Cartoon of the day

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Cartoon of the day

Special mention

 

“I will row through shit for you”

U.S. Olympic rower Megan Kalmoe doesn’t want to talk about water quality anymore. As she explained on her blog, journalists are ruining the 2016 Olympic games by being “fixated on shit in the water.”

We are American, and we are going to Rio to represent you in this potentially flawed and imperfect setting that you are trying so desperately to get the public to love to hate.  We are going to compete for medals to bring them home to you, and for you so that the US has a good shot at winning the medal tally again in Rio.  We go to Rio and face incredible odds, some of us, for you so that you will be proud of us, and proud of supporting Team USA. We are supposed to be a Team–all of us–and those of you covering our stories, and those of you resting comfortably in your intellectual armchairs are supposed to have our backs. All of us owe something to our nation for getting us this far, or for believing in us, and competing under our shared colors is our way of expressing our gratitude to you.  So tell me again why you want to talk about poop? . . .

I will row through shit for you, America.

Kalmoe and her fellow participants are, by her own admission, experts on only one thing: their performance.

Unfortunately, what she doesn’t take into account is the real shit in the water: the financing of the International Olympic Committee. That’s what makes it difficult for both viewers like me and athletes like her.

As the Washington Post explains, Olympic executives cash in on a “Movement” (as in “the Olympic Movement”) that keeps athletes poor. It’s just like any other modern capitalist corporation: the athletes do most of the work (in the water and on the fields) and receive little by way of compensation (especially the ones who are not stars in major, televised sports), while the national and international board members and executives walk away with much of the surplus the athletes produce.

At the very top of “the Movement” sits the International Olympic Committee, a nonprofit run by a “volunteer” president who gets an annual “allowance” of $251,000 and lives rent-free in a five-star hotel and spa in Switzerland.

At the very bottom of “the Movement” — beneath the IOC members who travel first-class and get paid thousands of dollars just to attend the Olympics, beneath the executives who make hundreds of thousands to organize the Games, beneath the international sports federations, the national sport federations and the national Olympic committees and all of their employees — are the actual athletes whose moments of triumph and pain will flicker on television screens around the globe starting Friday. . .

But by the time that flood of cash flows through the Movement and reaches the athletes, barely a trickle remains, often a few thousand dollars at most. For members of Team USA — many of whom live meagerly off the largesse of friends and family, charity, and public assistance — the biggest tangible reward they’ll receive for making it to Rio will be two suitcases full of free Nike and Ralph Lauren clothing they are required to wear at all team events.

In the words of its charter, the Olympic Movement is devoted “to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society.” To an increasingly vocal and active group of current and former Olympic athletes in the United States, however, the Movement is a vast, global bureaucracy that treats athletes like replaceable cogs, restricting their income without fear of reprisal from a workforce unable, or unwilling, to unionize.

“The athletes are the very bottom of a trickle-down system, and there’s just not much left for us,” said Cyrus Hostetler, 29, a Team USA javelin thrower and two-time Olympian who said the most he’s ever made in one year in his career, after expenses, is about $3,000. “They take care of themselves first, and us last.”

That means Kalmoe and her fellow athletes will be forced to row through lots of shit, competing to take home a medal, while those who run the International Olympic Committee will stay dry and clean, guaranteed to take home a large share of the surplus.

Only in America

Apparently, this is the way to get attention of the administration on college campuses these days: threaten to cut off $1 million football revenues.

A student engaged in a week-long hunger strike wasn’t able to get the university’s president to address the problem of racism on campus. So, black football players, with the support of other players and coaches, have stopped practicing and have threatened not to play in the scheduled games.

In response to mounting racial tensions at the University of Missouri and an administration’s perceived failure to address students’ concerns, members of the school’s football team have threatened to boycott its remaining games, leaving administrators reeling and emboldening student activists who have been demanding a change in leadership.

Like all such protests, there’s a larger context. This is, of course, the state where, fifteen months ago, Michael Brown was killed by a white police officer.

