guth charitable fund. the clements foundation. park foundation, dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. the herb alpert foundation, supporting organizations whose mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society. the bernard and audre rapoport foundation. the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. more information at macfound.org. anne gumowitz. the betsy and jesse fink foundation. the hkh foundation. barbara g. fleischman. and by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america, designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. >> welcome. let us now praise common sense. once again a president was about to plunge us into the darkest waters of foreign policy where the ruling principle becomes, "when in doubt, bomb someone." strategists in the white house, militarists in the think tanks, the powerful pro-israel lobby aipac, and arm-chair warriors of all stripes, neo-conservatives and liberal humanitarians alike, were all telling barack obama to strike syria, no matter the absence of any law or treaty to justify it, no matter the chaos to follow. do it, they said, to show you can, or what's a super power for? but they hadn't reckoned on public opinion. the people said no, not this time. not after more than ten years of soldiers coming home broken in body, screaming nightmares in their brains, their families devastated. not when our politics is an egregious fraud, unable to accomplish anything except enable the rich, while everyday people struggle to make ends meet. jeannette baskin, who lives on staten island not far from the statue of liberty, who describes herself as neither republican nor democrat, told the "new york times," "we invest all this money in foreign countries and fixing their problems, and this country is falling apart." don't think these people callous, those pictures of children gassed in syria sicken them. but there are limits to military power when religious rivalries and secular passions come armed with blowtorches. a retired educator named alice ridinger in hanover, pennsylvania, spoke for multitudes when she also told the "times" that while she finds the use of chemical weapons "terrible," she fears the deeper involvement that could follow a military strike. "i don't think that would be the end of it," she said. truth is, no one knows what would happen once the missiles fly. not the white house or pentagon. not the cia or nsa. not even the all-seeing oracles of cable television, the editorial writers of "the wall street journal," or the seers of such influential publications as "the economist," hawkish now on syria despite having been wrong on iraq. in time, the white house, congress, and the punditry could all be grateful to a suddenly attentive and stubborn public. they may have been spared a folly, thanks to this collective common sense that became so palpable it was a force in its own right. now politics and diplomacy have a chance. perhaps only a slight chance, the "washington post" reports that the cia has just begun delivering weapons to rebels in syria, deepening america's stake in the civil war. but we can't know if politics and diplomacy work unless we give them a try. meanwhile, give a cheer for common sense. so with the drums of war quieted for the moment, millions of us will take a deep breath and turn our attention from all syria all the time to the yankees and the red sox, the giants and the broncos. yes, it's that time of year, when our national pastimes compete and collide, and there simply aren't enough hours in the day or night for all the alluring distractions offered. the weekend's so packed with games it's hard to keep up with who's on first and who's been knocked flat on their backs. or, to be a bit more cynical, who's on steroids and who's being carried unconscious to the locker room. which is why i've asked dave zirin to help us keep score. he's been called "the best sportswriter in the united states." the reporter who, you may remember, challenged the president of bridgestone firestone on whether his product should be the "official tire sponsor" of the super bowl while the company was fighting a lawsuit for allegedly using child labor in liberia. zirin's the first sportswriter in the long history of "the nation" magazine. he hosts sirius xm radio's popular show "edge of sports." and he's written several provocative, even scathing books on sports and society, including, "bad sports: how owners are ruining the games we love," and this his most recent, "game over: how politics has turned the sports world upside down." oh, yes, utne reader named dave zirin one of the "50 visionaries who are changing the world." welcome to the show. >> oh, it's great to be here. >> you go back a long way with your chronicling of sports. how did sports grab you? >> well, i mean, i grew up in new york city just an absolute sports freak. i mean, i memorized statistics, i followed all those great new york city teams in the '80s, the mets, knicks, unbelievable. my room was a shrine to these people. i mean, folks like darryl strawberry, keith hernandez, lawrence taylor. and i never really thought about or cared about politics very much. and that really changed for me in 1996 when i was in college in minnesota. at the time, there was a player for the denver nuggets named mahmoud abdul-rauf who made the decision to not go out for the national anthem before games. and when -- >> because? >> because he said he felt like it violated his religious principles. and he didn't believe that there should be a conflation of sports, and as he put it, paying worship to a flag. and so a reporter got wind of it and went to him and said, "what are you doing? don't you realize that that flag is a symbol of freedom and democracy throughout the world?" and rauf said, "well, it may be a symbol of freedom and democracy to some, but it's a symbol of oppression and tyranny to others." now when he said this, the sports world just blew up. i mean, espn was, like, rauf spits on the flag. boo-yah. and everybody was crowding around and watching this. and i remember seeing one of the talking heads say, well, rauf must see himself as an athlete activist, you know, like muhammad ali or billie jean king. and i'll never forget watching that and thinking to myself, athlete activist? what the heck is that? i thought i was this huge sports fan and memorizing all the stats. it seems like there's this whole world that i didn't know existed. and so i went to library, i've started reading a lot of old articles, started digging in the crates, reading old biographies. found a book co-written by taylor branch, actually, called "second wind," it's one of bill russell's books. and it opened this world to me. and so i started to think to myself, okay, if this applies to the past, how does it apply to the present and how does sports shape our political lives today? >> and you made a beat for yourself out of focusing on the ground between politics and sports. >> well, it's such a rich vein because, i mean, on a given week, it's never a what am i going to write about? it's, what am i not going to write about? because there's always so much happening in the world of sports, and there's always so many different ways in which sports, not just reflects our lives, but actually shapes our lives. i mean, it shapes our understanding of things like racism, sexism, homophobia. it shapes our understanding of our country. it shapes our understanding of corporations and what's happening to our cities. i mean, in so many different ways, sports stories are stories of american life in the 21st century. >> i know you've seen bill siegel's documentary, a new documentary on "the trials of muhammad ali." what do you think about it? >> it's absolutely brilliant. look, i have seen every muhammad ali documentary. and this is by far the best one i've ever seen for a couple of reasons. first and foremost, there is about an hour of footage in there that i have never seen before. all this incredible footage of muhammad ali speaking on college campuses in 1968. speaking out with incredible eloquence against the war in vietnam. and it's a remarkable thing to be able to see footage that has so long been underground actually get unearthed for people to see, and to truly appreciate what it was that made muhammad ali so dangerous. because i think that's what we've really forgotten. >> and the old-time leaders of the civil rights movement were concerned that he was going to take them over the deep end, that they -- >> exactly. >> would lose support in the white house and elsewhere. >> i think that's something that people today don't really understand is that you had these two titanic social movements in the 1960s, the struggle against the war in vietnam and the african american freedom struggle. and then here you have the most famous athlete on earth with one foot in both. >> no, i will not go ten thousand miles from here to help murder and kill another poor people simply to continue the domination of white slave masters over the darker people of the earth. >> mr. muhammad ali has just refused to be inducted into the united states armed forces. notification of his refusal is being made to the united states attorney and the local selective service board for whatever action deemed to be appropriate. >> so he's transgressive on all these different levels. but the other thing when we look at ali is we also have to remember that he didn't show up in the 1960s, like, coming down from planet awesome to educate all of us about politics and sports. i mean, he wasn't malcolm x in boxing gloves or anything. when you look at his life, here he is in 1960, he's 18-years-old, he wins a gold medal at the rome olympics. and his hero was a professional wrestler named gorgeous george wagner -- >> gorgeous george. >> and he wanted to bring the showmanship of professional wrestling into boxing. and then the '60s kind of happened to him. and so, and that's one of the things that the movie does, which is so brilliant, is that it shows the way, the time shaped muhammad ali, and then muhammad ali turned and shaped his times. >> were you taken by surprise at the range of voices that were arrayed against him across a spectrum from the right, william f. buckley, to the left, david susskind? >> i find nothing amusing or interesting or tolerable about this man. he's a disgrace to his country his race and what he laughingly describes as his profession, he's a convicted felon in the united states. he has been found guilty. he is out on bail. he will inevitably go to prison, as well he should. he's a simplistic fool and a pawn. >> that's the part that i think people don't know today and don't understand today, because we really, we've done to muhammad ali what we've done to martin luther king, is we've turned them into these kind of harmless icons who live above the fray of messy politics. and so