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differences >> bill clinton and nobel peace prize winner talk about the 20th anniversary of the holocaust museum in washington d.c. at 1:30 p.m. eastern. at 8:30 from houston and national rifle association's annual meeting with an rea executive chris bosh and flush robespierre on c-span2's booktv, your questions for the world turned upside down author of the money phillips, in depth live sunday at noon eastern and at 6:00 booktv in london, politics, war, history, religion and culture as we start a 12 week series which british others and on c-span2 they 1963 birmingham raise riots, part of american history tv tonight at 8:00. >> sports columnist for the

nation -- dave zirin of "the nation" talks about his thoughts on sports. the essays range from soccer riots in egypt and the nfl lockdown to the inner workings of the n.c.a.a.. >> it is great to be here, i know that there are binders full of writers who want to speak here so i am happy to be asked if the mitt romney jokes are over. the book is called "game over: how politics has turned the sports world upside-down". before i start a want to say something very brief about the passing of hugo chavez. seriously. it actually speaks directly to the main theme in "game over". he is known for many things and his legacy will be debated for years and one of the things he did which is not discussed at all in any of the obituaries is

he is the number one international phone and the side of the owners of major league baseball. venezuela is the second homer of the dominican republic in terms of providing major league baseball to the big leagues, people like miguel cabrera who won the triple crown and felix tai hernandez of the mariners, the kung fu panda, all of them from venezuela and yet hugo chavez when he took power said the people of major-league baseball you are not going to have an exploitative relationship with this country. you will not do to us what you have done for decades and won't do what you have done to the dominican republic which is spend billions of dollars to build these baseball academies and assign kids as young as 15 years old for a couple thousand dollars, 99% of them are completely disposable and at the an end they are kicked out of the economy, no minor league contract or prospects or

education, basically taking advantage of the country's love of baseball and high poverty rates to treat the country like this was shot. he said to major-league baseball you are going to have education at the baseball academy said provide job training and we are going to tax the hell out of you to pay for the social reforms we are trying to do in this country. major league baseball's response was twofold. the shutdown their academies. there are 30 major league baseball teams, a number of academies and it has gone from 20 to 5. that didn't stop them from recruiting and training venezuelan players but signed them and whisked them to the dominican republic hundreds of miles away from their families to put them in the dominican academies instead. what is so interesting about it and what connects the themes in my book "game over" is the people of major league baseball a few lookit their complaints, what they said is he is trying to politicize our sport.

he is trying to politicize major league baseball, how dare he makes sports and politics in such a way? what is so ridiculous about that is to say there's nothing political whatsoever about having free rein to go into a country and set up these days of academies. that is not political at all. what it reveals, and this is true for the whole history of sports is that it is not sports and politics, it is sports and a certain kind of politics that aren't supposed to mix because politics of always been a part of sports. if i asked you right now who was the first president who ever received a professional team at the white house for publicity opportunity, who might use a? let's throw out some names. teddy roosevelt. that is a good dancer. any other gases? woodrow wilson. that is another one. the first president to ever

received a major league professional team was in the johnson administration. the andrew johnson administration in 1867. the cincinnati red stockings. as long as we have had professional sports there have been politicians trying to exploit professional sports for their own means and their own gain. when athletes themselves have attempted to use professional sports on issues they care about, when fans of attempted to do that, that is when the hammer really does come down and that is why i wrote this book "game over" because i feel like since 2008 there has been a revolutionary change in the world of sports, revolutionary change in terms of the way politics have shaped this for so many of us care about. but you would never know that by reading the traditional sports media. if anything you read the sports media it reminds me of the 0 reporters on the raise beef for the new york times in the 1950s

and they would cover the civil-rights movement in montgomery, alabama and come back with the most in said the juvenile will relevance stories about what they were seeing like stories about the quality of martin luther king's suits and say how can you be expected to be civic leader when he wears these baggy gray flannel suits that so ill fitting and you read this and think you don't see what is happening right before your very eyes. that is so much of sports journalism today so before i talk about the revolutionary changes happening in sports since 2008 i do want to talk about sports journalism because i do think most sports journalists fall into three categories, the first category is who is an athlete dating, what kind of cars are they driving, you don't know where the car-ins end and the nba begins. a horrifying new incentive in

car-ian's and nba players. there is so much coverage it doesn't matter how famous an nba player is a few want to get a lot of coverage you are a lot better off being connected to the kim kardashian family than taking up to the stand this one example of that is the most famous basketball player on earth right now has to be lebron james. last year lebron james and his teammates all where cookies over their heads and i start the book with this story. in solidarity with the family of trayvon martin after he was killed by george zimmerman as a self-appointed neighborhood watch leader, the crime of wearing a hooded sweatshirt in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time blues all of the miami heat post at the same time and it was an amazing sight, amazing story. not just lebron james and dwyane wade, you had mike miller, a player from the dakotas, blind

