I think “shared sacrifice” might be Strapping Young Bucks 2.0 (via):
You’re going to hear a lot about “shared sacrifice” from the NHL in the days and weeks to come. That’s the word from inside a secret emergency PR focus group, in which a top Republican Party strategist tested pro-ownership messages on a captive audience of hockey fans. One of those fans shared the documents with us, for a sneak preview of the propaganda campaign the NHL will be unloading on the public as the lockout drags on. Here’s a look at the bullshit on the menu before the league serves it to you.
* * *
“When I say ‘the NHL,’ what’s the first thing that comes to mind?”
That’s how 30 people were greeted as they filed into a comfortable, well-lit room in a nondescript office building in a DC suburb Friday evening. They were there not because they were genuinely eager to give their opinions on the lockout, but because they were being paid—$100 for three hours of their time, three hours’ worth of feedback to help the NHL shape its message to get the public back on its side.
I know these players make a lot of money and probably mostly vote conservative, but the real battle is always those who own the means of production versus the workers. Never forget that.
Comrade Dread
You know who else believed in shared sacrifice?
The Aztecs.
Didn’t work out so well for the folks being asked to put their heart into their work.
jacy
As a die-hard hockey fan (and I do mean die-hard. Hockey is one of the few things I love with no reservations,) I say fuck the motherfucking owners. If I could grind them into sausage and feed them to wild dogs, I would do it.
They want shared sacrifice? I’ll sacrife my desire to beat them with a hockey stick until they’re bags of wet meat.
Fuck.
Hockey makes me emotional. Lack of hockey makes me unreasonable.
Roger Moore
It’s not “Strapping Young Bucks, 2.0”. “Strapping Young Bucks” was a way of getting different factions of poor people to turn on each other so they wouldn’t notice that the rich were the source of their problems. “Shared Sacrifice” is a crass attempt to sell disaster capitalism, telling the whole of the 99% to meekly turn around and bend over while the 1% has its way with us. Not at all the same thing.
Political Observer
Romney continues to VAULT INTO THE LEAD as he crosses 50% in Gallup among Likely Voters, Obama campaign in freefall?
Linnaeus
One thing – among several – that’s infuriating about this is that the owners are complaining about the very arrangement that they wanted (and got) after the last lockout.
Cris (without an H)
Hockey?
Villago Delenda Est
@Political Observer:
This thread is about hockey, fuckstick.
The NHL owners need to be gathered in one place, and zambonied to death.
Political Observer
The owners have one job and one job only–to make as much money as they possibly can. Period. They’re not running charity outfits, they’re running big businesses, and the players are big liabilities that need to be held down as much as possible. They shouldn’t have to share their money with them just because.
Yutsano
Most of them aren’t American citizens. They might still be conservatives, but in their own countries. Just sayin’.
Joel
@Political Observer: Coincidentally, the players have the obligation to make as much money for their labor as they can, too.
Negotiations, how do they work?
Political Observer
@Joel:
They already make more than enough for pushing a ball around with a stick.
Redshift
Hiring Luntz is appalling, but I’m not surprised the owners are in a tough place. Fans know and love their players, whereas the owner is mostly just a name. And the players didn’t go on strike, the owners locked them out when they wouldn’t accept pay cuts at a time when the league boasts about rising profits.
Luntz is a first-class grifter, though. Getting paid for testing out a message of “your beloved players don’t really agree with the union” when that’s on the first page of any union-busting playbook, that takes real skill.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
If only those two groups were the same people.
I seem to recall someone suggesting the idea once, but it just seemed to piss everyone off.
Zifnab25
So, I see what the problem is here. They promised the survey participants $100, and then they paid them $100. If they promised the surveyed folks $100 and then said “Due to business obligations and a decline in revenue, coupled with the general negative projections and high price of gas in China, we feel it is only fair to give you $20 and this coupon for 20% at your local McSlupries.”, I think they might have saved enough money to pay the hockey players their due.
Admittedly, then the survey recipients union would have stepped in, and it would have gotten really ugly.
dmsilev
@Political Observer: You don’t know anything about hockey, do you?
Ball?
Cacti
@Political Observer:
The players are what people pay to see, you nitwit.
Metrosexual Manichean Monster DougJ
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God:
Heh indeedy.
