Richard (RJ) Eskow is a senior fellow at the Campaign for America's Future. He writes
"Who Makes the Game?" Donald Sterling Certainly Asked the Right Question:
We'll say one thing for Donald Sterling: He certainly asked the right question.
You've probably heard his comments a hundred times by now, but here's a quick refresher. When asked "Do you know that you have a whole team that's black, that plays for you?" Sterling replied:
" ... Do I know? I support them and give them food, and clothes, and cars, and houses. Who gives it to them? Does someone else give it to them? ... Who makes the game? Do I make the game, or do they make the game?" |
Elgin Baylor, the legendary player turned general manager for Sterling's Clippers, alluded to the "plantation-type structure" of Sterling's management in a 2009 lawsuit. And Josh Levin is right: there is a decidedly antebellum mentality to be found in the sports world, especially in Sterling's words and deeds as a team owner.
Richard Eskow
Racism is a powerful ongoing force in our country's social dynamic, but race is also closely connected with class as a tool for economic warfare. The plantation isn't the only analogy for Sterling's mindset. His attitude toward the players also resembles that of baronial landlords toward tenant farmers, or mine owners toward miners who were paid in 'credits' for the company store. Like plantation owners, the landed aristocracy and the mining bosses saw their employees and tenants as less than fully human. They kept them in a form of peonage, both financial and cultural, while clinging to a worldview which justified their own domination. […]
Not every industry is as dependent on its employees as professional sports, but many are. That includes the Silicon Valley, as demonstrated by an industry-spanning cartel designed to cheat employees of their wages.
No industry or corporation exists in a vacuum. Even the notoriously non-productive financial industry would collapse without the participation of "ordinary" Americans - as customers, pension fund contributors, municipal taxpayers, and implicit underwriters of too-big-to-fail institutions.
Who makes the game? You do. To believe otherwise is to unilaterally surrender power to the Donald Sterlings and Mitt Romneys of this world. Yes, they have enormous wealth at their disposal. And yes, they're corrupting the political process. But without the participation of everyone in our society, their game can't continue.
It may take boycotts or strikes or other forms of non-cooperation to illustrate the point, but the fact remains: Without us, there is no game.
That's worth remembering, long after Sterling's name has been rightfully forgotten.
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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2012—Colin Powell is so sad he can't erase 'blot' on his reputation:
Former Bush era Secretary of State Colin Powell has a new book out May 22. As with so many political celebs, it's a book written "with" a professional person who does the actual writing. But it includes quotations from the guy who was once seen as potential presidential or vice presidential material. Based on uncorrected proofs released in advance, what we get once again is Powell lamenting the stain he can't get rid of because of the dead-wrong 85-minute speech he gave to the United Nations Feb. 5, 2003. There he declared convincingly that the United States had irrefutable evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Within five months, that claim had been convincingly refuted.
“Yes, a blot, a failure will always be attached to me and my UN presentation,” the former U.S. secretary of state writes in a new book of leadership parables that draws frequently on his Iraq war experience. “I am mad mostly at myself for not having smelled the problem. My instincts failed me.”
Powell, 75, laments that no intelligence officials had the “courage” to warn that he was given false information that Iraq had such weapons during preparations for his February 2003 speech before the U.S. invasion the following month.
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We've been hearing this crap from the guy for seven years now. It's tedious. It's sickening. It's self-serving. It's bullshit. It's the same old, same old.
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