howard, who marched in the first march on washington, all these guys together stand with trayvon martin. there are 70 times more stories about who the kardashians are dating, 70 times, a factor of 70 in terms of what people are actually examining, what professional journalists are looking at. that is one problem in sports journalism. the second problem is this hyperobsession on statistics. some call the advanced statistics, a form of sports writing when you look at numbers in new creative ways. there is a lot about this that i love, i like the advanced statistics and articles about it, different ways to use numbers as a way to understand athletic performance and success and one of the reasons i like it is it seems to upset all right people, people like skip bayless on espn heat the statistics and they say things that you just

hear them and they are like in my day we valued things like intuitive and ascent moxie, not these things like numbers. if they had a good cut, the right height and the right weight. and that is the player you wanted to see. that makes the statistics a lot of fun. on the flip side of it this hyperfocus on statistics also means people miss the human stories going on in sports all around us. in brazil in september, and the world cup and olympic in 2014, was interviewing a bunch of folks and there was this old professor, old marxist professor i was interviewing and i said to him what do you say about the statistical arguments that shoat

neoliberal reforms may be bringing people out of poverty and he is against neoliberal reforms. and he said it is like, and they hide the most important parts. and is very true. the third type of sports journalism that is the most prevalent is the great old sports writer from the new york times called the guiding up of average. and you turn them into these unbelievably in fallible creatures we are supposed to drop to our knees and a field the, that cause problems because people who were guided up over

the years include people like joe paterno, lance armstrong, author of historians --oscar s pistorius how did they ask this horrendous following? you don't really know how the sports journalists ends and where the corporate pr release begins. you can see evidence of this down the road from us in oregon after the night the facility. we could take a moment to pity the poor people at nike or not but we could because in the last year we had to change the name of the lance armstrong fitness facility and change the name of the joe paterno child-care center. that is true but had to take down from their web site the oscar >> guest: -- oscar pistorius commercial which had him saying i am the bullets in the gun and bursting forward. this is the problem.

you build people up without any regard for who they are politically or socially or what they represent and you end up with these stories where the next cycle is how to jump on these people and demonize them and all the rest of it and for some people like joe paterno and oscar pistorius they deserve to be jumped on and criticized and all the rest of it but the fact that they were built up so high in the first place should give us pause. also gives us stories like manti t teo. was his crime? making of a girlfriend because he was a devout mormon who didn't want to tell his teammates he had never met her before and his price for that since then looks like not only will cause to millions of dollars in terms of getting drafted but he has to endorse a series of interviews with nfl executives asking the question are you gay? d like girls? which is illegal for them to ask

but is apparently what they are asking on interviews which does reveal recodified sanctified homophobia in the national football league and he hasn't held himself because when he was interviewed by katie couric she asks are you gay and to me there are only four answers to that question. yes, no, none of your business, or on weekends. that to me is of good way to answer is that. his response was to say to a little chocolate the macho talk like the guy you dated in high school, i am far from a which just sounds like a horrible new sitcom calling kirk cameron on trinity broadcasting network. but this -- the more you try to fit in the spot the more difficult it is and the more you

keep the story alive. this is the problem with sports journalism. the problem is a shield us from amazing things that happened since 2008, politics shaping sports like i've never seen before. there are four anyways politics has changed sports since 2008 and i will go through the real quick and we can do some q&a. the first thing that happened was in 2008, the election of barack obama as the first african-american president. what ever people might think of barack obama, he would like to kill us without a trial or whatever we might think about him the fact that the centrality of african-american athletes in sports elected but first african-american president attitudes effect on the confidence of athletes to speak about politics. you had people like brenda and rely of the portland trail blazers shell of the games wearing obama deer from head ditto or kevin garnett wearing

political slogans on his sneakers, the favorite was carmelo anthony who said he was going to score 42 points in honor of the 40 second president. he only scored 28 which was his woodrow wilson tribute. that was still a moment where sports and politics did come together. that in and of itself started to open the door to sports and politics. the second thing that happened in 2008 which was a huge deal and got no attention in the ministry impress was a remarkable report that came from an institution called the procter center at the university of minnesota, the only full-time center devoted to the study of women's sports and it was an incredible survey where they interviewed tens of thousands of people led by their professor who had met an amazing woman named mary joe cain and what it was they tried to answer the question which has always been a part of women's athletics which is does it help or hurt women's sports renew have things like

the women of the olympic issue of playboy for example or danika patrick or all the ways women sports is sexualized or you could say sexist and it has always been this debate where people stay on the one hand this is incredibly sexist and misogynist and diminishes the achievements of these incredible women and should have no place in our sports culture. the other side is our society is what it is, you got to find a way to get women on the front page or get people paying attention to women's sports, here is the way to do that. she does this study and says we have to stop having this debate because what we've learned is the more women sports is actualized the more women athletes are object a fight and the less people are interested in women's sports and there are reasons for that. the two biggest consumers are women's sports are first of all women. big surprise.