just like we don't learn about the martin luther king who spoke out against inequality and spoke for government intervention to solve social ills, things that would make him, of course, politically controversial today, we don't talk about the muhammad ali who said things like, the real enemy of my people is here. i am not going to speak out against people in vietnam who are fighting for their own liberation, while here at home my own people in louisville are treated like dogs. >> you've been drawn and written about martin luther king and sports. how did you come to that? >> well, it just, it was a fascinating thing in reading biographies of dr. martin luther king, particularly the magisterial work of taylor branch and then reading some sports biographies about athletes in the 1960s, how much overlap there is. and how much connection there is or the way that martin luther king was somebody who just kept a close eye about what was happening in the world of sports. i think dr. king was greatly influenced by jackie robinson and jackie robinson's breaking of baseball's color barrier in 1947. >> and years later he said of jackie robinson, he was a sit-iner before sit-ins. he was a freedom rider before freedom rides. and he got how important jackie robinson was to the struggle. he got that you couldn't talk about the civil rights movement without talking about robinson. and so because of that and because i think of a sense in dr. king that, you know, the arc of history bends towards justice, that when there was an athlete speaking out, he never said, that person needs to just shut up and play. so when his closest advisors like, for example, roy wilkins, spoke out incredibly harshly against muhammad ali, dr. king was someone who would not do that and would actually exchange private conversations. and they even appeared together in public at a rally in louisville for fair housing. and most significantly when there was a movement in the late '60s by african american athletes to boycott the '68 olympics in mexico city, which of course resulted in tommie smith and john carlos and their famous raised fist. dr. martin luther king defended their right to boycott, calling it an amazing act of nonviolent civil disobedience. and when martin luther king decided in 1967 that he would go public with his opposition to the war in vietnam, one of the things that he said was, well, it's like muhammad ali says, we're all victims of a system of oppression. >> it is my hope that every young man in this country who finds this war objectionable, and abominable, and unjust will file as a conscientious objector. and no matter what you think of mr. muhammad ali's religion, you certainly have to admire his courage. >> and so what you had there was martin luther king drawing upon the experience of muhammad ali as a way to defend his own position, which at the time, was extremely unpopular. so i always found that incredible fascinating that here's martin luther king, his own advisors are telling him, don't stand against the war in vietnam. keep your focus on domestic issues. and not only does king take that risk, but he mentions muhammad ali's name. he mentions the name of a boxer as a way to justify it. and i would encourage people today to really think about, imagine if a similar figure referenced lebron james to say why they were taking a political stand. i mean, it says something about the kind of stature that muhammad ali had. >> is there a sports giant today who is speaking to issues of social justice the way muhammad ali did? >> the main issue is, are there movements in the streets? because when there are movements off the playing field, they reflect on the playing field. so in the last couple of years, we've seen things like the entire miami heat team with lebron james and dwyane wade, they're superstars in the lead, all wearing hoods in protest of, at the time at the fact that george zimmerman had not been arrested for the shooting of trayvon martin. and many athletes like carmelo anthony of the new york knicks, he was very vocal about that as well. so you saw something there where it connected with players, particularly of african american players, very strongly, that there needed to be justice as a result of the trayvon martin case. the other issue that of course is huge right now is the issue of lgbt athletes, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender athletes standing up and speaking out for their right to their own humanity inside a locker room. now historically, a locker room has been, it's been called "the last closet," like an incredible bastion of homophobia. i mean, this goes back to theodore roosevelt, who encouraged young boys to play tackle football, and said if they didn't they were sissies. so, and he popularized that phrase, the sissy. and it was a way of differentiating, are you going to be a leader, are you going to be tough, are you going to lead the new american century and play football? or are you going to be a sissy? and for women who wanted to play sports, you had a similar dynamic where wait a minute, what does it say about you that you want these so-called male attributes like leadership and strength and, you know, physical daring? like, what does it say about you? well, you must, there must be something wrong with you. you must be a lesbian or they would say all kinds of things about women who wanted to play sports. and what you're seeing now in the 21st century are people really pushing back against that. so in the last, even just few months, you've had jason collins become the first active male player to come out of the closet in the history of north american sports. you had robbie rogers, a professional soccer player who came out and then retired at the same time, even though he was just 25-years-old, because he said he didn't think he could be out in the locker room. and then after jason collins came out, he got back on the field and played and said, jason collins inspired me. and you've had brittney griner who is arguably the best woman's basketball player of her generation. she came out of the closet so smoothly, you wondered if she was ever in. and so you have a new generation of athletes who are using that platform of sports to speak out about sexuality and human rights and dignity in a way that i think would do the people from the 1960s very proud. >> as you know, there's a controversy brewing over the olympic games being held next winter in russia. president putin has enacted a law threatening fines or even prison for anything considered to be gay propaganda. and some people are calling for a boycott of those games. >> i don't think that the united states should boycott, even though i'm horrified by not just the laws, but some of the attendant violence that's taking place in russia against the lgbt community and even their, their allies and supporters. i'm not for a boycott, because i think first of all the athletes themselves are going to be prime to go over there and make a statement when they're in russia. and i think that history shows that has a profoundly more powerful effect on the political culture than if you just stay home. i had the great fortune of doing a book with john carlos. and i asked what he thought about the russia olympics. and i said, "should people go over there and protest or should they stay home?" and he said, "well, if i'd stayed home, no one would ever have heard what i had to say. and who would remember that i stayed home today? but people remember that i went and i said my piece. so i think you've got to give people the chance to say their piece." >> but it's still very difficult for them, isn't it? >> yeah, absolutely. and i think there are two big reasons why it's so difficult in the world of sports. the first reason is of course that people want sports to be as apolitical as possible because it's escape. you know, people just want to sit back, relax, and enjoy the game. >> and it is. >> and, yes. >> don't you go to games for escapism? are you always looking at what this means that we're not seeing? >> oh no, i like the escapism too, but it's a little hard to go see the mets and be sitting in a place called citi field named after a bank that was paid for by billions in public dollars, and not think to yourself, yeah, i think that there's some political things maybe going on here that we should pay attention to. but also, i think owners tend to be politically on the right wing of the spectrum. and when they say, and when a lot of their friends in the sports media say, sports and politics shouldn't mix, what they're really saying is sports and a certain kind of politics shouldn't mix. because when it comes to the politics of things like militarism and corporatism, those politics are blaring at a typical game. but when it comes to a player actually trying to use their hyper-exalted, brought to you by nike platform to say something about the world in which they live, well, then that can be, as you said, there can be not a very graceful response to that. >> you mentioned the historian taylor branch who wrote that magnificent series on the civil, history of the civil rights movement. he said not too long ago that college sports in particular still reeks with the whiff of the plantation. >> right. >> you think that's true? >> oh, absolutely. i mean, you know, the first person who i could find who made that analysis of calling college sports a plantation was a man named walter byers. walter byers headed the ncaa from 1951 to 1988. he is responsible for the shaping of the ncaa. and when he left the sport, he said, we've turned it into a plantation system, meaning that there is a tremendous amount of money being generated that would flow into very few hands, and none of that money, obviously, going into the hands of the people on the field or on the court themselves. i mean, it is such a wild scam what happens in college sports in this country. and it's only getting worse. >> do you think college athletes should be paid? >> i think they should because of the revenue that they generate. i mean, think about it like this, woody hayes, he's the coach over at ohio state, his last year coaching there, he made $43,000 a year. today the coach at ohio state, urban meyer, makes $4 million a year as a base salary, $4 million a year. the head of the ncaa, mark emmert, makes almost $2 million a year. now keep in mind, the ncaa is a nonprofit. i mean, i'd hate to think of how it would operate if it was a industry for profit. >> the coach at my alma mater, university of texas, mack brown, had a so-so record two years ago, eight and five, and yet he got $5 million because essentially he took the team to the holiday bowl -- >> right. >> the university officials defended that, saying, well, look our athletics brought in $103 million revenue last year. >> well, i mean, there's some really basic reforms that should happen right away, because