SPORTSMEN - GUTLESS, GREEDY OR STUPID
11 04 2008This is a repost but I think it is topical… A few days ago I posted about actors who uncritically appear in blatant propaganda pieces but don’t say anything. Another group that are involved in this sort of thing are sportsmen. I remember Michael Jordan getting asked about sweatshops in Indonesia where people were making shoes for ridiculously poor wages. Jordan himself was rumoured to be getting paid more than all the people making the shoes put together and he didn’t have a lot to say about it. He was quoted in the NYT as saying…
“I don’t know the complete situation. Why should I? I’m trying to do my job. Hopefully, Nike will do the right thing.”
Nothing much has changed since then of course. Individual factories have seen some improvements and glossy codes of ethics have been made but the sweatshop syste remains intact. Democracy Now did a good section on it yesterday… Unfortunately the team I support also have a deal with Nike, which I am none too happy about. I have not bought a single product of theirs for a long long time for 2 reasons. The first is ethics and the second is that their products are shite anyway. The question is though, are the sportsmen who get these huge marketing deals to gutless to say anything, too greedy to care, or too stupid to realise what is going on? I don’t see that there are any other options. Whatever happened to this sort of thing…
or this..
“Wars of nations are fought to change maps. But wars of poverty are fought to map change.”
Muhammad Ali
Great post. I am stealing your video for my two readers.
am i your first second or third reader?
what? what? you actually want us to pay full boat for the crap we buy at walmart? americans do have a conscience we have a wallet.
steal away
My brother used to be the media apologist for Nike. When i tried to talk to him about some of their policies towards sweatshops, he would loudly and defiantly shout that there was nothing about his company’s policy he was ashamed of. Over and over, and over any subsequent conversation.
Right.
His loyalty earned him a place in the Berm for a few years, with Nike picking up the tab for a private heliport, private security forces, private schools etc. that were completely insulated from ‘the outside’. In my opinion, not very ‘in touch’ with the markets they sold to, and the third world they ripped off to get there.
Roy was also in charge of the mop-up after the disaster of the Allah shoe.
http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/062597/spo_nike.html
He was kept busy for the better part of a year erecting playgrounds at masjids and pressing cash into angry hands.
When he came to my house to complain, i told him that if Nike wouldn’t listen to anything else but court action, then they had chosen their method of dialogue and subsequent accountability. We also enjoyed telling him that Allah had 99 more names, to which he sank his head into his hands and moaned…
shortly after that, he quit his job to go do contract work with Homeland Security, helping them to monitor Muslims and build ‘case files’ on ‘terrorists’…
which i guess would include all the little ten year old Muslims putting together Nikes…
Good post Michael. Keep up the good work.
That bottom picture is wonderful. I’d love to have that enlarged and put on my apartment wall.
My comment on the other post was sort of a combined comment with that post and this one. Obviously time to go to bed.