Professional sports, at their best and their worst, reflect the culture of the people who follow them. And yet sometimes, when I read stories about professional sports, I still find myself surprised to find details that can teach us something about where we are. As well as where we need to go.
That happened to me a few weeks ago, when I read this article with a counter-intuitive lead: after years of new football stadiums being built with ever-increasing capacities, they are now being planned with fewer seats in the stands. But, in at least one case, the same capacity in the overall structure.
How does this work? Very simple.
Fewer "nosebleed seats." More luxury boxes. And giant sports bar-style lounges, with paid admissions, and giant videos screens that show NFL action from all around the country, with every play-by-play analysis program available, as well as the game in progress elsewhere in the building. Sort of a Doctor Doom-style man cave.
Hmm, you might say. Not all that impressive. You miss the thrill of feeling connected to the action on the field, to being a real part of the live event, to being part of the proverbial "12th man" on the field. Instead, you get to be part of a glorified version of your club basement. Plus, you're being charged for the privilege of doing so. Quite a bit, in fact.
But still not nearly as much as the people in the stands and luxury boxes. They are being charged a fortune. More than the original franchise prices of the teams on the field. And, since the season tickets and boxes are largely being purchased or leased for "business purposes," they're tax deductible by the purchasers and lessees. You know what the real definition of "tax deductible" is? It's IRS-speak for the suckers get to pay for it twice.
And by "suckers," just to be clear, I mean folks like you and me. Oh well, maybe not me. I won't go to the games, at least not most of them. I'll only be nicked by the "business purposes" folks. But that's plenty bad enough, when you consider we're all being nicked badly enough by these people, whose relative life of luxury is being subsidized by the folks choosing between paying the rent and dining on cat food.
Of course, television has long been the primary revenue source keeping the NFL in business. But that audience numbers in the millions, so that's not so surprising. Actual seats in the stands, on the other hand, only number in the thousands. And when there are even fewer of those seats than there were before, as is the case with any scarce commodity, you can jack up the price to exospheric levels, and still get away with charging a fortune to sit in them. More money, in fact, than you could ever get from the folks who can only afford a seat in front of a TV screen.
I'm talking, of course, about millionaires. And, even more amazingly, billionaires. We have literally millions of the former, and hundreds of the latter. Yet together, they number less than 9% of this country's total population. Putting it in practical terms--that is to say, in political terms--their dollars exponentially outnumber our votes. The money they have for entertainment purposes, such as watching professional sports, outnumber our votes.
And therein lies the central problem with our politics.
The central problem, contrary to the excessive media coverage of him, is not Donald Trump, as revolting and destructive as he is. As others have said, Trump is not the problem. Trump is a glaring symptom of a much bigger problem than the Trump circus of corruption and criminality.
We live in an age in which four decades of fiscal and monetary con-artistry has conspired to send so much wealth to the already wealthy that they can quite literally buy out the rest of the country. Even sports, one aspect of our national culture which supposedly exists to bring us all together, now exists to divide us into those who get to savor participating in the actual event, and those who get to "savor" mass-produced, flash-frozen-and-then-thawed buffalo wings.
And when the folks at the top of the financial pyramid use their goldmine to give the rest of us increasingly desperate folks the shaft, guess who really thrives in an age divided between the comfortable and the comfortless?
Con artists. Because, when work as a path to wealth becomes meaningless, people will become desperate enough to believe anyone. Even those who make promises they have no intention of keeping.
And so, contrary to what Trump's canyon-sized ego might want to believe, we do not live in the age of The Donald. We live in the age of the Grifter. And this year has exposed it more than ever before.
The age of the Grifter is possible only because we live in the age of billionaires, people with so much money that they can buy anything, even the government and a new citizenship to avoid their obligations to anyone but themselves. Even a pandemic can't stop their explosive growth; if anything, it may have enabled it. And why not? The COVID-19 nightmare created levels of desperation in this country that most of us have never seen, or even imagined seeing. Put yourself in the plutocrat's position. You've got hundreds of millions of desperate people, and something they need. What would you do? (More about that later.)
As a consequence, the sort of lifestyle, the salaries and benefits Americans took for granted in the last century can no longer be taken for granted. In fact, for some of the nation's hardest working employees, despite being routinely exposed to danger and disease, are forced to beg for the most basic rights in order to cope. And ultimately be denied those rights.
That's bad enough. But it gets even worse.
Most of the billionaires aren't the inventive class of the past. They are the investing class of the present, with an appetite for wall-to-wall public worship and the means to borrow money (not always honestly) in order to build the illusion of invulnerability. They buy businesses that are popular, built by those who have real talent, and pretend to be the source of all greatness. They are not people who were born on first base and think they hit a triple. They are people who have stolen home plate while pretending they have invented baseball. And, all too often, the incompetence that comes from a lack of experience merges with the malevolence that comes from being unchallenged, and allows a billionaire with superhuman economic power to buy a popular business and, through incompetence and malevolence, drive it into the ground.
