

With today’s Tea Party and the Ryan budget, the Right’s coalition is staying on the offensive. If the House budget were passed in total, tax rates for the rich would be reduced another 10 percentage points; military spending would remain high to please the neocons (who foresee a possible war with Iran); and Planned Parenthood and other pet targets of the Christian Right would be zeroed out.

Yet, with the proposed elimination of traditional Medicare, the Ryan budget has lifted the curtain on what the Right’s “free market” has in mind for most average Americans, who could expect to find their lives not only more brutish but shorter.

The real-life-and-death consequences of the Right’s tax cuts, military spending and culture wars are finally coming into focus. If you’re not rich – and can’t afford to pick up the higher tab on health care – you’re likely to die younger. Or your kids might have to dig into their pockets to help you out.

Less extreme but still troubling, another consequence of the Right’s remarkable success over the past three decades might become apparent on your TV screens this fall.

Thanks to all those right-wing judges packed onto federal appeals courts by Reagan and the two Bushes, American football fans might not have the NFL to watch.

The NFL’s lockout of its players seemed to be ending several weeks ago when a lower-court judge ruled against the billionaire owners, but the NFL’s lawyers confidently filed an appeal to a three-judge panel on the Eighth Circuit, knowing that they would surely get one dominated by Republican judges.

They did. Steven Colloton and Duane Benton, two Republicans appointed by George W. Bush, constituted the majority on the panel and reflexively sided with the NFL’s owners.

The ruling should have surprised no one. After all, the Right’s default position is almost always to side with the billionaires.

Corp. Comedy: Turds in the Drink/No Pro Football? No Problem (2 articles)

Bill Hicks and the Place of Corporate Comedy
By CHARLES M. YOUNG

I have three comedians on my iPod: Richard Pryor, George Carlin and Bill Hicks. All of them evolved as much into prophets as comedians, and all of them died younger than they should have from maladies that probably had something to do with the stress of being a live performer on the road in corporate America.

Hicks died the youngest, of pancreatic cancer at the age of 32 in 1994. Perhaps his pancreas had had enough of his drinking, which started later than usual at the age of 21 but got excessive quickly. Or maybe it was road food from all that driving to comedy clubs around the country. He looked puffy by his mid-20s. If Hicks came back from the dead, he could do a good routine about government agents slipping some carcinogen (white sugar?) into his food because his routines had come too close to the truth.

That was one of his best joke constructions, taking some dark conspiracy theory lurking in the collective unconscious and validating not so much the theory as the paranoia that got the imagination fired up in the first place. In a routine called "The Elite" on his album Rant in E-Minor, Hicks speculates on what happens to a new president.

"When you win, you go in this smokey room with the 12 industrialist/capitalist scumfucks who got you [elected]...And this screen comes down—whrrrrrrr—and this big guy says, 'Roll the film.' It's a shot of the Kennedy assassination from an angle you've never seen before. [Big laugh.] And it looks suspiciously off the grassy knoll. And the screen comes up and they go to the new president and say, 'Any questions?'"

Hicks did believe the Warren Commission was a lie, but you can have any theory you want about the Kennedy assassination and get the joke there. He's describing a fictional situation, and in literal reality, it doesn't happen like that. Long before anyone is elected president, they are vetted for obedience. Nobody has to tell politicians to obey, or what the consequences of disobeying would be. New presidents want to obey, and that's why they got the nomination. What Hicks is getting at is not so much conspiracy but the deeper truth that inspires so many grassroots conspiracy theories. It really is a tiny number of industrialist/capitalist scumfucks who control everything. They will tell any lie and commit any crime to keep their power. Hicks not only understood that, he could make phenomenal jokes about it.

I saw the recent documentary about Hicks, American: The Bill Hicks Story. As a coming of age story about a teenager who figures out that he's funny, becomes fascinated by the mechanics of humor, and is performing in nightclubs before he can drive, it's compelling and even triumphant. Growing up talented in the Deep South always has its element of heroism. The story is not so much about finding himself, which he did by his late teens, but finding a place to display what he found of himself. That was a struggle until the end.

