Why There Is No Left, Left (and Francis Fukuyama)

((Perhaps like Francis, I bit off more than I could chew. I started this post and set it aside for a while, but still I decided to finish and post.  Whatever you may think of anything I say, at least I try to offer some points.  Francis, given the opportunity in numerous powerful fora across the world, took only the opportunity to say that things were “highly puzzling and complex,” and added very little else. (Yes, we all write books—a basic function of anyone who wants to write a book is to provide a précis or an abstract; if you really want to, or just plain have to, then you just have to and you will.  If you have a point to make, you will make it, so it is no valid criticism to say Francis also had a book but made puzzlingly little effort to précis it in any meaningful way.  .  .he could have and didn’t.  At least I tried.))

 Under the title of “America’s Plutocracy,” one-time darling of the right Francis Fukuyama has now written a querulous op-ed about why poor Americans always support the most right-wing candidates who do them the most damage and exploit them the most.  (You can read the whole book, or failing that read excerpts everywhere, like here: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/money-power-and-class-in-america/article4666223/)  His insights, perhaps predictably from his eyrie, are bleary.

 Fukuyama seems ready to assert a plutocracy, but he’s lean, lean, lean on details as to how this came about.  Take this excerpt:

 

It has come as a surprise to many on the left that Mr. Romney – the “sneering plutocrat,” in the words of New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait – has pulled alongside or even ahead of Mr. Obama in some polls. They shouldn’t be so shocked. Money, power and class continue to play out in American politics in highly complex and puzzling ways. Plutocracy has kept the system going despite the enormous policy failures it has generated, not to exclude the recent crisis. And it just might push one of its prime beneficiaries, Mitt Romney, to a victory at the polls next month.

 

First of all, it isn’t a surprise to people on the left.  It stopped being that a long time ago, arguably decades ago.  Shocked?  From where he sits, I doubt that is a verb Fukuyama can even estimate the meaning of, unless he visited himself as a wild-eyed Republican radical gameboy a quarter of a century ago.  “Money, power, and class. . .play out. . . in highly complex and puzzling ways.”  Good one, Francis.  Thanks for your insight.  Now have another drink. 

 This, this is what Fukuyama has come to, chiding people for not realizing they’re being ripped off and their country, and western, success and mores are being sunk because it’s “highly puzzling and complex”?  Good of him to be so highlily and puzzlingly “complex.”  Next time I’m trying to solve a puzzle, I’ll call you, Francis.  Four letters, meaning unaccustomed to insight, lacking oppressive wit, or just being a patronizing gasbag. . .hm.

Well, since so few others are willing to take a shot, but since it is (or I hope is at least starting to be) on a lot of people’s minds, let’s have a go. Let’s try to answer the question of why the people (coal miners, autoworkers, cashiers, etc.) who can least benefit from, or afford to support right-wing candidates, have become their greatest supporters.  Let’s try to answer that question, of why the poorest people support the most right-wing candidates, just like in good ol’-Mussolini days (by the way, did he really make the trains run on time, or did he just run them over you if you didn’t support him?  Anyone with knowledge, feel free to remark.)

 Anything I will suggest will naturally blend into, bleed into other ideas you or I might have, but to try to prevent the kaleidoscope from crushing into a maroon-black centre, I will try to separate them out (a bit). 

1)  Let’s go back to the beginning.  Reagan wins, Gorbachev acquiesces, capitalism wins, communism loses.  Ok.  But look at things now.  Rampant communist-capitalist country (China) wins, capitalist-oligarch system returns with a bang (Russia), and former “socialist” satellites like Poland and Slovenia and Slovakia and the Czech Republic rocket ahead.  Turns out these last countries kind of like things they grew accustomed to under communism, like health-care, transit, and so on.  Throughout most of the United States, “transit” is a word you could only encounter in a Latin class at Harvard, but in Europe, it’s used to increase efficiency and productivity and enhance capitalist goals.  A person can travel at night in Romania, but in Tennessee?  Get serious. And that’s a problem, if you want to have an economy, much less a community or a country.

