The Boston Whiteskins

"“I don’t care about basketball,” Hodgman admitted, “but owning a sports team is one of the last remnants of capitalism’s golden age.” As an “oligarch American,” he said it’s time he acquired his own “herd of humans.”

When Stewart protested that his guest had the “wrong idea,” Hodgman quickly corrected him, showing just how much the current system of the NBA is like the 19th century slave trade. “So to recap, I take them from their homes, and compel them to perform physical feats for my pleasure and profit in a place on my choosing, and when I tire of them I can trade them with my wealthy friends without their consent,” Hodgman said.

If Sterling can make half a billion dollars by being a “secret racist,” Hodgman asked Stewart to imagine how much he could make by being an openly racist owner. Especially after he takes the Clippers all-white, “like Mitt Romney buying mayonnaise on his way to a Coldplay concert” and renames them the “Boston Whiteskins.”" mediaite.com

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Underneath the goofiness and the slavery imagery, there is a truth that Stewart et al may or may not have intended.

That is the simple fact that a sports franchise is a business in which there are owners of the equity of the company and then there are employees.  This is true without regard to covenants among the other owners of franchises in a larger group involved in the same trade. 

If the Sterlings were owners of a Burger King franchise, they would have employees; cooks, counter staff, janitors and the like.  In the same way, the owners of the Clippers have employees who are; coaches, players, trainers, PR people, etc.

Hodgman announces in this skit that he is uninterested in basketball but that he likes Sterling's "business model" in which the other owners will force him to sell a property that he paid $12 million for with a modest profit of at least half a billion.

To force a similar sale Hodgman states that he intends to be openly racist, fire all the Black player employees and move his franchise to Massachusetts, "the home of Caucasian basketbell," where he will populate the team with White people and call them "The Boston Whiteskins."

He says he reckons that the resulting hysteria will net him a profit without having to field a team at all.

Interesting.  Hey folks!  Business is about making money not playing basketball or cooking hamburgers.   pl

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/daily-shows-hodgman-wants-to-buy-the-clippers-for-all-the-wrong-reasons/

Comments

[ISL]

By chance I just watched Dirty Rotten Scoundrels this weekend.

So were our top political leaders taken in (playing the role of the wealthy gullible heiress's)

or just cynically playing for publicity points?

And if the latter, were they warned that eventually, the gig would be revealed? did they care? And were they counting on media amnesia tame as with everything?

Perhaps intel intercepts released by our new friends in Russia might evaporate the political score points (as if anyone will care when the elections roll around).

[steve]

Reminds of the time I was teaching in New Orleans and a kid asked me if I would be willing to become a slave in exchange for $2,000,000 per year.

I explained to him what he had just described was in actuality just a very, very good, yet demanding, job.

[Medicine Man]

I'm not sure what you're driving at, Col. I agree that the primary purpose of a business is to make money. Protecting the brand name of a marketed product, such as a sports franchise, is clearly part of that. Most of the real pressure on Sterling is coming from his fellow owners in the NBA and their motives are obviously monetary (as you say).

[turcopolier]

M M

My point is simple. Business is about transactions that yield profits and perhaps salary for the equity holders. Business is not about product. Product is produced and sold, brand reputation is protected, overhead expenses are paid for the sole purpose of protecting the source of wealth for the equity holders. Players in an NBA basketball company are part of the cost structure of the company. It is amusing for the owners to make money in the midst of a circus like an NBA game but it is only that. Companies that come to believe that they exist to produce some particular set of things or perform some particular service are doomed in the long run because demand changes while these older companies retain business practices and organizational structures that are cost centers rather than profit centers. the idea that seems to exist that the player/employees have "rights" in the company outside their contracts is just silly. pl

[Tyler]

How come no one ever talks about the NBA needing to be more diverse but the NYT Goldmans and Steinmans are always kvetching about diversity in rodeo or computer science?

[turcopolier]

M M

And furthermore, government is nothing like the model I described. From the business point of view, government is all cost centers and no profit centers. Now, if a company lives by government contracts, then that part of the company that manages the government income to the company is a profit center to the extend that income from that contract exceeds cost. I learned all this the hard way after leaving government. Former career government employees automatically assume that money is free. Why would they not? It has been free to their former organizations for all their careers. They also inclined to build elaborate staffs and organizations. These are pretty much always cost centers. I hated business but prospered in it. pl

[dan bradburd]

Tyler,

It was 'diverse' in the manner you suggest. So was big time college ball. Why not now? Probably pretty close to a meritocracy.

[Tyler]

Okay when its 90% black its "diverse" and a meritocracy but when its 90% white men its "problematic" and systematic racism.

Right.

