Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
The NFL has a rule barring corporations from team ownership:
“Ownership groups must contain twenty-four or fewer individuals, and at least one partner must hold a thirty percent or greater share of the team. The Green Bay Packers are an exemption to the current policy, since they have been a publicly owned stock corporation since before the rule was in place.”
At first glance this may seem a salutary policy, but in operation the League’s ownership consists mainly of billionaires, who are either football fans, publicity seekers and/or both. In fairness I must admit that some of the current owners are descendants of their teams’ founders, such as the Rooney’s in Pittsburgh, the Mara’s in New York and the Halas family owners of Professor Turley’s beloved Bears. Mainly the teams are run by people who made their money in other professions and decided that a football team would make a great hobby. The problem is that the “hobbyists” have and are exhibiting the type of business philosophy that seems to have taken hold in America, which is a ruthless model, in which their employees and even their customers, the fans, are merely pawns to be run over roughshod as they satisfy their egos and their greed. After the break I’ll explain my thinking on this and show why I see the NFL as a metaphor of what’s wrong with our country.
What brought this to mind for me was the “lockout” of NFL Officials and Referees, which ended this week after a debacle on Monday Night Football: http://jonathanturley.org/2012/09/25/foul-ruling-replacement-refs-blow-call-and-given-seahawks-unjustified-win-over-the-packers/ By Thursday a contract had been signed and the regular Officials were on hand to referee the Thursday Night Football Game. The sticking point in the negotiations had been over the NFL’s insistence that the official’s pension plans be converted into less lucrative 401k’s. This would have saved the NFL about $3. 5 million. With the $8 or $9 billion yearly that the league generates, this at first would seem silly. However, Roger Goodell, the NFL Commissioner admitted that this wasn’t about money:
“From the owners’ standpoint, right now they’re funding a pension program that is a defined benefit program,” said Goodell, who was in Washington on Wednesday attending a luncheon hosted by Politico’s Playbook. “About ten percent of the country has that. Yours truly doesn’t have that. It’s something that doesn’t really exist anymore and that I think is going away steadily.” What we agreed to do and offer as ownership,” he added, “is that they would have a defined contribution plan, in the form of 401(k), so they’ll still have a pension plan but the risk, like {for} most of us, would be on individuals.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/13/nfl-referee-lockout-pensions_n_1879049.html
So this “lockout” by the NFL was over principle? This struck me as very strange. Since only about 10% of the country has pensions (according to Goodell) and they are becoming “a thing of the past”, the NFL sought to take away the pension plan that their officials had had for many years. This struck me as a political viewpoint that has become all too common among America’s elite. While most sports columnists and broadcasters were careful not to be too disparaging in their comments, lest the run afoul of the all-powerful (in their field) NFL, there were some who did analyze what was happening correctly. One was Roger L. Martin, the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, the author of “Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes and What Capitalism Can Learn from the NFL.” In an OpEd piece for the NY Times he wrote:
“But why the lockout, and why did the N.F.L. fight so hard? Because the league was fighting a bigger fight, one that is representative of a war beneath the surface of the modern economy — the war between capital and talent. Since the Industrial Revolution, two groups have fought for the spoils of their joint production. On one side is capital — the owners and investors who provide the means of production. On the other side is labor — the workers who turn invested capital into profits. Traditionally, capital wielded disproportionate power.
As late as the early 20th century, capital brutally suppressed labor and ground down wages to subsistence levels. But labor fought back, aided by Congress, which passed the National Labor Relations Act in 1935. The act paved the way for big increases in unionized labor wages, and union participation tripled. Inevitably, capital fought back. Through the 1970s, owners moved jobs to Sun Belt right-to-work states. They automated, outsourced and worked to diminish the power of unions. When Ronald Reagan crushed the air traffic controllers’ union in 1981, it was a clear signal: labor had finally been forced to capitulate entirely.
But around this time, a dangerous new adversary to capital emerged: talent. Talent, in contrast to the more generic labor, is highly skilled and portable. And in the 1970s, talent began to flex its muscles. In Hollywood, artists demanded “percentage deals” rather than straight compensation (see George Lucas’s profit share on the “Star Wars” films). On Wall Street, investment managers demanded 20 percent of the upside on top of the traditional 2 percent of assets under management. In executive suites, C.E.O.’s accrued stock-based compensation so that they could share the upside with the capitalists. And, in 1975, baseball players won free agency, which led to the explosion of athlete salaries across professional sports.
