Socialism for the Very Rich: The Case of Professional Sports in the USA

One of the themes swirling around the current health care debates is the notion of a European socialism. In the standard rhetoric, not just restricted to health care, the pervasive and enervating affects of collective provision of goods and services are contrasted with the dynamism and freedom of pure market mechanisms. Well and good, but why is this model not used in the USA where most markets are dominated by cartels and collusion? Only the ideologues believe in the free market. The rich and powerful do not. And to prove my point I only need to look at professional sports in the USA. ‘Collectivist’ Europe has a fierce market system in the dominant game of soccer. Take the English Premier League (EPL) where at the end of every season the poorest performing teams are relegated to lower divisions, thus losing out on valuable televising rights revenues. The successful teams in the lower leagues move up to the more lucrative divisions in a direct relation between performance and pay. The very successful teams in the EPL get to compete in European-wide competitions where there is an even bigger payout. Competition is used to reward the successful and punish the unsuccessful.

Compare this with the closest USA equivalent, the National Football League. Here poor performance is rewarded not punished. If your team has a lousy season, you get the first round draft picks—the most promising players coming from college—and your schedule is adjusted the next season so you face weaker teams. Getting lower draft picks and a tougher schedule against good teams in contrast punishes the successful teams. The emphasis is on creating parity between teams. Where is the free market? Where is the competition? Relegation for the awful? Forget about it. Lousy teams are never relegated. Owners get to keep their teams in the lucrative TV-revenue sharing deals. The emphasis is on continually leveling the “paying field” so that mediocrity is always rewarded and excellence is always penalized. Of course the whole system is geared so that owners can keep raking in the money no matter how incompetent their franchises. Owners and players are kept in clover with no fear of relegation or revenue loss. Real competition? Forget about it. A monopoly system continually reproduces itself so that the poor and the weak get to stay with the rich and the strong that would have Karl Marx applauding. Sounds like socialism to me. And this same system also extends to baseball and basketball, where we have perennially woeful teams such as the Pittsburgh Pirates in baseball and the LA Clippers in basketball. So let’s bring all this criticism of European-style socialism even closer to home of the professional sports cartels. When the NFL looks like the EPL, that is when people can start speaking about a real market in sports. Until then sit back and watch Europe-style socialism at work in the NFL. To accurately reflect the business model used, the acronym needs to be changed to NSL for the National Socialist League.

And the winner is Rio, or is it Chicago?

Rio is the winner of the competition to host the 2016 Summer Games. The announcement made today from Copenhagen is now being celebrated in Brazil. Sadness reigns in Chicago, and Obama is second-guessing his decision to be the first US President to lobby in person for a US Olympic bid. But are the real winners the cities like Chicago that just failed to win the final nomination?

The Games will come to Rio along with all the costs and benefits. Hosting the Games demands major urban infrastructural investment. For the 1988 games Seoul expanded its airport, built three new subway lines, and cleaned up the polluted Han River. For the 1992 Games, Barcelona built a new waterfront and upgraded a declining area of the city as well as making numerous improvements throughout the metro area including new roads, a new sewer system, and the creation or improvement of over 200 parks, plazas and streets. For 2000 Sydney built a new road linking the airport to the downtown and the main venue on a contaminated inner city site. Athens spent close to $16 billion in large-scale public investments in water supply, mass transit, and airport connections to get ready for the 2004 Games. Beijing undertook a building frenzy with an estimated $40 billion of Olympic-related buildings and infrastructure including a new expressway and ring roads, miles of rail and subway tracks, and a $2.2 billion new airport that is the largest in the world.

The Olympics Games provides both the opportunity and the deadline to implement long-held redevelopment plans. In Greece, for example, the rest of the country had long resisted national investments in Athens. The international showcase of the Olympics provided the necessary spur. The Games start on a specific date with a global audience. The brute reality of such a severe deadline overcomes political resistances, bureaucratic logjams, and administrative inertia. The temporary and permanent greening of the city is also a possibility since the IOC now promotes ‘green’ games. The Sydney Games were held on a former abandoned waste site, Homebush Bay, and the Games were part of a wider urban remediation and greening project.

