On Tuesday , Stan Kroenke, the owner of the NFL Rams franchise decided to move operations from St. Louis to Los Angeles.
The decision brought sorrow and a bitter sense of betrayal fans in St. Louis who have supported "their" football team through thick and thin. For them the penny dropped: their Rams were not theirs at all.
The obvious injustice prompted them to chant "Kroenke Sucks!" when the move was announced during a St. Louis Blues --New Jersey Devils hockey game.
The chant showed that people intuitively recognize the problem. It's the problem of capitalism: a single owner backed by a small group of similar wealthy stockholders can override the interests of an entire local community for one reason and one reason only -- MONEY!
With capitalism, it happens all the time. A small board of directors (15-20 people) can decide to override the interests of entire communities -- Detroit, Youngstown, Camden New Jersey . . . -- and move operations offshore to Mexico, China, Taiwan, and who knows where else? In doing so, the private owners devastate the abandoned communities. Yet they bear no responsibility for their actions.
They simply leave. They leave without reimbursing the community for roads built to service their facilities, for tax breaks granted, for plants constructed with community subsidies, for families destroyed by loss of employment.
And, once again, it's done for one reason and for one reason only -- MONEY! It's the logic of capitalism.
It doesn't have to be that way.
As economist Richard Wolff has indicated, there can actually be democracy at work. Democracy at work means that if workers shared ownership of their factories, they'd never vote to offshore their jobs.
Following Wolff's logic, there can also be democracy in play -- even in the NFL.
The case of the St. Louis Rams contrasted with that of the Green Bay Packers illustrates the possibility. Unlike the NFL Rams, Packers' owners could never vote to move their franchise. That's because the owners are the club's fans themselves. So moving from Green Bay (pop. 104,000) even to Los Angeles (pop. 4.8 million) is out of the question.
More specifically, according to the Packers' 1923 Articles of Incorporation, no single person can control more than 4% of the club's stock. So these spiritual descendants of workers -- the Green Bay Meatpackers' Union -- have no one like Kroenke to deal with.
Moreover, Incorporation Articles stipulate that profit from any (unimaginable) transfer of ownership must go not to individuals but to the Green Bay Packer Foundation which benefits community education, civic affairs, health and human services and youth programs.
There are lessons in all of this:
- Democracy at work and in play is possible.
- It is preferable to capitalism's oligarchical tyranny.
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