and men with daughters because it seems as a kind of space where men can bond with their daughters. we can talk about what is wrong with our culture that that is the only place women feel they can bond with their daughters that that is a separate discussion beyond my paid grade but either way the study shows definitively that everything like the fact that women athletes who now every year pose in sports illustrated swimsuit issue as part of you don't know where the swimsuit models end and the actual athletes who pose in the same swimsuits like these things actually hurt women's sports, they are destroying women's for tenders more data because you see incredible objectification and sexist look at women's sports over the last 20 years, there is less coverage of women's sports now than there was, and years ago or 10 years before that. you can actually live in strong terms the existence of writing

women's liberation movement and women's athletic culture that prizes in the achievements of women of play, and the way they look wind in as few close as possible. this was another thing that was a huge story that needed to be looked at and should have been part of the discussion every time you have the objectification of women athletes but it wasn't there. the third thing that happened since 2008 which was a huge is the presence of actual people inside sports, actual athletes who care about gay, lesbian, trends and their rights. that is huge because sports is one of the ways in which all these ideas are constructed at an early age like cowboys are supposed to act, we have no role, that what room is no place for you, it is a place where

homophobia is accepted and is a part of women's the athletics as well. and it is the way homophobia operates because it keeps women athletes and a save space. since 2008 we have seen a big change. why that change happens? one of the reasons was things like the national quality margin washington d.c. 200,000 people increased activism after prop. 8 passed in california, renewed consciousness about these issues and it has gotten into the world of sports. one example of it was this past year, weeks before the superbowl, a player for the baltimore ravens, i am going to use the platform of the superbowl to talk about anti bullying and mary the quality, and the punter for the minnesota

vikings, both played key roles not just speaking out about the issue that can the rounds state referendums. that was a huge. there were a huge referendum victories in maryland where i lived and minnesota. it was much trickier because of those referendum's like the civil rights marriage freedom act but if you voted yes it stopped gay people from getting very. they do stuff like that sometimes and chris led the fight for the no vote in that as well and he was crisscrossing the state in between games and weathering the criticism of his coaches to do it and on the flip side of that you have tim tebow and tim tebow, somebody who is still a quarterback yet cannot throw and he is somebody who is able to get all this incredible attention way beyond his ability to actually perform when he does commercials for organizations like focus on the family which

believes in gay rhetoric of therapy recently had to cancel a speaking engagement at a church in texas which is a brutally homophobic church backed by a record by the name of jeffers, he actually pulled back because of the criticism he got from it but one of the things jeffers believes, if you are catholic, jewish or muslim you're going to hell, an all-purpose going to hell thing unless you believe in what he does so he pull away from that so we learned he is actually back on the gay rep read of therapy speaking for. the thing that is particularly galling is that he can't throw. my goodness. stop calling him a quarterback, cannot throw. the mere fact that people having these discussions, and for an organization that started, you can play, it was started by the burke family in toronto, canada.

if you never heard of the burkes they are like hockey royalty. the father was the longtime general manager, both of the funds were scouts, one of the sons, brian, came out of the closet and the family's reaction was not just to say we will tolerate you or we accept you out of the goodness of our hearts but we're going to fight homophobia with you. we are going to make hockey face based and we started a group called you can play and it amazing work and it is led by patrick who died in a car accident that patrick took brian's that the way to move forward. as a way to move forward. they do amazing work. and they will have the first out gay player in one of the four big sports and it will be a

hockey player so we will look for that in the news. and the work will be cited to make that happen. the biggest thing that happened in 2008 the total >> reporter: sports was the economic crisis of 2008. in and of itself, it made the issue of economics central to how sports was going to operate for the reason that public subsidies drive up for owners. people have no idea what that feels like. public money makes it easily affordable to pay for the stadium and no idea how terrible that feels. the thing that how it affected sports is four lockouts and the nhl, they lost a whole season and referees for the national football league. in each of these cases except for the referees it seemed it was more out of spite, the owners all said the same thing, we can't get the public

subsidies we use to get, therefore we need to keep access ability levels up by extracting money from the salaries of players. when we walk out players and sports we are locking out everybody at the stadium, locking out everybody who picks up an extra shift at the bar across the street from the stadium and locking out everybody who is able to make a living through the connection of the public subsidies that go into sports yet these folks are these private actors effectively intervening in public investment and keeping people from earning their living and that is an incredibly political process and this is global as well. this is a global phenomenon. one of the things we have done over a couple years is visit places before and after the olympics and world cup have been there. i go there when it is not fun which isn't very fun but is very interesting because we get to see what happened to all the

promises. "game over: how politics has turned the sports world upside-down" is one of the main victims of the austerity crisis after the 2008 economic crisis which took $34.4 trillion out of the global economy. go to greece and you see people living in squatter camps. everything that got paid for to make the olympics happen in 2004 are basically a lab rat homeless shelters where the state has led people set up slaughter camps so that is grease. or take a place like vancouver which had the winter games in 2010. i wasn't there before the start of the game on the front page of the newspaper, half of the paper was devoted to the fact that they will be cutting physical education programs throughout british columbia and the other half is how to spend millions of dollars to fly snow to the top of mountains because they did not have enough snow for the skiing contribution. a little bit of global warming there at the same time.