Are the Games a net cost or a net benefit to the host city? An honest answer has proved elusive. Inclusive cost-benefit analyses are severely hampered by lack of proper accounting methods, technical issues, such as accurately estimating exchange rates of foreign currencies, and such basic issues as the lack of available data. Costing the Olympic Games is a fiscal mystery made more complex by the partisan nature of much of the analyses. Organizations seeking to promote, justify, or attract the Games generate the vast majority of cost cost-benefit analyses. While many studies highlight the positive benefits of the Games (largely funded by organizations and groups seeking to justify the Games), fewer studies examine the costs of the Games and their redistributional consequences. The Games involve massive investments that crowd out other forms of public investment, such as spending on education and social welfare that may serve better the long-term needs of ordinary citizens. Other costs include the dislocation to the city during the construction period and the possibility of increased house prices and rent levels. There are also social and environmental costs that are rarely factored into the standard cost-benefit or economic modeling approaches. A recent report estimates that the staging of the last twenty Olympic Games displaced 20 million people, including the displacement of almost three quarters of a million people for the Seoul Games, 30,000—predominantly African Americans—for the Atlanta Games, and approximately 1.25 million displaced for the Beijing Games.

Objective cost-benefit analysis of hosting the Games remains at a rudimentary stage, with few accurate or comprehensive studies and little comparative data. There is often massive public investment in the Olympic Games that goes unrecorded in most cost-benefit analysis. The existing analyses suggest that the distribution of costs and benefits is regressive with most of the costs borne locally, especially by the more marginal urban residents displaced to make way for the Games, while most of the benefits accrue to local elites and a global media market. The measurement of costs and benefits and their social distribution deserve much more careful analysis.

A reputedly $40 billion Beijing Games raised the stakes: Beijing’s lavish spending and the grand spectaculars of its opening and closing ceremonies all ratchet up the expectations for subsequent Summer Olympics. Hosting the Games provides an opportunity for city reimagining. In the context of a global media spotlight, the spectacular staging of the Games launches the makings of a new city. But these new urban dreams are also fleshed out in the bids of serious candidates. So perhaps Chicago gets to make the dreams of making a better city without having to bear the heavy costs of actually hosting the Olympics.

Generational Inequities

The USA already has socialized health coverage. It is called Medicare; it covers 45 million people, all senior citizens. It costs around $431 billion each year, and it constitutes 57 percent of all Federal health spending. Medicare is socialized health care that no one wants to disturb. Republicans who rail against the principle of government involvement stake their criticisms well short of Medicare entitlements.

The stark difference between Medicare’s coverage and how the rest of the population’s health care is paid for is a clear example of generational inequity. Those born in good times get advantages over those born in bad times. Assume the (fictional) average American. Born in 1900, you experienced the Great Depression and the Second World War. It was only in your fifties that things began to turn around. Born in 1940 in contrast, you were carried along on the great postwar expansion of economic growth, rising incomes, and new and extended benefits. If you were white it was easy to get a job and do well. Sandwiched between tough times, those born between 1935 and 1970 are the lucky generations.

There are lucky and unlucky generations. Generational inequity really kicks in if those paying for the elderly are unlikely to see the same benefits. Older adults are advantaged because they have publicly provided pensions, healthcare, food stamps, housing subsidies, tax breaks, and other benefits that younger age groups do not. What is more, the younger groups, for a variety of reasons, including the relative decline in USA wages and incomes due to globalization, are unlikely to receive the same level of benefits. Born in 1990 you are coming into a job market in the Great Recession, with well over a generation of stagnant incomes and increasing costs. To add insult to injury you have to work to pay for your elders to have privileged health care and generous social security payouts that you are unlikely to see for yourself.

The kneejerk defense of Medicare, while millions are uninsured and underinsured, is simply one more example of an intergenerational divide. Class, race and gender have long been identified as sources of difference, advantage and disadvantage. We also need to add age to that list.

The USA As Failed State

The journal Foreign Policy conducts a yearly survey to highlight failed states. Top of the list for 2009 is Somalia, followed by Zimbabwe, Sudan and Chad. The USA, lodged between France and Singapore, is ranked 159. The least failed states are the Scandinavian democracies with Norway, Finland and Sweden coming in 177, 176 and 175 respectively. The USA, at first glance, seems to be in a relatively good position. But look again. Amongst the measures used to construct this index are group paranoia, uneven economic development, progressive deterioration of public services, security apparatus acting as state within a state and the rise of factionalized elites. When we look at these in more detail as they apply to the USA, the long-term trend is not comforting.

