Chapter 1: What is the context of the NFL Players Association's current crisis?
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Chapter 2: How has the leadership of the NFL Players Association changed over time?
Like you can, like you can get serious, like people every single year get really, really seriously injured. Like in training camp and in preseason games.
Right.
And there was no free agency, right? So, like, the team that drafted you, like, they own you until, you know, you're ready to call it quits or they trade you somewhere else or they cut you. And you kind of got to figure it out. But, like, the idea that you could just, like, have this agency and leave and your contract expires, you can go sign with someone else, that was not a thing.
So, obviously, when you think about where football is now, like, what I tell people is, like, when they ask, like, why should I care about this union? Okay, think about how bad it is now. It can get worse. It was worse. Yeah. It was worse. It was significantly worse.
But, you know, you have like this idea that, and it's a correct idea because the players are the basis of it, that this person in charge of the union needs to be a player. And Gene, like coming from his background, he, with the Raiders, we were talking about proud football organization, like the very like material basis of being an NFL player was extremely important to Gene.
So, you know, up until he passed away in 2008, I mean, he is, you know, he's, like you said, he's, he's leading strikes. He's fighting for more revenue. He's fighting for, you know, more benefits on the backend after guys retire. And Gene, It kind of culminates in the 2006 CBA. I would say this is kind of like the Empire Strikes Back moment for the owners.
Because in 2006, the players and the owners, they signed a CBA that, on the surface, granted the players a 60%, 60% revenue share against the owners 40%. When you start actually digging through the numbers. Yeah, that's not fake as fuck. Like... It was fake. It was fake, right? So I'll say this.
It was fake in the sense that there was something called like a revenue credit or a revenue tax or something that the owners took off of the pie before it went down to like the 60-40 split, right? So, you know, and it started, you know, in 2006, like I think the first time they cut it, it was like,
you know, $800 billion, and then, you know, within two years, they were taking well over a billion dollars before it got passed down onto the players.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of the NFL Players Association's decisions on player welfare?
But what they gave up. Unbelievable. I'm not sure like they were fully aware of what they gave up here. And the part of the biggest thing that where they gave up was part of the biggest thing after they after I say they gave the money back to the owners. They gave Roger Goodell. They made him dictator in terms of like the punishment.
Yeah.
Workforce. But the rookie wage scale. Oh, my God. A massive. Holy shit.
shit massive concession to ownership yeah because they they as in like tom brady and drew breeze more so drew breeze from what i've gathered kind of frame this as hey why are these rookies getting all this damn money like this is something that should be going towards the veterans and ownership was like oh you see that you think like you think that's a good idea like we're gonna
agree we could agree to that and what they got back was like less practice time so you know you know you don't have to have as many two-a-days man that's worth billions of dollars really like in terms of like yeah what you what you guys can set yourself up with and what the what the veteran players who who were on board with this what they thought was oh okay well if the rookie wage if the rookie wages deal like if that if that gets capped
At a certain amount, then that's more money for us. So like a prime example is in 2010, Sam Bradford was the number one overall pick to St. Louis Rams. He signed a six-year, $84 million contract. So the next year, Cam Newton is the first overall pick to the Carolina Panthers. And after this lockout ends, his contract was four years, $22 million. Fully guaranteed. She's correct.
you lost $60 million in terms of value from the year before. So what the players, what the veteran players thought was, oh, okay, well now there'll be this influx of cap space to sign veteran players. What do billionaires do when they suddenly have access to a cheap workforce? They just load it up on rookies.
So these veteran players, they sold themselves on the fallacy of trickle-down economics and got themselves replaced out of the league. So the only people that this benefited really was people like Drew Brees, people like Tom Brady. People who don't need it.
Right, but also are so indispensable to their organizations that they can eat up the cap space that was left over from the rookies getting signed. So that's when you start to see the quarterback contracts balloon up, where you go from in 2015, 11 years ago, or 2016, I think, Cam Newton signed a contract that made him the highest paid quarterback in NFL history at five years, $100 million.