billions of dollars in south africa irrigating the stadium's 24 hours a day to make is green and lush and beautiful as possible with a five minute block to 24 our irrigation with entire neighborhoods without drinking water, and to the point of which where trucks would have to drive out in the middle of the night to bring jugs of water to families. the fact they have those trucks is better than what the situation was like in new jersey when the super bowl takes place. chris christie, the governor, has already said when the super bowl is happening people might have to realize in the two week leading up to the superbowl that we will not have emergency services available for people in

the areas around a certain distance of the stadium itself because they are so worried about being able to hold the super bowl in the context of zero degrees or a snow storm or something like that. and they might not get that during the superbowl. the other thing in south africa was the world cup organizing it, they have the south african government trademark the words world cup in 2010 so fewer trying to sell anything that said the words world cup or 2010, it can be confiscated by the government which edge but huge deal with the informal economy, a big selling point, include billions of dollars in state money to put on the world cup. after the world cup basically the public sector unions, this will sound similar represented with it and enjoy the party,

would be a three million person public-sector strike in south africa right afterwards. wasn't this a blast coming here on the rough side of your country? i am in the next story with no sense of what is taking place was like the new liberal trojan horse or a professor in portland and celebrate capitalism which is a great way to refer to them. and accept things they otherwise would not accept because it is wrapped to host the olympics and the world cup and really vicious reforms are pushed through. this is what i am writing about and just to close, and this is particularly important, and understanding sports through a different lens became important to me when i was a player for

the houston rockets, and 21 going on 22, is a rookie in the nba and he sat out the first half of the season. and objecting to way the team the houston rockets was handling the issue around mental health. he told the my have mental health issues that might affect the pike and fly or practice or play. and still down with needing help with mental issues and employed by the team and he said yes, the psychiatrists who works for my boss, i don't think i want to do that. i want my own psychiatrist if that is okay and they said no. for the first half of the year egis and out and it looks like now he is working his way back and the process of inciting against them has increased his

political confidence and change the way he not only looks at his own life but the whole world. and one of the writers of espn, of really good journalist, really good writer on c-span, the way he handled this interview is really atrocious. he started interviewing and the issue no one is talking about is it is not just about me being mentally ill, the majority of the nba is mentally ill. what do you mean? he said everybody knows how many players smoked weed after games, drink after games, not just doing that because they're having fun and unwinding but manage their pain, their alienation, their isolation and no one wants to talk about that. you know what else no one talks about? the majority of this country is mentally ill. he says why do you think we

don't want to talk about that? we don't want to talk about it because if we admit that we might have to devote resources to doing something about it. 60% of the country had cancer there would have to be a massive public health efforts to do something about that but if the majority of us are mentally ill, they are going to ignore it. this is what he said. i am willing to fight and die to get universal mental health coverage in the united states. the reason people are mentally ill is because 2% of the population control the wealth and the rest of us are just fighting over the rest and we are stressed out of our minds figuring out how to make our way in the world. that is why we are mentally ill. he writes in his article okay, and he writes it sounds like a ninth grader who just rose a term paper and thinks he is the smartest person in the world.

you think about everything that does for the reader who is reading this because for does it is safe to say if we read that we would be like right hon, you are a jerk. how dare you say that? for a lot of people, oh oh, and provide this thing where you don't have to take me seriously because he thinks he knows everything. and the people who see the world lot clearer from a 40-year-old, 50-year-old gawker with their journalism school. is there something very neat about being a professional athlete in this country where you tend to come from an incredibly impoverished backgrounds, you oftentimes our person of color as well and yet how many poor people of color have microphones in their face and are asked what do you think about the world? of a lot of these athletes are

told you have to be quiet, total line, don't say a word, don't say a thing. the most important thing is to make money, support the people around you and sells something, and you also get athletes who say i have this, i know where i come from, and people looking up for me. to make a better place and things we need to treasure and bills movements around the fact, that sees jackie robinson as central. as central to the women's liberation movement. and the athletes of the future are central to building a world that is free of exploitation and build on the basis of human

cooperation and not destroying people so thank you very much. i appreciate your time. [applause] >> sorry i was losing my voice. questions? let me say if you have a question, some folks from c-span are going to give you a microphone so you will be recorded. feel free to say your name or don't say your name but you will be on tv. if you have any outstanding warrants or things you may be dealing with of a sketchy nature or don't want your boss to see you are here you might not want to ask a question. otherwise put your hands up. >> i would like to ask two questions if it is okay. the first one is what you thought during the superbowl when chris culvert from the 49ers and all of san francisco came out in support so that was

-- the second thing is along the same lines, sports people who speak out, what do you think of michael jordan refusing to speak out and be criticized for that because all he wanted to do was play basketball and didn't want to take a personal stand when people were asking him to take a stand. >> terrific question. what is your name? say your name? laura fake names like the address you like a human being? >> for an. >> fran. people who didn't hear about this, the super bowl has this thing called media day where people go in and ask questions of the athletes and one of the people asking a question was the spawn of howard stern, a living symbol of american decline and are the laying went to chris culver and said how do you feel

about having a gay teammate, asking it in a jokey homophobic way and he went to and said he would not accept having a gay teen may. it was several of the other san francisco players also rejected the idea they had never been part of an actual video they did. dan savage's comment about bullying, they actually set we were never part of that and that is the first and only time dan savage has ever taken a video down, he took down the 49 years, it was very ugly and would have been ugly no matter what team they played for bus playing for the san francisco 40-niners and saying homophobic things can never be seen as an good career move by would say. it was very interesting. they do ratings by cities for the superbowl. not too surprising this year was the baltimore ravens in terms of percentage of people watching it

