Rutgers basketball player Geo Baker wrote on Instagram in response to a post by US college sports’ governing body, the NCAA: 

“I have to sign a paper that says my name and likeness belongs to the school. Modern day slavery.”

Baker highlights one of the ugliest dimensions of the college sport industrial complex: the disproportionately racialized nature of its exploitative dynamics.

Former University of Wisconsin men’s basketball star Nigel Hayes explains, “It’s always been an interesting situation and dynamic. Black athletes, but white school, white coaches, white fans… minimal Black people.” Hayes adds: “Most are aware these university teams, primarily men’s basketball and football, are filled with Black players. Making money for usually white people and not being able to have their share of a billion dollar plus industry. So the visual you get is white institutions recruit Black talent to make millions. While dealing with all the other hurdles of being Black.”

 Paul, a former SEC men’s basketball player: “Every time I signed that piece of paper that said my name and likeness belonged to university, I felt like I was giving up a piece of myself. Why should my school own my name? My image? How is that fair? I am a grown man. A Black man. And I have to sign my life away to who? To a bunch of rich white guys.”

Former NBA player David West puts it this way: “Athletes are expected to be content as an unpaid labor force for a system that allows economic opportunities for everyone but them. The racial undertones are always there.”

 In the 2018-2019 academic year, the 65 Power Five universities generated $8.3bn through athletics. Yet, aside from scholarships, players don’t see any of that money directly.

 If players did receive a share, economist David Berri has calculated that men’s basketball players at an elite Power Five school like Duke would receive between $145,000 and $4.13m per year. And, here’s the thing: an extremely high proportion of the players being systematically denied the revenue they are responsible for generating are Black.

Based on the NCAA’s own figures, at the predominantly white institutions (PWIs) that comprise the Power Five, as of the 2019-2020 season, Black students comprise only 5.7% of the population. 

Yet, in the Power Five, Black athletes make up 55.9% of men’s basketball players, 55.7% of men’s football, and 48.1% of women’s basketball. At some schools, the numbers are particularly startling. Texas A&M, the second-highest athletic revenue earning institution in US college sports, has only 3.1% Black students in the general student body. Yet, its college football team is 75% Black, and its women’s basketball team 92.9%. 

It is hard to deny from these numbers that Black athletes are admitted into institutions that usually ignore them specifically to have their labor exploited for the universities’ gain.

Creighton University Blujays men’s basketball head coach Greg McDermott admitted that he demanded players “stay on the plantation” during a postgame talk. Tennessee GOP state law-makers called on universities across the state to prohibit athletes from engaging in anti-racist protests during the national anthem. 

Although non-Hispanic/Latino white people make 60.1% of the US population, 84.4% of Power Five chancellors and presidents are white. In athletic departments across the Power Five, 75% of athletic directors. At the coaching level, 80.6% of head men’s basketball coaches, 81.54% of head women’s basketball coaches, and 80% of head football coaches in the Power Five are white.

The college sport industrial complex also subsidizes major media corporations and the journalists who staff them. According to the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, 85% of sports editors and 82.1% of sports reporters are white. Pre-pandemic, CBS/Turner pulled in at least $655.1m from the men’s basketball NCAA Tournament alone, while ESPN networks earned $792.5m in ad revenue from college football. This revenue is entirely predicated on the racialized labor of unpaid campus athletic workers largely at Power Five schools.

Racial capitalism is the concept made famous by Cedric Robinson, which is to say global histories of colonialism and capitalism build to systematically extract wealth from people of color. Because of the violent and systematic exploitation of unfree labor that built the United States, there exists what we might call a racialized political economy of life chances – one that distributes opportunity and access in massively unequal ways, particularly between white and Black Americans. This is how racial capitalism functions as a form of coercion, a structure that views Black bodies as expendable and their labor essentially exploitable.

 Former NBA player Etan Thomas explains the impossibility of authentic consent in a neocolonial context this way: “You know when a company goes into an underdeveloped country and sets up shop there, and hires the locals there for pennies while the company makes billions of dollars. Then pretends that they are doing the locals a favor by providing a job opportunity for them that they otherwise wouldn’t have, and [provides] other benefits – maybe food and clothes and some form of healthcare – so they can stay healthy enough to continue working. That’s basically the system the NCAA has.”