I hope you recognize Elon Musk in all of this.
Especially since Musk has already shown that, in the age of the Grifter, the Grifters have acquired enough economic power and personal will to purposefully silence the voices opposed to them, even the ones who add value to the business owned by the Grifter while he grifts it into nothingness. Indeed, many of them don't need to be deliberately silenced; if their position in society is marginal enough, even the threat of being silenced is enough to coerce the same effect.
The trend of silencing voices in opposition to the ruling class is really nothing new. It's been going on since the first presidential term of Ronald Reagan, the marginal B-movie actor who made his real fortune as a spokesperson for General Electric, a company that began with Thomas Edison and ended up splitting itself into pieces to survive. It survived him into the 1988 presidential campaign, when the focus of the DC press was not on the integrity of Republican campaigning, but on how well they were working. Thus began the era of horse race coverage of politics, which has now become the era of horse race coverage of everything. Independent news sources have been replaced by corporate ones, who make more money off of "trends" than anything else. And who now have the power to manufacture their own "trends."
This is how and why almost everyone feels so disconnected, why so few people seem to know what's going on. They don't. And they are not being helped by a media that is increasingly disconnected from reality.
And it therefore should not surprise anyone that, for the billionaires and millionaires, this level of disconnect creates and fosters the illusion of moral superiority. This, in turn, leads to the absence of any kind of feedback loop. And that, in turn, leaves the billionaires more and more isolated from the people who ultimately create the wealth through labor, investing, or spending. In a word, us. The result is what some of the wealthy's defenders in the chattering classes refer to "bossism," but what should more honestly be described by its original name. Fascism. That is, the merger of government and corporate power. It happened under Mussolini. It happened under Hitler. And yes, it can and will happen here. It nearly happened here in the 1930s. And there are signs around us that it could easily happen again. Let's face it: it almost happened on January 6, 2021.
You know how little the billionaire class cares about you? They're willing to bet your life that they can use your safety to maximize their bottom line. Literally. Take a look at this. And ask yourself the question: in an emergency, would you want to be on a plane that had only one pilot? Would you actually pay to be on a plane that had only one pilot? And, perhaps key to what I've been discussing here, would you trust a profit-hungry airline to make that decision for you while keeping your safety and that of your fellow passengers uppermost in their thinking? Particularly after the recent Southwestern fiasco? I would like to think that no one would answer those questions with a "yes."
It's stories like this one, and, for that matter, the recent cryptocurrency collapse, that expose the fallacy of the libertarian fantasy of a world with no government, which has effectively deluded people into thinking we can give everyone unlimited personal freedom, including the freedom to not only help billionaires build fascism, but even invest in a form of "money" absolutely unconnected to any real value. Money in any form, whether backed by the full faith and credit of a government, means nothing without a connection to real value. The value can be in intangibles, such as intellectual property rights and future interests in real estate. But it must be connected to something that exists. Cryptocurrencies, to me, have always been a form of digital riverboat gambling. That's why I've never touched them, and never will.
Libertarianism is every bit as toxic as racism. Both distort the use and acquisition of power for the benefit of a privileged few, but always in the name of "the people." This is why we live in an era in which Republicans, having built their political power over four decades with a toxic brew of libertarianism and racism, have as much political clout as they have, a clout that is utterly disproportionate to the results that power has achieved. A nation crippled with debt and disease, and a people increasingly disenfranchised from the means by which to reverse and recover their fortunes.
It also explains the so-called inflation of the present period, which is in fact price-gouging. Prices don't need to be tamed by the Fed, whose raising of interest rates may in fact help to trigger not a recession, but a depression, something that may finish everyone off, even the wealthy for whose primary benefit the rates are being raised. Yes, this is what's being done by the party that denounces "big government." Small government is exactly what they don't want. Their dirty little secret is that they use rhetoric opposing "big government" to create exactly that--a big government that serves the interests of the few at the expense of the many.
They have done all of this while operating under the label of "conservatism," a philosophy that, in its classic form counsels heeding the lessons of history and, in the process, being mindful of the limitations that those lessons illustrate. But so powerful and brazen have they become that they are no longer pretending to be "conservative." They are openly declaring their true identities as reactionaries, painters of a mythical past that never existed, but which still serves for them as the only justification for their outrageous demands for power.
When the only justification for power is a lie, the justification cannot stand forever because the lie cannot stand forever. Truth is truth, no matter how much the Trumps of the world pretend that it's Silly Putty. At some point, it always finds away out of the web of lies woven around it.