Villago Delenda Est
@Political Observer:
The owners have a responsibility to make money over the long haul. Not to loot their organizations and then fly to the Caymans.
max
@Political Observer: But the truth is that the only way to contain the debate hype will be if the event is rather boring and neither candidate excels or fails.
You got your job by inking a sign that said ‘Will give rimjobs for food’ didn’t you?
max
[‘Yes, people, I am being unkind to the homeless.’]
Villago Delenda Est
@dmsilev:
Fuckstain knows nothing about politics, either.
So he’s pretty consistent.
Zifnab25
@Political Observer: Christ, with that logic I can only imagine what kind of pay cut you’re ready to deliver to the owners.
Violet
I have friends who do this kind of thing. It’s partly how they pay the mortgage. Whatever they’re chosen for to be in a focus group, they’re there if they’ll be paid.
Roger Moore
@Political Observer:
And the owners already make far to much for sitting on big bags of cash. The fans pay to see players play, not owners own. I know who deserves most of the money.
Yutsano
@Political Observer:
Then the owners can just put their feet on the ice every night. Oh wait…no one would watch that. Big big flaw in your logic here. The players are as much the teams as the owners. We’ve been through this dance over and over.
Villago Delenda Est
@Political Observer:
And the slimemold demonstrates, conclusively, that he knows not one blessed thing about hockey, in this post.
BGinCHI
Owners = Makers
Players = Takers
If that message could get out it would knock some sense into the heads of people who are inclined to believe that rich people are altruists and the engine of the economy.
I wish the players would start their own league.
Zifnab25
@Yutsano: Perhaps the owners could save money by breaking up the refs union. That seemed to work really well in football.
Haydnseek
“We can share the women we can share the wine. We can share what we got of yours ’cause we’ve done shared all of mine.”
-Grateful Dead
Shared sacrifice, indeed.
jacy
@Political Observer:
Funny that – I’ve never bought a ticket to a game hoping to see some lazy motherfucker in a suit sit in a luxury box and throw back drinks. And none of the jerseys I own have their motherfucking names on them.
Fucking sports, how do they work?
Cacti
@Roger Moore:
And people will pay a premium to see the very best players in their sport. No one’s going to pony up top dollar to watch scabs, retreads, and also-rans.
There was a reason why the XFL failed to take hold.
Comrade Dread
@Political Observer: So presumably, if your boss told you to take a 50% pay cut and have your health care supplied by Christian Scientists or he’d ship your job to Bangladesh, you’d fall to your knees and thank Mr. Galt for his sound economic ways?
Cacti
@Comrade Dread:
Luckily for Political Derp, twirling a sign that says “We Buy Gold” can’t be offshored.
Violet
@jacy:
That’s what reality shows like the Housewives series are for. People do pay to watch that.
Roger Moore
@Cacti:
And apparently trolling political blogs hasn’t been offshored successfully yet, either. I guess the cheap trolls in Bangladesh don’t have the idioms down.
Yutsano
@Zifnab25: Where is JenJen when we need her? She’d tear our wittle troll a nice new one.
blindtrust9
Mitt Romney explains why his tax plan will make everyone happier by giving trillions to millionaires and billionaires:
Mitt Romney: 7 Points for Freedom
Cassidy
Puck, dude. Puck.
Ash Can
And this is why, out of all the trolls running around this joint, I leave Political Observer un-pied — the dude is just plain fucking hilarious!
Zifnab
@Cacti:
The XFL was comedy gold.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@Political Observer:
Why?
Cassidy
Are they outsourcing trolling now?
jwb
It’s going to be fun when PO receives his pink slip from his conservative paymasters because he’s no longer needed to push this tripe.
The Red Pen
On both: challenge your assumptions.
The median pay is not millions of dollars.
Hockey is a really international sport, and players are not constantly surrounded by people who all think that any country national with health care is indistinguishable from Nazi Germany.
J. Michael Neal
If you guys aren’t getting enough hockey you just aren’t looking in the right places.
#1 in both men’s and women’s hockey, baby, with the two teams outscoring their opponents an aggregate 52-3 over eight games.
Ash Can
@Yutsano:
I would. Especially if they weren’t allowed to wear any padding or helmets. And if the Zamboni was chasing them around the ice on top of it.
ETA: Of course, it would make for an awfully short season.
The Red Pen
@Political Observer:
Then they should run meth labs like in Breaking Bad.
If they want to own hockey teams instead, they have obligations to their employees.
