He who pays, calls the game

 Of the 31 owners of NFL teams, seventeen - more than half - are billionaires.

For more than a year, public television’s award-winning investigative journalism series FRONTLINE had been collaborating on a new documentary about brain trauma in pro football with journalists from ESPN, the giant sports network. The title: “League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis.”

 ESPN President John Skipper pulled the plug on ESPN’s partnership with FRONTLINE.

ESPN is paying $15.2 billion  for the rights to telecast “Monday Night Football” for 10 years through the year 2021. The monthly price to watch ESPN is four times higher than the next most expensive national cable network. More than $6 billion are hauled in from cable every year. It’s the cash cow for the entire Disney empire. In an interview with the Times, former Disney CEO Michael Eisner said, “To this day, the Walt Disney Company would not exist without ESPN. The protection of Mickey Mouse is ESPN.”

Shortly before his decision, John Skipper had lunch with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and two others in New York City. Sources told the Times, “The meeting was combative… with league officials conveying their irritation with the direction of the documentary.” Skipper also admitted to ESPN’s independent ombudsman Robert Lipsyte that he had spoken with Disney chairman and CEO Bob Iger.

Whether coincidence or not, just after ESPN’s decision to disassociate itself from FRONTLINE, the NFL settled a class-action suit brought by thousands of retired players and their families seeking damages from injuries linked to concussions. To the casual fan, it was a win for the players - a sum of $765 million. But even if they finally have to cough up, the owners will feel no pain. That’s just a fraction of the estimated $10 billion the league generates in revenue every year. The typical payout per plaintiff will amount to around $150,000 - not nearly enough to cover a lifetime of lost wages and medical bills faced by the victims of serious brain trauma.

 Without college football, the NFL would have no players from which to choose.

In 1939, the University of Chicago dropped its football program, citing as its reason the  fact that according to school president,  Robert Maynard Hutchins the sport had evolved to the point where it was becoming a distraction to both students and faculty.  In Hutchins’ view, the game of football was now detracting from the noble ideals the university had set for itself. This was no empty, purely symbolic gesture. In 1939, the University of Chicago was a Big Ten Conference football power.

How much revenue has football brought the University of Notre Dame?  While no one can answer that question with certainty, the figure has to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.  On April 13, 2013, ESPN announced that Notre Dame and NBC had agreed to a 10-contract extension, running from 2016 to 2025, at a reported $15 million per season.

A bitter taste

 
Last month PepsiCo won a battle against Coca-Cola when the City University of New York awarded the global conglomerate exclusive pouring rights in a $21 million deal to distribute its beverages to all 24 of CUNY's campuses.

Students and activists had crusaded relentlessly in the "Killer Coke" campaign against Coca-Cola’s presence on campus in an effort to expose its poor record of labor and human rights abuses, particularly with regard to the murder of union leaders in Colombia. The effectiveness of their campaign resulted in CUNY rejecting Coca-Cola's latest bid.

“The real drive behind that resolution was that we don’t do business with corporations that have issues with human rights and workers’ rights,” said David J. Rosenberg, the president of the student government on the Brooklyn campus.

But while campaigners deemed the move a victory against the corporate giant, any sense of triumph was quickly overshadowed by CUNY’s announcement that Pepsi would take its place. The decision is a slap in the face for activists who, after working tirelessly to boot Coke, are now faced with another transnational company that essentially reintroduces many of the same concerns as its predecessor, namely: a company concerned only with profit at the expense of the health and general wellbeing of the population.

Both Pepsi and Coke have been accused of producing unhealthy products, promoting false marketing campaigns and fueling the obesity epidemic in the United States. Both have also attempted to vary the way people think about water, from a basic human right to something to be bought and sold, through their bottled-water marketing.