If a scholarship and chance to play college sport is one of the best possibilities available for material uplift, it is something of a no-brainer to take that opportunity. But, when a choice is between bad and worse, then it isn’t really freely made – and that is exactly what we are talking about in the context of college sports. 

Joe, a college  football player, immediately picked up on the fictitious notion that participation equates to consent: 

“It is a dynamic we are kind of forced not to think about in my opinion. For me football was always used as a ticket or a way out of the way I was living. Therefore I feel as though I was never able to address the fact that people don’t care about me but only my athletic ability. It is especially hard doing it for no compensation that is worth what we have to endure both mentally and physically. It is kind of like slave owner Mandingo fighter, in that my coach is measured on how good his slaves perform.”

Marla, a current WNBA player, shed light on the unique challenges faced by Black women in this context: 

“As a Black woman, the dynamics I experienced while I was at school were different. Yeah, of course we felt that we had no choice but to do what they told us and that our time wasn’t ours until basketball was done, not even when it came to school. But there was also this constant need for us to justify our existence compared to the guys. Everything for us was much harder to get credit for, even if we won more games.” Marla went on to say: “you know, I remember reading The New Plantation in a class and it makes a lot of sense to me. I often ask myself where I would be without basketball. Would I have had those opportunities? … Would I be accepted as a Black woman in the same way? Would I have been able to go to college? Would people on campus treat me the same? To be totally honest I think the answer is no way.”

Jordan M Fields, a former track athlete and now a policy advisor at Pittsburgh, explained  that “the extreme power imbalance that exists between Black college athletes, and white athletic administrators and coaches was obvious to me.”

 She ultimately viewed college sport through the prism of the plantation:

 “College athletic programs rely on Black athletes’ labor and increase their profit the more they exploit them physically and restrict their academic and social freedom. My comparisons of sports at the college level, to the plantation system, focus on the ‘plantation’ not necessarily as a place, but as the extremely self-degrading and manipulated mindset of countless Black athletes caused by their exploitation and the undermining of their personal and professional growth as young Black men and women. I never had the opportunity to speak freely amongst other athletes at my alma mater about this, and I don’t believe the conversation would’ve been welcomed amongst athletic department leadership.”

A  current ACC football player pointed out: “Recently, especially this last 2020 season, you could see the slave mentality some have regarding athletes. If you’re producing there is no problem, but however you show or express any concern outside of football or your respective sport, you’re a ‘liability.’”

Andrew, another football player, highlighted how the NCAA’s prohibition on earnings have consequences for Black players, who are often denied the social capital that accrues to white athletes from college sport.

“While the education is great, being a minority and an athlete disadvantages you from being able to take full advantage of the opportunity. I was told by coaches to drop classes that would take up too much time. I was told that my GPA was fine as long as my eligibility wasn’t at risk. To have a lack of support from the athletic side, and to not be able to fulfill my academic potential is tough. The system isn’t fair, and many seem to think it’s broken. The truth is that it’s working as intended. The majority of scholarship athletes who are Black struggle to find good paying jobs out of college if they can’t make it [to the NFL], while white players, walk on or not, often land jobs at least earning $60,000 a year. This isn’t a coincidence, I’ve witnessed first hand the difference in experience white players have compared to their Black counterparts. Boosters and alumni are typically white, and they’re more than happy to hire people that look like them, especially if they came from the team they love. Players who are persons of color aren’t afforded these opportunities because we aren’t members of the same ‘club’ that our white counterparts are beckoned into. Being a student athlete is valued on campus and off, but few experience the prestige it offers, especially when the color of their skin is seen first.”

Players also pointed to the problem with the compensation they did receive in exchange for their labor: the cost of attendance scholarship and the degree that ultimately results – in other words, their education. In fact, the story itself is already told by graduation rates. While the graduation rate by 2019-2020 of the 2013-2014 cohort across Power Five schools was 78% for all undergraduates, that number fell to 68.6% for Black women’s basketball players, 60.6% for Black men’s football players, and all the way down to 46.7% for Black men’s basketball players. 