2)  Let’s take on the obvious, the so-called demise of unions.  Well, union voters never were or are left-wing voters or Democrats.  Statistically, that can be proven.  Most union voters admired the boss and wanted to be like him, even if capitalist state structures made it virtually impossible they ever could be.  What unions do, and what the right knows, is something far more insidious—they create, as the right knows, that one thing most anathema to the right—community.  People get together.  They talk.  (Family, amongst the right, doesn’t mean “family values”—it means “my family, right or wrong.”) They share insights and family goals and gossip and information.  They have BBQs, play softball.  They realize they’re all in this together, and have a mutual stake in making their lives better.  If you look at the media, it’s all about wages and strikes, but if you look to the strategists of the right, you know what they’re trying to undermine.  Why did American slave-buyers make an explicit point of separating families, mothers and fathers from children?  Why did American slave-buyers make sure no slaves came from the same West African village?  Because if they did, they could _communicate_.  And if you’re in the top 1%, the last thing in the world you want is for the bottom 99 to be able to communicate.

So yes, unions, in the formal sense, have been withering, but it isn’t because of strikes or agitation for higher wages—it’s because the increasingly powerful 1% has determined that working people must not be allowed to communicate.  A 2% or a 4% wage increase is irrelevant; an engaged, informed, interested workplace is sheer terror for the right.

3) So tiresome it’s not even worth bringing up, but here we go.  Only an American could think this, but an American I know pointed out that, sure, a lot of people in America were toothless and dirt-poor, and would never, ever eat anything more than raccoon, but they were embodied (embalmed, drunk?) with the idea that, if they ever did discover oil on their land, or somewhere, they sure didn’t want anybody else taxing them.  If they won the lottery, or a distant uncle left them oil shares in a will, then no G-man was ever gonna take it away. Call it anticipatory or pre-emptive selfishness. It’s the American dream, a fantasy the nightmare of which so many Americans end up living out, especially if they get sick and lose everything because of medical bills.  The idea that someday you’ll just somehow get rich, like on TV.  Lord knows how long most Americans carry this dream into their middle and old ages, but many do.  They really think one day they’re going to get rich, and when they don’t, they want to make sure that no-one tries to make their Cokes cost .01 to .02 more.  It is to weep.

4) But that feeds into education.  Education rates have been embarrassingly low in the US forever, and they have been getting lower for a long time in Canada owing to the ongoing separation of classes and increasing inaccessibility of higher education.  If you can keep people stupid, you can keep them thinking that, somehow, with their toothless grins, they, too, will turn out to be Romneys.  Say nothing of girls in Afghanistan or Pakistan; there are probably countless black girls in Texas, or native girls in northern Canada, who’d take a bullet in the head if they could get an education and escape the cycle of hopelessness they’ve been born to.  When was the last time a U.S. politician’s son or daughter was harmed in an American war?  That’s now left to poor people who will sign up to take a bullet because it may be the only shot at grappling out of poverty that they can imagine.  Keep the people in a nasty, brutish, and mean state of fear and aggressiveness, and they will not think about making common cause with others.

5) And then there is technology and how that affects interaction.  Facebook and so on, blah, blah, it seems too tiresome even to discuss.  But people increasingly see themselves as private islands and VIPs.  Even in despair, on notecards, teens take to the web to express their individual hopelessnesses and have them magnified a thousand times over.  Young people could never imagine actually joining a political party and sitting through meetings and consulting with others and trying to make a positive difference.  No, that’d take too long.  Thus, NGOs and eco-tourism and the like are much more popular.  Students I’ve known shave their heads for cancer and think that’s resume material, that they should get a special commendation for it.  I imagine I’ve known over 10 000 post-secondary students, but I’d be hard-pressed to think of more than about 3 who could actually give a care about politics.  But volunteer at a food bank?  Oh sure, because that gives instant feelgood gratification and can go on your resume.  Try to do something about why we’d even need food banks in some of the very richest places on the entire planet?  No, that wouldn’t be cool, wouldn’t give that immediate sense of being a great person.  You can shave your head and go on facebook, but going to a meeting and eating old donuts and drinking lousy coffee in somebody’s apartment does not, not cut it on facebook.  If the only way you can imagine expressing yourself is on strictly individual terms, then you’re either right-wing, or, yeah, you’ll spend a few months in Ghana building a water pump that will break down when you’re on the plane home and then get a job with a bank.  Sure, people are disaffected with politics, for countless reasons—when have they never not been?  But I hold to my point—that a technologically enabled sense of the person as island has contributed to an increasing unwillingness to engage in grassroots change-positive action.  Signed a petition on facebook lately?  Good for you.  Might as well put “brushed my teeth” on your resume.