As Michele Simon, author of Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back explained to AlterNet, “It is sad to see universities who are trying to do the right thing by keeping out a company like Coke with a horrible track record to then allow Pepsi, which may not be killing people in South America but is killing people in other ways, to take its place...Too often we are focused on one aspect of how a corporation does business, comparing evils to slightly lesser evils. ..to replace Coke with Pepsi isn’t a victory,"

While Pepsi has spent a vast majority of its PR campaigns focusing on how it actively participates in initiatives to address water challenges around the world, the impetus behind such a move is nothing more than a coordinated effort to promote a “profit-driven privatization scheme that undermines the human right to water and local, democratic control of global water resources,” as Corporate Accountability International (CAI) explained.

“Pepsi’s involvement with the 2030 Water Resources Group demonstrates how it has been colluding with water intensive industries and powerful institutions like the World Bank to make private controls of water by setting up water-for-profit systems," said Erin Diaz, campaign director of Think Outside the Bottle and Public Water Works at CAI. "In each of these Pepsi-funded projects, water rates are tied to paying off private investments from multinational corporations...Decisions that affect people's access to water around the globe need to remain with the people—through our public, democratic systems."

In 2003, Pepsi was criticized for the quality and quantity of water used in its beverages after the Centre for Science and Environment discovered that the water PepsiCo and other beverage companies in India were using contained toxins including pesticides which contribute to cancer. According to Daniels Fund Ethics Initiative, the CSE found that Pepsi had 36 times the level of pesticides permitted in tap water. As a result the Indian state of Kerala temporarily banned the sale of Pepsi.

In 2007, Pepsi’s Aquafina water brand was accused of using tap water to fill its bottles. Corporate Accountability International claimed Pepsi was not being transparent in its business practices and using falsely misleading advertising to suggest its water was from purified spring water when it in fact came from the tap. As a result of the watchdog’s group efforts, Pepsi placed the words “public water source” on its label. Most Americans don’t realize that water quality and labeling laws are not as strict in the US when it comes to bottled water versus tap water so people are actually paying 10,000 times the cost of tap water for the privilege of drinking an inferior product, according to SaveTheWater.org. One bottle of water takes 700 years to decompose with production of plastic water alone amounting to 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide.

Dirty Meat, Dirty Business - That's Capitalism - Yuk!

Is there poop in your pork and poultry? It’s a serious question.
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has plans to expand a privatized meat inspection model that has been in place for 14 years at five hog plants in the United States and which has been found to fail time and time again at preventing contamination of meat - with fecal matter.
The program, known as the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point-Based Inspection Models Project - or HIMP - has been in place since the late 1990s and its expansion would replace almost half the USDA Food Safety Service inspectors in industrial meat plants with inspectors employed by those very same companies. It would reportedly speed up production lines by as much as 20 percent.
But a recent article in The Washington Post, reports that three out of the five pilot HIMP plants were among the 10 worst health and safety violators in the country, according to a spring report by the USDA inspector general.
"The USDA all along has been saying that these pilots will prove that removing government inspectors and turning over [their] the responsibilities to the company employees will enhance food safety when, in essence, the exact opposite has occurred," said Tony Corbo, who directs the food program at nonprofit Food & Water Watch.
Although the HIMP pilot program is still in a preliminary stage, the Agriculture Department has given a green light to Australia, Canada and New Zealand to use this experimental, privatized model of food inspection in meat plants whose products are for export to the United States, even though the foreign plants operating under processes considered equivalent to the HIMP program have experienced an epidemic of contamination-related problems within the past two years, including a Canadian plant which had to recall more than 8.8 million pounds of beef product fouled with E. coli.

Read more of the disgusting details here
by Candice Bernd

Again we see the basic necessity of the system is to chase profit by whatever means possible. Speed up the process, ignore inherent dangers, increase health risks or maximise chemical sanitization of meat. Anyone got any alternatives? 
JS

Suicide and the Crisis

Thousands of suicides are linked to the global financial crisis, with particularly high numbers of people killing themselves in countries suffering heavy job losses as austerity bites, an international study has concluded.  The researchers, from universities in Bristol, Oxford and Hong Kong, warned they could still be underestimating the extent of the problem as some countries hit hard by the financial crash were excluded from their study.

