Since it's Wednesday, and we're preparing for a holiday vacation next week, we thought we'd shoot from the top of the key, as they say in basketball, and tie multiple stories together today with one we've barely mentioned: the NBA lockout.
At first glance, these stories and the NBA lockout may seem to have little in common. From the coordinated attacks by city officials across the country on the Occupy movement, to the supercommittee meetings in DC, to the ongoing Penn State abuse disaster, to the NBA lockout, there is a common thread tying them all together - and it isn't just money.
It seems the battle between players and team owners right now is a third-grade game of whack-a-mole between multi-millionaires and multi-billionaires. To some degree, that characterization isn't completely wrong. NBA athletes usually make large sums, and owners make even more.
What the argument boils down to, though, isn't just a simple labor dispute between the team owners and the workers who actually do the work.
The problem the NBA is looking at is similar to what the supercommittee faces. In the supercommittee, the problem is that one side thinks those who have a significant amount of money should pay just a bit more in taxes, so that our entire country can benefit. The other side thinks those who have more should keep what they have - and to hell with those who already have too little.
In the NBA, the issue at hand is revenue sharing - both between the players and between teams. Every team must have a full roster and a full bench, and every team must have a full schedule of games to play. Some teams - like the L.A. Lakers, Miami Heat, and Boston Celtics - almost always make a lot of money. Meanwhile, some teams don't make as much, like the Indiana Pacers or Denver Nuggets. Without all the players and teams in the league, though, everyone loses.
However, some players and some owners aren't willing to share - much like most of the Republicans on the supercommittee.
There's another similarity, too. Like the not-so-secretly coordinated attacks on lawful and peaceful Occupy protesters that happened in many cities on Monday night, the team and league owners also appear to have been working together behind the scenes, while the players played by the rules and bargained through their union.
When league president David Stern issued an ultimatum, thinking the league would force the hand of the players' union, the union disbanded - allowing the players to attack the league and teams individually through their own lawsuits. Now the league is far more likely to have to fend off many smaller, individual legal assaults that can potentially do more damage. Think of guerrilla warfare instead of traditional fighting, where those who have must protect what they see as theirs from many different directions, instead of from a single enemy.
At Penn State, it now appears that current Assistant Coach Mike McQueary did stop the alleged rape of a ten year old boy by then Assistant Coach Jerry Sandusky - but Penn State officials appear to have done nothing when McQueary told them. They were protecting what was their brand.
In a similar way, NBA players are more worried about their own individual brands, just as the team owners are worried about their brands. Both groups are worried more about their own interests, over all the other people in their communities who will be affected by an NBA season that doesn't look like it's going to happen.
If you can't figure it out, the single thread that ties all these things together is selfishness, at a level that would make any pro in any industry look like an amateur.
Maybe it would be better if there were a pro league for those who are blindly selfish - though we're not sure we could bring ourselves to watch that, either.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Occupy Day Sixty: Who Are The Real Criminals?
While the unofficial celebration of the two month mark of the Occupy movement won't come until Thursday - when a planned march may actually shut down Wall Street itself - today is the sixtieth day of the movement, but an ugly morning to wake up to.
We'd heard rumors about what might happen last night, so when we woke up this morning to find that billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg did indeed send the NYPD to attack and remove the protesters in New York's privately owned Zuccotti Park - ln the middle of the night last night - we weren't entirely surprised. Much of the media was kept from the park during this raid, breaking not only the constitutional right of the protesters to peaceably assemble, but also the rights of the media.
In these sixty days, there has been a great deal of criticism, and an even greater overreaction by local officials across the country and the world, similar to what Mayor Bloomberg took last night. Some officials have even quit their jobs over the abuse doled out by their superiors. As we've noted previously, there's even been a concerted media smear campaign from right-wing sources (which was entirely expected), as well as a campaign from more extremist groups to infiltrate Occupy camps and cause mayhem in a failed attempt to make the Occupiers appear to be something they're not.
Both those who've now accepted the movement, as well as those who still are throwing slurs at the movement often still ask the same question they've been asking for some time now: What have the Occupiers achieved? What have they really won?
Even if the movement decides this phase is complete, declares victory, and packs up their tents, the biggest single winning achievement of the Occupy movement will still have been its ability to draw the attention of Americans and our politicians to the very real issue of income inequality in America. America is no longer the land where everyone has a fair chance to become anything they want. The U.S. right now has one of the highest levels of income disparity in the world, according to the Gini Index, a scale used worldwide to measure income inequality. In fact, the U.S. ranks in the bottom third of countries measured according to one recent study.
If you'd been paying attention to the media two months ago, you rarely would have heard any mention of the rampant inequality that affects virtually every American.