The documentary half-clarifies the infamous incident where David Letterman censored Hicks' routine in a 1993 appearance, just removed the whole bit from his show, which demoralized Hicks toward the end of his life. In 2009, Letterman decided to clean up his karma, inviting Hicks' mother on the show and apologizing for his poor judgment as an editor. The documentary shows the apology, which was gracious, but leaves out the actual routine, which Letterman did run in its entirety for the first time on the show.

Thanks to the wonders of Youtube, it is possible to see the segment (Hicks' mom and the routine), which is revelatory. I have four albums and two documentaries on Hicks, and the censored Letterman bit is one of his least funny. The guy is flailing, trying to maintain his shock value while staying inside the line of corporate television, which means he goes after lame targets like Billy Ray Cyrus. The joke that purportedly got him censored was a suggestion that the right-to-life movement blockade cemeteries instead of abortion clinics. Hicks picked a worthy target but missed it with a weak joke. Letterman was apparently afraid of offending a large group that gets offended easily, but the real problem with the routine was that Hicks' heart wasn't in it. His humor depended on crossing the line—not the line of good taste, which is easy, but the line of taboo truths—while Letterman has always stayed safely and lucratively within the line.

It has been said that Hicks' influence lives on in the comedy of Jon Stewart and Bill Maher. Not really. Stewart and Maher are both, at heart, GWOT Democrats. They have grown steadily more unfunny as Obama has steadily revealed himself as a tool of the usual industrialist/capitalist scumfucks. Even during the Bush administration, both Maher and Stewart were careful not to insult the military, which is way past the taboo line anywhere on corporate television.

On Rant in E-Minor, Hicks had this to say in a routine about integrating gays in the military: "Anyone DUMB ENOUGH to want to be in the military should be allowed in. End of story. That should be the only requirement. I don't care how many pushups you can do. Put on a helmet. Go wait in that foxhole and we'll tell you when we want you to go kill somebody. You know what I mean? I get so sick. I've watched these fuckin' Congressional hearings, and all these military guys, and all these pundits saying, 'Ohhhh, the espirit de corps will be affected and we are so moral...' Excuse me! Aren't you all fuckin' hired killers? Shut up! You are thugs! When we need you to blow the fuck out of a a nation of little brown people, we'll let you know. Until then...'We are the military. Is that a village of children and kids? Where's the napalm? Boooooom! I don't want any gay people hanging around me while I'm killing kids.'"

Compare that with Maher's orgasmic cheerleading for assassination on the most recent Real Time with Bill Maher:

"Barak Obama is one efficient, steely nerved, black Ninja, gangsta president." He went on to congratulate Obama for out-Republicaning the Republicans.

There's a modern prophet for you, like it takes nerves of steel to have hired killers shoot an unarmed man in the face on the other side of the world. Somehow I think that if Bill Hicks were alive, he'd be pointing that out. And he'd be pointing it out in little nightclubs (or in the UK, where he had more freedom to talk about America), not on Real Time.

Here's what Hicks had to say about the new Democrat who took office a year before Hicks died:

"'Ohhhh, that Clinton. Don't you have hope for Bill Clinton?' There no fuckin' hope in that guy. They're all the same. I'll show you politics in America. Here it is, right here: 'I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs.' 'I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking.' 'Hey wait a minute, there's one guy holding up both puppets!' 'Shut up! Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control. Here's Love Connection, watch this and get fat and stupid. By the way, keep drinking beer, you fuckin' morons.'"

Hicks had no mercy on his fellow comedians, especially a simpering demagogue like Jay Leno:

"It all started when he did the Doritos commercial. Here's the deal, folks. You do a commercial, you're off the artistic roll call forever. End of story. Okay? You're another corporate fuckin' shill. You're another whore at the capitalist gangbang...If you do a commercial, there's a price on your head. Everything you say is suspect. Every word that comes out of your mouth is like a turd falling into my drink."