the argument you always hear when people say that athletes shouldn't be paid is, well, they get a four-year scholarship. and so the first thing we need to say in response to that is, that's factually not true. college athletes get one-year scholarships that are renewed on an annual basis. so you could have a 4.0 gpa and be your class president. but if you're not performing on the field, you're gone. so to even call them student-athletes isn't even true. i once interviewed a former all-american, and the way he put it is the way i always carry with me, he said, "we're not student-athletes, we're athlete-students, because the second we get on campus it's made clear to us what our priority should be." so the reality at this point, it's basically they're campus workers who don't get paid. and that kind of injustice i don't think should be allowed to stand. >> what would you do about college, football in particular? >> if i could wave a magic wand, i would absolutely delink these kinds of sports from a university setting. and i would say look -- >> it wouldn't be the university of texas longhorns? >> i'm sorry, but i said magic wand, this is just the magic wand. i have a feeling i wouldn't get very far in texas with this argument. but -- >> you might get into the state, but not out. >> i wouldn't get into the state -- but this is the point though, is that web du bois wrote about this a hundred years ago, about the way that he felt like football was distorting, or as he put it, king football was distorting the atmosphere at yale university. and it's actually quaint what he wrote. he said, "the football budget is seven times the classics budget." and it's like, well, just seven times, my goodness. and so you fast forward to today, i would want the nfl with all of its billions to pony up for its own minor league. i would want the nba to do the same. because it really shouldn't shock us that sports that draw the most heavily on people of color, are also the sports that put them in a completely disempowered position, where they're training for these professional leagues without getting a dime in their pocket. so if we could delink them, i absolutely would. we're not going to. i get how deep this is in the vein of the culture. so i think a much more sane approach is first and foremost, if players can make money off their individual image, they should be free to do so. i mean, there's something obscene about a college player who boosters are paying literally $20,000 to have dinner with, but they don't get anything from that. or they sign a million things and they each get sold and the money goes to the university, but not even a little bit of it goes to them. but i think a much more sane thing would be to put caps on coaches' salaries, caps on assistant coaches' salaries. i mean, would it really be so terrible if mack brown made $1 million a year instead of $5 million or $6 million a year? i mean, would the talent pool for people who want to coach really dry up. i don't think so. that money could then go to a stipend for all people who play sports, male or female. and there is, i mean, this has been worked out that there's totally enough money in the system to make this happen, especially if colleges give up their addiction to stadium funding. i mean, at texas a&m where this kid johnny manziel, the heisman trophy winner is in so much trouble for allegedly taking a couple of grand for signing autographs. they're about to open up $450 million in renovations on their foot, and they said they want it to be a megaphone to the world. that's how it was described by the athletic director. and so they want it to be a megaphone, but the person who's actually been yelling through the megaphone, so everybody knows about texas a&m, johnny manziel, doesn't see anything of that. >> supporters of the present system, critics of yours would say, but this money, going to the coaches, going into the program, doesn't come from taxes. it comes from the revenue generated by the television contracts and all of that. >> there's a lot of truth to that argument. in some cases though it does actually draw in, at the state colleges, from state monies, especially when there are budget shortfalls. there's been terrible instances of this in california, for example, where they were cutting classes at cal berkeley while at the same time giving their coach jeff tedford a raise and doing hundreds of millions of dollars in renovations on the stadium. but the bigger issue is that the television money is just growing. espn just inked with the power conferences a 12-year, almost $6 billion contract to broadcast these college games. that's new revenue. that's $6 billion. and then people say, well no, that just goes back into the athletic department. and it's like, well, let's look at these coaches' salaries and how they're rising and still rising. let's look at now there's an arms race, if you will, of assistant coaches, where they're now making millions of dollars a year. and so what you're seeing is capitalism for some and i don't even know what you would call it, indentured servitude for the masses of athletes. and the concern is that a lot of these schools are becoming sports franchises where people happen to go to classes in between games. >> no one i know has covered so well the extent to which the world of sports has changed. what would you say is the defining feature of that change? >> the defining feature of that change can be seen in any city in this country where there is a publicly-funded, billion-dollar stadium. that to me is both a symbol and an expression of everything that's changed about the economics of sports. now look, i'm not saying that owners back in the day were these kindhearted creatures. but there was an economic system in sports where if you were an owner and you were going to make a profit, you needed to make sure that largely working-class fans would be able to pay money and put their butts in the seats and go to the park. now fans have largely become scenery. the way owners measure profits in this day and age are public subsidies for stadiums, luxury boxes at the stadium, and sweetheart cable deals. now what's so horrible about two of those three things, the cable aspect and the public subsidies for stadiums, is that we're paying for this whether we're sports fans or not. our cable bills go up, our taxes go up, to subsidize these kinds of ventures. and every single economic study shows that they don't work. so what these stadiums -- >> you mean they don't produce the revenue. >> no, it's more like a neo-liberal trojan horse. where people end up agreeing to things that they would never otherwise agree to, because it becomes wrapped in sports. and the idea, or maybe a fear that the team will move. or maybe excitement at the thought of a new building. yet we all pay a very serious price for this. i went to college in minnesota, i remember going to see the twins at the hubert h. humphrey metrodome. and it was not a good stadium. billy martin once famously walked in and said, how could hubert humphrey's parents name him after this dump? so it was a pretty awful stadium. and so, and i'm all for them having a new stadium, except the new stadium was built entirely with public money, even though it had been rejected a dozen times by the voters in various referendum. but the owner, carl pohlad, who's the richest owner in major league sports at the time, he devoted, and i, this is without exaggeration, the last 25 years of his life, from age 72 to 97, to lobbying to get this new stadium. that was his dream. and the very week they were going to break ground on the new stadium the bridge collapsed in minneapolis, sending about a dozen people to their deaths. a five-minute walk from where i live in d.c., the metro went off the rails the year after the new washington nationals' billion-dollar stadium opened. so people have to realize whether you're a sports fan or not, very real choices get made about the limited amount of public infrastructure dollars that we have. and if they don't get spent on infrastructure that safeguards our basic safety, then we all pay a price for that. >> what's the hold these billionaire owners have over the city fathers and sometimes city mothers of a place like detroit? i mean, you saw the headlines in detroit recently. one day the headline says, city declares bankruptcy. the next day, the headline says, multi-million dollar new arena. >> detroit red wings. over $400 million for a new hockey stadium, the same week that they talk about detroit declaring bankruptcy. i mean, first and foremost, it's not being built for detroit, it's being built for a gentleman named mike ilitch, founder of little caesars pizza, the man is in his 80's, he's worth $2.7 billion. and he's getting over $400 million in public money for a $650 million arena. this was signed off on by rick snyder, the same governor who enacted the anti-labor laws that are in michigan that caused so much controversy last year, and making it a right-to-work state. >> but he says this is a rebuilding project that they're doing it for jobs. >> what a wonderful opportunity to see excitement. and this will have a big multiplier effect in terms of additional development in that whole area of detroit. so it's a good win for detroit. >> yeah, once again, it's like, what kind of jobs are you creating? and could that money be used for different kinds of jobs in detroit? detroit is a place you leave, not a place you settle. you need to have real jobs that create a real tax base that can fund real schools that actually work. and you've got to keep the street lights on and you've got to have a garbage collection. and first of all, the kinds of jobs that it creates, it doesn't produce tax revenue. it produces revenue for mike ilitch which he can then hide and not pay. but it doesn't produce tax revenue for the people who are going to, who actually have to live in detroit after this. >> so what's your intuition, if not your evidence, for what, how that happened? >> well, i do have a lot of evidence on this one, because fortunately, the public records are good on this stuff. and this is about mike ilitch having a lobbying wing at the michigan capital and having the ear of rick snyder, i mean, mike ilitch -- >> the governor. >> yes. mike ilitch wanted a new arena, the same way the steinbrenners wanted a new yankee stadium. the same way in this town fred wilpon, even though we didn't know it at the time, but he was borrowing money on the new mets stadium, citi field, and giving it to his best friend, who happened to be named bernie madoff to invest it for him. i mean, and that's the part of it that just boggles my mind, especially as someone who grew up a mets fan, the idea that sports can be used as a kind of economic shell game for people in power. and i think that really is how it happens. because there's an agenda at the top of