These numbers offer a fuller measure of the exploitation of Black athletes on campus. In addition to being denied a fair portion of the revenue they produce through their labor, they also don’t receive the full compensation they are promised: an education resulting in a degree.

The problem is not calling the conditions of college sport, racist, white supremacy, or a new plantation; the problem is that no matter what label we put on it, that is what it actually is, and it is exactly what a lot of very wealthy and powerful white people want it to be.

‘I signed my life to rich white guys’: athletes on the racial dynamics of college sports | College sports | The Guardian

 “So many little towns are at risk of disappearing,” said demographics researcher Choi One-lack at the Korea Economic Research Institute (KERI). “The pace of ageing and birth declines is the worst here among the OECD.”

 Prior to the pandemic, birth rates in Italy were already among Europe’s lowest. Now, Italians are having even fewer children.

 Preliminary birth rate figures for Italy show that in December 2020, 15 Italian cities recorded a 21.6% drop in fertility rates compared to 12 months earlier.

Italy’s birth rate is the lowest out of all European states. The number of new marriages has halved, too.

Italian women had around 2.5 children in the 1960s. Today, that rate has fallen to a mere 1.27. 

Italian birth rate sinks further amid pandemic | Europe| News and current affairs from around the continent | DW | 15.03.2021

 In India up to 96 million people who may be living with more than 7,000 illnesses defined as rare diseases are not so lucky. India has no budget for rare diseases and health insurance companies do not cover them. Charitable programmes provide for only a very few. 

Half of rare diseases appear in children, of whom a third will die before they turn five. Only 5% of such diseases have a cure. But with medicines for management, patients can have a better and longer life. 

 “A majority of medication for rare diseases is exorbitantly priced and none is manufactured in India,” says Prasanna Shirol, co-founder of Organisation of Rare Diseases India (ORDI), a non-profit umbrella group.

 Newborn screening could diagnose many disorders at birth, since 80% of rare diseases are genetic. But barring a few Indian states, it is unavailable in government-run hospitals, where, in 2018, almost 55% of women gave birth.

Next-generation sequencing – a blood test that can diagnose a human’s entire genetic makeup – is now offered in some private laboratories, shortening the journey to diagnosis. But given the prohibitive costs, it may not be enough.

What price a child’s life? India’s quest to make rare disease drugs affordable | Global development | The Guardian

The US accounted for 37% of global arms sales during the 2016-2020 period and sold arms to 96 countries.

 Almost half of its sales went to the Middle East, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said. 

US exports increased 15% compared to the 2011-2015 period.

Middle Eastern countries accounted for the biggest increase in arms imports, up 25% in 2016–20 from 2011–15. Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest arms importer, increased its arms imports by 61% and Qatar by 361%. United Arab Emirates recently signed an agreement with the United States to purchase 50 F-35 jets and up to 18 armed drones as part of a $23 billion package.

SIPRI: Saudi Arabia largest importer of arms, US biggest exporter | News | DW | 15.03.2021

  Another new talk via our online ‘Discord’ platform –

‘The New Normal’, by John Cumming, 15th January 2021

 The pursuit of happiness is a phrase penned by the American Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence. Since it has never even come close to being achieved, the American people have sought their own means.

$150 billion is spent in the USA on illegal drugs each year and a comparable amount on alcohol.

 Nearly one in five people in the USA aged twelve and older (19.4%) took illegal drugs in 2018.

In 2018, an estimated 10.3 million people aged 12 or older misused opioids in the past year, including 9.9 million prescription pain reliever misusers and 808,000 heroin users. Approximately 506,000 people misused prescription pain relievers and used heroin in 2018.

 19.1% or 47.6 million people in the USA had a mental illness, an emotional disorder or a behavioral one in 2018 while representing an impaired state of being so severe that it impinged upon the quality of life.

One in seven adolescents (14.4%) or 3.5 million had a major depressive episode in 2018

Amongst young adults aged 18 to twenty-five 13.8% or 4.6 million had a major depressive episode.

Concerning substance abuse treatment in 2018, “an estimated 21.2 million people aged 12 or older needed substance use treatment.