6) This last does come to the democratic deficit.  It used to be that just about any party would urge people to “get out and vote!” because that was kind of an obvious, universally sanctioned thing to say, like “take care!” or “don’t drink and drive.”  But, of course, in the age of robo-calling and voter suppression and attack ads and the like, the mantra is more like “please slip on the ice and have to go to the hospital on voting day.”  Harper has imbibed all the tactics steeped in experience by his Republican mentors, and he knows that, if he can just slice and dice the electorate finely enough, the base and 5% is all he needs.  Ergo, yes, disaffect everyone you possibly can, and turn them off politics as much as you possibly can, through sleazy tactics, illegal campaign donations winked at by meaningless bodies like Elections Canada and bystander courts, proroguing, and so on and on.  Keep the people out, and you will keep the left out, too.  The closer you can get to 1% doing all the voting, the closer you get to Atlas shrugging at the wimps on the beach he commands.

7a) And this suggests the fourth estate, a concept one can only find in old dictionaries now.  Time was, the media had a role in informing people about what was going on, but, with the mainstream media being univocally right and increasingly concentrated, what few progressive voices are heard in local papers or on public stations are like whispered prayers in a stadium full of vuvzelas.  Now more than ever, journalists fear losing their jobs for not supporting right-wing causes, and/or desire above all to emulate their masters, so that, like a, say, Mike Duffy, they can eat soft donuts in a plush leather chair all day if they want.  Many know this one, with the “journalist” gushing over the criminal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtRkZ3i1ERQ

7b) But oh we do have lots of media, that 24-hr news cycle that turns a major issue into a one-minute hit, like a 400-page omnibus bill supplants a past process which would have seen legislation studied and mulled.  That 24-hr news cycle breeds contempt for politicians we are familiar with, and like our general computer world, makes us fatigued at the notion of having to spend more than 140 characters thinking about anything.  It was funny trying to watch relatively sober organs like the New York Times Magazine dutifully trying to come up with serious features, week after week, about cartoonish, inane Republican candidates like Michelle Bachmann and Herman Cain and Rick Perry who were the 24-hr news cycle’s flavours of the week.  There simply was no there, there.  Back in the day, people like that wouldn’t even have made the first cut of media attention.  But 24-hr news makes us insatiable for Palins and their spinoff shows and the spinoff shows of the offspring, and so on.  Politicians themselves simply can’t be, or become, or afford to be reflective.  They’ve got to propose the simplest solutions to the most complex problems, the father of which in recent Canadian history is Presto Manning.

8) Related to some if not most of the above, is a loss of secular belief, a faith in ourselves that we all could actually do something positive that would benefit us all.  We can now only see ourselves on facebook (with lots of friends), or, if we’re lucky, tv.  In the 1990s, Ontario’s Mike Harris government, keen for right-wing cred, helped a private consortium to just go ahead and build a private toll highway, the 407.  The public sector could have built that, and the public could have reaped the gains.  Everyone knows Ontario is in a hard place right now, so why can’t anybody fathom why it is perverse that the millions upon millions of dollars that *could* have flowed right back to Ontario citizens are now flowing into a few private clutches?  Casino billionaire (a man who takes jobs from others) Sheldon Adelson spent, at a very modest estimation, 53 million to try to elect first Gingrich, then Romney (http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2012/11/08/why-sheldon-adelsons-election-donations-were-millions-well-spent/).  How many jobs could $53M create, in America or anywhere?  53 million.  Think about it.  Shelley could have built a factory to employ disaffected Republicans for decades and kept 100s of them in work until they were pensioned off.  They could have made. . .bumper stickers, or license plates.