Villago Delenda Est
Taco ALWAYS sides with the parasites.
Every last time.
He’s a natural serf. Hold him in the contempt he deserves to be held in.
Offal like him are to be spat upon.
kc
Huck fockey anyway.
Yutsano
@Cassidy: GOOSE!!
Oh wait…
Cassidy
@Yutsano: Took me a minute, lol. My mind instantly went to Top Gun and I kept thinking “I don’t remember that part?”.
Roger Moore
@Ash Can:
And you notice that PO doesn’t engage in false advertising by qualifying the name further with some term like “astute” or “intelligent” or “competent”. And thank FSM it’s not “Political Participant”; I’m glad when people that stupid are content to observe rather than trying to take part in something that’s beyond their intellectual capabilities.
Roger Moore
@Ash Can:
You could make sure that their sticks were pointy on the ends, so they’d do more damage when they hit each other with them. And instead of Zambonis, you could use polar bears. That would be worth watching.
gex
There is nothing so telling as to talk about the HOCKEY PLAYERS as a liability for the HOCKEY league. Really, why won’t we just all pay to sit in arenas or watch empty ice while the owners maximize their profits?
The owners can stop spending so much by not signing such lucrative contracts. What they are paying the players is a result of competition for the players’ services. They want to make the players settle for salary limits that they are more than willing to exceed when the market is fully competitive for the talent. I.E. they want a distorted market place that puts price controls in place. Obviously, our resident troll fiscal conservative would celebrate that.
Kristine
Concussion.
I don’t think want me in their focus group.
And I enjoy hockey. But some of those hits are terrifying.
S-Curve
Strikes in pro sports tend to remind me of what Chris Rock said: “There’s a difference between rich and wealthy. Shaq is rich. The guy who signs Shaq’s paycheck is wealthy.” But people tend not to side with athletes because 1) regular folks don’t see athletics as important (see Political Unobservant above), and/or 2) sports seem like fun.
Cacti
@S-Curve:
A lot of people also have memories of jocks from high school who could and did get away with anything on a small scale. Give a jock money, and he can get away with murdering his wife.
pathman
Billionaires fighting will millionaires on how to divide the piles of cash. How marvelous!
gex
@S-Curve: It’s also like the debt too. They see a big number, and it is BIG. Context, percentages, etc. don’t really factor in with an innumerate public.
gopher2b
I’m pretty sure all these NHL players vote for Putin.
Roger Moore
@S-Curve:
I think fans also don’t understand just how much money the owners are making, or how much they’re subsidized by our tax dollars. There’s a reason owners want to talk so much about player salaries but do their best to keep team finances secret. Their cries of poverty would be a lot more credible if we knew as much about team finances as we do about the players.
Cassidy
@S-Curve: Ooohhh…big fallacy, there. Athletics is not the equal of professional sports. People don’t side with professional athletes because the average bench sitter makes 10x as much as most I do in a year and they complain they aren’t getting paid enough! Now don’t get me wrong, I’ll side wiht the union over owners any day of the week ending in “y”, but I’m not gonna feel sorry if Mr. “I only play 6 minutes a game” has to go with the Acura instead of the Ferrari.
S-Curve
@pathman: Well, but the fact is that there are piles of cash there, even if Gary Bettman is doing his level best to make sure nobody ever watches hockey again. Using whole “billionaires and millionaires” formulation works to delegitimize the players’ position, as though what we really want is to have “billionaires vs. the middle class.”
Also, I said “strike” before, but of course it’s a lockout, because the billionaires want to try to be billionaires-plus. (Now with more millions!)
S-Curve
@Cassidy: OK, I’ll cop to the athletics vs. pro sports fallacy, if you like. But I think that there’s only a difference in degree between these kinds of labor disputes and the kind of rhetoric I heard all the time (I live in a right-to-work-employees-to-death state) whenever autoworkers, teachers, etc., go on strike. “They have it so good, why are they complaining?” has been the most effective ploy the right has been able to use to turn public opinion against unions.
Not saying you shouldn’t feel that way, or that you should “feel sorry” for the players (I don’t), but there is a continuum here, it seems to me.
Citizen_X
@Cassidy:
He also has a career that, on average, will end by the time he hits thirty.
patrick
Pro Hockey was gaining significant popularity before the last lockout, and that destroyed all their momentum, to the point of a few years ago they were talking about league contraction…do they really want to go there again?