The research found there were about 5,000 more self-inflicted deaths in Europe and North America in 2009 – the first year after the banking crash triggered economic turmoil – than would have been expected in normal times. Britain shared in the trend, suffering 300 extra suicides in 2009, according to a study published last night by the British Medical Journal.

Researchers blamed the spike in suicides on soaring dole queues – an estimated 34 million people worldwide lost their jobs during the crisis – as well as bankruptcies and housing repossessions. According to their analysis of suicide rates in 45 countries in Europe and North America, young men aged between 15 and 24 were particularly vulnerable.

“Men are more likely to be the main earner in the family and thus more affected by the recession than women. They might experience a greater degree of shame in the face of unemployment and are less likely to seek help,” their report said.

They said there was evidence that numbers of self-inflicted deaths increased sharply in countries where unemployment had been relatively low before the credit crunch. They added: “The rise in the number of suicides is only a small part of the emotional distress caused by the economic downturn. Non-fatal suicide attempts could be 40 times more common than completed suicides and for every suicide attempt about ten people experience suicidal thoughts.”

The Samaritans said the conclusions chimed with their experience of dealing with suicidal and deeply depressed callers who were increasingly raising problems with redundancy, debt and mortgage repayments. A spokesman for the organisation said: “It is no surprise to us to be told suicides rise during recessions. A snapshot survey of calls to our branches in 2008, just before the current recession began, showed that one in 10 callers talked  about financial difficulties. “That had risen to one in six at the end of last year. Clearly this is a factor governments need to keep in mind when planning for economic downturns.” The Samaritans’ own research suggested that middle-aged men from disadvantaged backgrounds are at highest risk of suicide. They are up to  10 times more likely to kill themselves than men living in Britain’s most affluent areas.

Richard Garside, director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, said research showed economic shocks were “seriously bad for the health”. He said: “When people face economic hardship, and the stress and uncertainty that comes in its wake, they can react in different ways. Some will take it out on others, getting into fights, assaulting their partners, perpetrating homicides. Violence can also be turned inwards, leading to depression, distress and, for some, suicide. Whatever the economic arguments in favour of austerity, the rise in suicide rates is one of the clearest signs of its human cost,”

Work does not make you free

A group of economists believes the working week should be reduced from an average of 40 hours to just 30.

Anna Coote, head of social policy at the New Economic Forum think-tank, which compiled the research, explained: “Having too little time to call our own can seriously damage our health and well-being, our family life, friendships and communities. No one should be made to work long and unsocial hours to make ends meet.”

The spare time could also be used to care for the elderly, an ever-growing issue as the ageing population increases, it suggests.

A quarter of all sick days taken are due to work-related problems, especially stress and mental illness.  A recent survey by the European Depression Association found one in four British workers has been diagnosed with stress or depression. A recent survey for Canada Life insurance group found that a third of British workers said they would go to work even if they had the flu and 93 per cent believed a cold was no longer a reasonable excuse to stay at home.

The report says: “People have been working long hours to earn money to buy stuff that’s made and used in ways that inflict profound and irreversible damage on the ecosystem on which all life depends. It’s clear that time, money, consumer goods and planetary boundaries are interdependent. That’s a very good reason to think again about time and to change the way we value and use it, whether it is traded or not. Time is not just money. It is far more precious than that.”

All SOYMB can say about this report, what took them so long considering Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law, wrote The Right to be Lazy in 1883. As politicians like to say - too little, too late.

“The land of the free” no longer exists.

The political observers Paul Craig Roberts and Chris Hedges in two recent articles made some penetrating analyses on law and order in America which the following is a composite.

