16th
Globalizing Disparity
Although I do love huge events, I’m generally not a big fan of professional sports. Last week however, a friend got me courtside seats (on the floor!!!!) for the Orlando Magic-Detroit Pistons playoff game. It was crazy.
I remember in January catching a bit of the two NFL playoff games. That made me remember the times I actually watched the Super Bowl when traveling overseas. I can remember watching it on fuzzy TV’s in Taiwan, Singapore, Romania, and even Nepal. Not only has the NFL globalized itself by getting the Super Bowl on TV’s all over the world, it now has franchises in Europe and plays pre-season games in Japan.
I got thinking about how the so-called “Developed World” has moved on from merely globalizing or franchising our own forms of capitalism and democracy to now globalizing our profession sports.
Thanks to the old Information Age I hit-up Google for some basic statistics and was shocked to learn that the NFL stands as an indictment against us and our way of life in 2008. It’s a stark and blatant reminder that we desperately need a new kind of civil rights leader. Think about this:
- Nepal’s 2006 GDP was $8 Billion
- The NFL and MBL’s 2007 Payroll was $5.7 Billion, 71% of Nepal’s GDP
- The NFL’s 2007 Payroll was $3.2 Billion
- Sierra Leone’s 2006 GDP was $1.4 Billion, just 44% of what the NFL made this year
The jerseys that Nike sells to the NBA for $45 earn $0.29 for the Salvadoran worker who stitches them. Even just “the transference of barely 4% of the 225 greatest fortunes in the world would be sufficient to provide food, water, health, and education to the whole of humanity” (Jon Sobrino’s No Salvation Outside The Poor: Prophetic-Utopian Essays, 2008, page 39).
Sobrino writes, “human rights are presented as essentially universal, but in fact they are not, not only because they are not yet real for everyone, but because in the real world, the fact that they are real for some people often means that they are denied and even violated by others.” (2008, 12)