Generally, capital was not amused. Yet capital capitulated because this was a different kind of labor, with unique, specialized skills that consumers want and need. Replacement air traffic controllers were O.K.; but not replacement N.F.L. players, or a replacement Harrison Ford. The war between capital and labor became a three-way battle, with talent wedging its way onto the proverbial playing field. The biggest loser has been labor. Capital has given so much to talent — because it has no choice — that capital is even less inclined to give any quarter to labor. Capital is outraged because it is being beaten up by talent — whether C.E.O.’s, investment bankers, consultants, movie stars, players — and it takes out its anger on the easiest target: labor.”http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/29/opinion/the-nfl-strike-and-modern-economy.html?_r=0
I included, rather than paraphrase that really long quote because I think Dean Martin brilliantly sums up the schematics of what has become the attitude of many of America’s Corporate Class. However, while I agree that Dean Martin has gotten the schematics of what is going on correctly, I feel he is lacking in detailing the psychology and the mindset of our corporate elite. The NFL as an organization is a member of the corporate elite, as are most of their team owners. They vie for Corporate wealth to buy luxury boxes at their stadiums and they mostly share an educational and social background with those plutocrats. What I think the Dean misses in analysis is that “Capital”, (i.e. the 1%) doesn’t really hold “Talent” in high regard either. “Capital” loathes talent because “Talent” has skills that allow them to treat “Capital” without the deference “Capital” thinks is due them. How dare these “upstarts” try to get the better of me and my money they think?
Think about it. Why do billionaires like Bob Kraft (New England Patriots) and Woody Johnson (NY Jets) buy these teams? Sure they probably love football, but I believe there is also a psychological factor at play. To put it into somewhat gross terms human males have spent eons obsessed with whose penis is larger. We all know that this is mostly a metaphor for who has power over other males, or who is the Alpha? When you own a football team you are the boss to at least fifty male behemoths, who wouldn’t be there if they hadn’t been exceptionally Alpha males. When you’re the “Boss” that means that all your employees are subordinate to you. After awhile or maybe even initially, given the egos at play, the “Boss” begins to see himself as the central figure on his team. Players and Coaches come and go, but the “Boss” remains in control. Players and Coaches are seen as just as “disposable” as the “Labor” Dean Martin talks about. The demands of this “Talent” strike the “Boss” as effrontery and the “Boss” begins to believe that these “ingrates” to his munificence should be taught a lesson. This was really what the threatened “lockout” in the NFL last year was about. The leagues income kept rising, even terribly managed teams are being well rewarded and yet the NFL demanded “givebacks” from its players and to some extent got them. This was more than greed. This was a demonstration of penis size and a reminder to “Talent” of their place in the hierarchy.
A second area in this, that I think Dean Martin himself is guilty of, is the notion that mere “Labor” is ultimately replaceable and interchangeable cogs in the corporate wheel. This has been a dominant Business School theory for a long time and even goes back to when I was a business major in college.
What is behind it is the view of the working class as being merely dumb bodies to be manipulated to meet the needs of the Plutocrats. Thus has it ever been, this disparagement of Labor (the working class) by the Elite and by those with elite pretensions, who grovel at their feet hoping to be given some elite attention. “Labor” is hardly as interchangeable as many of the elite and the business schools think them. In the past few years we have seen a company like Circuit City, fire its most experienced and higher paid sales people to increase its profit margin, only to go into bankruptcy and close months later as sales fell.
What’s wrong with America, which I think the NFL as a corporate entity represents, is that a psychology of entitlement has taken hold in those who would rules us, or manage our affairs. While it is true that this has always been the case throughout human history, America emerged as a powerful nation because there was at least a pretense that it was the nation of the “common man”. Our Plutocracy has rediscovered the false notion that it is really all about themselves and their needs. We are hearing the “common folk” talked about in a way that hasn’t been socially acceptable since the 19th Century. We are seeing the Corporatocracy try to deprive most of us of good wages, good benefits and a security net. They are doing this not out of economic necessity because their lot has never been better. They are also projecting their own sense of entitlement onto us to justify their actions. Their fault, and the wrong they are trying to do to America, is their need to dominate us all. Its not about power or money so much as it is about the psychological pleasure of seeing oneself as the “Boss” and therefore possessing the bigger penis.
Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger.