I think things couldn't get crazier and they always do. I can’t keep up. While the US govt silently refuses to make corporations broker with US workers, to even consider compliance with international norms and legal structures regarding nuclear war and military aggression, the Washington Post has front page coverage of what could be bigger news. They are reporting that Washington Nationals 2nd basemen, Alfonso Soriano, is refusing to play a new position.
In a completely sober fashion, the WaPo quotes Stanford University Law Professor, William B. Gould IV(what’s that IV all about?), on Soriano’s refusal:
“It is a landmark case”
WaPo continues quoting him:
“I can't recall anything in a major sport where a player has refused outright to perform his assigned job…It has implications not just in baseball.”
What are we talking about here? Stanford Law professors called on to talk baseball? It sounds so silly that if I had not read it myself I would have thought this ‘story’ was from the Onion. I don’t follow sports but this coverage is interesting to me because lots of folks in the US do follow sports, particularly baseball. Aside from the obvious ridiculousness of using Stanford Law professors to convince people that this is worth paying any attention to, while war evidently is not so important, there is additional psychological manipulation here worth taking note of. So what message do they have for the millions that follow this type of nooz?
Newspapers and corporate electronic media often take opportunities like this dispute to explain to America how unions work. Major League Baseball union, the NBA, auto workers union, there all the same, right? Anyways, here we have millionaire second basemen refusing to play another position. Of course, the millionaire player’s union comes to the player’s defense, as is the unions function. So we have a guy here whose job it is to catch and toss a ball around for millions of dollars.
US citizens are very tense, very anxious and nervous about all kinds of stuff. Professional sports, gladiators, are the salve. People do not follow sports for this kind of BS dispute. Unable to effect change in daily life, improve wages, actually like one’s job, feel good about the society one is a part of, get the govt to respond about things.
Americans are always ready to be angry.
Enter the WaPo and other nooz agencies with these kinds of stories where unions (which are all the same right) are cast as disruptive, megalomaniacal bureaucrats. Then when General Motors announces that it’s firing 35,000 workers yet another disruptive union-ALL UNIONS ARE THE SAME!-makes headlines as having made some kind of demand and now people are out of work.
Stories like this are one prong of an ongoing corporate psychological assault on the working class. A version of divide and conquer designed to make working class, baseball loving folks hate the institution that fought the battles enabling the working class to have the money (higher wages), time(40-hour work week instead of 70) and health to enjoy a weekend at the ballpark in the first place. These stupid sports stories are in actuality nasty, sophisticated psychological attacks.
In 2005 US union membership was 12.5% down from 20.1% in 1983 and which is down from what was believed to be 33% in the 1950s. And this isn’t just about jobs and wages, although it is about those things. It’s about our political system which is dominated by corporate elites whose only real balance is, you guessed it, labor unions.
This and other ostensibly stupid sports coverage like this are intimately connected with the war in Iraq, 40 million+ people without health insurance, declining wages and disappearing jobs. Unions were a large part of a political system which even at the height of unions was pretty rotten. With women and non-whites getting the vote and civil rights protections in the 20th century, unions should have had even more clout. Instead we have less control of our political system than we’ve had in perhaps 200 years.
The battlefield is psychological.