There is intense group paranoia in this country, especially strong on the right as the wackiest are given voice by talk radio hosts eager to boost their ratings and by a Republican Party seeking traction through partisan politics. An open society needs a free marketplace of ideas, but what we are witnessing is the rise of voices that demonize and delegitimize that necessary interchange. Inequality has increased in the past thirty years in a trend that transcends which party is in power. The very wealthy have gotten even richer while rising costs and stagnant incomes squeeze the middle class. The stock market meltdown wiped out many of the assets of the middle class. Public services are also getting worse. To fly from Asia or Europe to arrive at a USA airport is to fly from the First World to the Third World of public services. Public infrastructure has been underfunded and poorly managed. There has been an assault on government waged since Reagan. And in the wake of 9/11 security measures have trumped individual liberties. State security has been beefed up, extended and deepened. And there is the rise of factionalized elites. Finance capital is now dominant. Goldman Sachs personnel, whether former, present or future, now dictate fiscal policy. And the political elites are less and less familiar with the everyday experience of average Americans.

So scoring the USA on the indices of a failed state:

• group paranoia--check
• uneven economic development--check
• progressive deterioration of public services--check
• security apparatus acts as state within a state--check
• rise of factionalized elites--check.

The USA is not yet a failed state. But it is heading in that direction. Failed states begin somewhere. The USA in its present crisis could be at a starting point on the road to failure. For those who have ever wondered about when and why great empires and nations fall, perhaps they now have an opportunity to witness this process unfold.

Whose Country?

These are difficult times. I am not speaking of the great recession that is causing economic havoc. No I am referring to the crisis of belonging. Two stories to illustrate my point. The first is told through a recent video clip of a public meeting in Delaware hosted by Congressman Mike Castle. A white woman stands up and harangues him about Obama not being an American citizen. She is repeating the ranting of the right wing bloviators, but there is a moment of authentic grief in her voice when she says, “I want my country back.” She articulates an often understated yet strongly embraced white fear that somehow the country she knew and cherished is being taken away from her. The obvious intellectual retort is to remind her that this was never just her country: it was stolen from the Indians and developed by people of all colors from all over the world. The country has too complex a history to submit to easy readings or singular appropriations.

The other story concerns Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s run-in with the Cambridge police. We will never know the exact details, as it is a case of he said /he said. But what is clear is that the confrontation crystallized issues of class and race and probably age. It seems more the result of testosterone than skin color. But for many blacks it was just another example that police oppression is a clear and present danger that has not yet faded into history. For many whites, myself included, it seemed a more complex scenario of race and class with a privileged black man expecting more deference than he was receiving. In this case the privileged man is Gates, a very well paid Harvard professor who jets around the world, is a constant presence in the media, and can call upon the President of the Unites States as a character witness. Startled that a policeman would question his presence in his own home--and who would not be startled--he responded with the message of class--you are dealing with someone important--but also of race, when he remarked that this is how a black man is treated in America. Gates felt attacked. The policeman felt betrayed by a President who seemed to defend his buddy publicly without knowing all the facts.

A middle-aged white woman, a rich black guy, and a young white police officer: they all feel under attack; they share a sense of threat and dread that pervades our culture. The US has no single ethnic or racial identity. That fact is a source of strength but also a source of anxiety, and it is this anxiety that informs the delusions of a white woman who can question the national identity of her President, a privileged black professor who responds in class terms by invoking race memories and a white policeman in someone’s own house who fails to recognize the charged politics of a racial encounter. In each case, there is a profound sense that power and authority is somewhere else, controlled by the other. There is a crisis of belonging that we need to address. The “discourse entrepreneurs” of race and class and gender--the always available black spokesperson, the right wing ideologue, the routine racist--only add to our woes by coming up with the simplistic slogan, the easy remarks, the crazy claims . Some of the early commentators on the Gates incident repeated the need to have a discussion of race. No. Spare us the easy slide into comforting clichés. We have had enough unsophisticated discussions of race that fail to understand the overlapping and often undercutting concerns of class and age and gender and sexual orientations. Gates to his credit addresses some of these issues in his writings, so it is ironic that while his work elicits the nuanced view, this one incident generates the simplistic response. We need more intelligent debate where the freighting of complex issues with simple slogans of race or political alignment is replaced by more complex understandings of the sources of difference in this country. Failure to address this complexity leads everyone to think that it is not their country. And when more people believe that, we really are in big trouble.

Westward Across The USA

I got lucky. Good weather. A clear cloudless sky and a window seat on an early morning flight from Baltimore to San Francisco. In 1804 it took Lewis and Clark nearly two years to reach the Pacific. Wagon trains following the Oregon Trail took between four to six months to cross just half the country. In 1876 a train from New York to San Francisco took nearly 84 hours. In late June 2009 a standard flight took me under six hours.