Has that little piece of humorous commentary aged one minute since 1993? Everyone else is just following Leno to the bank. They don't even think about it anymore. I mean, who cares if Leno "betrayed" Conan O'Brien when Leno came back to the Tonight Show? They both betrayed themselves first. What O'Brien stands for is Bud Light, iPhone, American Express and whatever else he's endorsed. What's to betray? O'Brien even tried to make fun of himself for taking the money in his Bud commercial, as if Ivy League snark immunizes you from being thrown off the artistic roll call forever. Nope. It's just another turd in Bill Hicks' drink, and that's where the industrialist/capitalist scumfucks want their corporate comedy.

++++++++++++++++++++

Why the NFL Would Do Us a Favor by Canceling the Upcoming Season
By ROBERT LIPSYTE

There's nothing like a little dust-up between millionaires and billionaires to start us thousandaires yawning. And when the upcoming pro football season is in danger of being cancelled because of it, we're likely to say: a plague on both your mansions.

Too bad, because the current struggle between labor and management in the National Football League not only reflects the current attacks on unions across the country but conjures up, even if in cartoon fashion, some crucial American issues: racism, classism, sexism, recreational violence, and the health-care gap. No wonder football seems to have replaced baseball as the national pastime.

While the legalities of, and mathematics behind, the issues at the heart of the NFL dispute may be complex, the basic issues are not. The league's owners cry economic woe, while refusing to open their books. They insist on adding two games to the present regular season of 16 games and at the same time are trying to reduce the players' share of revenues. Moreover, they have been remarkably unwilling to guarantee long-term health benefits to the players, even as evidence mounts that dementia and early death are linked to the sort of brain trauma commonly suffered in football collisions.

It's not exactly a fair fight, which of course is why unions were invented. It's estimated that half of the NFL owners are worth at least a billion dollars each, while slightly less than half of NFL players make more than a million dollars annually. The average player's career lasts fewer than four years.

Most traditional sports media -- while claiming to represent those thousandaires, the fans -- have framed the battle as one between rich, greedy young men versus very rich, very greedy older men. The young men, so goes the present media line, were overpaid in the good times, and now, like everyone else, must give back in the economic bad times for the sake of the game. Not surprisingly, this greedy v. greedy take on a football dispute, which threatens the upcoming season, is hardly likely to engage the empathy of TV viewers who just want to watch the game as a respite from joblessness, foreclosure, or the problems that come from inadequate health insurance.

In case you haven't noticed, this isn't all that different from the way the larger labor struggles of American society have been framed recently. Greedy, overpaid municipal employees, for example, watching the clock until their bloated pensions and benefits kick in, are bleeding beleaguered governments supported by the rest of us. Okay, your basic offensive lineman isn't exactly like a beleaguered teacher or nurse, but the key element of the plot to destroy his ability to bargain collectively against more powerful forces is the same: make him the alien other, make him different from us.

Losin' That Lovin' Feeling

Back when we thought professional athletes were merely bigger and stronger versions of ourselves and the teams they played for were extensions of our pride of place, labor unrest in sports was personal and painful. Fans wondered how a player could hold out for more money when they would have played the game for free. How could a league threaten to cancel a season? Didn't it know the games gave rhythm to their lives?

In more than 50 years covering sports, I find the most striking change is in the attitude of fans toward the athletes. Fans have, I suspect, lost most of the emotional attachment they once had for "their" players and much of the old extended-family feeling toward their teams as well. And there's some justification for that: they've been hurt too many times by callous trades, players selling themselves to the highest bidder, bad behavior of every sort, and franchises simply picking up and moving elsewhere.

But there's something larger going on as well, echoed by the seemingly successful latest attacks on organized labor highlighted by the recent demonstrations in Madison, Wisconsin, and in the creation of the Tea Party League by those seemingly everyday folk who just happen to be funded by the same kind of robber barons who blackmail cities and states into paying for their ballparks.