[Bill H]

I was serving on the board of our HOA and as we were preparing the budget for the upcoming year the board member who was overseeing the maintenance person informed us that he had instructed the maintenance man to buy up a lot of spare parts because the maintenance budget had not been used up and he didn't want to finish the year with unspent money in the budget. Oddly, I was the only member of the board to object to that insanity, and the only one who had ever served in the military or worked for government. I had to explain why that made no sense to our enterprise, that the unspent money could be transferred to our reserve account, and it was amazingly difficult to get that point across.

[Fred]

Now in addition to more diversity there is the call to action for, finally, (again) reparations!
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

[Tyler]

Coates is your typical sham "intellectual", stringing together thoughts with no rhyme or reason beyond a call for more gimmedats and giving white liberals in gated communities another reason to pat themselves on their back about their "tolerance".

We had reparations already, its called the Great Society and the War on Poverty. Its wrecked the black community, and he wants ANOTHER shot in the arm of that stuff?

[Will Reks]

How far back do you have to go to when the NBA was 90% white men? Dan's right but yours is an emotional argument.

There are fewer black players in the MLB these days but no one can argue that there wasn't systematic racism and exclusion pre-Jackie Robinson. Is there now? No.

The NHL is more than 90% white. That's not due to systematic racism and no is complaining about it.

[Tyler]

What the hell are you even talking about? I'm pointing out the hypocrisy of how diversity is a club used solely by the left to beat whites. No one complains about diversity in Hollywood or investment banking, no one complains about diversity in rap music, no one complains about diversity in runningback or wide receiver positions in football.

No, its all about diversity and intervention when its mainly white gentile men. There's nothing emotional about that argument ffs when its all around you?

The only reason no one mentions the NHL is because no one cares. Meanwhile you've got the DOJ threatening to sue schools if there isn't racial "equality" in discipline, but you're stammering "t-t-the NHL!"

[ISL]

my comment was actually for the nigerian thread.... Here it is quite non-sequitur

[Fred]

Tyler,
He's the son of a Black Panther repeating the victimization routine but more articulately. A few of my liberal friends are outraged that I didn't jump on the bandwagon.

[Tyler]

Apparently "stirring" and "powerful" are the two adjectives in vogue among the liberals regarding that trite nonsense.

The hilarity of Coates is that for all his rah rah fight da powah adolescent nonsense he only exists where he is because of the white liberals that use him as a totem. He's not particularly articulate or even clever, and could never fill this particular niche among whites.

I don't know of any black published & edited magazines that put out the standard navel gazing Leftist bs like The Atlantic. Speaks a lot of good about black people.

[Nancy K]

I think there needs to be more diversity in working in the fields also. Every time I see someone picking tomatoes, strawberries etc. they are brown. Where are all the white people who are being discriminated against and not hired to work in the fields.

[Will Reks]

No one complains about those fields because there are no grounds for complaint.

You read my NHL comment wrong. No one is complaining because it isn't an issue of racism. Nice try though.

[Fred]

Tyler, I just point the liberals to the last three decades of leadership in Detroit. That generally shuts them up.

[Tyler]

You are being purposefully disingenuous. This is the kind of NYT/lefty hypocrisy I am talking about here that you are bleating about not existing.

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2014/05/nyt-if-you-work-in-silicon-valley-odds.html

[Tyler]

Farmer would have to start paying a living wage instead of cutting corners by paying indio peasants $2/hr when they're not crying to the NYT about "crops rotting in the fields"

[Tyler]

My liberals are much more dedicated to the big lie.

Apparently evil whites moved away from Detroit after Coleman Young because they couldn't STAND having a Powerful Black Man(tm) in charge, and took their tax base with them because of RACISM and that's why Detroit is why it is today.

That is literally what they think. As I told Mr. Habakkuk, these people are insane.

[dan bradburd]

Tyler,

Can you please identify the arenas in which white men are suffering systematic discrimination? I do not feel that the world I see/know is the same as your world, and I would like to know whether we are seeing the same thing differently, or looking at different things.

[Anonymous]

The people

http://www.adversity.net/horror.htm

http://www.adversity.net/fed_stats/OPM2007/001_blacksFY2006.htm

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1795443

Elite education

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2012/12/ron-unz-on-the-illusory-american-meritocracy/

The children and society

http://www.phillymag.com/articles/white-philly/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8760676/Children-as-young-as-four-reprimanded-for-racist-behaviour.html

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/05/10/student-group-disbanded-blacks-field-trip/

[Tyler]

Anonymous laid it out, and of course there is the unrelenting violence of blacks against whites as laid out on WWW.stuffblackpeopledontlike.com and WWW.whitegirlbleedalot.com.

But hey slavery! Saint MLK!