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Chapter 4: How does the NFL Players Association's history impact its future?
Treader and, you know, the people around him, they viewed that experience from Lloyd Howell, like, busting unions as a positive. Yeah. Because, you know, there's this train of thought, like, oh, well, you know, well, if we know someone who knows how to destroy us, if we hire them, surely they will change their ways and they will start to help us.
Like, we're going to get inside knowledge on how to bust a union, so maybe we could weaponize that. Yeah. and turn it back the other way. Man, that's dumb as hell. Why would you? Like, that's, oh my God. Right. And not only that, but Lloyd Howell, who is elected the executive director of the union, is also a part of a hedge fund that is investing in NFL teams in minority states. Yeah.
The Carlisle Group. Yeah. Your executive director of the union works for hedge funds that are extracting value from these teams. From players. Yeah. Yeah. That's disqualifying. It should be disqualifying. He's on camera. The union posted a video of him on camera talking about how he was talking to the owners about letting the investment group in. Yeah. It's unbelievable.
It's as close as I've ever seen outside of, again, a union that is literally run by the bosses to, like, my union guy works for management. It's baffling. I don't know. It's like state-integrated CCP shit, right? Dude, yes. A corporate consultant is your union liaison to 32 billionaires and Roger Goodell. It's completely incompatible on a basic ideological level.
And then you start getting to, well, now he has direct control over people's lives and the funds of the union, which, as ESPN and Pablo Torre found out, he was using to go to the goddamn strip club in Miami. Yeah. And to spend on other stuff. And also he was sued for sexual harassment while he was at Booz Allen.
So he's hidden like the check marks for everything you see like corporate sociopathy, right? Yeah. And they're like, That's our guy. That's our guy.
Once all this stuff comes out about how he spent his money and how he was misappropriating funds, that was what got him out more so than the material practices that he exemplified while he was running the union, which involved hiding the fact that the owners were colluding against them. It is completely unhinged.
And unfortunately, the other thing that's unhinged is that's going to be all for today. However, there is more to this story tomorrow as we finish part two of this interview. And oh, my God. Holy shit. Somehow the worst is yet to come.
So join us for part two tomorrow in which, question mark, there seems to be good evidence of the NFL paying a guy specifically to be able to keep control of the union. Oh, dear. So if you want to find more of Charles McDonald's work, you can do so at the Football 301 podcast and at Yahoo Sports, where he writes the column for Verts. It's quite good. You should listen to it.
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Chapter 5: What challenges do young Jews face in understanding their heritage?
However, I think that there's something a little bit different going on, which is that, you know, young Jews are seeing the Israeli mass murder machine for what it is. But if they've gone through like the standard issue, you know, like Hebrew school education, they don't really learn a lot about Jewish history.
Like the way you would learn about it would be ancient kingdoms, the Bar Kokhba revolt, maybe if you're lucky. And then like a big, long, you know, 2000 year gap of horror and murder where nothing interesting or good ever happened and where you were just a victim of all of history. And then, you know, the glorious creation of the state of Israel redemption.
Like that's the sort of bullshit narrative you'd get. And when young Jews reject that narrative as they should, you know, when they learn about the reality of what Zionism means, a lot of them are left with a real hole in them because they haven't like learned anything positive about their own heritage. They've just been fed fairy tales that are meant to, you know, legitimize the state.
And so, you know, there's like a lot of, a lot of shame, right? A lot of pain over that. And I think what a lot of young Jewish people are trying to do is they're trying to look back to like their own grandparents and their own great grandparents. And for Jews in America, like most Jews in America come from Eastern European backgrounds.
You know, it's a different, different sort of demographic breakdown than in Israel. And that sort of like Jewish socialism is something that's very, very, very present in so many people's family history.
Not necessarily that, you know, your grandfather was like the greatest socialist revolutionary in the world, but just that he belonged to a socialist garment union and was part of like a socialist mutual aid thing because that was just the culture that existed. So many American Jews swam in 100 years ago.
And so I think there's this huge rediscovery of the Bund and of Jewish socialism that's inspired by the rejection of the Zionist genocide. On the one hand, I'm witnessing what you're saying.
