The Damn Yankees of Wall Street

The New York Yankees are the most dominant and valuable franchise in the history of American sport.  With billions of dollars in value, 27 world titles to their credit, the most expensive stadium in baseball, a cable network and the game's largest fan base, the Yanks are at the top of the heap.  They are king.  It is a great deal for you if you're a Yankee or a Yankee fan.

All of these assets and resources allow the Yankees to stockpile talent and spend gobs more money on free agent players than most other teams in the league.  This financial advantage allows the Yankees to continue to be a contender for a title year in and year out regardless of the success of their scouting efforts, minor league development or shrewd player trades.  In essence, the Yankees have more money so they can make a lot more mistakes than the vast majority of the other teams in the league.  Certainly the Red Sox and a few others have lots of money, but the Yanks could outspend every one of them if push came to shove.

The Pittsburgh Pirates or the Cleveland Indians are not quite so lucky.  These teams have no private cable network from which to draw funds.  They don't operate in America's biggest media market.  They don't sell out all of their games and they do not have assets in the billions to toss around on free agent deals when players they have groomed for success for years get hurt or never pan out.  Every decision that clubs like the Pirates and Indians make is intensified because if the wrong choice is made it can lead to years and years of futility in the standings.

This chasm in baseball accumen created by private revenue streams doesn't just make me wonder about the future of the game that I love, but reminds of a greater chasm with a much sharper meaning: class warfare.  The Yankees are the super-rich.  The Pirates and the Indians?  Well, they're the working class.  They'll have to work harder and smarter to get ahead and try to compete.  They might have one good year, or a competitive September, but eventually they'll fade away and wait for the Yankees to stroll to the playoffs again.

Much like the way baseball works today, the class system in this country is making it harder and harder for the average Indian or Pirate fan to put together a winning season.  But, it isn't just that the wealthiest one-percent have so much capital and resource that they can have access to things the rest of America could never and enough in reserves to make up for myriad mistakes, it's the rules themselves are actually stacked in their favor.

Imagine for a moment that the Pirates were to somehow make it to the World Series to play the Yankees.  This, in and of itself, would be a miracle but imagine it as reality.  Now, on that fateful fall afternoon that the World Series begins, you tune in to learn that in each inning the Yankees will be allowed five outs when they reach the plate, but the Pirates will be accorded only two.  It will require six strikes for a Yankee batter to be punched out and just two strikes (including foul balls) will send a Pirate packing.  There would be no way for the Pirates to compete and the series would be over before it began.

Every day in America this is the way the game is fixed for the super-rich and corporate conglomerates.  Recently, a list was announced on the Senate floor by Senator Bernie Sanders that comprised the ten largest corporations that avoided paying their fair share of federal taxes.  On average, these ten behemoth companies (e.g. Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil and Bank of America) paid a tick more than 1% in total federal taxes.  1%!  In 2010 GE paid no taxes at all.  This is like letting the Yankees play with 17 men defensively and every time their pitcher hits an opposing batter, the batter is out.

The ultimate kicker however, is that America's financial system, unlike the game of baseball is not designed in principe to have only one winner.  If the system works properly there should be a way for all involved parties to profit - and pay - for the success or failure of the market.  It is not a team versus team setup.  Yet, continued policy in the financial sector seek to encourage the average American to invest his money into the market only to exploit it.  Many Americans feel they pay too much in taxes and yet most of the very largest companies pay far too little, if anything at all.

No umpire seems willing to step in and call bullshit on this.  So, middle and lower class American Indians and Pirates are standing in the batter's box, staring into the sun looking down an 0-2 count knowing right now the strike zone runs from the tips of our toes to the tops of our hats and the next pitch will likely signal game over.

Harold and Maude And My Dad

In the summer of 1984, at the age of 12, my family forced me to move to a little town I had never heard of and didn't give a damn about.  At the time, we were living a miraculously happy and idyllic existence in the heart of Michigan's thumb region in a little berg known as Sandusky.  My school, my friends, my little league team and therefore my entire life was located squarely in Sandusky.  Moving was not an option.  How was I expected to survive?  Like virtually every middle-schooler in the history of time that has ever been forced to do anything they were not 100% thrilled with, I hated this idea.  More importantly, I hated my parents for coming up with the idea and loathed them still further for bringing the plan to fruition and relocating our family to some bullshit place.