society that wants corporate welfare. that's a huge part of that kind of 1% agenda. and sports is a way to do that without arousing the kind of ire that otherwise might exist. >> you've said that what's happened to sports in the last 30 years was actually preparing the public psyche, for what? >> i think for the wall street bailout more than anything else. i mean, if you think about the trillion dollars of public money that went to bailing out wall street after the 2008 financial crisis, and the terms of that bailout as well, asking nothing of wall street, prosecuting nobody, and preparing people for this idea that says the role of public spending is really to bail out private capital. and that's the way our society is going to work. money will flow up. we have a trickle-up economic program in this country. so instead of a more classical economic model that says, if you get money in the hands of working people, they will spend that money, and that will stimulate more demand and make the economy grow, the other thing the other model is now it's a finance model that says, get as much money as possible in the hands of big business. and that's going to be the basis of our economy, even though it's going to, in an incredible sense, be like inequality on steroids. now i think the way that sports has operated over the last, particularly in the go-go 1990s, when the economy was growing starting really in camden yard in baltimore you had this preparing of the public psyche to say, you know what the role of public money should be? to give it to private capital so they can build these stadiums. >> so what do we do about this? >> well, i think one of the things that's exciting about this moment, right here, right now, is that you have examples in places like brazil of people standing up. >> they're building all the stadiums for the world cup and people think of brazil as this soccer-mad country. and, of course, the organization that governs soccer is called fifa. and so the big banners in the streets were, we want fifa-quality hospitals. we want fifa-quality schools. and that became an in international news story, this idea of, no, the stadium doesn't represent civic pride, it represents why i have a bad hospital and why my kid goes to a failing school. that, to me, is a huge step. you know, that there's that expression that sometimes in struggle, days are like years, and sometimes years are like days. like what was happening in brazil was like years of work happening in a matter of days. and so the argument is now an easier one to make with people. the second thing that's encouraging is just popular opinion. i mean, it used to be they would do these sort of showcase referenda for new stadiums and whatnot. they don't do the referendums anymore. the former mayor here, rudolph giuliani was asked why there wasn't a referendum for the new yankee stadium. and he said, well, if we have a referendum, we'll lose, which was about as honest as you could get. so it starts with education, it starts with public awareness. and i think -- >> and anger, doesn't it? i mean -- >> it has to start with anger. >> in brazil, you could watch the people protesting the inequities brought on by the spending for the world cup facilities, and they're saying, we're mad as hell, we're not going to take it anymore. >> yeah, that's we are going to need a lot of that in this country. and i think we need to actually organize with sports fans and say, okay, you love sports, but do you really want to feel like you're subsidizing the person who owns this team? does that seem right to you? and go to unions and say, okay, you think there's union labor in building this stadium and that's why you support this project, but what happens when it's done? and then your kids are working for $8 an hour and the only way you'll ever go into this stadium is if you're selling beer. >> here we are at the convergence of two sports seasons that always get fans excited, me included. the opening of football, and the fall drive in baseball towards the world series. but then you have a controversy like alex rodriguez, a-rod. >> sure. >> with a 211 game suspension hanging over his head that he is going to appeal, alex rodriguez about to take his first at bat of the season. >> a-rod, appealing his suspension for cheating, he used performance enhancing drugs that he and other players got from that anti-aging clinic in florida, biogenesis. talk about a-rod. >> oh, yeah. i mean, it's so interesting, because on so many levels, i think alex rodriguez, there's a lot about him that's very loathsome. i live ten minutes away from a horrific slum with mold and ventilation problems and rats. alex rodriguez owns the slum. it's called newport ventures. and this has become a big local story in washington d.c. that alex rodriguez owns this horrific building. i mean, so the guy has made $350 million in his career. he's loathsome on a lot of levels in terms of how he uses his money and how he uses his fame. but at the same time, all of that being said what major league baseball is doing in terms of attacking him is precisely because he is such low-hanging fruit in that regard. he's not going to get a lot of defenders. but the part of the a-rod story which i think needs to be talked about more is less about alex rodriguez and more about the other players who were pinched in this biogenesis case. if you take alex rodriguez out of the picture, all the players who were just disciplined in the last couple of weeks, they all came through baseball's dominican republic pipeline. they were all players either from the dominican republic or from nicaragua or venezuela and they all go through the dominican to be trained before coming to the u.s. today, one out of every three minor league players is from the dominican republic, a country that has a poverty rate of over 40%. one out of three minor league players. now the other thing about the dominican republic is that steroids are legal and available over the counter. and so i look at major league baseball and i think, "these are people who want to have their anabolic cake and eat it too." they want to be able to develop a huge portion of their talent in a place that's a wild west for performance-enhancing drugs. and then in the 1990s, when they weren't testing, they made billions of dollars with the power surge and the increase in home runs. and now today, as the wheel has shifted, they've become the teetotalers who are cracking down in the name of public relations. i mean, every major league owner is like claude rains in casablanca saying, "i'm shocked there's gambling going on here. your winnings, sir." >> so is there a pattern in how baseball chooses its culprits? >> it's just like we were talking about before with our cities and with inequality. i mean, i also think that sports mirrors and reflects globalization. and so what you have baseball doing is investing billions of dollars in the dominican republic, where they can sign kids as young as 15-years-old for a couple thousand dollars. they get scouted before their tenth birthday. they go through these baseball academies that, i mean, it's been exposed so many times, like the substandard health and sanitation in these places. a young prospect for the, my hometown team now, the washington nationals died in one of these academies, a young man named yewri guillen. and we're at a point now where i think baseball has decided that it's better to be able to develop talent cheaply because 99% of them won't make major league baseball anyway, and to sign a bunch of people at higher rates when 99% of them won't make it anyway. so it's like a kind of brutal, brutal farm system that takes place down there. >> have we seen any of the owners penalized for failing to enforce the rules about steroids? >> not only have you not seen that, you didn't see one owner dragged in front of congress when the congress was doing their steroid investigations. you've never seen an owner asked, what did you know and when did you know it? even though we know for a fact that in the late '80s, you had trainers going to ownership meetings saying, hey, there's these things called synthetic testosterone, steroids, that they are going to flood the locker room in the next few years. and yet they either chose the policy of benign neglect or malignant intent. and we honestly, we don't know the answer precisely because they haven't been asked. you know, player once said to me, and this is kind of like my guiding compass to this whole issue. a player once said to me, when it comes to steroids punishment is an individual issue, but distribution is a team issue. and he was trying to make the point that when they crack down, they always go after the individual. and it's like the magical fishing net that catches the minnows while the whales go free. >> so now let's talk about football. a lot of attention is being paid to the scientific link between routine football plays and permanent brain damage. i want to play you a clip from a frontline documentary called "football high." >> starting in 2009, scientists at purdue university put sensors into the helmets of two high school football teams. the sensors measured every impact the athletes took over the course of a season. >> the original intent for this study was to study concussions. but we didn't experience any concussions for quite a few weeks, so we decided we would start bringing in some of our players who had not experienced concussions to just begin to understand whether or not there were any consequences from the blows that they were getting to their head. >> to the researchers' surprise, neurological tests revealed that players who had never reported symptoms of a concussion had suffered significant damage to their memories. >> you know what to do. this is the letters test, zero back, one back and two back. >> the sensors in helmets find that high school kids take more force to the brain than college kids. and the reality is, we know from the literature that the young, developing brain is far more vulnerable to this trauma. >> how do you change the game so that you're not getting all these small little hits that don't rise to the level of concussion? that's sort of the nature of the game. that's how it's being played. every time we line up, even in a practice, that's what's happening. so we're going to have to make dramatic changes or we don't change, we don't change the face of this disease. >> do you see those changes coming, given the fact that football is so deeply imbedded, as you have written and said, in the psyche of america? we love the violent sport. >> there will be changes and people need to recognize that they will be almost entirely cosmetic. think what we have to accept as a society, as a football-loving society, is that football is a lot like a cigarette. you can give it a bigger filter, you can tell people it has less tar, but no one