Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Baseball's Gene Debs

Marvin Miller can put a pretty vicious swing on a cripple pitch. The 95-year-old founding executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, walking stick by his side, was serving up some truth Tuesday night at the NYU School of Law.

In a 68-minute presentation, Miller forcefully challenged the corporate pay structure that gives shareholders little to no say over how much CEO's are being financially compensated. Conversely, he called MLB's pay structure the biggest "win-win" financial arrangement he had ever seen. Since the establishment of the players union in 1966, the average salary for a player has increased from $19,000 to $3.3 million. MLB revenue has climbed from $50 million in '67 to $7.1 billion last year.

Strong unions make even stronger businesses.

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Why do we have only two major political parties in the United States? Here's a possible reason you haven't considered: the citizens of New York state just coughed up $20 million to conduct a Republican Party primary-- that's an amount equal to a $20 bill for every person that actually participated as 96% of eligible voters stayed home. Taxpayers should pay for general elections that involve all political parties, not party primaries for Republicans and Democrats. Until we have full public financing of elections-- which the future health of our union depends upon-- the two parties that have worked tirelessly in cooperation to prevent us from ever having publicly-financed elections should pony up themselves for the free media publicity we call "primaries" and "caucuses."

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When Wilt Chamberlain was traded from the San Francisco Warriors to the Philadelphia 76ers in 1965, the deal went down at Stan (Musial) & Biggie's Restaurant in St. Louis.

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