and san francisco is not even in the top-10 and people a struggling to understand that and it is hard to root for a team that is homophobic when you are a city that decade has stood for an alternative way of looking at our bill g b t brothers and sisters. that was a huge deal at the time. was good to see the nfl and particularly -- you might have seen the news this past week that our teams, not just mant'i teo but asking players do you like girls and are you married and who are you dating and studiously put, these questions are not only immoral but illegal. you can't ask people things like that. i interviewed a couple players who have come out of the closet since retirement and they said the nfl has been asking this for decades. it is part of how they talk to you and it is a way to dehumanize people as soon as

they come into the interview room. and we control you, would like to know everything about you and then you will basically be ours to mold whatever we say so it is good that players are breaking out and the nfl has a long way to go. despite the immediate condemnation, there are ways to go. michael jordan is an interesting character in all of this, i have always been -- should be slamming athletes. the main idea of political freedom, that people should have a right to speak out if they want to and not worry about losing their job. and michael jordan offers not your typical athlete.

michael jordan is a fortune 500 company with legs. someone who runs the division of nike and what nike does in southeast asia a nation of savages. for michael jordan to say nothing when asked questions about things like sweat shops. that is a political choice he is making. and it represents a certain politics rocking and locks steps, and the -- makes and worthy of any criticism. >> question over here. in the back. >> thanks. question back to the gender

issue. female journalist, that they are being treated and on the nfl sideline, to be enhanced. >> the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first woman ever to broadcast an nfl game, you can look at rudy march ski, sports tv writer, to determine whether you would be a success or failure in the industry and gave us a high notice. the first ever to do that, and also the last. what happened since then and if you have a woman connected to the nfl and on the sidelines and still have a situation, all the criticism but espn gets you have to criticize them when they are like the monolith.

they came out with the gender study on sports journalists. i wish i had the numbers that it is really bad, 17%, if you take out espn it drops to subterranean levels, it says something about access and sports journalism in the classroom which is rare, and they feel like they could. and talking about broadcasting or doing actual media and writing. it is very narrow. the thing that is frustrating is if you look at the sheer numbers of women who play sports which is incredible. going from one to 34 young women, and look at the number of

women who buy sports in power which you look at, and was a woman's game between connecticut and tennessee. you see there is money to be made here. the upper echelons of sports is like watching them in a death fight with themselves. the money they want to make and the sexist audiology they want to promote and they are fighting this battle and must oppress women but want their money, and the results is you get nfl players winning pink to show their allegiance to the susan g. coleman foundation and that is the pretzels they have put themselves in and that is a terrible situation. i think this is going to be the next up surge if you talk about

political upsurge in sports, i have the right to play without thinking i need to be like danika patrick to do it. and this question over here. >> i wonder what you would change about college sports. >> first of all, not human particular but someone named lindberg, so not you, but -- >> but i used to play basketball. i didn't know if you would know. >> you said that as a cute little thing. on television. >> there is a whole part of the book about glenn burke. and glenn burke was someone who in the 1970s was out of the closet to his teammates, played baseball for the dodgers and

invented the high 5 and he made the mistake of having a relationship with the nature of that relationship is up for debate. and while he was playing for the dodgers, removed from sports, sellout for his teammates but never in the media as an active player. and what was your question? >> and the starting points, to blow the old thing up as a starting point so figuratively blowing and up, blow the whole thing up and start over. talk to somebody who is not from

this country and state institutions of higher learning, for major-league baseball or nfl franchise, that is crazy and it is absolutely crazy. this was something w. e. b. du bois was talking about a century ago and it is cute and claimed to read what he had to say. it is an outrage that the football team at yale this seven times the money as the english department and you are like that is so cute, seven times. that is like seven trillion times as much as your typical english department more or less save a few zeros but what he talked about was the corrosive effect of as he called it the football on campus and that is proven true because what you have in college athletes are campus workers with no rights and no pay. that is what they are.

i talked-about this, the whole word that comes from college football player who is paralyzed trying to sue the n.c.a.a. to get workers' compensation. that was their defense to the supreme court, to save they are not workers, it is said designation that should exempt us from carrying about their health or having to compensate them when something horrible happens to them. told saying, and the bone of its existence. and the professional is asian of amateur sports turned it into the absolute moral says pull. jerry sandusky was raping kids in the locker room of the football program, the thing that

was shocking and scary to people inside the world of the n.c.a.a. was sort of like a look at how far you would go to protect the institution because you already know and we have known for years that people look the other way if players are paid under the table, people look the other way on the institution like notre dame or in situations of sexual assault and rape and look the other way if small children are getting abused in the showers of the football team. why do they look the other way? is it because there is this, all of satanic awful people? it is this banality of evil, this idea that says the football program supports so much on campus, the central of the psychological life of an entire region and therefore we are going to do what we have to do to make sure the trains keep running on time no matter how