When, if ever, will people finally wake up to this?
Perhaps they already are.
Along with the Supreme Court's execrable Dobbs decision, and the rise of a new, more diverse generation of young voters Dobbs decision, it may very well have influenced the better-than-expected (for Democrats) outcome in the recent midterm elections. The lack of success by GQP election deniers on Trump's behalf would certainly seem to suggest as much.
Perhaps an even stronger indication of people waking up involves an issue that, in the post-Reagan era of politics, has been something of a third rail for progressives generally: taxes.
As the clock winds down on two successful years of Democratic control of Washington, the House of Representatives is wrapping up its work not only on its investigation of the January 6th attack on the Capitol, but also on its investigation of Trump's tax returns. You remember Trump's tax returns. They were the things people have been demanding since 2016, and that he has lied time and again about his willingness to release them, and the circumstances under which he would do so. Now he doesn't need to do so, thanks to the persistence of the House Ways and Means Committee in pursuing the release by the IRS of Trump's tax returns.
This is not good news for Republicans who tried to scare people on behalf of Trump by pushing the tax button and complaining about how the release of Trump's tax returns might lead to such "terrible" scenarios as the release of the tax returns for Supreme Court justices. Given the current makeup and output of the Court, all I could do when I heard that was to mentally respond "Yeah ... how about that?"
I'm deadly serious about that. I think everyone running for public office, federal, state, and local, should be required to put out six years of tax returns, enough to bring their tax matters within the scrutiny of the Internal Revenue Service under its statute of limitations. Maybe it would be a check on all of the principle-less con artists who think they can imitate Trump and con their way up the ladder of power. In the case of the Supreme Court, perhaps that's how we can get back to checking it with what has been historically a check on it: the court of public opinion.
And, if social media feedback counts for anything, it would appear that a significant number of people agree with me. I can't be certain, but I would like to think that the real issue with taxes in the U.S. is not tax rates, but whether or not everyone is pulling their weight. I hope and pray that's the case. And Trump is all but the poster child for the willingness and resourcefulness of the rich in making sure that everyone else pulls their weight.
We know this now, because we actually have the returns. And they show that Trump is not only a financial failure, but that he has lied in a desperate attempt to avoid being an even bigger financial failure. In the process, my hope is that we all learn what a terrible price has been paid to satisfy the political need of the Republicans to make people worship the power of the rich, as well as the popular need to fantasize about how wonderful it would be to be rich.
And to satisfy both needs, we have gone out of our way to let Republicans cripple the IRS, which (like it or not) collects the tax revenue needed to pay the price tax for the civilization we take for granted. The effect is that the rest of us pay more so that those with the most get to pay less. You want evidence that the IRS hasn't been allowed to do their job? Presidental tax returns are supposed to be routinely audited by it. Guess which president's returns weren't audited? I'm going to assume you got it right, but here you go anyway.
What must we do?
I've been talking about the need for a more progressive tax system from the time I started this blog nearly 14 years ago. Not just because we need to honestly pay our bills for the things we both want and need, instead of taking the plutocrat path of financing it through debt and sticking it to everyone else. But to avoid giving the plutocrats the power to stick it to everyone else. To force them to put some skin into the game they play with our country and its future. To remind them that we are all part of the same nation, and that we each have an obligation to its continued existence proportionate to what it has given us and what we are able to contribute.
And one more thing: to remind all of us that capitalism is a system that works best when you are forced to use your own money to build the dreams you want to build. It forces you to think practically, and to work with others in a manner that treats them with respect and enables them to contribute their own ideas as well, and build their own dreams. That is the difference between democratic capitalism and crony capitalism. Democratic capitalism is real capitalism: putting one's money to work. Not someone else's. Your own. We are, in fact, where we are because of crony capitalism. And, to paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, the problem with crony capitalism is that, sooner or later, you run out of other people's money.
We have gone a very long way down a very bad road. Is it too late to turn back?
I don't think so.
If I take anything away from the midterms, it's the possibility that the tide may be turning in a way that not even all of the election-related gimmickry of the GQP may be able to stop it. But that only remains true if all of us, myself included, remain involved. To whatever degree you can be. In whatever way you can be. I know that a lot of you have issues with the corporatism of the Democratic Party in the post-Clinton age. I do too. But pay the MAGA hats the compliment of doing what they've done: change the messaging of the party by burrowing into it. Get involved in your local branch of it. Organize your friends. Blog. Contribute whatever time, money, and energy you have to contribute.
And, above all, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, VOTE!
It's the only way things are ever going to get any better, without resorting to a full-scale civil war.
And maybe, one day, among other things, we'll all be able to sit together in stadiums again, and cheer for the same team.
