Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

Craig Carton

One of the reasons for a happy marriage now in its sixteenth year is that my wife and I have similar pop culture tastes as well as leftwing politics even when they clash. For example, we have both enjoyed listening to shock jocks in the morning for about as long as we have been married.

First it was Howard Stern, an obvious sexist pig but a very funny one. When Stern moved to satellite radio, we switched to Don Imus, his arch-enemy. When Imus was fired by WFAN in 2007 for a racial slur, we decided to give his replacements a try. Despite being featured on a sports talk radio show, Imus was mostly about interviewing politicians and reporters—and very good at it. Taking over for Imus, ex-NFL quarterback Boomer Esiason and long-time radio talk show host Craig Carton also interviewed politicians but their primary focus was on sports. What made the show worth listening to was Carton’s shock jock antics that were obviously stolen from Howard Stern. Riffs on bowel movements, raising kids, impromptu restaurant reviews, etc. were interspersed with commentary on sports with the typical call-ins from “Vinnie from the Bronx” about a trade the Yankees should make.

Three days ago a jury found Carton guilty of conning wealthy investors into buying bulk tickets to concerts but only used the seven million dollars to pay off his gambling debts plus other personal expenses such as landscaping his 9,345 square foot mansion. He faces up to 45 years in prison but will likely get much less, my guess five years or so.

Carton was making huge bets at casinos. Witnesses told the jury that he borrowed money from loan sharks to fund these outings. One of them was Desmond Finger, the general manager of the Upper East Side strip club Sapphire 39, who testified that he made high-interest loans of up to $500,000 for each of his casino fixes. Carton probably worried much more about the money he owed to someone like Finger than the hedge funds he conned. It is not hard to imagine him getting roughed up or worse from one of Finger’s friends if he didn’t pay up. At least in prison, he won’t have to worry about his legs being broken–at least if he keeps his eyes opened and his big mouth shut..

Carton, like Stern and Imus, made lots of enemies because of his big mouth. Bob Raissman, a sports columnist for the NY Daily News, a one-time far-right tabloid now oriented to the Democratic Party, raked him over the coals. Referring to his attorney’s decision not to put him in the witness box, Raismann wrote:

How ironic that in the fight of his life, Craig Carton could not use his most lethal weapon — his mouth.

The same mouth that took him to radio’s mountain top. Morning-drive in New York City, making over $1 million per year working on WFAN with a celebrity/ex-jock/wheeler-dealer Norman Julius Esiason.

The same mouth that spewed invective, verbal sewage, loved by FAN’s target audience, the miscreants who showed up to watch him walk across the Brooklyn Bridge in a Speedo.

Many people, including me and my wife, could not figure out why someone doing so well would shoot himself in the foot. It was the same question I had about Bernie Madoff. After having made it big as a shock jock or a securities broker, why would anybody risk throwing it all away by committing a crime?

Madoff remains a mystery but it is clear that Carton had a very serious gambling addiction. Like drugs, tobacco or alcohol, it can destroy one’s life. I say this from personal experience having a very close friend who lost well over a hundred thousand dollars over the years betting on horse races. When we were in our late teens, he used to bet hundreds of dollars on the trotters at Monticello Raceway. Some nights he’d win, other nights he lost. I used to accompany him to the races but usually bought a book with me to read during the races. For me, gambling is a complete waste of time and money. One of the reasons I got out of the stock market was that it was too much like gambling.

If you listened to the Boomer and Carton show, you’d be struck by how much gambling permeated the conversation between the two. It was always about whether a team would cover the odds. All of these shows on WFAN have a big focus on the “over-under” on professional sports events especially on Friday, just before the NFL games on Sunday.

On May 14^th this year, New Jersey, Carton’s home state, made sports betting legal. This measure had been pushed for years by the former governor Chris Christie, who was one of Carton’s best friends. Christie, a frequent guest, on the Boomer and Carton show, used to love talking odds with the hosts. FanDuel, a sports fantasy website, has also been given the green light for bookmaking.