has invented a safe cigarette. >> you don't think better helmets will work? >> horribly, some of the studies show that better helmets can make things actually more damaging, because it's harder to detect when you're actually hurt, when you actually get your so-called, your "bell rung" as they used to say. because it becomes the sort of thing where your brain is banging against your skull, which is banging against the sides of the helmet. and because there are less exterior injuries, which might be a telltale sign, you don't see them. so it actually becomes worse and more dangerous. that's the scary thing about this. i mean, we don't, what we know now is that you don't need a diagnosis of a concussion to have a concussion. i mean, these sub-concussive hits are actually more dangerous. i mean, i think we're so attune to thinking that the danger of football is some 6'4" 250-pound linebacker running at four or five speed and knocking your block off. but that's not the danger. it's the mundane, daily knocking into the next person. that's where the danger is. >> i have been a football fan all my life because i love the surprise of it. the hail mary pass that's in the air, the beauty of the last-minute tackle. but the beauty and the surprise seem to be less compelling to me, given these reports on concussions. and given the suicides of several professional football players. >> yeah, junior seau who played 20 years and was not diagnosed with a concussion once. dave duerson, who took his own life by shooting himself in the heart, just so his brain could be studied. and junior seau also took his own life by shooting himself in the heart. these are things that i think need to weigh heavily on the minds of football fans when they watch the game. i mean, people like violent movies, they like violent video games they like violent sports. but i'll tell you something. boxing is profoundly less popular now than it was in muhammad ali's day, and that's because people actually saw with their own eyes what people like muhammad ali went through after their careers. and i think the more people know about how players suffer after they leave the game, the more the sport is going to be in crisis. >> dave zirin, thank you very much for being with me. >> my privilege, thank you. >> when thomas jefferson wrote that all men are created equal, his monticello farm team was obviously not what he had in mind. they were chattel, possessions toiling in his fields. so it's not lightly that dave zirin and other observers invoke the plantation mentality to describe college football today, or the national football league. tom van riper, who covers sports for "forbes" magazine, points out that of the 31 owners of nfl teams, seventeen, more than half, are billionaires. many boast of being self-made in the image of horatio alger, and are now ensconced in luxury skyboxes far above the proletarians whose own dreams of glory ride vicariously on the grunts and groans of bulky but agile gladiators only one play away from a career's end. a collision with the laws of physics. football, like politics, ain't beanbag. the fortunes of players can vanish in a single blow, while high in their plush digs, owners reap continuing gains from tv and advertising and the tax breaks and subsidies showered on them by compliant politicians. big-time sports now mirrors the vast inequality that has come to define america in this century. soon after the taping of my interview with dave zirin, the nfl settled a class-action suit brought by more than four thousand retired players and their families seeking damages from injuries linked to concussions. to the casual fan, it was a win for the players, a sum of $765 million. but even if they finally have to cough up, the owners will feel no pain. that's just a fraction of the estimated $10 billion the league generates in revenue each year. the average payout per plaintiff will amount to around $150,000, not nearly enough to cover a lifetime of lost wages and medical bills faced by the victims of serious brain trauma. these players and their families haven't won much. it isn't even a tie. as another formidable sleuth of journalism, david cay johnston, recently asked in the "columbia journalism review", "if the settlement does not cover all the costs of medical care, much less lost future wages, who will bear that burden?" his answer, taxpayers. when players are no longer insured by the league and find themselves unable to afford private insurance for their enduring afflictions, taxpayers, that includes you and me, will be the ones to pay, through medicaid and social security disability. we won't even be allowed to see the nfl's own extensive research into the neurological damage caused by concussions. the settlement allows the league and the owners to keep it under lock and key. something else to remember as we relax in our favorite easy chair, dazzled and thrilled by men who can be hurt for life. if the world were just, they would not be so matter-of-factly tossed aside, we might think twice about how we want to be entertained, and the owners of capital would be amply penalized for unsportsmanlike conduct. we began the series last year with three broadcasts on winner take all politics, based on the book of that name by political scientists jacob hacker and paul pierson. their theme was the political engineering of inequality, or "how washington made the rich richer and turned its back on the middle class." in the next few months we will be returning to those core issues. next week, robert reich, named one of the best cabinet officers of the 20th century, will be with us to talk about his new documentary "inequality for all." >> now the thing you want to know about this mini cooper is it is small. we are in proportion, me and my car. my name is robert reich, i was secretary of labor under bill clinton. before that the carter administration. before that i was a special aid to abraham lincoln. of all developed nations, the united states has the most unequal distribution of income and we're surging toward even greater inequality. 1928 and 2007 become the peak years for income concentration, it looks like a suspension bridge. >> last year we made $36,000. >> think i probably make $50,000 a year working 70 hours a week. >> the middle class is struggling. people occasionally say to me, "now what nation does it better?" the answer is, the united states. in the decades after world war ii, the economy boomed but you had very low inequality. >> do you know robert reich? >> i do. >> he's a communist. >> when i was a kid, bigger boys would pick on me. i think it changed my life. i had to protect people from the people who would beat them up economically. who is actually looking out for the american worker? the answer is, nobody. if workers don't have power, if they don't have a voice, their wages and benefits start eroding. we are losing equal opportunity in america. anyone of you who feels cynical just consider where we have been. >>one of the purposes of this film, bill, is to make sure people understand that the only way we're going to get the economy to work for everybody and our society, once again to live up to the values of equal opportunity that at least we aspire to, is if we're mobilized, if we're energized. if we take citizenship to mean not simply voting and paying taxes and showing up for jury duty. but actually, participating in an active way, shutting off the television -- >> with some exceptions. >> there's some exception. and spending an hour or two a day in our communities, on our state, even on national politics, and putting pressure on people who should be doing the public's business instead of the business of the moneyed interests to actually respond to what's needed. >> at our website billmoyers.com there's a thought provoking variety of analysis and commentary. that's all at billmoyers.com. i'll see you there and i'll see you here, next time. this episode of "moyers & company" is available on dvd for $19.95. to order call 1-800-336-1917 or write to the address on your screen. funding is provided by -- carnegie corporation of new york, celebrating 100 years of philanthropy, and committed to doing real and permanent good in the world. the kohlberg foundation. independent production fund, with support from the partridge foundation, a john and polly guth charitable fund. the clements foundation. park foundation, dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. the herb alpert foundation, supporting organizations whose mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society. the bernard and audre rapoport foundation. the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. more information at macfound.org. anne gumowitz. the betsy and jesse fink foundation. the hkh foundation. barbara g. fleischman. and by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america, designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. 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independent production fund, with support from the partridge foundation, a john and polly guth charitable fund. the clements foundation. park foundation, dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. the herb alpert foundation, supporting organizations whose mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society. the bernard and audre rapoport foundation. the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. more information at macfound.org. anne gumowitz. the betsy and jesse fink foundation. the hkh foundation. barbara g. fleischman. and by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america, designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. >> welcome. let us now praise common sense. once again a president was about to plunge us into the darkest waters of foreign policy where the ruling principle becomes, "when in doubt, bomb someone." strategists in the white house, militarists in the think tanks, the powerful pro-israel lobby aipac, and arm-chair warriors of all stripes, neo-conservatives and liberal humanitarians alike, were all telling barack obama to strike syria, no matter the absence of any law or treaty to justify it, no matter the chaos to follow. do it, they said, to show you can, or what's a super power for? but they hadn't reckoned on public opinion. the people said no, not this time. not after more than ten years of soldiers coming home broken in body, screaming nightmares in their brains, their families devastated. not when our politics is an egregious fraud, unable to accomplish anything except enable the rich, while everyday people struggle to make ends meet. jeannette baskin, who lives on staten island not far from the statue of liberty, who describes herself as neither republican nor democrat, told the "new york times," "we invest all this money in foreign countries and fixing their problems, and this country is falling apart." don't