The Occupy movement also forced the big banks to back down on the most onerous of new fees they were attempting to shove onto their customers. While the Occupy movement temporarily stopped those fees, the banks are already attempting to find other ways to stick it to their customers - even trying to soak money off of the unemployed.
As we pointed out yesterday, when governments finally get their priorities in line, focus on the people and their own responsibilities, and force the banks to pay off their own gambling losses, the people win, the government wins, and those who caused the economic boom and bust of the last ten-to-fifteen years lose, as they should have all along.
Even if other politicians follow the abusive, violent, unnecessary, and questionably legal lead of those like Mayor Bloomberg in New York, or Mayor Quan in Oakland, it still wont change the fact that the message of the Occupiers is factually correct. The Occupy protesters have also been overwhelmingly peaceful - even singing to their abusers as they've been attacked. In other words, the real criminals and thugs haven't been the Occupiers at all, but those who have moved against the Occupy movement.
That last action may be the most important achievement of the Occupy movement.
As well-known journalist Matt Taibbi noted last week, "It's not that the cops outside the protests are doing wrong, per se, by patrolling the parks and sidewalks. It's that they should be somewhere else. They should be heading up into those skyscrapers and going through the file cabinets to figure out who stole what, and from whom. They should be helping people get their money back."
Who are the criminals, really - and who are the people living in the aftermath of what the criminals have done?
We'd heard rumors about what might happen last night, so when we woke up this morning to find that billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg did indeed send the NYPD to attack and remove the protesters in New York's privately owned Zuccotti Park - ln the middle of the night last night - we weren't entirely surprised. Much of the media was kept from the park during this raid, breaking not only the constitutional right of the protesters to peaceably assemble, but also the rights of the media.
In these sixty days, there has been a great deal of criticism, and an even greater overreaction by local officials across the country and the world, similar to what Mayor Bloomberg took last night. Some officials have even quit their jobs over the abuse doled out by their superiors. As we've noted previously, there's even been a concerted media smear campaign from right-wing sources (which was entirely expected), as well as a campaign from more extremist groups to infiltrate Occupy camps and cause mayhem in a failed attempt to make the Occupiers appear to be something they're not.
Both those who've now accepted the movement, as well as those who still are throwing slurs at the movement often still ask the same question they've been asking for some time now: What have the Occupiers achieved? What have they really won?
Even if the movement decides this phase is complete, declares victory, and packs up their tents, the biggest single winning achievement of the Occupy movement will still have been its ability to draw the attention of Americans and our politicians to the very real issue of income inequality in America. America is no longer the land where everyone has a fair chance to become anything they want. The U.S. right now has one of the highest levels of income disparity in the world, according to the Gini Index, a scale used worldwide to measure income inequality. In fact, the U.S. ranks in the bottom third of countries measured according to one recent study.
If you'd been paying attention to the media two months ago, you rarely would have heard any mention of the rampant inequality that affects virtually every American.
The Occupy movement also forced the big banks to back down on the most onerous of new fees they were attempting to shove onto their customers. While the Occupy movement temporarily stopped those fees, the banks are already attempting to find other ways to stick it to their customers - even trying to soak money off of the unemployed.
As we pointed out yesterday, when governments finally get their priorities in line, focus on the people and their own responsibilities, and force the banks to pay off their own gambling losses, the people win, the government wins, and those who caused the economic boom and bust of the last ten-to-fifteen years lose, as they should have all along.
Even if other politicians follow the abusive, violent, unnecessary, and questionably legal lead of those like Mayor Bloomberg in New York, or Mayor Quan in Oakland, it still wont change the fact that the message of the Occupiers is factually correct. The Occupy protesters have also been overwhelmingly peaceful - even singing to their abusers as they've been attacked. In other words, the real criminals and thugs haven't been the Occupiers at all, but those who have moved against the Occupy movement.
That last action may be the most important achievement of the Occupy movement.
As well-known journalist Matt Taibbi noted last week, "It's not that the cops outside the protests are doing wrong, per se, by patrolling the parks and sidewalks. It's that they should be somewhere else. They should be heading up into those skyscrapers and going through the file cabinets to figure out who stole what, and from whom. They should be helping people get their money back."
Who are the criminals, really - and who are the people living in the aftermath of what the criminals have done?
Monday, November 14, 2011
Sink Or Swim, The E.U. Can't Help. Iceland, However...
While we hope you enjoyed a good weekend, we know there was a lot going on over the last couple of days. Maybe you caught the wonderful moment immediately before the Husker football game at Penn State, led by Husker Coach Ron Brown - or the embarrassingly awful GOP presidential debate on CBS. Maybe you were drowning in preparations for Thanksgiving and the upcoming holiday season.