Whether you're a TPL or an NFL fan (or both), the odds are increasing that you've lost connection to the players and instead begun to identify with the powerboys, the owners, whether of the corporate nation or the National Football League. This is hardly a phenomenon that began with sports, but it's vividly accessible in the simpler, more clear-cut world shaped around the player-owner-fan dynamic.

I first saw it revving up while covering our previous national pastime, baseball. In 1957, the year I joined the New York Times' sports department, two of the city's three baseball teams, the Dodgers and the Giants, decamped to California for better stadium deals. Brooklyn Dodgers fans seemed most bereaved and outraged. The team's players had often lived in their neighborhoods. Their vicissitudes had made possible conversations that crossed the usual class and racial divides. In churches and temples, clergymen led prayers to end losing streaks. Brooklyn was proud of its progressive history -- only 10 years earlier, Jackie Robinson had broken the major league color barrier at Ebbets Field. More African-American players soon joined him.

This was not the first franchise shift (Boston, St. Louis, and Philadelphia had all moved earlier in the 1950s) but this one got the most attention, perhaps because even then there were so many fine writers and academics in Brooklyn. The discussion has never abated.

The flight from Brooklyn to Los Angeles became a symbol of fan betrayal.

It was in those last months before the move, when the heckling from the stands grew vicious, that I first sensed the old order beginning to fracture. Those were, of course, just the initial fissures. Since then, the economic and social gap between fan and jock has widened to a yawning abyss as the millionaires and billionaires appeared and sports stadiums increasingly became the preserves of those wealthy enough to fork over staggering sums for seats.

Meanwhile, the financial value of sport teams escalated and the role of sportswriters as information couriers between players and fans became increasingly obsolete. TV freed athletes from needing print journalists to present them to the public, and most TV sports journalists -- the Daily Beast writer and editor Bryan Curtis has called sportscasting "a halfway house for half-wits" -- were thrilled to remain part of the show on the industry's terms.

Celebrity Sports Writing

From the athlete to the owner, sports increasingly became a matter of branding. Athletes could work to control their images through ads and paid appearances. Nowadays, blogs, tweets, and Facebook pages give teams and athletes direct access to fans. They can announce (and spin) their own news. There are tightly-controlled and infrequent mass media conferences. One-on-one interviews are negotiated with agents and public relations advisors. Sports writing has become another department of celebrity journalism.

Attempts at progressive activism within sports tended to be co-opted by cash; product endorsement money (think of those Nike ads) has usually kept even socially conscious athletes quiet. Few successful watchdog organizations were ever formed, though Ralph Nader's revived League of Fans may be something to keep an eye on. Its first public statement was a call for the end of college athletic scholarships, a fundamental building block of the pro game.

The violent excitement of football, its aggressive marketing, and the solidarity of the owners -- many of the more recent ones new-money entrepreneurs -- were all factors that helped push the game past baseball in audience and revenue. It captured the techno-smashmouth-imperialism of an empire that didn't quite know it was fading. Every mad-dog linebacker was an avatar for hedge-fund managers.

Some days I think that the worst-case scenario -- no National Football League games this year -- might be a blessing, especially if it were extended down through college and high school into the peewee leagues. It would be a year in which we could study those leading American issues that football vivifies so well.

Take lack of proper healthcare. No one is discussing steroids at the moment, although the freakish size and musculature of so many players would seem to indicate either the arrival of ever more sophisticated performance-enhancing drugs that escape detection or testing that is less rigorous than we have been led to believe.

The most pressing immediate concern, however, is head trauma. It usually becomes apparent years after retirement, but it begins in childhood when pounding on more vulnerable brains leads to lasting damage. A year off would give everyone a chance to let the steroids drain out and the testing for head injuries (even among youngsters) begin.

The classism and racism in pro football is almost too obvious to be worth mentioning. That the players are now predominately African-American, many of them sons of the underclass, may make this revolt of the gladiators even harder for the entitled white, ego-driven plutocrats -- not to mention the fans, predominately white and ever more likely to identify with the positions of the owners in this dispute. Otherwise, how do you explain the phenomenal expansion of the fantasy leagues in which every fan gets to be both owner and general manager of his or her own team?

