Nike: selling shoes, selling Communism

There is no more powerful beneficiary of the useful stoogery of various Americans than the increasingly powerful Xi regime in Communist China. As we’ve seen in recent days, while hundreds of thousands of brave people in Hong Kong are risking their lives in protests against Beijing’s growing effort to crush that city’s freedoms, shameless creeps in the NBA and at ESPN, aware that China pays big bucks to broadcast American basketball games, have variously condemned the Hong Kong protests, chosen to stay silent about them, or played moral-equivalency games, equating America’s failings with those of a totalitarian dictatorship that imprisons millions of its political enemies and religious minorities.

On October 11, Tucker Carlson devoted much of his hour-long Fox News evening program to the NBA apologists for China. The focus was largely on Steve Kerr, coach of the Golden State Warriors, who is apparently well known for the predictable PC opinions that he shares on Twitter and elsewhere. Kerr, noted Carlson, routinely acts as if his reflexive echoing of received elite opinions makes him some kind of fearless hero of the oppressed. But when asked at a recent presser what he thinks about China, which actually does oppress on the largest scale ever known to man, and which Carlson quite properly called “the largest police state in the history of the human race,” Kerr hedged. When first asked about China, Kerr dodged it; the second time around, however, he opted for a bit of moral equivalence, suggesting that America’s “record of human rights offenses” was comparable to China’s. Only a fool or a shameless liar could say such a thing. Guesting on the same episode of Carlson’s show, John Daniel Davidson of the Federalist pointed out that Kerr’s brother is a China scholar – so it’s not as if the coach is clueless about the true nature of the Beijing regime.

As Carlson put it, the NBA is “beholden to China.” The league has actually banned its own players from speaking about China while on tour in that country. Carlson also noted another dog that hasn’t barked: Mark Cuban, the billionaire who owns the Dallas Mavericks and who is famously outspoken, has stayed mum on the question of China.

Carlson brought on a guest, radio host Jason Whitlock, who made a fascinating argument: the ultimate problem, he said, doesn’t lie with the NBA; it lies with Nike, the sneakers company whose products are cheaply manufactured in Chinese sweatshops by veritable slaves, worn and advertised by NBA stars who have lucrative promotional contracts with the shoe manufacturer, and sold at handsome prices around the world, with China, of course, being one of its largest markets, if not the largest. “Basketball exists to sell shoes,” charged Whitlock, who maintained further that “Nike is control of basketball.” Hence the refusal of everybody connected to Nike to breathe a negative word about totalitarian China.

Posted on October 22, 2019October 12, 2019 by usefulstooges 2

More NBA toadying

And on it goes. In recent posts we’ve contrasted the courage of Hong Kong protesters – who are putting their lives on the line to risk the growing encroachments on their freedoms by the government in Beijing – with the readiness of American individuals and firms that do business with China to sell out the idea of liberty for a buck.

Sam Wachs and his wife before being ejected from the arena

Since American sports are so big in the PRC, many of these latest stories of cravenness and cowardice have had to do with athletics. We’ve seen that the NBA and ESPN have both been lightning-quick to sacrifice any pretense of principle in order to avoid offending Xi’s tyrannical regime. Well, here’s more. On October 10, Reason magazine’s Eric Boehm reported that two different sports arenas in the U.S. had ejected fans protesting the Communist Chinese attempt to crush liberty in Hong Kong. On October 8, it happened at Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center, where Sam Wachs and his wife, who had bought tickets to a preseason game between the Philadelphia 76ers and a visiting Chinese team, the Guangzhou Loong Lions, displayed small signs reading “Free Hong Kong.” Security guards were quick to give the Wachses the heave-ho.

The next night, the same Chinese team were in Washington, D.C., for another game, in this case against the Washington Wizards. This time there were several protesters. They wore t-shirts bearing slogans in support of the Hong Kong protesters and unfurled a “Free Hong Kong” banner. When the banner was confiscated, they waved a homemade sign reading “Google Uighurs,” a reference to the current internment by the Communist Chinese government of more than a million adherence of that Muslim minority. That effort, too, was quashed.