On top of sports betting, lotteries have become ubiquitous in the USA. Even though a lottery ticket might cost only a couple of dollars, poor people can end up throwing money down the drain in the hope that they can become millionaires. As a vicious cycle, the lotteries only exist because state treasuries have been drained by tax cuts, thus making poor people even more needy.

The Wikipedia entry on “problem gambling” cites medical authorities who see it in the same terms as substance abuse even though it is described as an impulse control disorder rather than an addiction. The gambler can’t help betting when feeling distressed (e.g., helpless, guilty, anxious, depressed). Since this is the normal state of mind for most Americans, it is not surprising that billions of dollars are wasted on betting just as they are on opioids. Of course, gambling will only cost you your freedom while opioids will cost you your life.

Like Boomer Esiason, Craig Carton was a Trump supporter and a racist. The show constantly praised the cops and always took their side whenever someone like Trayvon Martin was killed. It is a crowning irony that a “law and order” man like Carton will end up in a New Jersey prison serving time with Black prisoners who might have heard him on one of his racist rants.

I continue to listen to Boomer Esiason in the morning, now that he has a new co-host, a guy named Gregg Gianotti who is the comic next to Esiason’s straight man just as was Carton. Thankfully, Gianotti does not seem that interested in politics. Mostly, he enjoys talking about sports. Naturally, my wife has bailed on the show since her interest in sports is zero.

I only wish that WBAI was not as bad as it is. For most of the 1980s and until 2000, I used to listen to it religiously and donate hundreds of dollars a year. A typical morning show would consist of great music and interviews by someone like Will Wilkens, a fellow member of CISPES and a good friend. This was the kind of programming Samori Marksman, a Caribbean Marxist, used to promote.

After Marksman died suddenly of a heart attack in 1999, there was a coup led by Utrice Leid that antagonized most listeners, including me. A listener revolt eventually led to her clique being ousted and the station converted into one based on “community control”. That conversion led to a new type of programming marked by conspiracy theories, medical quackery and tedious leftist sermonizing that was unbearable.

Anticipating this article a couple of days ago, I turned WBAI on just for a sample of what it was up to now. Confirming my worst suspicions, the host was on the phone with someone who was making the case for alchemy as a solution to diabetes, heart disease and other ailments.

The opening sentence of Charles Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities” reads as follows:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Of course, Dickens wrote the novel to demonize the French Revolution but some of this rings true as applied to the current period. I would only qualify it by saying that a new “Tale of Two Cities” would be much darker and would begin by simply stating: “It was the worst of times”.

That first Olympic marathon caught the public’s imagination to a startling degree, especially in Greece itself. Incentives included clothing, wine, a vast amount of chocolate and free haircuts for life at local barbers.

–David Arscott, “The Olympics”

What you read above is the solution to last Sunday’s NY Times acrostic, something that echoes what David Wallechinsky said in the must-see documentary “The Business of Amateurs” that opens as VOD, including ITunes, on Friday, August 26^th. Wallechinsky, the president of The International Society of Olympic Historians, points out that even the original Olympics were hardly an amateur affair. The participants were supported substantially by patrons and lived a life of comfort.

Amateurism, to put it bluntly, was an innovation of the British upper crust that sought to keep the working class riffraff out of sports in the late 1800s. It included many different incentives to the wealthy boys who took part in sports, especially crew. A typical award might be a silver cup that was equivalent to a year’s wage for a factory worker.

“The Business of Amateurs” addresses all of the major crises facing collegiate sports today, including the corporate greed of the NCAA, the hardships faced by football and basketball players—the big ticket gladiators—whose scholarships are mere crumbs compared to the profits they generate, and most critically the risks that football players take in a violent sport that can lead to Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), the damage to the brain that can lead to early onset of dementia, Lew Gehrig’s Disease (ALS), Parkinson’s, and depression so deep that it can force men to kill themselves as linebacker Junior Seau did.