9) Penultimate closing thought.  It was interesting to see some of Ken Burns’ documentary about the Oklahoma Dust Bowl of the dirty 30s lately, and to read in the New York Times magazine lately about the basketball franchise there.  Singly or doubly, these media emanations offered intriguing data.  OK always was a Republican state, but during the dust bowl, FDR did his best, and told it like it was, that no president could control the weather.  The government offered employment and did what it could, and OK went Democrat for a time (cf. the essentially duly reviled fleeing Brit R. B. Bennett in Canada, whose austerity buggies were but the wry name representing real sacrifice of people more stoic than prineer anywhere).  Despite the incredible privations, the suicides and so forth, it doesn’t look like anyone just up and starved. That didn’t seem to happen.  There was a government.  It wasn’t like New Orleans lately. Then OK went back Republican and is now.  But after it was bombed by a white-supremacist far-right looney tune, OKC began to rebuild.  And rebuild how?  Well, duh, by beginning to work together on things, and actually *accepting* things like penny-fraction civic taxes so that roads and galleries and monuments and parks and so forth could get built.  So it just goes to show that you don’t need to be far-right anti-tax in order to progress; you can be a Republican, and have a park.  Incredible.  If only the Canadian government could go on a fact-finding mission to Oklahoma.

10)  A closing thought.  So much has been written about how the Republicans are so out of touch with the changing demographics of America that they will have a hard time getting re-elected again without moderating their policies.  Probably that’s an overstatement, but there’s much to it, still and all—if Republicans can’t appeal to more than just the old white men, paraphrasing the much criticized but not so inaccurate words of candidate Obama, who cling to their guns (and Bibles they can’t read much less comprehend), then the Republicans are in trouble.  But things change.  I am more worried about the demographics in Canada.  I’m not eager to see a coalition of the NDP and the Liberals, but there is much to be said for MP Pat Martin’s point that, given our non-representative political system, Harper can be Prime Minister until he gets bored just by getting 1/3 of voters to vote for him.  That is a democracy?  And the PM has wasted no time while he’s been PM trying to shut down voters—robocalling false voting stations, using lying attack ads, sucking up taxpayer money on government propaganda ads that Putin studies with envy—even wasting your money and mine—close to a million of it—to find out how much the ethnic vote (read: Asians and Indians) likes him.  This is *your* government, spending *your* money to promote itself and self-strategize (http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1287450--immigration-ministry-paid-for-media-monitoring-of-minister-jason-kenney-s-image), but apparently it’s of little consequence to Canadians.  Funner to shave one’s head to fight cancer, instead.  Pity no-one can find a link between shaving heads and creating accountable systems that maximize results.  Want to crowdsource?  Try not shaving your head.  Try supporting your dying buddy by having a meeting to get together people to try to come up with a way to figure out how we can maximize health care dollars and affect or create government towards providing the best cures for the greatest number of people, including your buddy/mom/friend, etc.  No?  Not cool enough?  Sorry.

Sorry.

zr

Obama's New Girlfriend: (her name is Sandy)

I am growing so, so, so weary of pundits saying that Sandy was a blessing for Obama because it gave him a chance to “look presidential.”  He wasn’t looking presidential.  He was the President.

It wasn’t about “looking” anything.  In times of crisis, you look to your president, your leader.  There was Katrina, there was Bush.

To listen to pundits, it’s as if New Yorkers and New Jerseyians called down wrath upon themselves so that Fox/CNN could blame them for Republican shortcomings.

 Most leaders (reality check) are going to have to deal with problems; if the issue becomes how they “look,” then we’re really in trouble.  Say Romney wins—will he call the national weather service not to find out what hurricanes are coming but how he will “look”?

-zr

And another thing!, he stormed uselessly and thunderously.  This whole "look presidential" and "photo-ops" crap mostly comes from the tv media itself.  So you're a journalist, so you've been subjected to a "photo-op"--whatcha gonna do about it?  Call it a photo-op, or act like a journalist and talk about what actually happened?  What Jane Doe or John Doe sitting in his/ her living room in Oklahoma really ponders the issue of "looks presidential"?  Journalists have been sucked in and are trying to report on themselves before they report on the story at hand. 