think these people callous, those pictures of children gassed in syria sicken them. but there are limits to military power when religious rivalries and secular passions come armed with blowtorches. a retired educator named alice ridinger in hanover, pennsylvania, spoke for multitudes when she also told the "times" that while she finds the use of chemical weapons "terrible," she fears the deeper involvement that could follow a military strike. "i don't think that would be the end of it," she said. truth is, no one knows what would happen once the missiles fly. not the white house or pentagon. not the cia or nsa. not even the all-seeing oracles of cable television, the editorial writers of "the wall street journal," or the seers of such influential publications as "the economist," hawkish now on syria despite having been wrong on iraq. in time, the white house, congress, and the punditry could all be grateful to a suddenly attentive and stubborn public. they may have been spared a folly, thanks to this collective common sense that became so palpable it was a force in its own right. now politics and diplomacy have a chance. perhaps only a slight chance, the "washington post" reports that the cia has just begun delivering weapons to rebels in syria, deepening america's stake in the civil war. but we can't know if politics and diplomacy work unless we give them a try. meanwhile, give a cheer for common sense. so with the drums of war quieted for the moment, millions of us will take a deep breath and turl the time to the yankees and the red sox, the giants and the broncos. yes, it's that ti when our national pastimes compete and collide, and there imply aren't enough h alluring distractions offered. the weekend's so packed with games it's hard to keep up with who's on first and who's been knocked flat on their backs. or, to be a bit more cynical, who's on steroids and who's being carried unconscious to the locker room. which is why i've asked dave zirin to help us keep sce. states." the reporter who, you may remember, challenged the president of bridgestone firestone on whether his product should be the "official tire sponsor" of e suthr bowl while the company was fighting a lawsuit for allegedly using child labor in liberia. zirin's the first sportswriter in the long history of "the nation" magazine. he hosts sirius xm radio's popular show "edge of sports." and he's written several provocative, even scathing books on sports and society, including, "bad sports: how owners are ruining the games we love," and this his most recent, "game over: how politics has turned the sports world upside down." oh, yes, utne reader named dave zirin one of the "50 visionaries who are changing the world." welcome to the show. >> oh, it's great to be here. >> you go back a long way with your chronicling of sports. how did sports grab you? >> well, i mean, i grew up in new york city just an absolute sports freak. i mean, i memorized statistics, i followed all those great new york city teams in the '80s, the mets, knicks, unbelievable. my room was a shrine to these people. i mean, folks like darryl strawberry, keith hernandez, lawrence taylor. and i never really thought about or cared about politics very much. and that really changed for me in 1996 when i was in college in minnesota. at the time, there was a player for the denver nuggets named mahmoud abdul-rauf who made the decision to not go out for the national anthem before games. and when -- >> because? >> because he said he felt like it violated his religious principles. and he didn't believe that there should be a conflation of sports, and as he put it, paying worship to a flag. and so a reporter got wind of it and went to him and said, "what are you doing? don't you realize that that flag is a symbol of freedom and democracy throughout the world?" and rauf said, "well, it may be a symbol of freedom and democracy to some, but it's a symbol of oppression and tyranny to others." now when he said this, the sports world just blew up. i mean, espn was, like, rauf spits on the flag. boo-yah. and everybody was crowding around and watching this. and i remember seeing one of the talking heads say, well, rauf must see himself as an athlete activist, you know, like muhammad ali or billie jean king. and i'll never forget watching that and thinking to myself, athlete activist? what the heck is that? i thought i was this huge sports fan and memorizing all the stats. it seems like there's this whole world that i didn't know existed. and so i went to library, i've started reading a lot of old articles, started digging in the crates, reading old biographies. found a book co-written by taylor branch, actually, called "second wind," it's one of bill russell's books. and it opened this world to me. and so i started to think to myself, okay, if this applies to the past, how does it apply to the present and how does sports shape our political lives today? >> and you made a beat for yourself out of focusing on the ground between politics and sports. >> well, it's such a rich vein because, i mean, on a given week, it's never a what am i going to write about? it's, what am i not going to write about? because there's always so much happening in the world of sports, and there's always so many different ways in which sports, not just reflects our lives, but actually shapes our lives. i mean, it shapes our understanding of things like racism, sexism, homophobia. it shapes our understanding of our country. it shapes our understanding of corporations and what's happening to our cities. i mean, in so many different ways, sports stories are stories of american life in the 21st century. >> i know you've seen bill siegel's documentary, a new documentary on "the trials of muhammad ali." what do you think about it? >> it's absolutely brilliant. look, i have seen every muhammad ali documentary. and this is by far the best one i've ever seen for a couple of reasons. first and foremost, there is about an hour of footage in there that i have never seen before. all this incredible footage of muhammad ali speaking on college campuses in 1968. speaking out with incredible eloquence against the war in vietnam. and it's a remarkable thing to be able to see footage that has so long been underground actually get unearthed for people to see, and to truly appreciate what it was that made muhammad ali so dangerous. because i think that's what we've really forgotten. >> and the old-time leaders of the civil rights movement were concerned that he was going to take them over the deep end, that they -- >> exactly. >> would lose support in the white house and elsewhere. >> i think that's something that people today don't really understand is that you had these two titanic social movements in the 1960s, the struggle against the war in vietnam and the african american freedom struggle. and then here you have the most famous athlete on earth with one foot in both. >> no, i will not go ten thousand miles from here to help murder and kill another poor people simply to continue the domination of white slave masters over the darker people of the earth. >> mr. muhammad ali has just refused to be inducted into the united states armed forces. notification of his refusal is being made to the united states attorney and the local selective service board for whatever action deemed to be appropriate. >> so he's transgressive on all these different levels. but the other thing when we look at ali is we also have to remember that he didn't show up in the 1960s, like, coming down from planet awesome to educate all of us about politics and sports. i mean, he wasn't malcolm x in boxing gloves or anything. when you look at his life, here he is in 1960, he's 18-years-old, he wins a gold medal at the rome olympics. and his hero was a professional wrestler named gorgeous george wagner -- >> gorgeous george. >> and he wanted to bring the showmanship of professional wrestling into boxing. and then the '60s kind of happened to him. and so, and that's one of the things that the movie does, which is so brilliant, is that it shows the way, the time shaped muhammad ali, and then muhammad ali turned and shaped his times. >> were you taken by surprise at the range of voices that were arrayed against him across a spectrum from the right, william f. buckley, to the left, david susskind? >> i find nothing amusing or interesting or tolerable about this man. he's a disgrace to his country his race and what he laughingly describes as his profession, he's a convicted felon in the united states. he has been found guilty. he is out on bail. he will inevitably go to prison, as well he should. he's a simplistic fool and a pawn. >> that's the part that i think people don't know today and don't understand today, because we really, we've done to muhammad ali what we've done to martin luther king, is we've turned them into these kind of harmless icons who live above the fray of messy politics. and so just like we don't learn about the martin luther king who spoke out against inequality and spoke for government intervention to solve social ills, things that would make him, of course, politically controversial today, we don't talk about the muhammad ali who said things like, the real enemy of my people is here. i am not going to speak out against people in vietnam who are fighting for their own liberation, while here at home my own people in louisville are treated like dogs. >> you've been drawn and written about martin luther king and sports. how did you come to that? >> well, it just, it was a fascinating thing in reading biographies of dr. martin luther king, particularly the magisterial work of taylor branch and then reading some sports biographies about athletes in the 1960s, how much overlap there is. and how much connection there is or the way that martin luther king was somebody who just kept a close eye about what was happening in the world of sports. i think dr. king was greatly influenced by jackie robinson and jackie robinson's breaking of baseball's color barrier in 1947. >> and years later he said of jackie robinson, he was a sit-iner before sit-ins. he was a freedom rider before freedom rides. and he got how important jackie robinson was to the struggle. he got that you couldn't talk about the civil rights movement without talking about robinson. and so because of that and because i think of a sense in dr. king that, you know, the arc of history bends towards justice, that when there was an athlete speaking out, he never said, that person needs to just shut up and play. so when his closest advisors like, for example, roy wilkins, spoke out incredibly harshly against muhammad ali, dr. king was someone who would not do that and would actually exchange private conversations. and they even appeared together in public at a rally in louisville for fair housing. and most significantly when there was a movement in the late '60s by