Study: College Football Is Feudalism

As the GOP demands colleges start the season, new research shows that coaches are getting rich off a system that prohibits athletes from joining a union and being paid for their work.


David Sirota
Sep 2






Donald Trump and his party’s leaders have been simultaneously pushing to shield higher education officials from COVID-related lawsuits, while demanding that schools ignore health warnings and launch the college football season. In calling for a resumption of collegiate sports, Republican lawmakers have depicted themselves as defending the interests of players because, in their words: “These young men need a season.”

New research, however, suggests that it is not the unpaid players who most “need” a season. Instead, those with the real financial stake in reopening are the coaches and university officials who are together making huge money off players who are barred from being paid and joining a union to collectively bargain for compensation. Those prohibitions continue thanks to the same lawmakers now demanding the unpaid players risk their lives returning to the football field to generate the revenues that finance coaches’ multimillion-dollar pay packages.

A new study from researchers at Northwestern University, University of Chicago and University of Michigan found that if Congress permitted Division I college football and basketball players to form a union and collectively bargain for the same revenue share as professional athletes, on average each college “football player would receive $360,000 per year and each basketball player would earn nearly $500,000 per year.”

That amount, the researchers note, “is significantly higher than the current average value of full scholarships these athletes are currently receiving.” Indeed, they find that less than 7 percent of football and basketball revenues go to pay scholarships and living expenses — far less than the revenue share professional athletes get. Of course, in most professional sports leagues, players are represented by unions that collectively bargain with owners.

If you think college athletes revenue-generating activities isn’t “work,” read the findings of the 2014 National Labor Relations Board.

“Players spend 50 to 60 hours per week on their football duties during a one-month training camp prior to the start of the academic year and an additional 40 to 50 hours per week on those duties during the three or four month football season,” the agency wrote. “Not only is this more hours than many undisputed full-time employees work at their jobs, it is also many more hours than the players spend on their studies. In fact, the players do not attend academic classes while in training camp or the first few weeks of the regular season.”
No Pay For Players, Multimillion-Dollar Pay Packages For Coaches

So what happens to the nearly $5 billion of revenue that unpaid college football and basketball players are generating every year? With Congress refusing to pass new laws protecting college athletes’ rights as workers, an ever-larger share of that cash haul is being funneled into huge salaries for college coaches, university officials and athletic facilities.

The Northwestern study notes that as unpaid players have generated bigger and bigger revenues, “coaching salaries have grown substantially along with athletic department budgets.”

“Average salaries of Power 5 football coaching staffs at public schools grew from $4.8 to $9.8 million from 2008 to 2018,” the researchers found. “There have been corresponding increases in spending on non-coaching administrative salaries as well. From 2008 to 2018 these increased from $12.1 to $22.3 million.”

Alabama Republican Senate nominee Tommy Tuberville embodies one iconic example of public universities enriching coaches with revenues generated by unpaid players. Auburn University gave him a $5 million severance payout even though he quit his job. He then received a $2-million-a-year pay package from Texas Tech, which raised his salary while slashing compensation for educators. He then went on to receive a $2.2 million-a-year salary from the University of Cincinnati, whose officials said “it’s a market rate.”

Revenues from players’ unpaid labor has also been used to increase spending on athletic facilities. The Washington Post reported that in 2014, 48 schools in the wealthiest sports conferences “spent $772 million combined on athletic facilities, an 89-percent increase from $408 million spent in 2004.”

The researchers also found that as the revenues generated by unpaid football and basketball players are distributed to other sports programs, “the existing limits on player compensation effectively transfers resources away from students who are more likely to be black and more likely to come from poor neighborhoods towards students who are more likely to be white and come from higher-income neighborhoods.”
Players Demand Rights, Congress Stalls As NCAA Spends On Lobbying

As GOP lawmakers demand a resumption of college sports, players have asked for new legislation that would let them be paid for their work and the right to form a union. But bills have yet to move forward as the NCAA and its allies have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a lobbying campaign in Washington.