First, there has to be a crisis.  Then, there has to be a leader.  Then, there has to be a leader seen dealing with it.  You don't leap out of the gate with: "here's a chance to look presidential!!!"  TV journalists are so infected and indissociable from their own medium than they can't sift anything for reporting or analytical purposes.

Where was the journalist who said: "er, this storm is causing damage.  The president said "blah."  He is taking "blah" measures."  Oh no, it was all about journalists getting to speculate on whether or not whatever candidate "looked" presidential.  How messed up is this, completely.  Say a journalist's mother gets breast cancer.  Does a journalist's mother stand by eagerly and say: "yes, yes, she's looking like a warrior.  She looks like she's ready to fight it.  For those who counted her out, here she is saying, defiantly, that she's in this race until the finish."  The media offering me nil in the way of moral compass, as usual I'm going to have to make up my own, on which I'll report later, I guess.

CHLPA  Self-Interested Rogers Sportsnet Media Goes All Out to Mock Potential Canadian Hockey League Players Association (but it’s probably an idea whose time has come, and eventually will come)

TV and radio media have lately been heaping scorn on the notion of a CHLPA, which bubbled up briefly but then appeared to burst, and this post addresses why the media may be doing it and why a CHLPA should not necessarily be dismissed just because of self-interested media concerns.

(Disclosure: Dan Zorg is not a member of a union, or a lawyer.)

Various sources suggest that CHL players make about $50/week.  Of course, they are billeted and no doubt have living and meal allowances and equipment covered and so on.  But they work very hard for an uncertain future and they aren’t paid anything even approaching minimum wage, which is what at least one would-be CHLPA lawyer or another was saying they should get.  Minimum wage?  What is wrong with that?  What’s in it for the media, the Rogers representatives from Peter Maher to Bob McCown, who lampoon people who think that, hey, maybe players should get paid minimum wage?  Well, keeping their jobs and making sure they make money while players don’t.

After all, it’s not like there isn’t a lot of money in CHL hockey.  The proportion of CHL franchises doing better than NHL franchises is obviously higher.  Why else would the CHL keep expanding?  Why else would a Western CHL team play 72 games a year, or 88% of an NHL schedule, and every bit as gruelling and inane a playoff schedule with seven-game series’?  Why else would teams like the NHL Flames also want to own teams like the CHL Hitmen?  Why else would Rogers Sportsnet enter into partnership with the CHL to broadcast dozens of games per year? 

But CHL players can’t make minimum wage?  And people like Peter Maher and Eric Francis and Bob McCown, who make infinite amounts more than junior players, the vast majority of whom will never make the NHL, think it’s really neat to make fun of a potential CHLPA?  What is in it for them?  Have they been instructed by their employers to mock the idea of a CHLPA?

Have a look at that schedule again.  The CHL is at minimum one, and more normally two or three rungs below the NHL.  But CHL players still play 68-72 games and the huge playoff schedule.  The schedules look wonky, with intense concentrations of games followed by several days off, and bus travel schedules seemingly designed by aliens.  It is not uncommon for teams to play, say, 5 nights in 7, or 3 in 4, with long bus trips in between.  Take just any old example—near the beginning of February 2013, the Prince Albert Raiders will play 4 games in 5 nights.  The first is at home, then they visit Saskatoon, Lethbridge, and Swift Current before returning home, having travelled 1400k in that time.  By WHL scheduling standards, that looks very geographically reasonable.  Still, hockey isn’t like baseball, where you stand around in a field.  Hockey is an intense, physical, aggressive game, and if you’re going to get to the pros, you better be on your game.  Anyone reading this play hockey, or just exercise?  What if I said to you that you’d play four games in 5 nights and ride the buses in between and get to hotels/motels at 2, 3, 4 a.m., etc.?  Is that how an athlete practises, refines, and perfects his/her abilities?  Is that healthy?  Is that how athletes, seeking optimal performance, would actually train?  No, it’s idiotic, and invites injuries, but someone makes a lot of money off of this, and it obviously isn’t the players who provide the entertainment in the first place for $50 a week.