monstrous whatever happens happens. and down to its last compound. >> we are going to make you work today back there. >> the campaign and the new jim crow. and the potential fight that is going on around the prison company, it is in florida. >> thank you for asking about that. and it is terrific you are doing that, and michele alexander's book the new jim crow which is an indispensable piece of writing which is the most important anti races books is

the autobiography of malcolm x, an amazing work. and the new jim crow is a campus issue in a very serious way. it is the university called florida atlantic univ. and there's a private prison called geo group, the second-largest prison company in the united states, and $6 million to rename the football stadium. this is horrible for so many reasons. private prisons are using inherently moral structure is to spend tens of millions of dollars to lobby for things like three strikes' laws and mandatory minimum sentencing and if there are less prisoners they make less money. they want to make sure the

incarceration rate is as high as possible because they are the people in cash strapped times to get the state contracts to build these private prisons but geo group even by the standards of private prisons particularly bad. judge in mississippi, keep in mind mississippi called geo group a cesspool of inhumanity based on how they treated their prisoners and the shoes like sanitation, withholding medication, lack of clean beds, not doing laundry for the sheets. like we are talking about with penn state not because these are evil people but looking at their profit margins and it is a lot cheaper to not watch the sheets every day, a lot cheaper to not make sure toilets are clean and the results of course, human rights violations on another scale and what is particularly scary about this is right now all the private prison companies are totally psyched about immigration reform and the idea

of it pushing through and immigration reform might be something people here would be in favor of 4 very good reasons, people not living in the shadows at the citizenship and the like. one thing immigration reform will do is make is open season on undocumented people in the country and now we come jail these people. the prison population in this country is two million, largest in the world. the number of undocumented people in florida alone is three million. in florida alone, three million potential prisoners is vying for the state contract. all three million of those people, that means lucrative for the million dollar company. so renaming the stadium geo group stadium is a form of branding to be able to make their name more acceptable to the people and to get those wonderful p r. what is brilliant about this is the students are fighting back. the team at florida atlantic

called the owls, the students have started a group called stop alcatraz. stop alcatraz already occupied the president's office, they already forced the campus wide meeting calling for her resignation and really raising hell so a lot of students, really personal to them because a lot of parents spend time in geo group jails and have the experience of doing that because they're the children of immigrants and operate as detention centers. and this is something we should draw inspiration from. it all started because they got greedy with their money. this is a good thing.

>> piggybacking on that little bit the power of espn, the power of fox sports, compete with espn, and the huge human dismembered contract with comcast cable and whoever, how is that going to access the underprivilege socioeconomic fault lines, far below, how are they going to excess, when i grew up as a kid i could turn on any radio or tv, i could watch women in sports, billie jean king, you name it, we had access to it. if you are going to start showing gay athletes or see more women in sports, we need to have access so young people can see that and have inspiration. >> i am so glad you raised that

because this is one of the other things that has happened in sports in recent years and i talk about it in the book but it goes further back to 2008 roughly 20 or 30 years and there has always been this very tight relationship between professional sports and working-class communities in the united states and that relationship has been severed dramatically in the last generation. when my dad was growing up in brooklyn it was the thing where he would find milk bottles and handed in for collins and for the coins he could see a brooklyn dodgers game. think how many milk bottles you would need to get a ticket to see a major league baseball game. as to remove 50 kids how many had been to dodgers kid, one kid raise their hand out of 50. it has become this sort of thing where if you were going to see a game it is probably because

you're selling beer for $7 or $8 an hour or directing people to their seats or working in concession stands. sports themselves have become something just to be able to go to a sporting event, you mentioned the issue of cable which is another big deal like the ability to watch a sporting event. >> channel 8 has it a couple times, eight or ten game package, i am not sure, maybe someone from k gw would say that. >> the worst part of it is i don't know if this is for here, because you guys -- the effort to get tens of millions of dollars of public subsidies and by the way good job doing that. i am always marveled at how one using it is that a son of hank paulson decided to name his son marriage. is a family named the kind of

funny. like you wrote with a platinum spinning your mouth and go by the name merit. in los angeles for example, everybody's cable bill is going up because of paying for the dodgers's new cable team. everyone is subsidizing the dodgers, whether you can afford a ticket or not if you have cable you are subsidizing los angeles dodgers and this to me is like collective debt or privatization of profits is something sports has been doing for 40 years and what it has done, it really primes as for the bank bailouts in this country. the idea that somehow to accept it is our job as the public to bailout private capital. many people think okay, that is what we are supposed to do when in reality i think it is organized theft ended is shameful to me that sports,

something that we love is used as a way to push that agenda through. i totally agree and hear what you are saying but we are going to have to fight for access. that is what it comes down to. people need to start looking at sports through a more activist wins. not something that is just going to be there for us but something we have to fight, with issues about basic health as one of the things we turned around. >> steve, with the whole land armstrong affair that just took place do you foresee that is an underreported story for other major league sports? i have been hearing about soccer in particular with all the running that they do in soccer, the marathon ears, do you think