With legislation stalled, players have tried to take matters into their own hands. Last year, a Villanova player filed a class action lawsuit arguing that in refusing to pay athletes, universities are violating minimum wage laws.

Prior to that, the National Labor Relations Board in 2015 overturned a ruling by one of its regional directors and refused to recognize Northwestern University players as employees entitled to the right to collectively bargain.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016 refused to hear a case to resolve allegations that the NCAA is illegally refusing to compensate players for the lucrative commercial use of their names, images and likenesses.

Why Jacob Blake's Family will have to fight for justice

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_Q78RiPrwE

Fifty-six-year-old Tennessee resident evicted from her home after contracting COVID-19

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/31/evic-a31.html

By Patrick Smith
31 August 2020

In early August, 56-year-old Memphis-area resident Leslie Nelson’s belongings were thrown out into her yard. A resident of the nearby Memphis suburb of Raleigh, Nelson was still recovering from COVID-19 and was also suffering from epilepsy at the time of her eviction.

Leslie was evicted because of her inability to pay her mother-in-law’s medical bills. Her mother-in-law was the technical owner of the property where she was living. She had passed away several years ago and the house was left to her and her partner. She didn’t know the bills existed.

“I offered to pay,” Leslie told the Commercial Appeal, Memphis’ local newspaper, referring to when a process server showed up to collect on the unknown debt, “but he didn't even give me a warning. He just sent movers over here and they showed up with police officers.” A GoFundMe pageset up to help Nelson get back in her home has raised nearly $15,000.
According to friends, Nelson is currently “navigating the court system and has a temporary residence.” The public opposition to her eviction “was able to get her the resources she needs to fight back.”

Nelson contracted COVID-19 when she went to a friend’s house on June 11. A few days later she started feeling sick. Her health deteriorated and she felt sicker than she had ever felt before. She called an ambulance and was hospitalized for a few days and was put on oxygen. Methodist North Hospital released her when she was starting to feel better. But she became ill again when the process server showed up.

According to the Commercial Appeal, she suffered from “an epilepsy-induced seizure” on the day of her eviction. In one of the videos that were taken, she was heard to say to a police officer, “I have COVID-19 and it’s hard to even think!”

There have been over 26,000 COVID-19 cases in Memphis and 369 deaths according to the City of Memphis website. As with other parts of the country, testing is only being offered to “those who are symptomatic, contacts of confirmed cases, or who work in the healthcare field,” the website notes.

Furthermore, Shelby County Health Department Director Dr. Alisa Haushalter will not release COVID-19 cases reported at schools. The county has falsely declared its primary concern is that it does not want “to breach the privacy of any child and create issues of stigma.”

According to Nelson’s friends, those who kicked her out had no concern for her health or where she was going to go. Police officers stood watch to enforce the removal. Hunter Demster, an area resident and activist that arrived on the scene to assist Nelson, said in an interview with the Commercial Appeal, “A dozen people have showed up, dedicating their time, potentially putting themselves in harm’s way of COVID to do the right thing.”

Demster also spoke to the World Socialist Web Site about the incident that developed at Nelson’s home and the looming eviction crisis in the city triggered by the pandemic. “Leslie called me. She was crying and terrified! I simply said, I’m already on my way and I’ll do what I can. She said she was very relieved to know she wouldn’t be alone.”

He continued: “We have over 9,000 evictions coming up. This will devastate this city. [It] caught me off guard when the first one I heard about hit so close to home. Memphis is the poorest or second poorest city in the country for decades. It’s no surprise that we are facing so many. Under-resourced, under-funded and forgotten.”

Memphis has an overall poverty rate of 27.8 percent and a child poverty rate of 44.9 percent. These statistics put Memphis in second place overall in poverty as of 2019, based on data taken from the University of Memphis (UofM). According to UofM, “Memphis is not ‘number 1’ in poverty in 2019, in either overall or child poverty. However, this is not cause for optimism, as Memphis is in worse shape than a year ago.”