Much has been made of the CHL’s education program—basically, if a player plays a year in the CHL, that player gets a year of tuition at a university.  Good.  But most degrees take four years or more.  How many players actually play four full years in the CHL?  (Anybody ever get injured?)  Would the CHL release those stats, instead of just bragging about how much it “invests” in players (how noble!—not like the league gets anything out of those players), or offering bland aggregates saying the CHL has awarded x 1000 “scholarships”?  And besides, the CHL education program is use it or lose it—don’t go to school within 18 months, and you don’t get those vaunted “scholarships.”  Say you actually did play 3-4 years in the CHL.  Odds are, you’d like to keep the dream of a pro career alive.  After all, hockey is all you’ve known, and it’s unlikely that your schedule and those bus trips have prepared you very well for academics, anyway.  So you might try the ECHL, AHL, Europe, whatever.  But spend barely more than a full season doing it, and poof, that “education program” is gone.  So yes, the CHL’s education program is a good thing—it didn’t used to exist, and it’s a good start.  But only a CHL flack could call it generous, and when one looks at the strings attached to it, it’s hard not to think that the program is designed for PR purposes, if not explicitly to minimize the CHL’s actual educational commitment.  

Elsewhere on this blog, one can find a post I made about the Graham James re-arrest/re-trial.  I certainly didn’t expect to gain anything but flamers out of that one, but I was trying to get at systemic queries, and what one tries to do with things/situations like that of James.  Suppose there had been a CHLPA when James was coaching in the Western CHL? Now, am I saying that the presence of a CHLPA might have stopped a Graham James?  No, I’m not saying something that simplistic.  But think about it.  If a vulnerable young player who knows he can’t go to an abusive, pedophilic, corrupt, immoral etc. coach, or team brass, or who doesn’t have or doesn’t feel he can talk to an agent or recruiter—who in any case want him to get, or to get him to the pros and make money and NOT hear anything bad--or who may have a bit of a messed-up background, etc.—IF that young player knows that at least there’s something like a union representative who can be approached in confidence and can assist in legal matters and so forth, then maybe that young player can get some help.  And what if a would-be predator knows there’s yet that one more level of social/professional/legal observance he’s going to have to get around?  What happened to all the media people who wanted to be tough on crime? It is fairly amazing to me that those who easily revile Graham James (at least when they’re no longer able to vote him coach of the year anymore) are also those most eager to ensure that junior players get zero workplace assistance or representation (such as many even in the private media enjoy).  That is a toughie, that one.  Just what makes the media such anti-union cheerleaders, eager to heap scorn on an idea that could work to players’ benefits in many ways?  Well, look no further than the team owners and networks that drive the media’s every utterance.  What a sad, sad state of affairs.

Media badgerers like Bob McCown made a big deal out of how the nascent CHLPA couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say how many it had signed up and where.  He and his cohorts sympathized deeply with poor David Branch, CHL Commissioner, who really did cast himself as just about the most befuddled and put upon man in the land.  Undeniably, it does look like the CHLPA effort was mishandled and poorly organized, but then again, trying to organize and certify a union of any kind, against media and management pressure, is incredibly difficult.  Trying to organize a union of teenaged kids competing amongst themselves and dreaming of the big time and lottery money is doubly improbable, no matter how much money they’re making for others (and how much, much more ~relatively~ speaking, any potential union executives or lawyers could make out of the deal).  Where’s the media to speak on behalf of the union, or rather, players?  It doesn’t exist, because if such media appeared, that media would be fired by the league and owners and the media broadcasters who pay the owners and the league.  Talk about a closed loop.  According to the Windsor Star, Branch “said that just because there is not a union does not mean the players' concerns will be ignored. ‘We don't think a third party can do it better than us.’”

