Posted: 24 July 2012 at 13:09 | IP Logged

The only exception to this rule was the nearly catastrophic events surrounding the NBA at the end of the 1970s. The two sides managed to reach an arrangement to cheap soccer jerseys   save the whole enterprise, but not until management consented to surrender some of its control ¡ª namely, to show labor the real books and to deal with them honestly, thereby demonstrating both good faith and the true depth of the league's fiscal abyss. Compare that to the preposterous propaganda attending last season'scheap soccer jerseys   lockout, in which the NBA claimed that 22 of its teams were "losing money" and, therefore, the players needed to give back more than they had in the past. The first thing that happened was that actual financial reporters checked outcheap soccer jerseys   this foolishness and didn't stop laughing until Valentine's Day. The lockout was about control, just as the silly dress code was about control, the quibbling over rap music was about control, the widespread panic over tweeting is about control. This is an intramural struggle for power in which the fans are as remote a factorcheap jerseys for sale   to the conflict in question as Pakistan was to the Battle of Gettysburg.

Certainly, the NHL's initial bid and the NFL's threat to put scab officials on the field are opening gambits, but the mentality behind them is as clearcheap jerseys free shipping  and as plain as it ever was. And why shouldn't it be? The people who own professional sports team come from the same upper corporate class that has spent 30 years destroying the idea of the American economy being a mixed system and a cooperative venture rather than purely an engine of private profit. In all their other successful ventures, keeping down the workforce has been a primary goal. The creation of a passive workforce has been so thoroughgoing that it is now acheap jerseys online  discipline taught in America's finest business schools. Indeed, there is more than a little evidence that the elite from which we get our owners is rigidly and steadily fashioning for itself a country of independent owners and subordinate workers. Last week, for example, on a meeting of a special committee of the Wisconsin State Legislature at which one state official said that, cheap jerseys wholesale as far as he was concerned, the purpose of public education was to develop a "workforce."

"In workforce development we say," this fellow said, "you begin at birth and end at the grave."