In the United States police arrest some 13 million people a year, 1.6 million on drug charges—half of those for marijuana. They carry out random searches and sweeps with no probable cause. They take DNA samples from many of those they arrest, even some eventually found to be innocent, to build a nationwide database. And police departments are bolstered by an internal surveillance and security apparatus that has eradicated privacy and dwarfed the intrusion into personal lives by police states of the past, including East Germany. And in the last three decades the United States has constructed the world’s largest prison system, populated with 2.2 million inmates. The US prison population is much larger in absolute numbers that the prison populations of China and India, countries with four times the US population.

Once you are branded a felon you are barred from public housing by law, discriminated against by private landlords, ineligible for food stamps, forced to ‘check the box’ indicating a felony conviction on employment applications for nearly every job, and denied licenses for a wide range of professions. In many states you are denied the vote. And this is for people who might have had only a small quantity of drugs, perhaps a few ounces of marijuana. There are 6 million people who because of felony convictions are permanently shut out from mainstream society. They are second-class citizens, outcasts.

The replacement of jury trials with plea bargains meant that police investigations ceased to be tested in court or even to support the plea, usually a fictitious crime reached by negotiation in order to obtain a guilty plea.  Police learned that all prosecutors needed was a charge and that little depended on police investigations. It was easier simply to pick up a suspect who had a record of having committed a similar crime.  Because many of these crimes carry long mandatory sentences it is easy to intimidate defendants into “pleading out” on lesser offenses. The police and the defendants know that the collapsed court system, in which the poor get only a few minutes with a public attorney, means there is little chance the abused can challenge the system. And there is also a large pool of willing informants who, to reduce their own sentences, will tell a court anything demanded of them by the police.

Totalitarian systems always seek license to engage in this kind of behavior by first targeting a demonized minority. Such systems demand that the police, to combat the “lawlessness” of the demonized minority, be, in essence, emancipated from the constraints of the law. The unrestricted and arbitrary subjugation of one despised group, stripped of equality before the law, conditions the police to employ these tactics against the wider society.

 The American police perform no positive function. They pose a much larger threat to citizens than do the criminals who operate without a police badge.  Americans would be  safer if the police forces were abolished.

The  Wall Street Journal reported:  “Driven by martial rhetoric and the availability of military-style equipment–from bayonets and M-16 rifles to armored personnel carriers–American police forces have often adopted a mind-set previously reserved for the battlefield. The war on drugs and, more recently, post-9/11 antiterrorism efforts have created a new figure on the US scene: the warrior cop–armed to the teeth, ready to deal harshly with targeted wrongdoers, and a growing threat to familiar American liberties.”

The bald fact is that today’s cop in body armor with assault weapons, grenades, and tanks is not there to make arrests of suspected criminals.  He is there in anticipation of protests to beat down the public for exercising constitutional rights. The tyranny of law enforcement in poor communities is a window into our emerging police state. These thuggish tactics are now being used against activists and dissidents. 

We Are One

Many countries are engulfed in the economic crisis. Instead of exposing the bosses some commentators have put the blame on foreign-born workers and minorities—anything that serves to divide the people and hide the true cause of the problem. They try to pit workers against foreign-born workers, blaming them for unemployment and the general crisis of capitalism. They steer the workers away class struggle and into reliance on piecemeal reforms and empty legislative measures. Capitalism has often used its oppression of minority and migrant workers to maintain its hold over the whole working class.

So poisoned by race hatred, it is enough to say: “These people are outsiders, hence they must be inferior.” and to some this explains everything. Foreign-born workers have to work at lower-paid jobs, at heavier, more dangerous work than the native-born, and are hounded by the government at the least excuse. If any group of people can be picked out and segregated and made helpless, there is an excuse for paying them lower wages.  A white woman worker in a factory will be paid lower wages than a man for the same work. The worker, white or black, native or foreign-born is exploited by business owners.