Roger Moore
@Citizen_X:
And he may be a bench sitter, but he’s still had to fight hard to earn that spot on the bench. Even the bench players are among the thousand or so best players in their respective sports, as demonstrated by a vigorous competition. And he may be on the bench today, but he’ll instantly become much more important- for no increase in pay- if the guy ahead of him on the depth chart goes down with an injury.
J. Michael Neal
It’s important to keep in mind that, just like the NFL lockout earlier this year, the real conflict here is between the large market owners and the small market ones. Unlike the NFL, I do believe that there are teams that are losing money at an unsustainable rate. However, there are also teams making huge profits.
The owners can’t agree on a revenue sharing plan. So they are trying to push the salary cap down to a point where the small market teams can function. Of course, this simply means that the large market owners would reap ridiculous profits. That’s why the players included a revenue sharing plan in their last proposal.
Cassidy
@S-Curve: I get what you’re saying, but there is a hgue difference between union minimum 300K+ a year vs. union minimum starting 40K a year. Like I said, I’ll always support the unions, but I have a hard time sympathizing with someone who’s starting pay is 10x mine and more than I’ll ever make in a year in my lifetime. And I get it, he has a house to buy, needs cars, kids to support, just like all of us so I don’t support cutting their salaries just because. But, in the event they have to take a pay cut, they can absorb it. Most other union professions can’t.
@Citizen_X: The second string guys? Naw dude. You’re talking about the stars who make millions but are beat the hell up by thirty. The non-starters have long and quiet careers getting paid a few hundred thousand a year. Unless they get cut and have to start a new life. That does happen.
Roger Moore
@patrick:
There’s a golden goose just begging to be killed for all the gold it has inside it.
Joel
@dmsilev: Trolling has been outsourced to the Philippines.
Mnemosyne
@Political Observer:
I agree — the owners should be out there playing the game. What do they need players for, since the owners are the John Galts who make it all happen without any need for players, or referees, or parking attendants, or concessions workers?
daverave
Screw the owners and Bettman. I’ll be on their side when they are at risk of permanent, debilitating injury every day that they are doing their “job.”
different-church-lady
This is the NHL: most of the players are Canadian, so the rules of thumb for American athletics aren’t the same.
different-church-lady
@dmsilev: Pro troll is pro.
JenJen
@jacy: I’m with you on every word you wrote. Hockey is life to me, and it’s just depressing to have the entire NHL season up in the air. We were talking about this Luntz bullshit in one of last night’s thread and it honestly ruined my whole night. It’s hearbreaking enough that my beloved Cincinnati Reds lost in the first playoff series, but no NHL? What the hell?!
Fuck the owners, and especially fuck Bettman. This is what you get when you start expanding the league down into Atlanta, ferchrissakes. Best thing that could possibly come out of all of this, if you ask me, is a contracted league.
@Political Observer:
MASSIVE troll fail. Big hockey fan, I see!
Heliopause
“Simply put, it will take a balanced approach, shared sacrifice, and a willingness to make unpopular choices on all our parts.”
Jonny Scrum-half
I’m not crying for the players here — they’re doing just fine. But I don’t understand people who take the owners’ side. There’s a Sirius sports radio host, Dino Costa, who insists that ticket and concession prices are so high because the players keep demanding more money. Of course, he ignores:
1. That the players’ salaries are the result of individual negotiations with the owners, who make the decisions to pay those salaries, and
2. Even if the players all took a 90% pay cut, there’s no way that the owners would reduce the prices paid by fans. In fact, that’s the “free market” at work — the owners would charge the highest prices that would maximize revenue to them, and fans have shown that they’re willing to pay the current prices.
Another Halocene Human
Shared sacrifice: the players and the fans share the sacrifice.
Hmmmm, seeing a flaw with this plan.
1badbaba3
“Tennis star, who fooled you? ” Nice one, mate.
Bettman must go. Now.
If I say any more, I risk prosecution.
Metrosexual Manichean Monster DougJ
@1badbaba3:
Glad someone got it!
1badbaba3
Actually my first punk rock single. November 1977. Seems like only 35 motherlovin’ years ago. I blame Obama.
Wally Ballou
@S-Curve:
And- 3) pro athletes are frequently non-white, which makes them ipso facto undeserving and overpaid.
Although this mostly isn’t the case in hockey, which probably doesn’t hurt the NHLPA on the fan support/PR front.