I still have a childlike enthusiasm about flying. I always try get the window seat and, if the weather permits, prefer to look on the earth below rather than close the blind and watch the latest movie. To see the country unfold before you is an experience that borders on the magical.

First we rise from the tarmac to leave the eastern seaboard. It is late June, early morning. Below, the earth is sensuous green almost tropical, heavy with humidity. The sprawling suburbs of Megalopolis soon give way to the wooded ridges of the Appalachians. I look out for the telltale signs of mountaintop coal removal. Too far north. It looks like virgin territory, the river systems outlined by the sinuous lines of early morning mists.


Appalachia: photo John Rennie Short

We cross the Ohio Valley. A giant coal-fired power station shooting a white smoke high into the air to fall as poisonous particulates where I live and breathe. We fly west into the land of the giant grid. The landscape here is an embodiment of rationalist enlightenment thought and the product of the 1785 land ordinance that divided the lands into units of 640 acres combined into one mile squares that stretch in a seemingly unending grid across the land. We fly west across the well watered river plain rich in alluvium into the drier lands where the square grid now share the same space as the round circles of the center pivot irrigation systems. The land is all geometry, a humanized rational landscape.


The giant grid: Photo John Rennie Short

We cross the 100th meridian that marks an important climatic divide between wet and dry, fertile and arid. In the late nineteenth century, John Wesley Powell suggested that west of this line the climate was too dry to support intensive agriculture. The powerful railway lobby overrode his proposal and generations of failing farmers paid the price. The dry landscape is still a testament to Powell’s sage proposal. The grid begins to disappear as we fly across the gently rising upper plains and then…almost without warning the western edge of the Rockies rises up dramatically. The first sight of the snow capped peaks take me by surprise and elicit wonder. It is midsummer yet they are high enough to retain winter snow in north facing crevices and shaded cracks.


The Rockies: photo John Rennie Short

The sharp edge is soon replaced by the high plateau, an eroded gullied landscape still freshly scarred from the turmoil of its recent creation. Stark, beautiful and empty. It is a dry, desiccated landscape full of gorges and gullies, long strips of ridges, possibly a meteorite crater quickly glimpsed before it disappears. Slashed and gashed, jagged, raw and rough.


The High Plateau: photo John Rennie Short

Then, another sharp rise in topography as the snow streaked peaks of the Cascades mark the western edge of the Rockies. I look straight down and glimpse the convex granite slopes of Yosemite, one of the nation’s first wilderness parks. Their vertical majesty flattened out by my 35,000 feet aerial perspective. Then the grid of the Central Valley, one of the most productive lands in the nation. There sits the grid square of Sacramento. The ocean is almost in sight. We cross the dry foothills, golden and brown, the plane loosing altitude rapidly as it gets ready to land. We fly low across Silicon Valley, skim the bay and land at the airport.

The cacophony of the power-tooled suburbs

I live in the suburbs. Low density with lots of greenery, and that is the problem. All that greenery has to be whacked and manicured in order for the suburban image to be achieved and maintained. Grass has to be cut in summer, leaves blown in fall, snow plowed in winter, trees and bushes pruned in both spring and fall. None of this is done slowly and quietly by hand. No. Brute, electronic force does it all. My neighbors, each with the carbon footprint of a medium-sized African city and the mechanical clout of a small European army, wield an ear-wracking array of power tools. They use these on the weekend. During the week the hired gardening crews marshal their own arsenals of landscaping weaponry whose decibel levels resemble sticking your head three feet from the jet engines of a 747. The end result is a neighborhood filled with the electrified screech and aching whine of the machine.


The manicured lawns and precision cut trees of suburbia rely on noisy machine power. Because I do much of my work at home, I get to listen to the landscaping firms who work during the week and then also to hear my neighbors exercise their right to make as much noise as possible on the weekend with a battery of ever-escalating domestic machinery. Unlike the big central city where there is a constantly high level of background noise, the leafy suburbs go quiet in the late evening, but that makes the daytime noise all the more difficult to take. Not inured to the constant noise of the city dweller, the suburbanite who lives in the suburbs, rather than just sleeps there, has to experience the deafening weekday noise of professionals as well as the weekend warriors. Because of the constant drone of the power tool, the suburbs are leafy and green, but definitely not quiet.


Photos: John Rennie Short