that is going to be a big story in the future or is that going to be kept under wraps? >> david stern said in front of congress as commissioner of the nba in 2006 and he said nba players don't use gloves because of been body types and muscle mass, not the sort of thing that is conducive to steroids unlike football players, and people in congress are like that is brilliant, well said. that hulking mass when armstrong, performance enhancing drugs for all kinds of things. the number one thing these do is allow you to train longer and train harder. if you are an athlete who comes from a poor socioeconomic background and you know taking this bill would be the difference between you having a longer career and making millions more dollars means for a lot of athletes is a

no-brainer sellout sybase plans cycling is largely unexplored because people don't want to know what the answers are. my other thing for performance enhancing drugs is anybody who thinks the status quo in terms of how they are regulated, anyone who's thinks that is absolutely out of their minds. toomey the smartest people who talk about this are on the extremes of each side of the issue and the answer does lead in the extreme. there's one set of arguments, taken out of the shadows and taken out of the closet. ..

>> the current way it operates really is an absolute joke, and it ends up doing terrible harm to people. you would think if someone's a professional athlete, these are the people who when they're 60 and 70 should be the healthiest people in the world. you know what i'm saying? the men should look like george clooney, and -- you know what i'm saying? they're 60 and 70, and the women

should all look like martina navratilova. but that's not the case. often times people are broken. one ffl player said to -- nfl player said to me is the thing about playing football is you go straight from being young to being old. the amount of brutality that you put your body through not just on the field, but in between games as well. because, obviously, if you're taking something artificial that makes you train longer than a human should, those chickens are going to come home to roost eventually. so that's how i'd answer that. thank you. and we have a question up here. >> hi, dave. >> hi. >> i'm sarah from portland. i was wondering since you talked a lot about sort of the power that individual sports players have, if you could talk some about sort of the power of sports fans and particularly the -- [inaudible] and i think they're called in egypt. and just what they're up to now,

because i know they've been doing some awesome, cool things, but i haven't been paying attention recently, or just the role of sports or how sports has played out in the arab spring, if you know any good stories. >> yeah. there's a whole chapter in the book about this, about sports fan clubs in the arab spring because this, to me, was this brilliant and brilliantly underreported story that when hosni mubarak's dick dictatorshp fell, one of the central forces that made that happen were the fan clubs of the main soccer teams in egypt. and this was for a basic reason. for decades under mubarak's dictatorship, he -- like other dictators and other autocrats in the world -- they always, they give extra room for soccer clubs to fight the police, to fight each other, to fight themselves, to set off pyro. it was always seen as an apolitical way to let frustrated, angry male youth blow off steam. and better they do that than be

part of any sort of revolutionary movement to take on the government. now, the thing that happened when the revolution started in egypt is that the soccer clubs were the people who were most experienced at doing things like fighting the police, setting up checkpoints and all the rest. they came ready made to tahrir square. no, you're doing this wrong. let me show you how to actually do this and keep the police from coming in here. and over time they played in this incredible role in actually winning leadership and that winning of revolutionary leadership, it continued after mubarak left power, because one of the things that they continued to do was call for justice on the question of the people who the state police had killed. and this is the thing about the soccer clubs that made semithem so dangerous and -- made them so dangerous to the status quo in egypt, is that their hatred has

always been for the state apparatus and for state violence. that's always been their focus. they say this explicitly, we don't care whether it's the muslim brotherhood or whoever is actually in power. what we care about is whether people are held to account for those who died. and that's so power, because one of -- powerful, because one of the great broken promises of morsi, the current president, is seeking justice in the question of the state apparatus who killed people both under mubarak and sort of the military intermediary dictatorship that bridged morsi and mubarak. and that has made them a consistent street-fighting force in demanding this. and it's a story that is still playing itself out, and they're going to keep being out there. they've actually gotten more politically powerful since morsi took power, because they have been this voice. and as morsi has disappointed people, people are looking for, well, what should we do. and i do talk about it in more

detail in the book. they are just likely lair yous and wonderful stories about people in these soccer clubs. the other thing is they hate these other soccer clubs. at the start of the revolution, they're like, yeah, i hate mubarak, but i hate those guys even more. you better stay on the other side of tahrir, buddy, i'm not going anywhere near you. by the end of it they're, like, linking arms and fighting together. i quote this one guy who's part of the revolutionary socialists of egypt. and he said i really felt like i would sooner see mubarak fall before i would ever see people from these soccer teams link arms. that, to me, is the craziest thing i ever taught i'd see in egypt. and this is something that was part of the arab spring. i mean, any place -- actually, that was the first thing that gadhafi did after things broke in egypt, was he suspended all the soccer matches in libya. because it was like they saw soccer as a possible

transmission belt among the struggle from one country to another. and then the other place where soccer in the middle east has assumed this huge role not just with fan clubs and players, but it's on the gaza strip. and i write about that in the book as well. because there have been three players on the palestinian national team who have been killed in the last two years by the israeli government. and in the bombing of gaza that took place last year, the headquarters of the opal tin yang -- of the palestinian football association was bombed. the actual offices were targeted with precision missiles and bombed. and i think telling that story and telling the story of a guy who people might be familiar with who was the palestinian soccer player who went on a hunger strike because he'd been jailed for two years without charges, and he eventually was released because of international pressure. that was being pushed through by fifa as well which is about as corrupt and decrepit a body as

