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Why Protests Should Be a Part of Super Bowl Sunday
Today, the greatest multitude in the history of the United States will be tuning into the same television show at the same time. The 2012 Super Bowl, to be played between two major media markets, the New England Patriots and New York Giants, kicks off at 6:30 pm. This year’s game can also be called, “The East Coast Bias Bowl,” the “ESPN Nocturnal Emission Bowl” or the “Pox on Both Houses Bowl.”
Popularity plus polarization will mean epic ratings. It also means a pox of sponsors branding Indianapolis’s Lucas Oil Field within an inch of its life. But while the high rollers will party down and Fortune 500 companies will have an unparalleled audience, the city of Indianapolis will reel under the weight of our national party.
Bloomberg News, which no one will mistake for The Nation, headlined an article, “Super Bowl Lands on Taxpayers’ Backs as Indianapolis Stadium Deal Sours.” Bloomberg describes a state of affairs in Indy where “Super Bowl fans are riding zip lines through downtown” while “taxpayers are digging deeper in their pockets to pay for the stadium where the game will be played.”
They report that local officials have had to hike sales and hospitality taxes to pay off $43 million in “unexpected financing costs.” The Bloomberg article joins a withering piece in the Indianapolis Business Journal about how the local economic impact will be less bonanza than meteor. No amount of extra shifts for waiters and parking lot attendants can match the tax burden they will endure in order to play host. But at least city planners can have that zipline and the “800,000-square-foot exposition” called “The NFL Experience”
This Woodstock for the 1 percent in the state capital has, as we’ve been covering, been coupled with the passage of the anti-union, anti-wage, “right to work” laws by the Republican-dominated Indiana statehouse. It seemed earlier this week that the Occupy movement along with the AFL-CIO and joined by a highly supportive NFL Players Association could translate into a serious show of force right at the gate of the stadium. There have been marches this week through “The NFL Experience” of more than 1,000 people, and today NFL Players Association executive director DeMaurice Smith spoke and marched in a 400-person UNITE rally at the city’s main Hyatt Hotel.
This has been welcome, with one person describing it to me as “electrifying,” but the state’s union leaders are also explicitly pulling back from any kind of public showing in front of the stadium or on the Super Bowl grounds this Sunday. Nancy Guyott, president of the Indiana AFL-CIO, said today, “The Indiana State AFL-CIO does not plan nor condone any attempts to disrupt the Super Bowl. While we understand the anger and frustration of working Hoosiers’ over the disgraceful passage of the so-called, ‘right to work’ bill, the appropriate outlet will be at the ballot box, not the Super Bowl.” She made clear that no state locals would be participating in any rallies in any kind of official capacity.
De Smith in his Thursday press conference said that the NFLPA was committed to challenging other states where “right to work” laws have been proposed, but did not speak to any action this Sunday. In addition to a sigh of relief from the local media, Laura Crewson blogging for Daily Kos Labor endorsed a plan of action. “With the NFL Players Association having vocally opposed that law, it’s an opportunity to draw attention to labor issues in the state,” she wrote. “At the same time, you don’t want to be the assholes who actually disrupted the Super Bowl, so there’s a line to walk here.”
There are two problems with this approach. The first is this strawman idea that the choices Sunday are either to “be disruptive” or do nothing. A loud and proud picket on the Super Bowl grounds might not win adherents among those who can afford tickets, but it would be a way to raise awareness on a national scale. The same is true if players wore a patch on their shoulder, helmet or even chinstrap. Given the anti-labor and "right-to-work" initiatives being considered in Minnesota, Arizona and even Michigan, there cannot be enough visibility. Also, given the politics that swamp the Super Bowl, from the corporate branding to the military commercialism to the anti-abortion ads, why should labor be at all sheepish about having a voice on game day?
But no one should assume that the union leadership’s words will be law on Sunday. If the Occupy movement has taught people anything it’s that fortune favors the bold. Already, there is a demonstration called for noon at the Indianapolis state house, but that could be just the appetizer. The Wall Street Journal quoted Tim Janko, a steelworker from northwest Indiana, and Perry Stabler, a retired steelworker, who both said they would be seen and heard on game day. Janko said, “I’m going to picket the Super Bowl because this is wrong,” he said. “I’m going to have a Teamster drive me into town.” Stabler also commented, “Union workers built that stadium, they should have the right to demonstrate in front of it..”
