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Books By Dave
Zirin
Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics and
Promise of Sports (2007)
What's My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the
United States (2005) /
Muhammad-Ali-Handbook
(2007)
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Can't Knock the Hassle: Chavez
Challenges Baseball
By Dave Zirin
| Marines shouldered bats next to
their rifles when they imposed imperial
order in a region by blood and fire.
Baseball then became for the people of
the Caribbean what baseball is to us. -
Eduardo Galeano |
When Hugo Chávez struck out in his December
referendum aimed at overhauling the Venezuelan
political system, a small group of overfed men
raised their glasses in triumph: the assorted owners
of Major League Baseball.
Edward Bennett Williams once called them a "Den of
Idiots," and for the last decade, the idiots have
descended in vulpine fashion on both the Dominican
Republic and Venezuela, marauding like free
marketers on steroids in their quest for baseball
talent on the cheap. Currently, 30 percent of all
minor league players are from the DR alone.
Owners love Latin America for the same reason Disney
can't get enough of Haiti: they can sign children
for pennies, treat them like trash when they're
finished, and face contact lens-thin regulations for
their troubles.
The impact on the athletes can be devastating.
"Super Mario" Encarnación, once the most prized
prospect of the Oakland As, was found dead in a
Taipei motel room in October 2006, after an apparent
drug overdose. He had been playing at the margins of
the semi-pro baseball circuit desperate to not
return home a failure to the DR. He returned, only
when his friend former AL MVP Miguel Tejada, paid to
have his body shipped back to their village from
Japan.
Encarnación did
do better than Lino Ortiz. The nineteen-year-old
pitcher was about to be called up to the Majors when
he died from taking an animal steroid in the DR
looking for an edge. Steroids are actually legal and
available over the counter, but their cost makes
them prohibitive. Lino bought his from the pet store
and met an all-too-early-death.
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After the DR,
the country that supplies the most talent in Latin
America is Venezuela. There are now more than fifty
players from Venezuela in Major League Baseball,
including superstars like Johan Santana, Magglio
Ordońez and Miguel Cabrera. In the last twenty
years, 200 Venezuelans have played in the Major
Leagues with more than 1,000 in the minors. And yet
despite this bounty of talent, the idiots are
starting to scamper from Venezuela because Hugo
Chávez is demanding that owners pay for the
privilege of their pillage.
Lou Meléndez, MLB's vice president for international
operations, was more than miffed to receive
documents that called for instituting employee and
player protections and requiring teams to pay out 10
percent of players' signing bonuses to the
government. Chávez wants to tax MLB for what they
take from the country.
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"We don't pay
federations money for signing players anywhere in
the world, and we don't expect to do so. It's
certainly not a way to conduct business," huffed
Meléndez. "When you see certain industries that are
being nationalized, you begin to wonder if they are
going to nationalize the baseball industry in
Venezuela."
As ESPN wrote,
"There has been speculation, more internal than
public so far, that Chávez, a socialist and
self-proclaimed revolutionary who took office in
1999, will turn Venezuela into the next Cuba. In
other words, some worry that baseball in Venezuela
will serve to illustrate (once again) how politics
spills over into sport."
The hypocrisy
is stunning. Heaven forefend, there is nothing
"political" about a multibillion-dollar business
running roughshod over an entire nation with no
accountability for the dashed dreams of the 99
percent who don't make it stateside. And there is
surely nothing political about shutting down your
baseball academy for fear that the natives might
demand business practices that might approximate the
humane.
Already, the Baltimore Orioles, Boston Red Sox, and
San Diego Padres have cut and run. "We just figured
we might as well do it [then] to avoid some of the
hassle of having to deal with some of the
legislation that Chávez passes down there in hiring
coaches, worrying about severance pay, and just
getting in and out of the country," Juan Lara of the
Padres told the media.
This tension
exposes the rot at the heart of this relationship.
Chávez dares demand regulation and the first
instinct of the owners is to flee toward more
exploitable ground. Not only is Chávez right to
pressure baseball to actually give something back,
other countries - the Dominican Republic, in
particular - should follow his lead.
Every year,
millions of Latin American children are shredded as
they reach to escape poverty with a bat and a ball.
It's long past time MLB gave something back to the
nations they so blithely upend.
Even an idiot
can see that.
Dave Zirin
is the author of "Welcome to the Terrordome:"
(Haymarket). You can receive his column Edge of
Sports, every week by emailing
dave@edgeofsports.com This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need
JavaScript enabled to view it Contact him at
edgeofsports@gmail.com. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need
JavaScript enabled to view it Comment on this article at
www.edgeofsports.com.
Source:
Black
Agenda Report
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Super Rich: A Guide to Having it All
By Russell Simmons
Russell Simmons knows firsthand that
wealth is rooted in much more than the
stock
market. True wealth has more to do with
what's in your heart than what's in your
wallet. Using this knowledge, Simmons
became one of America's shrewdest
entrepreneurs, achieving a level of
success that most investors only dream
about. No matter how much material gain
he accumulated, he never stopped lending
a hand to those less fortunate. In
Super Rich, Simmons uses his rare
blend of spiritual savvy and
street-smart wisdom to offer a new
definition of wealth-and share timeless
principles for developing an unshakable
sense of self that can weather any
financial storm. As Simmons says, "Happy
can make you money, but money can't make
you happy." |
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 13 March 2008
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