you could possibly manage. but fifa speaking out for the rights of the palestinian soccer player was another one of those moments where they thought i would sooner see ice cream emerge from urinals before i would see -- [laughter] fifa say anything political useful ever. but it's a sign of the times. it truly is. and the story of palestinian soccer is one i talk about in the book and one that's well worth telling. >> because it's, um, you know, it's like i'm a sensitive person, i like people to like me and stuff, but some people don't like me, and that humpts a little bit. -- hurts a little

bit. it's kind of like weird. you've got some people, like people like espn people, people who do the mainstream stuff who sort of reach out to me, and they're like, hey, i really like what you're doing, keep doing what you're doing. and i was like, you should do it too. no, i'm not going to do it. [laughter] but we need you to keep doing it because that sort of creates some more space for me to do something that's a little better. so i've had people consciously reach out to me and say that, and that's gratifying. okay, i'm not doing this in a vacuum here, but it is connected in some way, shape or form to getting masses of people to see better coverage because they'll see it done by other people. because there's a little bit of a transmission belt there. so that's really good. the other side, though, is there are also people who just like really, really like viscerally dislike me in a way that's really, like, hurtful, you know? but they, the reason they do is because i really do think that sports journalism is a political

pursuit. how you talk about people is political. how you choose to talk about women athletes is a political decision. how you choose or not choose to talk about racism is a political decision. and if you do something politically that i disagree with, i'm going to talk about it or write about it because it's a way of actually having a real political debate. but for a lot of people who come up through sports journalism, these contents of politics, debate, like what are you talking about, dude? girls are silly. they can't get why you think these issues might actually matter. and that's where it can get kind of ugly sometimes. but, you know, do what you've got to do. you know, they say the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. so hate, cool. [laughter] >> i'd ask your thoughts on the

idea of major league homophobia as a fig leaf to cover up homosexual blatancy in -- >> [inaudible] in sports? >> in sports. >> oh, i think that's huge. i mean, frankly, i mean, i think that there are few spectacles more homoerotic than an nfl game if you're willing to look at it honestly. [laughter] you don't want to say that, but, dude, any time you've got tight ends bending over, you're going to have questions and curiosities. [laughter] and i totally think that homophobia is an outgrowth, marley in football. like -- particularly in football. it's a lot of men touching and rolling around. and, i mean, the phrase, the phrase sissy in our vernacular, like one of its origin toes is

teddy roosevelt, because he was promoting football as a way to teach boys to be men. and us si was a way to define people who wouldn't play football. so it goes back to its earliest days, like this idea of football as manhood and no discussion of anything that has to do with homoeroticism with football. this is one of these discussions that makes me popular, by the way, with other sports writers. [laughter] and i'll never forget, like, probably the most homoerotic sport which is also a sport that's very enjoyable, i think, mixed martial arts, if people have watched that. and i asked a mixed martial artist about this once, a very prominent one. be you think about some of the actual positions and touching and submission holds, it's like, it's kind of -- it's a homoerotic sport, don't you think? he thought about it for a long time, and he said, look, we have this thing we say in the locker

room, it's only gay if you make eye contact. [laughter] and i thought, like, wow. [laughter] what a cultural indictment of our world. [laughter] it's only gay if you make eye contact. in finish and on that -- and on that -- [laughter] we'll call it a fight. thank you very much. [applause] everybody, appreciate it. [applause] >> for more information visit the author's web site, edgeofsports.com. >> now joining us on the campus of stanford university at the hoover institution, it's a familiar face and a more familiar name, and that's victor davis hanson who's just come out with his newest book, "the save your generals: how five great commanders saved wars that were lost from ancient greece to iraq." what do you mean when you talk about saved war? what's a saved war?

>> nothing's over until it's over. so there are situations usually in consensual societies where people are collectively the leadership or individually have said it was a bad idea, or we can't win, or it didn't turn out like we thought it would be. and yet there are people who in peacetime are not necessarily spectacular, but they come out of the shadows, so to speak. they're sort of the military versions of shane, saviors. and they have a particular profile throughout history. and they look at the war differently than the majority. and they say, you know what? it's not lost. and, n., we can win it, but they have a hard time convincing people to give them the opportunity because by definition they're eccentric personalities, tend to alienate people, tear not team players -- they're not team players whether it's william tecum shah sherman or david petraeus. >> those are three of the generals that you picked. who are the other two in. >> an obscure man named bell star russ who had the idea they

could restore the entire roman mediterranean empire in the sixth century a.d., and my favorite of all of them, matthew ridgeway. retook seoul, south korea, and got us back up to the 38th parallel when everybody wanted to evacuate and go back to japan. >> did you have to narrow the list? >> yes, i did. >> from -- where did you start? >> well, i had people, i had people as diverse as the spartan, i had richard the lionheart, curtis lemay. all sorts of figures. i thought rath or than trying to be successmatically chronological, let's pick what i thought were the most interesting, dynamic, controversial and then use them as a template in the conclusion to say they're applicable to other people across time and space. >> in "the savior generals," you write: savior generals are not mere cowboys. most are keen students, even