The people of Indiana are angry. I’m not sure telling them that anger has its time and its place is going to do the trick.
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Show All"Huxley stated in Brave New World Revisited that the only way to create a permanently stable society is for a totalitarian regime to have absolute power. The regime must then ensure that people are happy all the time, be able to control the behavior of each individual, and ensure that independent thinkers are forbidden from disturbing the social fabric.
Huxley creates a society that frowns on individual creativity and that only welcomes those who conform. The social motto "Community, Identity, Stability" frames this social structure. Huxley generates "community" by dividing the population into segments, where the Alphas serve as intellectual superiors and Epsilons function as pure menial labor. Huxley shows how "identity" comes from the Conditioning Centre through the selection of the embryos into each of five groups. "Stability" occurs through the limitations placed on the intelligence of each group."
aldous huxley, brave new world
http://www.gradesaver.com/brave-new-world/study-guide/section1/
take a guess folks, if you are unemployed, uninsured, scraping by from day to day unable to afford to see a dr, enjoy a decent meal or god forbid pursue your dreams, which caste are you in - the aplhas or the epsilons
epsilons all around...
huxley also developed this notion of using sports as a mechanism of placation against men
he foresaw in his writing's around 1920 the expansion of sports, he said that the state should make large arenas for teams and that folks should be sucked into watching them. this, he reckoned, would keep men in a permanent state of childhood
when he wrote that, around 1920, people didn't know what he was talking about because adults did not "do" sports when they got to be adults
adults grew up and did adult things
they didn't know what he was talking about then but we sure know what he meant today, especially with the superbowl going on
men acting like boys. men who can't take their place in society as adults but they know the batting average of 300 players in baseball and the records of every running back in the nfl
grown men who have nothing better to do than wonder if their team is going to win this week
grown men who can't talk to their children, their wives or their friends about life, philosophy, economics, politics, or anything else for that matter
men who "love" their teams
mr huxley would be proud - the epsilons are running wild
here's what i say - fuck sports. fuck tv
today of all days - turn the tv off and make plans to do something with your family - that is if you can pry them away from the tv or their data phones or their games
here's something even more radical - do that every day
give it a shot - you have nothing to lose and a lot to gain
Interesting that you should present the link between sports--as the new opiate of The Peoples, and its capacity to freeze so many would-be men at an adolescent level of function. That's a key aspect of my new script. The lead male character is intended to serve as "Exhibit A" for the all-American male who has become entirely programmed by the media-news/sports complex. While he may imagine that he thinks for himself and holds all his own preferences, every one of those appetites has been shaped by advertising, and/or the Bernays School of the MSM.
I've mentioned on numerous occasions a link between the collective passion (and testosterone) directed at mainsteam sports, especially football, and the reciprocal lack of collective passion for the actual collective state of America. How many millions will follow Superbowl, like some sort of Mars-ruled puppet theater, but entirely shy away from putting that much emotional energy into matters that really count?
The conditioning is enormous. And while I read "Brave New World" many moons ago, I either lost recall of, or never read, the insights you link with Huxley. In any case, thank you for sharing this info.
The FIFA World Cup makes the Superbowl look like peanuts and it's on a truly GLOBAL level.
1:09 mins left in the game!
I'll bet you were always the last to be picked for dodgeball....
Good stuff, there. Also parallels 1967's Report From Iron Mountain, and the notion of sublimated "socially oriented blood games" as nationalistic (approved for obvious reasons) pastime.
It's truly perverse how much attention and outright jingoistic worship that revolves around supporting the 'Gladiator Mentality' of sports. Neither my wife nor I have ever followed any sport or team, not even with a casual, passing interest. Men chasing balls around holds no interest for us.