The stories that may have floated out of your attention zone over the weekend include the resignation of Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the announcement of his replacement, and the installation of an interim government in Greece. We were watching events in both countries, as were many around the globe. In our modern world of highly connected economies, what happens in Japan or Europe, Brazil or China, can have an equal effect here in the United States.
For all the bluster of political candidates telling you America is uniquely different, when it comes to the reality of how the real world market works, the U.S. is just another refugee bobbing on a mostly uncharted ocean of economic uncertainty. Admittedly, our financial raft is better than what most countries have - some don't even have a piece of metaphorical flotsam to hang onto. Still, at this point looking to our traditional economic and political partners in Europe to save us from our own economic woes is pointless. Even now, countries like Italy are doubling down on the failed strategy of economic austerity.
As one of our favorite economists, Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman pointed out Friday, the European experiment in painful austerity isn't as effective as hoped - and doesn't confirm the American conservative worldview. In fact, as the revival of Iceland's economy is clearly pointing out, the American people - especially those supporting the Occupy movement - have been right all along.
In case you missed it, the story going on in Iceland really began in the early 2000s, when Iceland followed the lead of countries like the U.S., loosened its regulation of banks, and allowed investment and deposit banks to mingle with each other and other banks around the world. In 2008, when the market implosion of Wall Street spread like a virus around the world, the three major private banks in Iceland all collapsed under the weight of the bets they'd made (a large portion of which was in the U.S. real estate market), and had to be nationalized.
As Dr. Krugman also recently pointed out, nearly everyone projected that Iceland was going to go into economic Armageddon if they didn't follow the lead of everyone else - save the banks, screw the working people, and make the public pay the price.
Iceland, however, did exactly the opposite.
Over the weekend, Iceland announced that they were finally going to begin paying out a small portion of foreign depositor claims, after their highest court upheld a law that protects the common people and the public welfare. Further, Iceland's Economy Minister said that all legitimate depositors, whether in Iceland or from other nations, will be repaid their full amounts of deposit. Investment bankers, however - like the Wall Street gamblers and their corporate cronies - will have to deal with the pile of bad bets they made all by themselves.
In other words, Iceland bailed out Main Street, and told the greedy gamblers on their version of Wall Street to enjoy their trip to the depths of the financial Davey Jones' locker.
So far, even in the midst of a global recession, Iceland's method of salvation is the only one that seems to be doing more than just keeping their nation treading financial water.
We think it's high time the U.S. tried a similar strategy.
The stories that may have floated out of your attention zone over the weekend include the resignation of Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the announcement of his replacement, and the installation of an interim government in Greece. We were watching events in both countries, as were many around the globe. In our modern world of highly connected economies, what happens in Japan or Europe, Brazil or China, can have an equal effect here in the United States.
For all the bluster of political candidates telling you America is uniquely different, when it comes to the reality of how the real world market works, the U.S. is just another refugee bobbing on a mostly uncharted ocean of economic uncertainty. Admittedly, our financial raft is better than what most countries have - some don't even have a piece of metaphorical flotsam to hang onto. Still, at this point looking to our traditional economic and political partners in Europe to save us from our own economic woes is pointless. Even now, countries like Italy are doubling down on the failed strategy of economic austerity.
As one of our favorite economists, Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman pointed out Friday, the European experiment in painful austerity isn't as effective as hoped - and doesn't confirm the American conservative worldview. In fact, as the revival of Iceland's economy is clearly pointing out, the American people - especially those supporting the Occupy movement - have been right all along.
In case you missed it, the story going on in Iceland really began in the early 2000s, when Iceland followed the lead of countries like the U.S., loosened its regulation of banks, and allowed investment and deposit banks to mingle with each other and other banks around the world. In 2008, when the market implosion of Wall Street spread like a virus around the world, the three major private banks in Iceland all collapsed under the weight of the bets they'd made (a large portion of which was in the U.S. real estate market), and had to be nationalized.
As Dr. Krugman also recently pointed out, nearly everyone projected that Iceland was going to go into economic Armageddon if they didn't follow the lead of everyone else - save the banks, screw the working people, and make the public pay the price.
Iceland, however, did exactly the opposite.
Over the weekend, Iceland announced that they were finally going to begin paying out a small portion of foreign depositor claims, after their highest court upheld a law that protects the common people and the public welfare. Further, Iceland's Economy Minister said that all legitimate depositors, whether in Iceland or from other nations, will be repaid their full amounts of deposit. Investment bankers, however - like the Wall Street gamblers and their corporate cronies - will have to deal with the pile of bad bets they made all by themselves.
In other words, Iceland bailed out Main Street, and told the greedy gamblers on their version of Wall Street to enjoy their trip to the depths of the financial Davey Jones' locker.
So far, even in the midst of a global recession, Iceland's method of salvation is the only one that seems to be doing more than just keeping their nation treading financial water.
We think it's high time the U.S. tried a similar strategy.
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