african american athletes to boycott the '68 olympics in mexico city, which of course resulted in tommie smith and john carlos and their famous raised fist. dr. martin luther king defended their right to boycott, calling it an amazing act of nonviolent civil disobedience. and when martin luther king decided in 1967 that he would go public with his opposition to the war in vietnam, one of the things that he said was, well, it's like muhammad ali says, we're all victims of a system of oppression. >> it is my hope that every young man in this country who finds this war objectionable, and abominable, and unjust will file as a conscientious objector. and no matter what you think of mr. muhammad ali's religion, you certainly have to admire his courage. >> and so what you had there was martin luther king drawing upon the experience of muhammad ali as a way to defend his own position, which at the time, was extremely unpopular. so i always found that incredible fascinating that here's martin luther king, his own advisors are telling him, don't stand against the war in vietnam. keep your focus on domestic issues. and not only does king take that risk, but he mentions muhammad ali's name. he mentions the name of a boxer as a way to justify it. and i would encourage people today to really think about, imagine if a similar figure referenced lebron james to say why they were taking a political stand. i mean, it says something about the kind of stature that muhammad ali had. >> is there a sports giant today who is speaking to issues of social justice the way muhammad ali did? >> the main issue is, are there movements in the streets? because when there are movements off the playing field, they reflect on the playing field. so in the last couple of years, we've seen things like the entire miami heat team with lebron james and dwyane wade, they're superstars in the lead, all wearing hoods in protest of, at the time at the fact that george zimmerman had not been arrested for the shooting of trayvon martin. and many athletes like carmelo anthony of the new york knicks, he was very vocal about that as well. so you saw something there where it connected with players, particularly of african american players, very strongly, that there needed to be justice as a result of the trayvon martin case. the other issue that of course is huge right now is the issue of lgbt athletes, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender athletes standing up and speaking out for their right to their own humanity inside a locker room. now historically, a locker room has been, it's been called "the last closet," like an incredible bastion of homophobia. i mean, this goes back to theodore roosevelt, who encouraged young boys to play tackle football, and said if they didn't they were sissies. so, and he popularized that phrase, the sissy. and it was a way of differentiating, are you going to be a leader, are you going to be tough, are you going to lead the new american century and play football? or are you going to be a sissy? and for women who wanted to play sports, you had a similar dynamic where wait a minute, what does it say about you that you want these so-called male attributes like leadership and strength and, you know, physical daring? like, what does it say about you? well, you must, there must be something wrong with you. you must be a lesbian or they would say all kinds of things about women who wanted to play sports. and what you're seeing now in the 21st century are people really pushing back against that. so in the last, even just few months, you've had jason collins become the first active male player to come out of the closet in the history of north american sports. you had robbie rogers, a professional soccer player who came out and then retired at the same time, even though he was just 25-years-old, because he said he didn't think he could be out in the locker room. and then after jason collins came out, he got back on the field and played and said, jason collins inspired me. and you've had brittney griner who is arguably the best woman's basketball player of her generation. she came out of the closet so smoothly, you wondered if she was ever in. and so you have a new generation of athletes who are using that platform of sports to speak out about sexuality and human rights and dignity in a way that i think would do the people from the 1960s very proud. >> as you know, there's a controversy brewing over the olympic games being held next winter in russia. president putin has enacted a law threatening fines or even prison for anything considered to be gay propaganda. and some people are calling for a boycott of those games. >> i don't think that the united states should boycott, even though i'm horrified by not just the laws, but some of the attendant violence that's taking place in russia against the lgbt community and even their, their allies and supporters. i'm not for a boycott, because i think first of all the athletes themselves are going to be prime to go over there and make a statement when they're in russia. and i think that history shows that has a profoundly more powerful effect on the political culture than if you just stay home. i had the great fortune of doing a book with john carlos. and i asked what he thought about the russia olympics. and i said, "should people go over there and protest or should they stay home?" and he said, "well, if i'd stayed home, no one would ever have heard what i had to say. and who would remember that i stayed home today? but people remember that i went and i said my piece. so i think you've got to give people the chance to say their piece." >> but it's still very difficult for them, isn't it? >> yeah, absolutely. and i think there are two big reasons why it's so difficult in the world of sports. the first reason is of course that people want sports to be as apolitical as possible because it's escape. you know, people just want to sit back, relax, and enjoy the game. >> and it is. >> and, yes. >> don't you go to games for escapism? are you always looking at what this means that we're not seeing? >> oh no, i like the escapism too, but it's a little hard to go see the mets and be sitting in a place called citi field named after a bank that was paid for by billions in public dollars, and not think to yourself, yeah, i think that there's some political things maybe going on here that we should pay attention to. but also, i think owners tend to be politically on the right wing of the spectrum. and when they say, and when a lot of their friends in the sports media say, sports and politics shouldn't mix, what they're really saying is sports and a certain kind of politics shouldn't mix. because when it comes to the politics of things like militarism and corporatism, those politics are blaring at a typical game. but when it comes to a player actually trying to use their hyper-exalted, brought to you by nike platform to say something about the world in which they live, well, then that can be, as you said, there can be not a very graceful response to that. >> you mentioned the historian taylor branch who wrote that magnificent series on the civil, history of the civil rights movement. he said not too long ago that college sports in particular still reeks with the whiff of the plantation. >> right. >> you think that's true? >> oh, absolutely. i mean, you know, the first person who i could find who made that analysis of calling college sports a plantation was a man named walter byers. walter byers headed the ncaa from 1951 to 1988. he is responsible for the shaping of the ncaa. and when he left the sport, he said, we've turned it into a plantation system, meaning that there is a tremendous amount of money being generated that would flow into very few hands, and none of that money, obviously, going into the hands of the people on the field or on the court themselves. i mean, it is such a wild scam what happens in college sports in this country. and it's only getting worse. >> do you think college athletes should be paid? >> i think they should because of the revenue that they generate. i mean, think about it like this, woody hayes, he's the coach over at ohio state, his last year coaching there, he made $43,000 a year today the coach at ohio state, urban meyer, makes $4 million a year as a base salary, $4 million a year. the head of the ncaa, mark emmert, makes almost $2 million a year. now keep in mind, the ncaa is a nonprofit. i mean, i'd hate to think of how it would operate if it was a industry for profit. >> the coach at my alma mater, university of texas, mack brown, had a so-so record two years ago, eight and five, and yet he got $5 million because essentially he took the team to the holiday bowl -- >> right. >> the university officials defended that, saying, well, look our athletics brought in $103 million revenue last year. >> well, i mean, there's some really basic reforms that should happen right away, because the argument you always hear when people say that athletes shouldn't be paid is, well, they get a four-year scholarship. and so the first thing we need to say in response to that is, that's factually not true. college athletes get one-year scholarships that are renewed on an annual basis. so you could have a 4.0 gpa and be your class president. but if you're not performing on the field, you're gone. so to even call them student-athletes isn't even true. i once interviewed a former all-american, and the way he put it is the way i always carry with me, he said, "we're not student-athletes, we're athlete-students, because the second we get on campus it's made clear to us what our priority should be." so the reality at this point, it's basically they're campus workers who don't get paid. and that kind of injustice i don't think should be allowed to stand. >> what would you do about college, football in particular? >> if i could wave a magic wand, i would absolutely delink these kinds of sports from a university setting. and i would say look -- >> it wouldn't be the university of texas longhorns? >> i'm sorry, but i said magic wand, this is just the magic wand. i have a feeling i wouldn't get very far in texas with this argument. but -- >> you might get into the state, but not out. >> i wouldn't get into the state -- but this is the point though, is that web du bois wrote about this a hundred years ago, about the way that he felt like football was distorting, or as he put it, king football was distorting the atmosphere at yale university. and it's actually quaint what he wrote. he said, "the football budget is seven times the classics budget." and it's like, well, just seven times, my goodness. and so you fast forward to today, i would want the nfl with all of its billions to pony up for its own minor league. i would want the nba to do the same. because it really shouldn't shock us that sports that draw the most heavily on people of color, are