This number translates to about 1 in 13 people who needed treatment (7.8 percent). About 1 in 26 adolescents aged 12 to 17 (3.8 percent), about 1 in 7 young adults aged 18 to 25 (15.3 percent), and 1 in 14 adults aged 26 or older (7.0 percent) needed treatment.”

Drugs, Substance Abuse and Mental Issues in the USA  | Countercurrents

 ‘Socialism, Free Speech and Cancel Culture‘

A talk by Stephen Harper, 20th January 2021.

 It has been 10 years since peaceful protests against Bashar al-Assad’s government turned into a full-blown civil war. Far too many have died or been crippled. Millions have fled their homes and millions have ended up in poverty.

This blog has followed the developments in Syria from the promise of the Arab Spring to the disastrous destruction of the country by the government’s repressive reaction to the intervention of Islamist terrorists and calculating cold-bloodedness of foreign powers.

SOCIALISM OR YOUR MONEY BACK: Revolution Without Leaders

Our blog’s first report was one of optimism.

 “This is the purest people’s revolution there ever was,” said a Damascus-based activist who is affiliated with two of the groups engaged in encouraging protests. Leaders are nonexistent, he said, and they wouldn’t be welcomed.

 Efforts by exiled opponents of Assad to form a united front have faltered because of an acute awareness that the Syrian street is driving the uprising. No one, least of all the Syrians wants to see a repeat of the Iraq experience, in which exiled leaders with no street credibility are foisted upon those living inside the country.

“The people who are on the streets don’t want a leader,” said Dhia Aldeen Dugmosh, a protest organizer who was detained twice and escaped to Beirut. “Not only the Syrian people, but all the Arab people, are fed up with having a leader.

SOCIALISM OR YOUR MONEY BACK: The Syrian Struggle for Democracy is on Two Fronts

But, sadly, it was not to be. In due course, the blog was carrying accounts of  developments did lead to the formation of self-appointed leaders from various organisations setting up a Syrian National Council, seeking support from such outside parties as “the Friends of Syria” and also the birth of the Free Syrian Army, financed, armed and trained by the Gulf States as well as various Western powers. Into this mix came  the growth of the Muslim Brotherhood and fundamentalist Jihadist Islamic groups, operating under various guises, creating religious sectarianism.

 “We are still many who want a peaceful revolution,” an activist who calls herself Celine says via Skype from Damascus. “But since it became an armed conflict, many people who were sympathetic to our cause have dropped out.”

“Peaceful resistance is a must; if we use weapons we will not be able to succeed as we do not have enough weapons or soldiers,” said Khalaf Ali Al-Khalaf, a Syrian activist from Aleppo. “The military option will increase people’s pain. Providing people with arms will only increase death. The opposition must convince those requesting arms that there is a different method of resistance. We are facing an unusual regime so we have to use unusual methods.”



“The SNC claims to be representative of the Syrian people. That’s just not true,” says Ms. Nseir, a SNC’s spokesperson in Lebanon but nevertheless a critic of it. “They talk only about arming the rebels. They never talk about nonviolent resistance and they certainly do not speak for the ramadieen, or grey people, the silent majority who support neither the regime nor the armed rebels.”

 ‘Safinas’ explains. “Our revolution has been stolen from us…We are fighting two regimes and two armies now.”

Many Syrians who had embraced the opposition now felt alienated by its drift toward extremism and aligned with neither side. The opposition movement once offered hope of a more democratic future. Now many Syrians worried that they could be trading one repressive regime for another.

SOCIALISM OR YOUR MONEY BACK: Syria – A Plague Upon Both Houses



“We won’t be with the regime, but neither are we with the opposition,” said Ahmed, a journalism student at Damascus University. “People like me are still here,” he said, “but who listens to the voice of reason when guns are shooting all the time?”