The tiny amount that the workers are paid in wages does not by any means represent all the wealth they create by their labour. No, the lion’s share of the wealth produced goes to the owner of the factory or shop where they work. The lower the wages the greater the exploitation, the higher the profits to be extracted from their labour. The minorities are thus to the blood-suckers of society a choice morsel from which they can squeeze even greater gains than from local labour. Charging higher rents for the wretched hovels which they have to live, robbing them outright by the agency system, the boss class in all these things follows the same principle. A worker torn out of this environment is much more appropriate to the needs of capital, much more ruthlessly driven to earn at whatever the wages on offer are. Such a worker is less able to support himself or herself during unemployment by borrowing from local networks of relatives and friends, and less likely to have reserves on which to fall back in hard times, less likely to have possessions that can be sold or pawned. Such workers are likely to be much more responsive to differences in wages – regardless of conditions - and, lacking local social ties, much more geographically mobile in response to changes in the labour market. This – as well as overt discrimination – is a factor in the general picture of immigrants working longer hours, working more night shifts, doing more piece-work, with a higher rate of job changing and of geographical mobility than native workers. Many employers recognise this factor: migrants make the best workers; and they always try to recruit new immigrants since those who have lived for some time in the country are likely to have become “spoiled”, i.e. conform to local working class standards.

Another factor is the cost of reproduction of labour. The “home” country bears the cost of reproduction of the worker from its domestic product; the “guest” country receives adult labour power without the costs that would be needed to raise and train the worker. The higher the skill level, the greater the benefit involved in the transfer. Immigrants who settle and establish families, who draw on local public “maintenance” services (including ultimately old age pensions) will, in time, reduce this benefit for the destination country. However the advantages to the receiving country is maximised for a single worker on temporary contracts without any right to permanent abode and who can be denied local reproduction and maintenance services.

Does the slogan “equality” mean that we must fight so that the black or foreign worker will get the same rights as the poor white worker? But what rights has the white worker? The fact is the white workers are exploited, robbed and swindled in a thousand ways as well. One might imagine that the white workers were living such a wonderful life under capitalism that the only goal should be equality of the foreign workers with the native workers, No, the immigrant must fight not only for equality with the white workers but together with the white workers also must fight against the conditions that prevailed for the whole working-class, regardless of nationality. Mere “equality” then, is nothing to brag about and is nothing to fight for. Shall  we struggle for “equal” wages? But the local worker gets a starvation wage himself. What kind of fight is this to make? The same applies to a fight for “equal” rent, or the right to live where indigenous workers live (in squalid slums, only one degree better than the newcomers slums). We fight against low pay, insecure jobs and discrimination at work and ghettoisation  of communities but this has nothing to do with “equality".

Many on the Left are concerned with gaining control of the State and accelerating the growth of its power and not with abolishing the State. Deploring the ill treatment of immigrants is seen, not as an attack on the powers of the State, but as an argument by some so-called Leftists for ending all immigration. In some parts of the Left they stress the illegal immigrant menace and  to “protect the legitimate" immigrants, illegals should be expelled. Accepting the right of the State to control immigration is accepting its right to exist, the right of the ruling class to exist as a ruling class, the right to exploit, the “right” to a world of barbarism.

The policy of “divide and rule” of the master class has erected a mountainous and monstrous  barrier of prejudice between the foreign-born and native. Millions of foreign-born workers, accustomed to a lower standard of living are lured to migrate year after year, to form a vast reservoir of cheap labour on the basis of the lowest possible wages and poorest working conditions. A lack of a socialist outlook has permitted some workers to be easily swept in behind the chauvinist agitation and racial policy of the capitalist class. Nothing could have been more dangerous for the ruling classes than that local and migrant workers should make common cause and instead of fighting each other join forces and fight employers.

The Socialist Party, first and foremost, must show that capitalism has no solutions. No reforms or can bring an end to this state of things. We must resist the efforts of the capitalist class  and their agents to sow illusions about “reforming” capitalism, and instead build our movement with the perspective of overthrowing it. Unity is our strength. Black and white, foreign-born and native worker — our interests are the same and they are directly opposed to the interests of our rulers.

AJJ