And of course, it hardly needs be said that sexism remains pernicious, ranging as it does from those endless filler shots of hottie cheerleaders to a continuing pervasive discrimination against female college athletes which is frequently an attempt to protect the existence of large college football teams. Title IX, the federal law mandating fair play for women, requires an equity between male and female athletes. To balance their 100-plus squads of football players, college athletic departments routinely lie about the number of varsity female athletes they support.

And then there's the violence, on field as well as off (about 20% of NFL players have arrest records, according to articles and a book by investigative reporters Jeff Benedict and Don Yaeger); and don't forget in the living room -- domestic abuse hotlines light up after big games. Is it the gambling, the liquor, the testosterone?

Maybe we should be rooting for the labor impasse after all, at least through the coming season, during which we could learn some new football cheers:

Drain those steroids! Scan those brains! Open those financial books! Hit... softer!

NFL Players and Owners at an Impasse

A Cloud of Dust
By DAVID MACARAY

Within hours of the NFL’s collective bargaining talks breaking down, the owners initiated their anticipated Plan B, locking out the players (on March 12). And it wasn’t long after the lockout was announced that TV sports commentators began criticizing both sides for having “given up too soon.”

They chided both the team owners and the NFLPA (National Football League Players Association) for abandoning negotiations after utilizing a FMCS (Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service) mediator for “only sixteen days.” Those sixteen days of mediation were alluded to in utter disbelief, as if common sense told us that sixteen days weren’t anywhere near long enough.

What these commentators didn’t seem to realize is that union-management disputes aren’t like diplomatic negotiations or congressional hearings. This wasn’t a summit meeting between North and South Korea, where, after sixteen days, they’re still arguing over the seating arrangements.

Union-management negotiations are a whole other deal. Because labor disputes are all about money (as with the NFL, where the two sides are at odds over the players’ share of total revenue), and tend to be brutally direct, there is very little foreplay—and virtually none of the pompous rhetoric and public grandstanding we’ve come to associate with politics and diplomacy.

Sixteen days with a federal mediator in the room? That’s an eternity. If NLFPA executive director DeMaurice Smith were candid, he’d likely tell us that fourteen of those days were a total waste of time.

During a strike I was involved in some years ago, we met with an FMCS mediator (an ex-Steelworker rep named John Courtney) a grand total of three times. The first meeting lasted four hours and it occurred two days before we shut down the facility; the second occurred a month later, and it lasted eight hours; and the third and final meeting occurred on the 56th day of the strike. We spent 22 consecutive hours at the table before reaching a tentative agreement.

With all due respect to Courtney and his boss, Sam Sachman (who joined us at 11:00 P.M. on the final night), mediation played a very small part in the process. Although the mediators put their hearts into it, neither side paid much attention to them. What ended the strike—what got the union to return to work after 57 days—was the same thing that ends most strikes: the combination of austerity, fatigue, despair and resignation.

As for the football dispute, it will be surprising if it continues beyond the next two or three weeks. For one thing, there’s simply too much money to be made (and lost) by both sides. After all, this is a battle between millionaires and billionaires. For another, April 28 is college draft day, and the closer they get to that date, the higher the sperm count will be raised. The NFL doesn’t want to see the draft come and go without a settlement.

On March 22, the League made a slight tactical blunder when Commissioner Roger Goodell ominously suggested that the owners’ last offer “may not be on the table” the next time the parties meet. Besides Goodell having no business posing as an objective third party (he clearly represents the owners, who hired him and can fire him), his remarks scared no one. All he did was antagonize the Players Association.

When management puts a good faith offer on the table, they’re not only announcing to the union that it’s an agreement they can live with, they are, in effect, exposing their hand. They’re showing the union exactly what they consider important, how much they’re willing to pay, how far they’re willing to move, and what they’re willing to give up.