“Memphis is the logistics-distribution hub of the world, dependent upon low wage workers and warehouse workers,” Demster explained. “The oligarchs here do everything in their power to criminalize the activist and concerned citizens who fight for the working class. Hence the federal lawsuits and police surveillance and sending federal troops here to silence us.”

Another acquaintance of Nelson’s who had received word of the eviction-in-progress over social media told the WSWS: “When I got there, there was a group of movers throwing all of her belongings onto the lawn. Leslie told me she had recently gotten out of the hospital and the process servers showed up at her house with no warning and told her she was being evicted.”

“Regardless of any moratorium on evictions, landlords are finding loopholes like in Leslie’s case,” the acquaintance said. “And if not that, then they’re not making necessary repairs to keep homes livable. Predatory landlords are predatory no matter what kind of protections are in place.”

With the ending of the $600 extension of unemployment aid last month and as state moratorium on evictions expire there will be incomprehensible suffering inflicted on the working population in Memphis and beyond. In the United States, one in five adults in rental housing reported that they were behind on rent in a Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey conducted in early July. That includes 12.5 million adults who had not paid rent and another 1.3 million whose rent had been deferred.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition’s CEO, Diane Yentel, recently noted, “The 40 million U.S. households projected for eviction by year’s end — and the lack of legislative action to prevent them — is [like] nothing I’ve ever seen.”

“I know of several people who are being taken to court as soon as next week whose landlords are trying to evict them,” an activist in Memphis told the WSWS. “I know of four immuno-compromised, unemployed roommates whose landlords have refused to repair the hot water heater, leaks in the roof, etc. The landlord is trying to evict them next week even though they have nowhere to go. Everyday I hear more stories like that, and it’s only getting worse.”

The callous treatment of working people such as Leslie Nelson is an expression of the malign neglect of the ruling capitalist class. Billionaires have received an endless flow of cash in order to boost their financial balance sheets and boost Wall Street to record highs while working people seeking to stay in their home are treated with abuse and contempt.

Only a mass socialist movement of the working class, basing itself upon the social needs of the population, can stop the money-mad campaign to force workers back to work in unsafe conditions while leaving millions destitute in the face of COVID-19.

Summary Of CA Bills That Passed/Failed

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rty989LFyQY

California Governor Newsom continues murderous policies as COVID-19 cases in state reach 700,000

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/31/cali-a31.html

By Peter Ross
31 August 2020

No less than in Republican-controlled states, the Democratic Party administration of California Governor Gavin Newsom has, since the beginning of the pandemic, acted to protect the interests of the ultra-wealthy. It has long since abandoned any serious effort to contain the spread of the virus.

On May 7, six weeks after California became the first state to issue shelter-in-place orders, Newsom announced that the state faced a $54 billion revenue shortfall. One day later, with the state averaging over 1,700 new cases per day, the administration began planning a phased reopening.

On June 12, as the number of cases in the state passed 125,000, with more than 3,600 new cases per day, California moved to stage three of the reopening, allowing indoor businesses such as restaurants, bars and gyms to reopen. During this period, the infection rate exploded from about 1,700 new cases per day on May 8 to more than 5,300 on June 28.

After peaking at over 9,000 new cases per day in late July, and following a renewed closure of bars, indoor dining and gyms, the infection rate now stands at about 6,000 per day. But the push to reopen workplaces and schools threatens to bring about yet another wave of cases.

The level of testing, at 85,000 per day, remains grossly inadequate to monitor, let alone contain, the pandemic.

On August 13, the Los Angeles Times published a timeline titled “How a rush to reopen drove Los Angeles County into a health crisis.” It documented the direct impact of the reopening policy on the number of infections and deaths in Los Angeles. At the time of that exposé, in Los Angeles alone 5,000 had died from COVID-19. In the ensuing three weeks that number has increased by 15 percent.

