Class War Made Too Obvious

So there's three things sticking in my non-sports craw tonight. The first is a blog that has excerpts from a Wall Street Journal story detailing the problems of the very rich. No, seriously. Go take a look, assuming that you haven't eaten recently. (The gist for non-clickers: you can't buy happiness, and the super-rich are so very offended that you think they must be happy. Happiness, it seems, can only be rented. So there.)

The second is the continuing Please Don't Look nature of the NFL vs. NFLPA negotiations, where after years of posturing and silliness, the NFL says that they are now giving up more financial disclosure than ever before.

Which is to say that the NFL owners have wasted everyone's freaking time by not, well, getting anywhere near the very basic information that would be required for a negotiation based on trust. Which isn't what the owners want, of course.

What do the owners want? Complete and total capitulation from the players, so that they do not have to do what they really need to do -- destroy the small market owners so that the large market owners can make more. Just like baseball, a plainly superior sport where a third of the markets or more don't even have hope on opening day. But I digress.

Now, I get that football players are meatheads, misogynists, morons and frequently play for very, very wrong laundry. But good God in heaven, the owners are a million times worse. Take a good look in the jowly maw of Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson, and try to resist the joyful visualization of his head being caved in with a baseball bat.

Wooden. Impacting around the right temple, with the sound of meat being dropped from a distance. The recoil is less than you might imagine, given the decades of protective jowl rings that Richardson has accumulated. So the bat will need to come again, on a thoroughly professional swooping uppercut, catching him under the many chins and lifting the meat sack off the ground...

Perhaps I've said too much.

The third and final bit is the Wisconsin state legislature tonight. In case you've missed this story -- and not too surprisingly, it hasn't really gotten the kind of round-the-clock coverage that it might deserve, given that it doesn't exactly play into the corporate media's pre-determined plot of how everyone hates unions, and the country is bankrupt due to overpaid teachers -- the Republican legislature went for "the nuclear option" tonight, passing a different not-different bill that, well, gives Republican governor Scott Walker exactly what he's lied and refused to negotiate for all along: the end of collective bargaining status for public servant union members.

Which is to say, the end of unions. Since a union without collective bargaining agreement is basically a man with one less ball than John Kruk.

Now, I don't much care what your opinion of the Wisconsin situation is. But I think we can probably agree that three is a trend, and what we've really got here is a situation where the abuses of the wealthiest people among us are getting really, really obvious.

And well, one of the nice things about this country, at this point in our technology and with our history... is that we've got an Internet that works quite well outside of the 95% media coverage from six corporations.

And we've *always* had the guns, and the willingness to use them.

So, um, rich people? Really, really rich people who own public companies like sports teams, or bellyache to reporters about how hard your life is, or buy elections and political parties to enact retribution on your enemies, while continuing to grease the country's skid towards a true banana republic with no middle class to speak of?

You might want to rein it in a bit.

Because there are more of us, with increasingly less to lose, and an ever-increasing ability to make trouble.

Thanks for your indulgence, and I'll (try to) get back to the sports now...