“The demonstrations by these students are a reflection of where things are going nationally in terms of people being fed up with intolerance,” said the Rev. Traci Blackmon, a St. Louis minister heavily involved in the Ferguson protests. “The notion that the administration would not take a very strong no-tolerance policy toward hatred of any kind is just unconscionable. And the response to the absence of that is what you’re seeing now.”

And this is a president who was hired to run the university like a corporation.

University of Missouri curators saw Wolfe as an ideal successor to Gary Foresee, a former Sprint Nextel CEO who had become the first non-academic to run the college system. Even their praise was couched in business jargon.

“He can sell to others the vital importance of our university,” board of curators chair Warren Erdman told the Rolla Daily News. . .

“I’ve had the great fortune to work with a lot of different companies and executives,” he told the St. Louis Business Journal. “There’s a six degrees of separation and we can get access. Even if you don’t have a personal relationship, you can use your LinkedIn network and can typically find a mutual friend who can initiate an introduction.”

It quickly became clear that Wolfe was being brought in to cut costs in a state where legislators were eager to slash taxes, depriving the university of revenue. . .

One of Wolfe’s first acts was to approve a three percent tuition hike, drawing the ire of parents and students.

A few months later, Wolfe stirred anger again by shutting down the university’s highly regarded publishing house in order to save $400,000 a year. After an outcry from professors and authors across the country, however, Wolfe changed course.

The controversy was heightened by the fact that Wolfe was, at the same time, pushing for a $72 million expansion of the university’s football stadium.

Last year, the board of curators voted to extend Wolfe’s contract, praising him for his business-minded approach.

“President Wolfe has thoughtfully transformed our strategic planning process in a way that focuses our limited resources on priorities while reducing or eliminating waste and redundancies,” the board said in a statement.

This semester, however, Wolfe’s corporate cost-cutting appeared to go too far.  Just a few days before the start of the semester, the university announced it was eliminating subsidies that graduate students use to pay for health insurance.

Graduate students revolted. Thousands, including Butler, protested against the cuts. They issued demands and walked out of classes. Ultimately, the university relented and restored the subsidies.

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

Cartoon of the day

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Cartoon of the day

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Protest of the day

According to Joe Coscarelli [ht: sm],

A 90-minute walk-off in late February has cost 250 UPS drivers in Queens their jobs — 20 of them now, and the other 230 when the company has trained their replacements, the Daily News reports. The protest was staged in response to the firing of an employee and union activist with 24 years of experience. “These are middle class jobs that sustain families, and we can ill afford to have [so many] adversely affected by a rash decision,” said Public Advocate Letitia James, who has taken the workers’ side.

“Although UPS maintains that the job action was illegal, these tools have been staples of successful labor movements, and union members should not be restricted from employing these strategies if they feel workers are being treated unfairly,” reads a city council proclamation, delivered ahead of a City Hall press conference tomorrow.

But UPS says the drivers knew the deal, even the one who just came back from an on-the-job brain injury:

One of the workers who faces dismissal just got back on the job following a near-fatal accident.

Domenick DeDomenico, 40, was in a coma for 10 days after getting hit by a car last year while delivering packages for UPS. He fought back from serious brain injuries and needed a year of speech and physical therapy.

Just in case the giant corporation was seeming too sympathetic.

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Good questions

Bill Keller, in writing about the proposed religious exemptions to the Affordable Care Act, poses a series of good questions:

You might ask why a clerk at Notre Dame or an orderly at a Catholic hospital should be denied the same birth control coverage provided to employees of secular institutions. You might ask why institutions that insist they are like everyone else when it comes to applying for federal grants get away with being special when it comes to federal health law.

Here’s how I put it in a discussion with my coworkers last May:

since when does the existence of “institutions that employ and serve others of different or no faith” require only that such institutions be allowed to carry out their religious mission and not their other responsibilities, such as employer (including employer of women), healthcare insurer, and so on? Such institutions already get significant tax breaks in order to carry out their religious mission, in exchange for fulfilling their many other responsibilities.