As Boehm pointed out, the NBA’s aggressive treatment of what was frankly a small number of protesters at a couple of U.S. basketball game has only served to draw attention to China’s perfidy and to the NBA’s eagerness to do China’s bidding. On October 10, the New York Post ran an op-ed by one of the Washington protesters, Jon Schweppe, who explained that he and some friends had decided to stage a protest at the Washington game after reading about what happened to the Wachese in Philadelphia. The sight of NBA thugs “groveling to a totalitarian regime and censoring…fans” in Philadelphia, of all places, “home of the Constitutional Convention and the Liberty Bell,” had gotten his dander up. Would the NBA, he wondered, dare to treat supporters of freedom the same way in the nation’s capital?

That tiny Uighurs sign that was too much for the NBC bigwigs

The answer came quickly. When he and his pals unfurled their banner, they were told by NBA reps: “We respect your freedom of speech, but…we don’t have any stance on [Hong Kong]. So we’re just asking not to have any signage related to that in here tonight.” The little sign about the million-plus imprisoned Uighurs didn’t please the NBA bosses either. “My friend,” writes Schweppe, “pleaded that we were simply seeking to educate some of the NBA officials, coaches and players, many of whom had expressed ignorance about the issue. It was in vain: The supervisor still confiscated the sign and told us that if we continued to disrupt the game, we would be ejected.” Instead, Schweppe and his friends just chose to leave. Good for them for standing up for freedom. Shame on the NBA for putting its profits first.

Posted on October 17, 2019October 11, 2019 by usefulstooges 0

Now it’s ESPN’s turn to bow to Beijing

The bowing and scraping to China doesn’t stop. Last week we wrote about how Apple has removed the Taiwanese flag emoji from IPhones sold in Hong Kong. We mentioned that Google and Microsoft, as everybody knows by now, happily jigger their products in accordance with Chinese censorship. Then there’s Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, who, when he dared to express solidarity on Twitter with the freedom protesters in Hong Kong, saw his whole world came crashing down on him. His team owner, the NBA, the Chinese Basketball Association, a Chinese broadcaster with which the NBA has a lucrative deal, and a bunch of Chinese companies that manufacture NBA-branded clothing – all of them, shamefully, took Morey to task for giving freedom a thumbs-up.

Next thing you knew it was ESPN’s turn. On October 9, the show SportsCenter, which is aired on that network, showed a map of Communist China that included within its borders the island of Taiwan, part of the Philippines, and the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. The map also included the notorious “nine-dash line,” whereby Communist Chinese maps indicate its utterly unfounded claims to the South China Sea. When called on its use of this map, ESPN refused comment, as did the Disney Organization, its principal owner.

Let’s look at this disgraceful episode piece by piece. Of course, Communist China officially claims Taiwan as part of its territory, and has never renounced its supposed right to take the island by force, although Taiwan is in fact an independent – and a free – country, and no map other than one produced in Communist China would include it as part of Communist China.

The red line indicates China’s South China Sea claims.

As for the South China Sea, Communist China has been more and more aggressive about it in recent years, treating much of it as its own property even though if you look at a map – a real map, not a Chinese map – you’ll see that the sea stretches far south of China, and is bordered on the east by the Philippines, on the west by Vietnam, and on the south by Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, and Indonesia. In order to bolster its territorial claim to most of this body of water – which is comparable to the U.S. claiming the entire Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea – China has actually created artificial islands in the Spratly Islands, an archipelago in the South China Sea that contains settlements and military establishments owned by Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Brunei.