Among the athletes interviewed by director and narrator Bob DeMars is Scott Ross, who played linebacker alongside Seau for the University of Southern California. Throughout the film, we hear from Ross who is battling the same kind of depression that Seau faced and for the same reasons. The only relief he can get from his symptoms is alcohol that can temporarily quiet the demons that plague him. Before the onset of the symptoms, he was making a good life as a businessman with a wife and kids. Toward the end of the film, we hear the message from Ross’s current girlfriend (his alcoholism had destroyed his marriage) that she had left on DeMars’s answering machine. He was found dead in a car next to a church, the result of a toxic mixture of alcohol and pain killers.

DeMars was uniquely qualified to make such a film since he was a defensive lineman at USC from 1997 to 2001. Not only has he the insider’s knowledge of how the NCAA exploits football players; he is concerned about the possibility that he too might be experiencing the consequences of one concussion too many. We see him talking to his psychiatrist about the panic attacks he had begun to experience. She replies that this could definitely be connected to brain damage.

DeMars is a big blonde bear of a man whose presence in the film has a Michael Moore quality. If Moore found it nearly impossible to meet with Roger Smith, the CEO of General Motors, DeMars has the same problem setting up an appointment with Mark Emmert, the president of the NCAA. A phone call does not get through after repeated tries and when DeMars goes into the lobby of their headquarters, they throw him out.

Compared to the NCAA, the NFL is practically saintly. Or maybe, it is just that it is more honest since it openly operates as a profit-making enterprise. If you get injured in a football game at the pro level, you will still be paid. If you get an injury playing for a big-time athletic program on the Division One level, you just might lose your scholarship. The football players are at the total mercy of the administration that despite all the blather about student-athletes considers them to be virtual slaves of the university. You get room and board and the adulation of fans but that hardly pays the bills. When one student tells a radio interviewer that he can’t pay for groceries, some good Samaritan leaves a bundle on his doorstop. That picayune gift got him thrown off the team.

Another athlete, a Black wrestler from Minnesota, puts up a rap video on Youtube complaining about exploitation. He is told to take it down by the school because his name belongs to them, not him. Years after a UCLA basketball player has retired from the game, he learns that the NCAA sold his image to a video game manufacturer without his permission. He files suit against the game maker and wins. Although everybody hates Johnny Manziel for obvious reasons, the documentary points out that he was outspokenly against the NCAA’s cartel control over his labor. Texas A&M made millions off of his stardom but he got in trouble for earning small change selling memorabilia with his signature.

Probably the most disgusting aspect of this big business pretending that it was a nonprofit is how it short shrifts poor black men from getting a decent education when they are at a place like the University of North Carolina that set up classes in African-American studies exclusively for their mainly Black athletes, some of whom were reading at a 3^rd grade reading level. Through the connivance of various professors, they always got passing grades even though they were meaningless. One U. of North Carolina professor named Mary Willingham got fed up with the charade and went public. Needless to say, the school initially denied her charges just as they would deny any responsibility for CTE. In essence, the top administrators only cared about raking in the dough. Although the film did not get into the problem of athletes and sex crimes, Baylor University is a prime example of how administrators look the other way when athletes are guilty of crimes. As long as they are generating revenue, who cares if a coed gets raped. Ken Starr, who went after Bill Clinton for getting a blow job from Monica Lewinsky, was the president of Baylor college when the football team was acting practically like ISIS in a Yazidi village. Starr tried to keep the sex assaults a secret to protect the school’s revenue generating machine. The hypocrisy reaches biblical proportions.

Towards the end of the documentary, there’s a hopeful note about athletes forming a union that can stand up for their rights, something that got started at Northwestern University, which ironically has the highest graduation rate of any major school. In March 2014 the NLRB decided that the athletes were really employees of the university and gave them the green light. Unfortunately, the board reversed itself a year later. This was a unanimous overruling that included the members of the board appointed by Democratic presidents.