The summer was rough and fall sucked once school started.  A ping pong table installed in the basement was about the only saving grace of our first few months in Bath, a tiny nothing of a town just north of East Lansing.  Change is difficult for any adolescent, but especially so for me.  New friends were made slowly and the reduction of my fury over the move cooled very, very slowly and the transition took even longer than under normal circumstances due to my self-inflicted emotional duress.

One Saturday evening after dinner, my Dad and I were down in the basement playing ping pong and talking intermittently.  He would ask about school or make inconsequential chit chat.  Every effort was being made to have a real conversation or to get me to open up, but I was having none of it.  Then at the end of a volley, a point which I won by the way, he asked if I wanted to go to a movie.

After a discussion of what the movie was called and what it was about, I was able to glean, basically, that my old man wanted to drag me out to see a movie about a teenager who befriends an old lady because he's depressed and lonely.  In fact, they begin their friendly bonds by running into one another at a funeral.  Old lady, weird friendship, depression, funerals for amusement - no thanks dude.

Was my father doing this because he thought of this as my way out?  I mean, I was depressed and lonely and perhaps he thought that I could start spending time with some old bitty in the neighborhood to make up for the fact that I hated my new school, I hated our new house and reminded my folks daily of the nearly complete absence of any friends within a 125 mile radius.  Let's just say I was dubious.

There were two factors that aligned to get me to the theater that night.  The first was that as an adolescent and young adult, I was absolutely terrible about telling people how I genuinely felt about stuff, if it made anyone feel bad; even when their feeling bad was my partial intent.  Therefore, the only way to get across the message of my lack of enthusiasm for this particular flick trip was to not react much to it all.  My physical reaction of indifference was then completely overwhelmed by factor number two; the movie didn't start until midnight.

Now as a twelve year old there was still some cache to being up past midnight.  This endeavor was fully two gears past that.  Not only would we be up past midnight, our thing didn't start until midnight.  And the event was outside the house!  As such I would be rolling home at 2:00 in the morning like a real, actual adult.  Dad thought I would like this thing so much, he was willing to take me out at the witching hour to see a weird movie at an arthouse theater to show it to me.  I tried to conceal my sudden and bursting desire to go, so I simply said, "That sounds like it might be alright".

The theater, called The Odeon, was incredibly small.  It was situated in a sort of strip mall sort of building and couldn't hold more than 60 or 70 people.  I remember the smells vividly; a concoction of popcorn, cigarettes and adulthood.  The seats creaked loudly when you pulled them down to sit and were filled with cracked tributaries of torn pleather.  Sticky sweet sheers of gum and sodas spills glazed the floor like a kind of carnival velcro.  After loading up on popcorn and Cokes, we found some creaky seats in which to park ourselves and sat down.  There might have been something like 20 other people in the room, but I really don't remember.  For the next two hours it was just me and Steve.

As much as the theater and time of night wowed me, I still had little or no hope for the movie.  The description left a lot to be desired and after my initiation to the after dark ambience of The Odeon I began to fixate on people and things in the theater that would hold my attention once I got bored from the lame picture.  I spent some time watching the older guy with a balding crown, beard and corduroy jacket laughing awkwardly with a lady much younger than he was.  It seemed likely that he was a professor at the college or something, but beyond that I was out of my element and not that interested.  Had this event taken place about four years later, I would have invented an entire Woody Allen film about him in my head.  Middle aged nerds, a couple of lonely women, and my Dad and I made up the rest of the crowd.

Over the next two hours I felt transformed.  If you've ever seen just a few minutes of Harold and Maude you know precisely what I'm talking about.  If you haven't seen it, there is no way for me to explain it to you.  I laughed at things that I had never imagined could possibly be funny.  The dark humor of the film and its myriad oddities spoke to me instantly.  Yet what I was mostly shocked by was that I had been brought to this movie by father - at midnight.