My father was in the trucking business, so we moved a lot when I was young (late 70s early80s), and having attended several different schools I can attest that every one I ended up in drew some of the worst sadists/bullies to sports, and certainly not out of 'healthy competition" (top-down propaganda), but of the well recognized social perks of being associated with those hierarchical systems:
the wholesale systemic abuse/hazing of younger kids and the disadvantaged, and the subsequent favored social status that can come from kids treating other kids as less-than-human (the official propaganda surrounding this is that kids "grow out of it," they don't, and instead carry those 'value$' into the corporate world); the systematic downplaying of, or covering up of, wrongdoing committed by valued Team Players, even of a serious nature (including murder at my wife's high school) - such kids would be given a pass and the school would cover it up while simultaneously crucifying other less popular kids (troublesome non-conformists) who were guilty of much less; and even so far as to include sexual favors for certain teams/team members at parties or out-of-town trips as sort of an un-written/un-spoken law of that particular social landscape whereby a major perk is the sexual attention of females who adopt this bizarre authoritarian role of making themselves sexually available to certain guys via cultural expectation, and also out of a sense of warped competition with other girls (i.e. "I had sex with John & Joe, who are very popular, and you *didn't* therefore I am better/more popular than you" sort of mentality).
I'm certainly not saying every person who's attracted to those systems necessarily exalts the worst as 'the best' (Orwellian), but even the ones who weren't all about it tended to turn a blind eye to some of the very ugly aspects of those systems, or would be quick to downplay the seriousness of it ("Who said life's FAIR!?" - that type of rightwing sentiment). So it's easy to see how/why such systems are hand in hand with the overarching aim$ of a society that is as profoundly sick as ours - it's all about denial and/or refusal to acknowledge.
EDIT - why do my posts not display unless I'm logged in?
Political protest?
At the Super Bowl?
Are you serious?
I cannot imagine a subset of the American public ~less~ likely to protest, or more likely to mock such a protest than football fans.
Try Bruce Springsteen's upcoming shows to actually gain a little traction. Maybe. At least his new album touches upon these issues.
Super Bowl Ticket Information: The least expensive seats as of Wednesday were $2100, and the cheapest tickets on the NFL's ticket exchange were $2300. The individual ticket prices go up to $15,000.
Field-level luxury suite seating costs $650,000.00.
Fans are expected to spend $11 billion on Super Bowl-related purchases, including the consumption of 1.25 billion chicken wings.
$3.5 million dollars will be paid for each 30-second commercial of which there are 70.
The military flyover of four jets just before the start of the game will cost approximately $450,000.00 for 23 seconds of entertainment.
AND THEN THERE ARE THE HOMELESS...
Meanwhile, the rest of us in Indianapolis are waiting for something better. The hours at our public libraries have been cut. Our education funding is down. The metro buses are free during super bowl week, but cuts in planned even though our public transportation system is among the worst in the nation. When we had a little snow a week or so ago, a lot of attention was paid to ensuring that downtown would be cleared. It was called a "practice run" for the super bowl in case snow occurred. Forget the rest of us.
Ahh, the good old days.
Dozens of family and friends sitting around the television on a Sunday afternoon, getting lit, and hollering till we got hoarse.
Sad to admit, it wasn't the DWI's, or the grandaddy of all hangovers that usually followed, that made me give it up---it was "the waking up" to the fact that we "the tax-payers" were being sold-out by our politicians to continue this "fine tradition" of corporate welfare.
My first act of public protest was to carry a sign reading "END CORPORATE WELFARE---BOYCOTT PRO SPORTS" out in front of Safeco Field on its inauguration day opening for Mariner baseball.
A stadium that the voters refused to pay for---but the politicians funded anyway.
Memory's of that sell-out have resurfaced with politicians in Seattle now scamming to build an arena for a new basketball team.
Truthfully, I still miss "the game" sometimes.
What I don't miss is being a sucker for the 1%. For I know that every dollar that I give to keep this "game" going will never be enough.
These corporate leeches will always want more. And I include the "so-called" players union in that statement. Their as much a part of this colossal rip off as the owners are.
What a silly idea!
1. Why in the world would you expect favorable -or any kind of- coverage?
2. Why would you expect a good response from the viewers even if you got the impossible favorable coverage? People are watching this thing for the COMMERICIALS for eff's sake!