[Read more: http://www.windsorstar.com/Branch+breathes+easier+union+move+collapses/7493382/story.html#ixzz2BEPm5dvF]

Nope, no conflict of interest there.  Only the league that sells and profits from the players, trades them, releases them, etc.—only the league can really look after them.  What if a member of the Calgary Hitmen wanted to join a potential union—the Calgary Flames, broadcast regionally by Rogers Sportsnet, also own the Heat, the Hitmen, the Roughnecks, and the Stampeders.  Talk about a company store.  Can you imagine how fast you’d end up in Siberia if you indicated a willingness to be represented by anyone but the cartel that owns you?

*IF* the CHL was doing such a wonderful job helping its players “voluntarily” (well, that’s big of them, to help their players “voluntarily”—one only wonders what “involuntary” looks like-- http://www.chl.ca/article/statement-from-the-canadian-hockey-league), then why hasn’t the league splattered all over its websites and affiliates’ websites 100s of success stories about the game and what all the amazing scholarship winners they’ve anointed have gone on to do? 

Who could really provide employment assistance, training, legal advice, abuse counsel, etc.?  A players association could.

Eric Francis of Hockey Night in Canada was another who scoffed at the union idea.  He thought it was a big joke, and chipped in on the FAN590 that he didn’t think Georges Laraque was “very smart.”  Based on what I’ve seen of Eric Francis, I can’t imagine what his qualifications are for assessing the intelligence of others.  Based on what I’ve seen of Georges Laraque, he strikes me as a thoughtful guy, willing to step up and support good causes and his community, willing to get involved in public or political situations, and generally use his minor celebrity both to advance progressive things and, I imagine, also himself (though given the money he made in the NHL, more than many of us will make in a lifetime, it seems to me to be a cheap shot to say that he’s in it for the money or fame when he could just be golfing like many other retired players, instead of hanging out in Haiti doing relief work, say).  (And it is also a fact well-known to any hockey fan that, just as there’s a disproportionate number of catchers who go on to be managers, there’s an unusual amount of tough guys like Laraque who end up being the most articulate and philosophical and reflective about the game they took a small but highly visible part in—the Sheehys, the Grimsons, the Cherrys and Kypreoses—it’s striking how often it is the tough guys who end up being agents and lawyers and coaches and pitchmen and commentators and so on.)  For what it’s worth, Eric Francis is also a big backer of Lance Armstrong, who he still supports because Armstrong has done so much to raise money in the fight against cancer.  So Armstrong, who, like many other athlete/steroid-chemical users who experience long-term or premature life-ending consequences as a result of their drug habits, may well have even gotten cancer partly as a result of the huge amount of cheating and doping he did, he gets a free pass from Francis.  It’s true that cycling’s a dirty sport, but as the voluminous USADA report shows, Armstrong was amongst the dirtiest and most vicious in that sport; he was not only fairly casual (such a prima donna was he) about letting those close to him see him dope, but also a ruthless ringleader (don’t use juice to support Team Lance?  You don’t have a job with Team Lance).  When those who had evidence against him accused him, he sued them, all the while knowing he was cheating, and that other people knew it and had seen it. That, in view of all the counter-lawsuits he’s going to get now, that was smart?  So lessee, we’ve got Laraque, an athlete who maintains a public profile and does good works, and we’ve got Armstrong, a cheating athlete who maintains a public profile and does good works and sues those who know he’s cheating.  In Eric Francis’s view, Armstrong’s still a fine exemplar, but Laraque “isn’t very smart.”  Well, you draw your own conclusions about what makes Eric Francis draw the conclusions he does, whoever’s paying him.

Bottom line: The CHL is big, big money—for owners, for the league, for media rights holders.  Sooner or later, the CHL is not going to be able to get away with paying its employees/junior players on the order of $50/wk (despite magnanimous gestures like feeding them).  Media talking heads, especially those who are themselves owned by private networks, will fight the players they feast off as much as they can, but one day the players will have to get a sop.  What if the World Junior Team asked for a 1% cut of TSN’s revenues?  Can you imagine the storm over that one?  Even if lawyers take .99% of that 1%, the players, and the game and society, would be better for it.  Some of the players who don’t make the NHL might even become lawyers.

--zr