Despite the alarming data, last Friday Newsom announced a four-tier reopening process that kicks off today with the reopening of hair salons, barber shops and retail stores to 25 percent capacity, to be progressively extended. The measure is being touted as a return to pre-pandemic “freedom”—a clear concession to right-wing complaints that necessary science-based restrictions are a limitation on personal liberties. In reality, the organized opposition to public health-based restrictions in the name of “freedom” is being promoted by the corporate elite in line with its murderous return-to-work policy.

The unfolding economic and fiscal disaster, which the state government has seized upon to deepen its attacks on public education and social infrastructure, threatens to plunge millions of Californians into destitution. The Newsom administration estimates that the 2020-2021 fiscal year will see a 24.5 percent unemployment rate, a nine percent drop in personal income, and a 21 percent decline in new housing permits. These projections are optimistic in light of social reality.

In Los Angeles County, unemployment has only slightly declined—from 20 percent in April to 17.5 percent in July, which means a million people are without employment. A 2020 study by UCLA’s Institute on Inequality and Democracy estimates that almost a half million people living in rental housing in Los Angeles County have no income and are at a high risk of homelessness.

California’s homeless population was estimated to be about 150,000 in 2019, a number widely believed to be a drastic underestimation. The homeless population increased by 21,000 in 2019 and is expected to grow by another 30,000 this year as a result of the mass unemployment and economic devastation caused by the pandemic. The homeless, many of whom suffer from preexisting medical conditions, are among the most vulnerable to infectious disease.

With 154 billionaires and more wealth than all but the four wealthiest countries in the world, California is at once the richest and the poorest state in the country. According to the United States Census Bureau, after adjusting for the cost of living, California has the highest poverty rate in the nation, with an average of 18.2 percent of its 39.5 million residents living in poverty over the last three years. While the median income in the state is slightly above the national median, costs for housing, electric power and essential goods are far higher than the national average.

In a recent report, the Public Policy Institute of California found that more than 35 percent of the state, almost 14 million people, live in poverty or “near-poverty.” This section of the population, subjected to poor housing, inadequate medical care and unsafe working conditions, confronts both higher infection and fatality rates than the general population. In July, more than 300 workers—three quarters of the workforce—were infected at a downtown Los Angeles sweatshop owned by Los Angeles Apparel.

The pandemic has swept through California’s notoriously overcrowded prison system, infecting more than 9,300 inmates and 2,200 staff members. Close confinement, poor medical care and limited access to personal protective equipment have led to an infection rate almost five times higher among state prisoners than in the general population. California’s prison population stood at about 117,000 in April 2020, with 32 out of 35 prisons holding incarcerated populations above their design capacities.

A particularly deadly outbreak at the California Institution for Men has resulted in over 1,000 infections and 20 deaths. The transfer of 121 inmates from this prison to San Quentin State Prison resulted in an even deadlier outbreak. More than 2,100 prisoners at San Quentin, half its population at the start of the outbreak, have so far been infected.

After decades of stagnant wages and cuts to health care and social services, working people have been made to bear the brunt of the recent $54 billion cut in the state budget, which includes a 10 percent pay cut for state employees, delayed payments to public schools, a $1.7 billion cut in funding for public colleges and universities, and a $248 million cut from housing programs. Newsom, who pledged in mid-May to take a salary cut in solidarity with state workers, has continued to receive his full monthly salary of $17,479.

At an August news conference, Newsom had the audacity to claim that “there is no money sitting in the piggy bank” to pay unemployment benefits. But between March and June, the same period during which the virus was spiking throughout the state, California’s 154 billionaires saw their net wealth increase by about $170 billion, more than triple the budget shortfall.