On the ride home I just felt happy.  Genuinely happy.  Other than going to a baseball game I could never remember another time when I felt like a friend to my Dad.  This however, was a different thing entirely.   My Dad had displayed the faith in me to share something weird and odd that he cared for in a sincere way as if to show me that he gave a damn.  He went out of his way to get me to laugh at life's absurdity and to take me to a place that I probably didn't belong at a time when I probably shouldn't be there.  He wanted to be my friend and to lift me up out of my shitty adolescent malaise that he surely felt some responsibility for.  While he may not know it, he succeeded admirably.

Now, I am the parent of adolescents.  With the perspective of parenthood, I know that whatever I got out of that night at the Odeon, my Dad got just as much if not more if he paid any attention at all.  It is my hope that someday, or if I am very lucky, maybe already, I have given my kids a moment something even close to this.  While this essay is meant to be a thank you to my Father for that night and what it means, perhaps the best thank you I could give to him would be to learn by his example.  Thanks Dad.

Rebel Rebel Your Face Is A Mess

This week marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the American Civil War.  This tragic conflict cost our nation more than 600,000 lives, millions of dollars in treasure, thousands more emotionally ruined lives and  a cultural wound between north and south that a century and a half later is still not completely healed.  What we got in return were the words and deeds of America's greatest President, the renewed opportunity to become a whole nation again and millions of Americans began to earn their freedom after years of enslavement.

The Civil War was about dozens of complicated issues, and the issue of states' rights was certainly among them.  But it would be utterly foolish to say the war was not primarily about slavery.  The right to own slaves, to sell slaves and to allow states first entering the union to participate openly in the slave trade were the basic issues that led to the call to war.  Any attempt to try and paint a different genesis for the war is historically and factually incorrect.  Most historians agree that the driving event that led directly to the Civil War was a failed slave revolt led by abolitionist John Brown.  Every state that seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy was a slave owning state.  If the South had won the war, slavery would have become the rule of law throughout its dominion.

Somehow, even in an age when we have an African-American president, there are those who try to pass off the rebel flag, that good-ole gloried symbol of the Confederacy, as something symbolizing everything great and good in the rebellion, and not as an outward symbol of slavery.  No matter what good or great deeds and men one finds on the side of the Rebs - and there are truly a great many - the Confederate flag is a symbol of human bondage for profit.

Claiming that the Rebel flag is a symbol of states rights and southern heritage is akin to flying a Nazi Swastika over your home and explaining to your neighbors that you really just love Beethoven and schnitzels a lot.  It may mean that you love Beethoven, but it also looks as though you condoned, nay endorsed, the murder of millions of Jews.  Its symbolism is greater than your personal interpretation of it and if you fly the rebel flag you announce that you believe in the South as it was prior to 1865; virulently racist and immersed in an economy driven by the profit derived from slave labor.

Perhaps even more staggering is the rampant and constant use of the Rebel flag in places where it is simply oxymoronic.  Because of its status as a symbol of our national legacy, the Confederate stars and bars is often seen completely outside of its historical context.  Frequently when driving on the highway one can spot a truck with a Dixie flag on the left bumper and an American flag on the right.  These two things are at complete odds with one another.  Don't you get it!?!  They cannot both exist at the same time.  That's what Lincoln was talking about when he said a house divided against itself cannot stand.  He was talking about your freaking truck in 2011 - you dumbass.  Do you have another car with a Red Sox sticker on one side and a Yankees sticker on the other?

Cultural legacy and regional history are sacred things and I don't mean to piss on them.  That being said, the war is over and the flag that the Confederacy left behind still means awful and painful things.  If you're going to fly it, you had best understand what it means and what you're saying to the people who see you flying it.  It says you're a would-be slave holder who no longer wishes to live in the United States of America.  If you don't want to broadcast that message, then take it off your car, van, boat, truck, wagon, trailer, motorcycle, home or business.  Take it down because that is what really means, even if it reminds you of America's rebel spirit or a Lynryd Skynyrd show you went to back in high school.

The American flag is a rebel flag too.  It symbolizes a nation built on an armed revolution and a country that fought with itself for four awful years and still invited the South back in to its family when the war was finally over.  Perhaps flying that flag is the better way to pay a tribute to your legacy and more importantly to commemorate the terrible conflict that began 150 years ago his week.  Another option might be, to paraphrase Thumper from the film Bambi, to suggest that "If you can't fly a nice flag, then don't fly one at all."

