Owners threaten football lock-out

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Following a year of record-breaking TV ratings and team profits, one would expect the NFL to be basking in the glow of its emergence as the most popular sport in the United States. Instead, the cloud of an impending owners’ lockout of players looms over the 2011 season. The owners and the NFL Players Association are in contentious negotiations. As we go to press, talks have been extended until March 11.

While NFL owners collected over $9 billion in revenues in 2010, an astonishing sum when considering the league and teams employ only 3500 full-time employees, they are asking for major concessions from the players. The NFL owners are asking players to give back an additional $1 billion in shared revenue and for them to agree to extending the NFL season by an additional two games.

Currently, the NFL calculates team salary caps based on a share of total league revenue. Players receive 60% of revenue minus a deduction of $1 billion off the top, which goes straight to the owners’ pockets. The NFL is demanding that players agree to a deduction of $2 billion.

Owners have presented the extension of the NFL regular season to 18 games as a win-win for both sides, since revenues would increase even more as a result. Of course, it’s the players, not the owners, who would pay the consequences of the increased hits from two more games. Football is by nature a violent game, and the long-term (continued from page 10: “Even the Rain”) she doesn’t give in to caricaturing either position.

Emma apparently feels that espionage is a moral evil per se, while Ben and Vera perceive it as a means to an end, with morality attaching to the end, not the means. If advancing the interests of the Soviet Union during World War II was a noble cause, then spying on its behalf could not be immoral. To Ben and Vera there can be no doubt that Joe Joseph, who would only tell them that he “did what he had to do,” did the right thing.

When Emma confronts Vera and asks her opinion of the new revelations, Vera simply replies, “Well, I’m not a rah-rah American, so . . .”

“What does that mean?” Emma demands.

“Just that I’m not a rah-rah American. If I were a rah-rah American I would see it one way, but I’m not, so I don’t.”

But Emma prattles on about “the ethics of spying,” prompting her grandmother, exasperated, to tell her: “Listen, Joe was a member of the Communist Party, you know that.

Anybody with a beating heart and half a brain was back then.” Emma’s generation can’t understand that, Vera says, because most young people nowadays are simply apathetic.

Furthermore, she continues, Joe Joseph’s allegiance was not to the U.S. government, nor should it have been. “The Russians were really the ones fighting the war, not us, and some people were very happy to sit back and let them die, even some people in the party, and some people like your grandfather were not. You’re talking about ethics, well those were his ethics, not to turn his back on his comrades who were fighting fascism.”

Emma tries to regain the moral high ground by enumerating Stalin’s many crimes, but her grandmother cuts her off and ends the argument: “Well the question is which side are you on, that’s the question.”

In the end, Emma resigns as director of the Joe Joseph fund. Vera tells her that her action is the moral equivalent of what cowardly people did when called to testify before the McCarthyite committee: “Listen, what you’ve done here, my darling, is you’ve named your grandfather’s name. That’s what it amounts to.”

And although the playwright never explicitly reveals which side she herself is on, I—not being a rah-rah American myself—was pleased that she gave Vera the last word. n consequences of the repeated hard contact to the head endured by players is just beginning to be understood. In just one example of the several studies done on the affects on players’ health, a 2009 study commissioned by the NFL found that among former players Alzheimers and other memory-related diseases were 19 times the normal rate for men ages 30-49 than among the general population.

NFL players are highly paid entertainers by the standards of most working people, and media coverage tends to simplify the dispute as one between millionaires and billionaires. But a quick look behind the numbers shows that most NFL players have the same uncertainty and precariousness in their lives as most workers.

While the average NFL salary is $1.8 million, less than a quarter of players make that much. More than half of NFL players earn salaries under $1 million. For every story a sports fan reads of elite players signing contracts with bonuses in the tens of millions, there is the practice squad player making $5200 a week for 17 weeks (with no benefits) hoping to make the team to collect the league minimum of $295,000.

While all those dollar amounts are way beyond what any factory worker could dream of, consider that the average NFL career is merely three years. Within those three years, NFL players literally put their lives on the line to provide the entertainment that generates the $9 billion.

While owners cry poverty, they are making billions on the backs and concussed brains of players. Like the bank... Wisconsin (continued from page 12: “Massive Wisconsin uprising fights all-out assault on unions”) tributed freely by local vendors who received donations from around the world.

In the center of the massive rotunda, surrounded by a diverse crowd, young people hold court with a bullhorn, offering an open mike for speeches and leading chants and songs that reverberated throughout the building.

Hundreds of cops stationed within and around the Capitol have taken a non-confrontational stance, engaging in discussion with protesters and amongst each other, and in many cases expressing solidarity with the protesters. But aside from refusing to evict protesters in a one-night show of support, the cops have done their jobs for the Department of Administration by restricting access to the building and ejecting the remaining occupiers after the court order.

Socialist Action calls for uncompromising solidarity with public workers in Wisconsin, Ohio, and elsewhere. The unions and their allies must stand firm against any concessions or cutbacks. It would be unconscionable not to also support low-income workers, the children of workers, the unemployed, the ill, and minorities who

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H. Marc Larson / The Green Bay Press /AP Scott Olson / Getty Images