The trade unions have in every instance acceded to the state’s demands, including a 9.23 percent cut in state workers’ salaries and a suspension of state contributions to retirees’ health care, agreed to by the state’s largest public employees union, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1,000. Cal Fire Local 2881 has agreed to a 7.5 percent pay cut.

The trade unions have likewise supported plans to resume in-person instruction in the public school system. While the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest in the nation, has opened the school year with fully online instruction, the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), which sold out last year’s teachers strike and paved the way for more budget cuts and school privatizations, is collaborating in school reopening plans.

In a July report, the UTLA proposed a list of half-measures, including keeping students in small “pods,” reducing class sizes, and requiring masks for students and staff. The call for “pods” is practically identical to the Newsom administration’s guidelines, which call for children to be grouped into learning “cohorts” of no more than 14 children and no more than two supervising adults.

The California Teachers Association has likewise called, in the vaguest terms possible, for hand washing, face coverings, social distancing inside classrooms, and “mental health counseling.” Even if these inadequate measures were enforced, they would do little to make classrooms safe for students and educators.

Statewide, counties are allowed to reopen schools if they are off the state’s COVID-19 watch list for two weeks. Orange County and San Diego County, two of the largest counties in the state, are both already off the list. On Monday, the Orange County Board of Education voted to allow schools to resume in-person instruction next month, without masks or social distancing. A group of teachers and parents protested outside the meeting and gathered 26,000 signatures urging the board to reconsider.

According to Los Angeles Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer, the Newsom administration is giving local health officials the ability to grant waivers to school districts that permit schools to reopen for students in grades K-6 once case rates fall under 200 per 100,000 people. This threshold—twenty times what the Centers for Disease Control defines as low incidence—has been chosen not out of consideration for the safety of students and educators, but in order to provide a justification for reopening. On Tuesday, the case rate in Los Angeles County was 196 per 100,000 residents, just under the threshold.

Claims that children transmit the virus less frequently than adults have been shown to be fraudulent. A paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that children under the age of five carry higher amounts of the virus in their nasal passages than older children and adults, while an extensive contact tracing study conducted in Italy found that children younger than 15 years old transmit the virus most efficiently.

The overwhelming majority of parents and educators are opposed to resuming in-person instruction. “I don’t think a waiver is appropriate at this time given the rate of transmission and the number of cases,” said Mill Valley parent David Howard, “You know, you get a bunch of kids in a classroom with stagnant air, that’s a petri dish to spread the virus.”

Marianne WIlliamson On Why She Fears The Dems Will Lose

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zt2PNCkV37c

Fear and uncertainty dominate Jackson Hole central bankers’ meeting

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/31/hole-a31.html

By Nick Beams
31 August 2020

The annual Jackson Hole conclave of central bankers, which concluded over the weekend, underscored the incapacity of global financial authorities to devise any policies either to bring about economic growth or counter the mounting contradictions in the financial system.

Reporting on the meeting, held in virtual format this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Financial Times noted: “It was the head of Singapore’s monetary authority who best summed up the biggest fear gripping the virtual Jackson Hole conference this year.

“‘We’re not going back to the same world,’ Tharman Shanmugaratnam warned.’”

The central initiative at the gathering was the decision by the Fed’s key policy-making body to maintain interest rates at their ultra-low levels for an indefinite period and keep pumping money into the financial system.

The decision, announced by the Federal Open Market Committee as the conclave opened and elaborated on in a keynote speech by Fed Chair Jerome Powell, was in effect a guarantee to Wall Street that its demand for “forward guidance”—lower interest rates for longer—would be met.

The Fed said it would no longer be guided by a 2 percent inflation rate limit in determining its interest policy, but would instead focus on an “average” rate of 2 percent, meaning that the cheap money regime could continue even if prices rose above that level.

As for dealing with the slump in the global economy—the most serious since the Great Depression—and combating the potential for further storms in the financial system following the market meltdown in mid-March, there were no answers, as underscored by the remarks of the Singapore finance minister.