And what about those bits of the Philippines and India? What exactly is on the minds of the bullies of Beijing? No wonder the countries of east Asia are trembling at China’s increasing pushiness. That ESPN map was no mistake, any more than the maps of the Middle East put out by Muslim countries that just happen to omit Israel. Indeed, looking at that bogus China map, it is hard not to be reminded of the way in which the Third Reich, after it had attained a certain level of power, began to grab one chunk of neighboring territory after another, painting more and more of Europe a bright red, with a big swastika right smack in the middle. Make no mistake about it: Chairman Xi and his crew plainly want to paint their neighborhood red too. And when it happens, don’t expect the cowards at ESPN to object.

Posted on October 15, 2019October 10, 2019 by usefulstooges 1

A “football voice on social issues”?

Colin who? For those who are not fans of American football, the name of Colin Kaepernick was, until recently, entirely unknown.

That changed on August 26, when the quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers refused to stand up for the National Anthem at a pre-season game against the Green Bay Packers.

His explanation: the U.S. oppresses black people. Kaepernick, whose biological father was black and biological mother white, was raised in Wisconsin by adoptive white parents who took him into their family after losing two children to heart defects.

kaepernick standing for anthem in 2014 — At a 2014 game, Kaepernick stood for the anthem

Pretty much everybody in the football world had an opinion about Kaepernick’s action. So did countless politicians and commentators. Most acknowledged the obvious fact that Kaepernick has a right to his opinion and a right to decide not to stand up for the National Anthem. Views differed, however, on whether his opinion was correct.

Some compared him favorably with Muhammed Ali, who was stripped of his heavyweight title for refusing to fight in the Vietnam War. Writing in The Guardian, Les Carpenter described Kaepernick as “a rare, strong football voice on social issues.” Others echoed these judgments.

Alejandro_Villanueva_(American_football) — Alejandro Villanueva

Then there were those like Pittsburgh Steelers left tackle Alejandro Villanueva, who served in the Army in Afghanistan, and who in response to Kaepernick’s action told ESPN that the U.S. is the best country in the world. “I just know that I am very thankful to be an American. I will stand very proudly, and I will sing every single line in the national anthem every single time I hear it,” he said. “I will stop whatever I am doing, because I recognize that I have to be very thankful to be in this country.” Kaepernick’s birth mother spoke up against him, too, tweeting that “there’s ways to make change w/o disrespecting & bringing shame to the very country & family who afforded you so many blessings.”

colin-kaepernicks-house — Kaepernick’s house

Critics were also quick to point out that the country whose anthem Kaepernick refuses to honor has made him rich. Photographs of his 4600-square-foot San Jose mansion, which he bought in 2014 for $2.7 million, appeared all over the media. Accusations of hypocrisy and ingratitude swirled. And anger mounted among gridiron junkies. How could a man to whom his country had given so much treat its flag with such disrespect? Had he given no thought to the innumerable members of the American military who were no longer able to stand for the anthem because they’d lost their legs on the battleground fighting under that flag?

The story seemed about to die down when more information materialized. In a widely quoted story, sports blogger Terez Owens wrote that it was actually Kaepernick’s girlfriend, Nessa Diab (known popularly as Nessa), a devout Muslim, Berkeley grad, and You Tube star turned MTV personality, who had talked him into staying seated for the anthem. Football experts offered another theory: Kaepernick is a third-string QB whose performance on the field has been less than stellar; was his anthem sit-down a desperate effort to force the front office to keep him on the roster, for fear that firing him might be construed as punishment for his opinions?

kaepernick2-1 — Kaepernick in his Castro T-shirt

Then there was the T-shirt. Kaepernick held a locker-room press conference after his fateful action. He was wearing a T-shirt. And not just any T-shirt. This one featured several pictures of Fidel Castro with Malcolm X.