And you don’t go backwards. Management can’t suddenly withdraw that offer and pretend it never existed simply because they’ve grown impatient. They can’t pretend that the union’s negotiating team hasn’t already etched the terms of that offer indelibly on their brains….not if they’re serious about reaching a settlement.

Roger Goodell’s pathetic threat only succeeded in further alienating the players; and given how sensitive these bargains can be, that’s the last thing he wanted to do. Some advice for the commissioner: Stick to your administrative tasks, and leave the negotiating to the negotiators.

NFL Owners vs. Players

(I've been a pro football fan since I was 4--some would call my past fandom somewhat obsessive--but even though today, I am nowhere near the level of fan I was as a kid or even in the 1990s, I will stop watching pro football completely if they let their labor issues cancel the 2011 season. Completely. 

In 1994, due to the MLB Strike, the World Series was canceled for the first time since 1904. At the time, baseball was nipping at the heels of pro football (#1) as America's solid #2 spectator sport. After the strike, MLB sunk to the #4 sport behind the surging popularity of the NBA (the only sport that never seems to have labor issues), and the expanding NHL. MLB is currently the #3 spectator sport behind the NFL and NBA. (currently ranked as follows: NFL#1, NBA#2, MLB#3, NASCAR#4, NHL#5)

But in 2005, the NHL, which had seen huge gains in its popularity since the late 1990s, including a large network contract with ABC/ESPN, even briefly challenging the NBA as the #2 spectator sport, canceled its entire 2005-06 season due to a lockout. All the popularity gains they had made the previous decade were instantly erased, and in fact, the NHL actually fell from the #3 spectator sport down to #5, having since been eclipsed by NASCAR as America's #4 spectator sport. In the years since, the popularity of the NHL has remained stagnant, proving that losing an entire season is nearly unrecoverable, as far as fans interest is concerned.

And now the NFL, firmly entrenched as the nation's #1 spectator sport since the late 70s, has made the ill-advised decision to lock out its players in March 2011 if an agreement on a new collective bargaining agreement can't be reached. Learning nothing from the labor struggles of its fellow pro sports leagues and arrogantly considering their product beyond reproach to its fans, the NFL risks its popularity as the #1 spectator sport for the past 3 decades, opening the door for the NBA--a league that has had no labor issues since the 1970s, and whose popularity among the fans has never waned since it surpassed baseball in the 1990s--to become the most popular spectator sport in the country. Considering that the NHL still has not recovered from its 2005 lockout, and how long it took for baseball to recover from its cancellation of the 1994 World Series, the NFL will most likely tumble in the eyes of its fans, who are for the most part blue collar workers who are suffering the most during this prolonged economic downturn, with no end in sight. Fans will still watch college football and the other pro sports while the NFL stubbornly sticks to shooting its own wheels off. Screw them then.

In this economy, when the bulk of their fans face foreclosure, unemployment, rising healthcare costs, and the litany of Recession-era setbacks, millionaires and billionaires arguing over slivers of pie offends most people, including me. If they had a PR dept worth a fuck, they would put off this CBA negotiation until the economy recovers for all of us, not just the corporations and banks. Though I don't endorse either side, there would be no league without the players. The owners pay the bills but they earn the bulk of the profits, too. Lock out the players, lock out the fans. I'm done as an NFL fan if they cancel 2011.--jef)

+++

Three Myths About Professional Athletes and Their Unions
By DAVID MACARAY

With the NFL’s contract set to expire on March 3, and rumors of a lockout gaining momentum, fans are not only wondering if there will be a 2011-12 football season, they’re already blaming the NLFPA (National Football League Players Association) for this predicament. For whatever reason, it’s the players and their union who usually get blamed in these disputes. Rarely do fans direct their hostility toward the owners.

Correspondingly, it’s amazing how many people still believe that professional athletes didn’t coalesce into labor unions until relatively recently—during the turbulent 1960s—and that these collectives were formed as a result of collusion between greedy sports agents, opportunistic lawyers, and militant athletes.