“We’ve got to avoid a prolonged period of high levels of unemployment, and it’s a very real prospect,” he said. “It is not at all assured that we will get a return of tight labour markets even with traditional macroeconomic policy being properly applied.”

It was a significant comment because one of main themes in remarks by central bank chiefs was that monetary policy alone would not be sufficient to restore growth, and government intervention was needed to boost the economy. But, as Shanmugaratnam noted, even if “properly applied,” there were no guarantees of success.

According to the Financial Times, the notion that central bankers “need to face the reality of permanent upheaval and long-term economic damage” was the “main theme” of the event.

One of the most frequently cited academic papers produced for the meeting was prepared earlier this month by Colombia University academic Laura Veldkamp on the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The paper said that the biggest economic effects of the pandemic “could arise from changes in behaviour long after the immediate health crisis is resolved.” A potential source of such a long-lived change was a shift in the “perceived probability of an extreme, negative shock in the future,” and that “long-run cost for the US economy from this channel is many times higher than the estimates of the short-run losses in output.”

The paper continued: “This suggests that, even if a vaccine cures everyone in a year, the COVID-19 crisis will leave its mark on the US economy for many years to come.”

In other words, the pandemic was not only a trigger event, acting on the contradictions that had built up in the economy and financial system, but a transformative one as well.

With the Fed now having formally committed itself to the endless supply of cheap money to Wall Street, attention will turn to the European Central Bank (ECB), which is also conducting a strategic policy review, to see whether it goes down the same road.

While the governing council, under the presidency of Christine Lagarde, may be inclined to move in the same direction as the Fed, it would face certain opposition from Germany’s Bundesbank, which has expressed opposition to the easing of monetary policy.

A member of the governing council told the Financial Times, “we will look at it,” but the Bundesbank would be “very nervous” about it.

On May 5 this year the Constitutional Court in Germany ruled that the Bundesbank had to examine whether the bond-buying program of the ECB breached rules that it should not bail out individual governments. That potential crisis was averted, but the issue could be raised again if the ECB decides to replicate the actions of the Fed.

However, the ECB is likely to come under pressure to take further action because of indications that what limited recovery has taken place in the European economy is starting to slow, as COVID infections begin to rise again in parts of the euro zone.

Estimates for a growth in Spain are being revised down as infections increase, and there are warnings that the French economy could plateau below the level reached before the pandemic struck, at least until the end of 2022.

Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey, reflecting the interests of UK finance capital in the City of London, indicated support for the Fed’s move, saying it should have been more expansive previously. Bailey again raised the possibility of negative interest rates.

“We are not out of firepower by any means, and to be honest, it looks from today’s vantage point that we were too cautious about our remaining firepower pre-COVID,” he said, adding that there are times when we “need to go big and go fast.”

The actions of the Fed have done nothing to boost the real economy, as an increasing number of companies announce that temporary layoffs will be made permanent.

The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that a survey conducted by Randstad RiseSmart found that “nearly half of US employers that had furloughed or laid off staff because of COVID-19 are considering additional workplace cuts in the next 12 months.”

This indicates that the pandemic has been a trigger for a major restructuring of employment conditions.

The effects of the Fed’s policies and the further monetary easing to come are focused on the stock market, with Wall Street indexes rising to the record levels they achieved in February. The main beneficiaries have been the high tech companies—Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (the owner of Google) and Facebook—which together comprise more than a fifth of the Nasdaq index.

The extent of their rise and growing financial and monopoly power is indicated by the results of an analysis carried out by Bank of America Global Research, reported by the business channel CNBC. It found that the market capitalization of the major US tech firms, now standing at $9.1 trillion, was greater than the market capitalization of the entire European market, including the UK and Switzerland, at $8.9 trillion. In an indication of the massive shift that has taken place, the research note pointed out that in 2007, total European market capitalization was four times that of US technology stocks.



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