If Democrats want to really hurt southern states

[WSHazel]

Put pressure on black and white football and basketball players to boycott schools in any state that gerrymanders. There are a lot of schools that are willing to pay up for these athletes. They don’t need to go to LSU, Alabama, Auburn and Tennessee. These states live and die college football and in some cases college basketball.

It would only take a few star players honoring this boycott to start a snowball effect.

[biophile]

1. That hurts the players too

I don’t think that’s a great solution for kids on scholarship or trying to get noticed by professional teams. There’s only so many positions available nationwide. They can’t all play in northern states. And blue states have been forced to gerrymander in retaliation so there are even fewer options and schools.

[WSHazel]

2. College players are paid now

A starting football player on a high level D1 team is making at least $500,000/year, probably half the starting lineup is making about $750,000 and more. A QB makes $2-3 million, more in some cases. These kids are very highly paid, and have options. They don't have to play at Alabama, Auburn, Tennessee, LSU or any other state school in a state that takes voting rights away from black citizens.

[biophile]

4. There are roughly 130-140 D1 schools -

If you boycott a third of them then you have removed 40+ or so players and even if they land somewhere else, they are displacing the player who was already there. Kids work all through elementary to high school to get into a school like that. I just don’t see this as our best way to fight this racist trend.

[WSHazel]

6. Asking a few highly paid athletes to go somewhere else is not asking for great sacrifice

It is not like anyone is going hungry. And the likely response is the SEC schools will just pay more to get lesser players, which is a tax I can live with.

Protests and asking nicely are not going to get this done.

[PatrickforB]

10. Why? Isn't this republic more important than college sports? We working schmucks already have

unaffordable healthcare, unaffordable housing, unaffordable childcare when available, jackbooted ICE brownshirts rounding up people without due process, concentration camps, a war that is destroying all international goodwill and costing us a billion a day, farmers going bankrupt because of tariffs and lack of fertilizer, pending shortage of jet fuel, massive drop in international tourist visits to the US, a massive drought in the southwestern US, severe weather, and to top that off, everything costs way more than it should.

Our children and grandchildren come out of college buried in student debt and the number one cause of bankruptcy in this country is HEALTHCARE DEBT.

In the meantime our national debt stands at $39 trillion, and the dollar is no longer being used as the currency of choice for international trade, which will soon put us under the iron boot of austerity policies where we are heavily taxed but have no government services because all our tax money will be needed to pay down that debt until there is a revolution and whatever government crawls out of the ashes renegs on the debt so recovery can commence.

The tech-bro billionaire parasites and corporations only pay in ~4% of the government's income tax revenue while working people like us pay in 54.4% (not counting our ADDITIONAL contributions to Social Security and Medicare, and they don't even have the political will to shore up those programs so Social Security will only be able to pay out 70 cents on the dollar as of 2032.

The government has become completely unresponsive to the citizens and instead kowtows to a few insane billionaires and governs through corruption and incompetence.

We are in the end stages of the Wall Street and robber baron's long-term plan to gut the New Deal. Since 1981, irresponsible tax cuts for corporations and billionaires have stripped the treasury to the bone and our government can't afford programs that help us.

Our government of, by and for the people has become a government of, by and for corporations, Wall Street and billionaires.

And, like all robber baron parasites, this current batch is squeezing too hard. Americans are very, very angry, because most are only a couple of checks away from homelessness.

In the face of all this, I must ask who in the hell cares about college football? I have tried to spell out the gravity of the situation. We are perched uneasily on the precipice of economic depression. Things here may become really bad really fast, and now Jim Crow has been reinstituted and the Republicans are going to try and rig the midterms. If that happens I am not sure the center will hold. Too many desperate people will hit the streets and we may end up with a revolution.

I don't want that because I am 67 years old and silly me, I thought if I did everything right and worked hard, I would be able to retire in comfort, but that is in jeopardy now because of these fucking Ku Klux assholes. These are the same pieces of southern fried shit my family fought against in the Civil War, and now these racist fucks are coming out of the woodwork and killing everything good about this country, everything we thought we believed in.

Athletes should well boycott schools in these racist states. But I agree that is NOT the whole solution. We need to pull the fangs of Wall Street by changing the rules of corporate governance AWAY from shareholder primacy, which puts profits above all human life and the earth itself. We need a 21st century Fairness Doctrine because ALL of our media is publicly traded which means the fiduciary responsibility of the 'news' producers is always and only to generate profits. We need to overturn Citizens United and laws like it, and gut the Supreme Court. All the McConnell appointees need to be chucked out or the court should be packed and term limits imposed.

There is no moral compass - we have descended into a pit of corruption. Can we save the republic? Or will it all come down around our knees and we have to rebuild it from scratch?

We are the most brainwashed people who have ever walked the earth. These wedges that make us hate the other side? That is by careful design. It provides a distraction for the billionaires so we won't notice them ripping us off right and left.

So you think our party has the political will to get ugly and fix this?????????

The issue seems in doubt. Sorry but it does. I've been a working economist for over 20 years and I have watched this massive class war unfold on American workers for that whole time. The enemy is not Republicans, it is Wall Street and the billionaires. They are sociopaths because shareholder primacy capitalism encourages and rewards sociopathic behavior. Until we fix that, I am not sure we can recover.

One thing IS sure though. After Putin is done winning the cold war through Trump, who is demonstrably a Russian asset, we will be in a pretty deep hole. We will need to build real community and traditional Saturdays watching college football may well go by the wayside whether our kids boycott those Jim Crow colleges or not.

[RockRaven]

3. I don't want to hurt southern states. I want southern states to stop hurting others, and themselves.

And they don't give a shit about sports in comparison to how much they care about power. They would happily suffer that trade, even if your proposal were to widely succeed.

[WSHazel]

5. College football is like a religion down south

You are very wrong about how much they care about football. Basketball is not quite the same, although it is still very important in states like Kentucky and Arkansas. The only reason these states really integrated their colleges in the 60's and 70's was because the SEC was going to fall behind athletically if its schools didn't start recruiting black athletes. Adolph Rupp held off as long as he could, but then Louisville started to get good, and he couldn't wait anymore.

[biophile]

7. That's true and I wouldn't want any student athlete of mine to go

down south for a college anyway, with or without gerrymandering, so there’s that 😏

[RockRaven]

8. Lemme tell you about this thing called Republican partisanship. It is more of a religion

than college football.

[paleotn]

11. I'm beyond that now. They've made their bed. Let them "enjoy" it.

Hurt them in any way possible.

[Chemical Bill]

9. Well, there may be a development that is way ahead of you.

High school girls are picking colleges where they can be assured of reproductive health care. High school boys can't be far behind them....

[orangecrush]

12. Do that with everything

[dobleremolque]

13. Interesting idea, but a big ask for young men in high school, however

good they are on the field, to be all that sophisticated about politics and making political statements with their talent.