But sports unions have been around for over a century. The Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players (note that “Baseball” was two words) was established way back in 1885, during Grover Cleveland’s first term as president. Professional athletes formed their own union while this country was still in the horse and buggy era. Indeed, the first Model T Ford wouldn’t roll off the assembly line for another 23 years.

There’s no shortage of myths about pro athletes, their wages, and their unions. Here are three of the most common:

Myth #1: These guys don’t need a union.

For openers, if they didn’t have a union, they wouldn’t have minimum salaries, defined pensions, guaranteed work rules, or grievance procedures. They wouldn’t have these things because they wouldn’t have had the muscle to obtain them. Professional athletes need a union for the same reason nurses, airline pilots and autoworkers need one. Without a union, they’d be at the mercy of the owners.

And if you trust team ownership, you haven’t been paying attention. In 1990, major league baseball’s owners were found guilty of collusion, a felony, and fined $280 million. Team owners are sharp-eyed, hardbitten businessmen, not sports dilettantes. Just as defense contractors plunder the U.S. treasury while waving the American flag, team owners like to pretend they’re performing a public service rather than engaging in naked commerce.

Moreover, management’s argument that high salaries are a threat to “small market” teams is disingenuous. First of all, where is it written that there should be an unlimited number of professional teams? For 90 years major league baseball flourished with only 16 teams. Secondly, why are those same free market fundamentalists who object to subsidies and regulations now worried that the Pittsburgh Pirates may face extinction? It’s the inexorable Law of the Market, boys, and you can’t have it both ways.

Myth #2: They make too much money.

In a perfect world, school teachers, social workers and existential poets would earn more money and wield more prestige than men who can hit a moving baseball or catch a football. But it’s not a perfect world; and whether we like it or not, the entertainment industry (including music, TV, movies, professional sports) generates a staggering amount of revenue….billions and billions of dollars a year.

With raises the question of who should get the lion’s share. Should it be those with the demonstrable talent, the skilled individuals who actually perform—the singers, actors and athletes—or should it be the parasites who cling to the talent, who draw sustenance from it—the owners, studio executives and promoters? Also, it’s worth noting that the majority of team owners became wealthy through inheritance. These “jock-sniffers” (players’ derogatory slang for owners) bought their teams with daddy’s money.

Amazingly, pro athletes figured this out long time ago. In 1890, professional baseball players (most of whom were unsophisticated lads fresh off the farm) decided that they didn’t need to be owned. Unsophisticated as they were, they were shrewd enough to realize that while there were many things a baseball team required—uniforms, a field to play on, teams to play against, spectators willing to pay, etc.—being owned by somebody wasn’t one of them.

Accordingly, they went ahead and formed what was called the Players League, consisting of eight teams owned and operated by the players themselves. Besieged by threats and false promises, the PL lasted only one season (1890), but the establishment of this players’ co-opt was a revelatory moment in American labor history.

Myth #3: High salaries are why tickets cost so much.

This is perhaps the silliest myth of all because it ignores a fundamental principle taught in Economics 101: the law of supply and demand. Team owners will charge as much as the market will bear. Simple as that.

Does anyone really believe that team owners would charge less for tickets if their payroll were to suddenly shrink? That these owners would willingly seek less money for tickets than what they already knew they could get? Of course they wouldn’t, and to think otherwise is absurd. They would continue to charge all that the market will bear, regardless of team payrolls, because that’s the nature of commerce.

Also, who do you think leaks these exorbitant salary figures? It’s not the players or their agents, who don’t necessarily want fans or other players to know their business. It’s team management who publicizes them, hoping that John Q. Public will get angry at the greedy players instead of resenting the owners for raising ticket prices. TV revenue and $1 a year stadium leases assure that no NFL team can lose money, which is why, despite their whining, NFL owners have steadfastly refused to open their books for inspection.

So with the current dispute being a battle between the millionaires and the billionaires, the choice of whom to support seems fairly obvious. You support the people who matter, who actually contribute, who possess a demonstrable skill, who are, in fact, indispensable to the game. You support the players.