A House Is Not A Home

Nearly eight years ago, my wife and I bought a small house in a small town.  It was a house that had belonged to my great-Grandfather and it needed quite a bit of work.  With the help of family and friends, we put what little money we had in to reviving the place and making it seem like our home.  We gutted and replaced cracking plaster, slapped on coats of paint, installed a furnace, ran plumbing, and performed a host of other cosmetic repairs to bring the house back in to some semblance of shape before we moved in.  It took several weeks of sweat and a fair amount of financial help of my folks to get it done.  While it was no palace, when it was finished it seemed like it was ours.  In essence, it felt like home - and we were proud of it.

It is a very humble home still.  We could use new windows and siding.  In the near future, we'll have to have a new roof put on.  As our children grow, the house seems to get smaller, and of course we have too much stuff and at times things feel cramped.  Yet I am still regularly reminded of the pride and effort and outpouring of help that went into transforming the house and I am always humbled and moved by it.  In some way, that helps to make our home a bit more special to me.

Despite the work my little house needs, it is not the home I really worry about these days.  The State of Michigan is my home too and it's in a state of disrepair.  2010 census figures showed that Michigan was the only state to lose population in the last ten years.  The city of Detroit alone lost 25% of its residents.  These drops in residents along with high unemployment and an unwillingness to raise any taxes at all costs have cost my home state dearly.  Police and Fire departments all across the state are being gutted and consolidated as tax bases erode.  Education funding is slashed annually while restrictions and requirements on public schools increase constantly.  Michigan's bold and effective tax incentive program for the film industry is in danger of becoming extinct even though it has brought scores of film companies to the state to spend millions of dollars while helping to enhance Michigan's cultural legacy and public image.

While much of this economic woe is due to a downturn in jobs and a shrinking population, much of it could be fixed by simply reinvesting in our state.  Like most state governments, Michigan has a convoluted tax structure that is piece-meal and largely ineffective.  It is also a system set up to help benefit those at the top of the pyramid as opposed to those at the bottom of it.  Simple gestures like a graduated income tax, a slight increase in the sales tax or a tax on services could help to completely reinvent and reinvigorate a struggling state with a shrinking reputation.  With a minor tax code restructuring and as little as $10 per household per year in additional tax liability we could save schools, hospitals and fire departments.  Jobs could be created and Michigan could once again be a place where people want to move to - not away from.

Of course, right now there is a fear of any tax on anything at all.  People don't want to pay ten dollars or even 8 cents more a year in taxes, because they don't want to pay any taxes at all.  This fear drives politicians to cut, cut, cut and cut.  All of this cutting has done nothing but drive people away.  No one moves to Michigan because the taxes are lower.  South Dakota has no state income tax.  Would you move to South Dakota for that reason alone?  Neither would I.

In 1976, the Michigan State Congress passed an incredibly aggressive bottle deposit law.  This legislation was passed primarily because of an enormous amount of litter on our state highways.  The law required that each bottle or can of soda and beer be charged a 10 cent deposit charge and when the can was returned to the store the 10 cents was returned to the consumer.  Michigan was just the fourth state in the country to pass such a bill at that time and the only state with a 10 cent deposit as opposed to just 5 cents.  Many Michiganders were up in arms over the costs and inconvenience of the legislation.  But it worked.  And after 35 years the law is still in place and is seen as simply commonplace.  So much so, that when I go to other states with no deposit program I still am unable to throw a can away.  Doing something different is often very difficult.  The difficulty of it however, does not make it less necessary.

We need to begin to demand more of our political leaders than budget cuts and spending revisions.  Leadership should not be defined by figuring how to STOP doing things.  Sometimes leadership is convincing people to do something difficult because it's the right thing to do.

This is the home of the Great Lakes and of Motown.  It is still the center of the automotive world and the birthplace of the eight hour workday.  It is a a natural wonderland and still a place of great innovation.  Michigan is getting a bad rap because you, as a Michigander, are letting it get a bad rap.

So Michiganders, I ask you, what kind of house do you want to live in?  Do you want a house or do you want a home?  Are you ready to roll up your sleeves and get to work pitch in and revive a state that needs your help?  Your home needs some repairs and an extra helping hand.  Now get off your ass and lets get to it.