“The Indiana State AFL-CIO does not plan nor condone any attempts to disrupt the Super Bowl. While we understand the anger and frustration of working Hoosiers’ over the disgraceful passage of the so-called, ‘right to work’ bill, the appropriate outlet will be at the ballot box, not the Super Bowl.”
This quote is a perfect example of how the elite establishment perpetrates itself. The AFL-CIO is an integral part of that establishment, serving to corral the people into a "pen of justice". The labor union president implores the people to vote "least worst" wing of Das Kapitalist Party.
But that's not new. That's as old as El Diablo himself. What's new is that the people are no longer stampeding into Das Kapitalists' "pen of justice". The people are moving away from both wings of Das Kapitalist Party, Demok/Repuk, and instead taking a walk on the far left side. And they ain't coming back, "dear labor leader".
The people are learning what real justice looks like. It's part of universal equity/justice. It's a holistic justice, that connects into the constellation of all good things. Complete. Synergistic. Clear. Consistent. Stable. Sensible. Resonant. These words describe the view/agenda/platform of the people. We don't need labor unions because we are collective owners of production. We mostly own our independent small pieces of production, because we mostly don't need large shops. And where we need a more organized shop, we own/operate it collectively, via the Coop model. This is the year of the Coop.
Not only are labor unions obsolete, but so is the idea of credit. We don't need elite kredit. The small need we have is taken care of by our local, small, independent, non-profit credit unions.
I guess we could cover a lot of ground, and demonstrate by example in virtually every industrial sector and civil sector how/why the people's establishment trumps the elite establishment of destruction/slavery. The people's establishment is very exciting to think about, develop, and implement. I know personally a multitude of people who are gaining the utmost fulfillment participating in this process. The expansion of the people's establishment is accelerating. I don't think it can be stopped.
Here in Montreal, we used to have a National League baseball team. The team decided that it wanted Montreal's taxpayers to fund a baseball stadium on prime land in downtown Montreal. Montrealers are huge sports fans, but we didn't believe that taxpayers should pay for the Expos' stadium, and so when push came to shove, we refused. The upshot of the whole thing was that the Expos left Montreal to become the Washington Nationals because the poor, benighted taxpayers of Washington DC agreed to build them a stadium.
If you ask Montrealers about it today, you would find that very few of us regret not building the stadium, even at the cost of losing the Expos.
But the folks in Winnipeg were going crazy over the "return" of the "local" NHL team. They didn't seem to care that there weren't enough takers for the team in Atlanta and the people there weren't buying enough tickets and that's the only reason that this team "returned" to Winnipeg. All the season tickets were sold out for the Winnipeg Jets "home" games within a very short time!
The 2010 Vancouver Olympics also made money for a few people, while the people of the province will end up paying for the cost for some time to come. And Montrealers finished paying for the 1976 Olympics some 30 years after the event! And the Formula 1 organizers have been threatening to close the Canadian Grand Prix at Montréal due to revenue shortfalls! They have found other willing suckers in India, for example. What I mean to say is that big sport is a big racket. But there are also big time suckers everywhere - so they won't go out of business anytime soon. The book "Five Ring Circus" by Christopher Shaw exposes some of the shady aspects of the racket called the "Olympic Movement" and I suspect that the MO will be the same or similar for most big events as well.
I've never watched a Stuperbowl....and probably never will.
"If the Occupy movement has taught people anything it’s that fortune favors the bold"
See how someone who doesn't really get the Occupy movement can help sabotage it with such statements? The author doesn't really get it because he's basically pro-union. Occupy is about achieving ownership/control, not about higher slave wages. This difference is highly relevant because the status quo is NOT working. The crucial feature of the Occupy movement is not that it's bold, but rather that it's different. Different vision/agenda. Ownership/control of production/policy, instead of higher wages.
The labor unions need to heed the people's real demands. They should transform themselves into workers' coops, with a real agenda of fragmenting larger workplaces into small locally owned/operated workshops.
IS Occupy about "achieving ownership/control"?
I'm not sure I've really seen that yet.
I really do not think you can pigeonhole occupy into one mindset.