The non-violent movements that had gathered momentum early on has become side-lined by the Free Syrian Army. The Syrian regime’s bloody crackdown on dissent pushed many Syrian protesters into an armed uprising and call for foreign military intervention. The FSA began as a collection of soldiers who refused to fire on peacefully protesting civilians, who then left the army and began to form militias aimed at protecting these demonstrators. Soon, this purely defensive function gave way to raids and ambushes of government troops, thereby fuelling the regime’s claims that protesters are not peaceful, and that they cannot be dealt with peacefully. We witnessed how the militarisation of the Syrian protests lessened the democratic nature of the opposition by placing the power into the hands of the armed exile groups who have ended up serving the interests of rival nations because it is they who arms them, rather than expressing the genuine will of the Syrian people.

The Syrian civil war had transformed into a proxy war for regional dominance and remains so to this day. There were the hawks who masqueraded as doves justifying military interventionism by saying that it’s necessary to save people from the tyranny at the hands of their own government.

SOCIALISM OR YOUR MONEY BACK: War by Proxy

Rim Turkmani, a member of the Syrian Civil Democratic Alliance, explained :

“Nowadays, people don’t talk about democracy anymore.You don’t talk about the original rights and freedoms, which the people two years ago went to the street to protest for. We’re talking more about ending a war.” A peaceful resolution to the conflict is not something international actors with regional ambitions, such as Saudi Arabia, are interested in, 

Our blog’s constant message has been that any war is brutal and it is dehumanising and the majority of victims will always be the innocent unarmed civilians. Eating the hearts of prisoners and slitting the throats of children should not surprise anyone. Nor should we expect that the atrocities are to be committed solely by one side and not the other. 

Our alternative is simple and involves no partisanship or bias towards either side in the conflict. Cease fighting and stop shedding blood for those who share not a shred of concern for your welfare and who for their own vested interests want warfare.  Peaceful resistance does not mean no resistance. It does not mean non-action. It involves direct action, like general strikes, which is capable of paralysing the country.  Despots depend on the population’s cooperation and submissiveness – and if the people effectively withhold their consent, even the strongest of regimes can collapse. Without the consent of working people – either their active support or their passive acquiescence the ruling class would have little power and little basis for rule. Non-violence is not passive, nor is it a way of avoiding conflict. Any non-violent movement that takes on a well-entrenched dictatorship will suffer casualties. Nor is there any guarantee of success, even in the long run as we have seen in Syria. However the other option, entails an even greater price in lives lost and ruined.

Today, it is the turn of the people of Myanmar, Hong Kong and elsewhere to learn the harsh lessons that if you go over to violence, the soldiers will not mutiny. They will be loyal to their officers and the Tatmadaw will have a good chance to survive.  An armed response from the protesters will not succeed, as the regime is invariably stronger on the military front. As soon as you choose to fight with violence you’re choosing to fight against opponents in possession of the best weapons. The state’s police and army are better trained in using those weapons. And they  control the infrastructure that allows them to deploy them. To fight dictators with violence is to cede to them the choice of battleground and tactics. Using violence against  experts in it is the quickest way to have a movement crushed. That is why governments frequently infiltrate opposition groups with agent provocateurs—to sidetrack the movement into violent acts that the police and security agencies can deal with. 

Non-violence is an aspect of resistance that the normal forces of coercion are ill-prepared for. The success or failure of any peaceful revolt largely depends on the campaign’s ability to undermine the regimes supporters and weaken the allegiance of its civil servants, police and soldiers to the regime; to persuade those neutrals sitting on the fence to join the opposition. The worse the regime suppresses protests, the more steadfast ought the opposition be in its commitment to non-violence and the more the people resist, the more we will realise our own collective strength.

  The problem isn’t that there isn’t enough food to go around, but that more and more people are unable to afford to purchase it. 

The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) recently released a report predicting that the number of people facing extreme hunger could soar to 270 million by the end of this year — effectively doubling.  It isn’t a lack of availability — it’s that many people simply can’t afford to purchase food.

The world population is crashing, and it doesn’t look like we’re even going to reach the 12 billion which was projected just a couple of years ago. Now it looks like 8 or 9 billion is going to be the leveling off for the population. So, you can’t argue that we need to double production because we already produce too much to begin with. And yet, this is what we hear over and over again. So, this is really sort of how capital politicizes the discourse around hunger in order to colonize new markets.

Taken from here

Capitalist Economies Overproduce Food — But People Can’t Afford to Buy It (truthout.org)