You know, like we're all kind of witnessing, like you said, it's not specifically to the Jewish community, but because the Jewish community has been fed, you know, this idea that Israel is so integral to their Jewishness and to their safety and to these kinds of things.
There is a very maybe specific way that they are metabolizing that or acting out against it.
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Chapter 6: How is the Bund and Jewish socialism being rediscovered?
I mean- I'm trying to think of what to make of it. I mean, I do think, very sadly, there are a large number of American Jewish people.
And in some way, I'm talking outside of my own experience because my own family is not Zionist.
So this is more like my speculation type thing. But they're very progressive.
They believe in Medicaid for all. They believe in You know, they believe that cops shouldn't be constantly murdering Black people, as they do in America all the time. They believe even ICE should be abolished.
Chapter 7: What contradictions exist in Jewish identity and Zionism?
But they also have this, like, unthinking emotional attachment to Israel, even if they literally hate everything that Israel's doing. And I feel like a lot of those people, what they'll do is they'll try to blame it on Netanyahu and not on the entire system. Like, I would see people who supported the protests, you know, over the judicial reform
but they weren't willing to like fully confront the absolute fucking horrors, not just of the occupation, but of Israel itself.
Yeah. Yeah, definitely.
I've also, you know, obviously experienced that kind of block, you know, where it's easier to blame a particular government than to maybe think about, I mean, the specificities of Israel's founding and Israel's ideology, but also like the violent nature of nation states. And like, just kind of thinking through that, I think can be a little bit difficult for people.
And as someone who works on polling, like, yes, there are so many contradictions. We take polling to understand the starting points, but that doesn't restrict our political imagination.
Like, that's how I think of it.
It's obviously also difficult for people to start to kind of maybe disentangle their emotional commitments to the state of Israel, especially in this moment where there are like white supremacists and Nazis and neo-Nazis and all sorts of...
evil people regaining control of all sorts of, you know, state institutions and finding, you know, a great deal of legitimacy and a great deal of traction amongst the American public. It's difficult to tell, I think, some parts of the American Jewish community, like, hey, Israel's not a safety valve for you when, in fact, there's so much anti-Semitism now in the United States.
I mean, I feel like it's a self-reinforcing loop, though.
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Chapter 8: How are recent elections reflecting public sentiment in the U.S.?
anti-Zionist forms of Jewishness are discovered and rediscovered that these spokespeople are terrified because, I mean, the biggest thing that they want and that they're so terrified about is they're terrified about losing the young people. The whole project, it's about, you know, like this Jewish continuity, they call it.
And, you know, Jewish people like getting married to each other, you know, having kids, like, contributing money to their institutions, you know, maybe making Aliyah to Israel. And if people are like, no, I reject this. I reject this state that's committing a genocide. And I reject this ideology built on supremacy.
And actually it's like fine to live in New York city and to, you know, live and love and struggle alongside my neighbors. That's directly antithetical to their project. And I think that's why the boon has not just been erased, but it's, mere mention provokes such anger.
Like sometimes I just look through my comments and it's just these endless fucking comments from people being like, Boondall died in the Holocaust, LOL.
Like, what do you say to this, right? That's so disgusting. Yeah, the Boond was all gassed, LOL. You won't choose to be gassed, you know, Zionists are thriving.
And I'm like, this is the most psychopathic, talk about self-hating, right? Mocking people for being murdered in the Holocaust, you know?
Mm-hmm.
It's because the boon's ideology of solidarity across difference, of heerness, and of socialism is profoundly threatening. And honestly, what thriving is happening? People in Israel are terrified. There are missiles raining down. A garrison state cannot keep people safe. No such ethnostate can keep people safe, but...
And I'm reminded also from your answer about Ariel Angel's article, I think last year in Jewish Currents, We Need New Jewish Institutions. I think it's like they see the writing on the wall that this is something that's going to happen. And with books like yours, with kind of a revisiting of this history, it only hastens, you know, this kind of political project coming to fruition.
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