Apparently, then, Kaepernick is a fan of the murderous Cuban dictator. Like a considerable number of other people in the Western world, he would seem to have a rosy – and deeply misinformed – picture of Cuban life under Castro. The preponderance of immediately available evidence suggests that he is one of many millions, indeed, who have bought the Cuban line that the Castro regime, among many other magnificent accomplishments, has created a colorblind society. Alas, that is a lie. A big one. In fact, official racism is fierce in Cuba. President Obama even mentioned it in his Havana speech last March. The other day, Mark Hemingway, in a piece about Kaepernick, cited a 2013 New York Times article whose headline says it all: “For Blacks in Cuba, the Revolution Hasn’t Begun.”

(Of course, to the extent that the headline hints that Cuba’s revolution has benefited anybody other than Cuba’s elite, that’s a problem. But it’s also a blog entry for another day.)

So it goes. Colin Kaepernick won’t stand up for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the National Anthem of the democratic nation in which he lives and thrives far beyond the imagining of most people on this planet. But he wears with apparent pride an item of clothing celebrating a man who has oppressed an entire country for over half a century, denying its citizens even the most basic elements of freedom and human rights, all the while cruelly punishing dissenters with imprisonment, torture, and even execution.

We can only hope that Kaepernick will soon supplement his athletic skills with a more sophisticated and comprehensive understanding of the very real differences between the U.S. and Cuba. And that, if he doesn’t, the young people who look up to him as a sports hero will know better than to adopt his benighted political views.

Posted on September 5, 2016August 31, 2016 by usefulstooges 4

Tall tales about China

bill_walton_feature — Bill Walton in broadcast mode

Back in the 1970s, seven-footer Bill Walton was a basketball superstar, following a stellar turn for the UCLA Bruins with a pro career playing center for the Portland Trail Blazers, San Diego Clippers, and Boston Celtics. In 1978, he was named the NBA’s most valuable player. After retiring from the game in 1990, he became a sports broadcaster. In November, it turned out that he’s also a big fan of Communist China.

The revelation came during the Pac-12 China Game in China between Texas and Washington. Walton was on the scene, hired to do color commentary for ESPN. As it happened, however, much of his commentary was not about the game itself but about the country in which it was taking place.

He described his visit to China as a “transformational, life-changing experience for me. I cannot express the phenomenal things that are going on in this country.” He called China “remarkable” and noted that its “civilization has spanned more than 8000 years.”

Walton was awed by the scale of things in China. “There are 170 cities in the country of China with a minimum of a million people in them,” he said. “There are 300 million people in the middle class here with 800 more million trying to climb up.” In Shanghai alone, he noted, there are as many people as in all of Texas. The University of Texas has 51,000 students, but “there are that many people in every one of these countless skyscrapers here!”

pb-121210-china-da.photoblog900 — The China we don’t see

He favorably contrasted the Chinese people’s attitude toward consumerism with Americans’. Yes, there’s some consumerism there, but mostly “government investment in infrastructure. There is so much room for growth.” In the U.S., “70% of our economy is consumer goods, purchasing stuff,” he said, his contempt for American materialism palpable. The comparable figure for China? “Only 40%.” He added: “You know what the savings rate in the United States is? Zero. Or negative. You know what the savings rate is here in China? 50%.”

He mentioned one aspect of Chinese society that he particularly liked: “They don’t have credit cards because the government doesn’t want them having [them].”

Does Walton have credit cards? Would he really want to live in a country that wouldn’t allow that? Or is his view, like that of so many Western fans of Communism, that these restrictions are just plain terrific for other people but (of course) not for him?

At no point, in any case – at least as far as we’ve been able to determine – did Walton mention (let alone criticize) the fact that the nation he was showering with praise is a Communist state, a dictatorship, a place where political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of worship, and property rights are severely limited. The press is censored, as is the Internet. Detention without trial is a common practice; so are forced confessions. It was only a few weeks ago that China announced the end to its one-child policy, a rigidly enforced regulation that led to widespread infanticide and countless forced abortions.

More tomorrow.

Posted on February 18, 2016February 8, 2016 by usefulstooges 2

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