As it happens, I saw “The Business of Amateurs” the very day this same NLRB decided that Columbia graduate students had the right to unionize. Let’s hope they don’t change their mind a year from now. Not only is this a good thing for grad students. It might have ramifications for football players. Columbia might have a crappy football program but the initiatives taken by student activists might have the beneficial side-effect of helping our modern day gladiators.

If you’ve seen “Hoop Dreams”, “At All Costs” will seem familiar at first since it is focused on African-American high school basketball players competing to get an athletic scholarship. But unlike “Hoop Dreams”, the subjects of this worthy documentary that opens as VOD on September 20^th are relatively middle-class. If the “Hoop Dream” players are desperately trying to find a way out of poverty, those in “At All Costs” are much more trying to achieve a dream that they have nourished since the age of six in some cases. Like trying to win “The American Idol” contest, landing a starting position as a point guard for the aforementioned University of North Carolina might lead to a multimillion dollar contract with an NBA team right after freshman year if the athlete takes his team to the NCAA final four.

In this instance, the players are competing in the AAU, which has become the primary audition spot for top players. Have you heard of the AAU? I hadn’t and I say that as someone who has sports talk radio on at least two hours a day. It stands for the Amateur Athletic Union that was formed in 1888 and that is much of a fiction when it comes to amateurism as the NCAA. Under the auspices of the AAU, companies like Nike and Adidas organize tournaments during the summer when stand-out players compete before the watchful eyes of people like Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, who coached the American professionals who trampled over the competition in the Brazil Olympics.

The film is focused on one AAU team called the Compton Magic that is coached by Etop Udo-Ema, a former Division One basketball player and quite open about his involvement in the AAU. It is all about the money. He gets all sorts of perks from Nike and Adidas and preaches to his players about doing well in the summer games in the AAU circuit. It is their big chance to get rich and famous. At least you can give Udo-Ema credit for being honest, as opposed to the bullshit artists running big-time basketball programs.

Among the players profiled in the film is Parker Jackson-Cartright, a soft-spoken and appealing personality whose father treats him in the same way someone might treat a racing thoroughbred. It is his ticket to success as well as his son’s.

The Jackson-Cartright family’s life revolves around the basketball programs in high school and the AAU. The dad attends all the games and is philosophical about his son continuing to compete after a bad foot injury. He muses, “We have to put it all on the line” even if putting it all on the line might mean a permanent injury.

For athletes like Parket Jackson-Cartright, school is simply a place where he can ply his trade. With every waking hour devoted to shooting hoops, there is not much time to spend on enjoying his youth or getting deep into his studies. If the injury to his foot would have kept him out of a top sports program, he would likely end up in a state school and in an uncompetitive position academically.

Even worse is that focusing every fiber of his being on basketball makes such players one-dimensional as Michael Connor, an African-American psychology professor at Cal State, Long Beach, points out in the film. Upon hearing this, I wondered if this was why Michael Jordan is so apolitical. If your body and soul are consumed by basketball, maybe you lose track of what they once called keeping your eyes on the prize.

It also made me wonder if Connor was referring to Herbert Marcuse’s “One-Dimensional-Man”, a book that was popular in the 1960s and influenced many young radicals including Angela Davis who was Marcuse’s student at Brandeis.

Have you read “One-Dimensional Man” that was written in 1964 and that can be read online? It holds up rather well.

The society of total mobilization, which takes shape in the most advanced areas of industrial civilization, combines in productive union the features of the Welfare State and the Warfare State. Compared with its predecessors, it is indeed a “new society.” Traditional trouble spots are being cleaned out or isolated, disrupting elements taken in hand. The main trends are familiar: concentration of the national economy on the needs of the big corporations, with the government as a stimulating, supporting, and sometimes even controlling force; hitching of this economy to a world-wide system of military alliances, monetary arrangements, technical assistance and development schemes; gradual assimilation of blue-collar and white-collar population, of leadership types in business and labor, of leisure activities and aspirations in different social classes; fostering of a pre-established harmony between scholarship and the national purpose; invasion of the private household by the togetherness of public opinion; opening of the bedroom to the media of mass communication.