also the sports that put them in a completely disempowered position, where they're training for these professional leagues without getting a dime in their pocket. so if we cod deulnk them, i absolutely would. we're not going to. i get how deep this is in the vein of the culture. so i think a much more sane approach is first and foremost, if players can make money off their individual image, they should be free to do so. i mean, there's something obscene about a college player who boosters are paying literally $20,000 to have dinner with, but they don't get anything from that. or they sign a million things and they each get sold and the money goes to the university, but not even a little bit of it goes to them. but i think a much more sane thing would be to put caps on coaches' salaries, caps on assistant coaches' salaries. i mean, would it really be so terrible if mack brown made $1 million a year instead of $5 million or $6 million a year? i mean, would the talent pool for people who want to coach really dry up. i don't think so. that money could then go to a stipend for all people who play sports, male or female. and there is, i mean, this has been worked out that there's totally enough money in the system to make this happen, especially if colleges give up their addiction to stadium funding. i mean, at texas a&m where this kid johnny manziel, the heisman trophy winner is in so much trouble for allegedly taking a couple of grand for signing autographs. they're about to open up $450 million in renovations on their foot, and they said they want it to be a megaphone to the world. that's how it was described by the athletic director. and so they want it to be a megaphone, but the person who's actually been yelling through the megaphone, so everybody knows about texas a&m, johnny manziel, doesn't see anything of that. >> supporters of the present system, critics of yours would say, but this money, going to the coaches, going into the program, doesn't come from taxes. it comes from the revenue generated by the television contracts and all of that. >> there's a lot of truth to that argument. in some cases though it does actually draw in, at the state colleges, from state monies, especially when there are budget shortfalls. there's been terrible instances of this in california, for example, where they were cutting classes at cal berkeley while at the same time giving their coach jeff tedford a raise and doing hundreds of millions of dollars in renovations on the stadium. but the bigger issue is that the television money is just growing. espn just inked with the power conferences a 12-year, almost $6 billion contract to broadcast these college games. that's new revenue. that's $6 billion. and then people say, well no, that just goes back into the athletic department. and it's like, well, let's look at these coaches' salaries and how they're rising and still rising. let's look at now there's an arms race, if you will, of assistant coaches, where they're now making millions of dollars a year. and so what you're seeing is capitalism for some and i don't even know what you would call it, indentured servitude for the masses of athletes. and the concern is that a lot of these schools are becoming sports franchises where people happen to go to classes in between games. >> no one i know has covered so well the extent to which the world of sports has changed. what would you say is the defining feature of that change? >> the defining feature of that change can be seen in any city in this country where there is a publicly-funded, billion-dollar stadium. that to me is both a symbol and an expression of everything that's changed about the economics of sports. now look, i'm not saying that owners back in the day were these kindhearted creatures. but there was an economic system in sports where if you were an owner and you were going to make a profit, you needed to make sure that largely working-class fans would be able to pay money and put their butts in the seats and go to the park. now fans have largely become scenery. the way owners measure profits in this day and age are public subsidies for stadiums, luxury boxes at the stadium, and sweetheart cable deals. now what's so horrible about two of those three things, the cable aspect and the public subsidies for stadiums, is that we're paying for this whether we're sports fans or not. our cable bills go up, our taxes go up, to subsidize these kinds of ventures. and every single economic study shows that they don't work. so what these stadiums -- >> you mean they don't produce the revenue. >> no, it's more like a neo-liberal trojan horse. where people end up agreeing to things that they would never otherwise agree to, because it becomes wrapped in sports. and the idea, or maybe a fear that the team will move. or maybe excitement at the thought of a new building. yet we all pay a very serious price for this. i went to college in minnesota, i remember going to see the twins at the hubert h. humphrey metrodome. and it was not a good stadium. billy martin once famously walked in and said, how could hubert humphrey's parents name him after this dump? so it was a pretty awful stadium. and so, and i'm all for them having a new stadium, except the new stadium was built entirely with public money, even though it had been rejected a dozen times by the voters in various referendum. but the owner, carl pohlad, who's the richest owner in major league sports at the time, he devoted, and i, this is without exaggeration, the last 25 years of his life, from age 72 to 97, to lobbying to get this new stadium. that was his dream. and the very week they were going to break ground on the new stadium the bridge collapsed in minneapolis, sending about a dozen people to their deaths. a five-minute walk from where i live in d.c., the metro went off the rails the year after the new washington nationals' billion-dollar stadium opened. so people have to realize whether you're a sports fan or not, very real choices get made about the limited amount of public infrastructure dollars that we have. and if they don't get spent on infrastructure that safeguards our basic safety, then we all pay a price for that. >> what's the hold these billionaire owners have over the city fathers and sometimes city mothers of a place like detroit? i mean, you saw the headlines in detroit recently. one day the headline says, city declares bankruptcy. the next day, the headline says, multi-million dollar new arena. >> detroit red wings. over $400 million for a new hockey stadium, the same week that they talk about detroit declaring bankruptcy. i mean, first and foremost, it's not being built for detroit, it's being built for a gentleman named mike ilitch, founder of little caesars pizza, the man is in his 80's, he's worth $2.7 billion. and he's getting over $400 million in public money for a $650 million arena. this was signed off on by rick snyder, the same governor who enacted the anti-labor laws that are in michigan that caused so much controversy last year, and making it a right-to-work state. >> but he says this is a rebuilding project that they're doing it for jobs. >> what a wonderful opportunity to see excitement. and this will have a big multiplier effect in terms of additional development in that whole area of detroit. so it's a good win for detroit. >> yeah, once again, it's like, what kind of jobs are you creating? and could that money be used for different kinds of jobs in detroit? detroit is a place you leave, not a place you settle. you need to have real jobs that create a real tax base that can fund real schools that actually work. and you've got to keep the street lights on and you've got to have a garbage collection. and first of all, the kinds of jobs that it creates, it doesn't produce tax revenue. it produces revenue for mike ilitch which he can then hide and not pay. but it doesn't produce tax revenue for the people who are going to, who actually have to live in detroit after this. >> so what's your intuition, if not your evidence, for what, how that happened? >> well, i do have a lot of evidence on this one, because fortunately, the public records are good on this stuff. and this is about mike ilitch having a lobbying wing at the michigan capital and having the ear of rick snyder, i mean, mike ilitch -- >> the governor. >> yes. mike ilitch wanted a new arena, the same way the steinbrenners wanted a new yankee stadium. the same way in this town fred wilpon, even though we didn't know it at the time, but he was borrowing money on the new mets stadium, citi field, and giving it to his best friend, who happened to be named bernie madoff to invest it for him. i mean, and that's the part of it that just boggles my mind, especially as someone who grew up a mets fan, the idea that sports can be used as a kind of economic shell game for people in power. and i think that really is how it happens. because there's an agenda at the top of society that wants corporate welfare. that's a huge part of that kind of 1% agenda. and sports is a way to do that without arousing the kind of ire that otherwise might exist. >> you've said that what's happened to sports in the last 30 years was actually preparing the public psyche, for what? >> i think for the wall street bailout more than anything else. i mean, if you think about the trillion dollars of public money that went to bailing out wall street after the 2008 financial crisis, and the terms of that bailout as well, asking nothing of wall street, prosecuting nobody, and preparing people for this idea that says the role of public spending is really to bail out private capital. and that's the way our society is going to work. money will flow up. we have a trickle-up economic program in this country. so instead of a more classical economic model that says, if you get money in the hands of working people, they will spend that money, and that will stimulate more demand and make the economy grow, the other thing the other model is now it's a finance model that says, get as much money as possible in the hands of big business. and that's going to be the basis of our economy, even though it's going to, in an incredible sense, be like inequality on steroids. now i think the way that sports has operated over the last, particularly in the go-go 1990s, when the economy was growing starting really in camden yard in baltimore you had this preparing of the public psyche to say, you know what the role of public money should be? to give it to private capital so they can build these stadiums. >> so what do we do about this? >> well, i think one of the things that's exciting about this moment, right here, right now, is that you have examples in places like brazil of people standing up. >> they're building all the stadiums for the world cup and people think of brazil as this soccer-mad country. and, of course, the organization that governs soccer is called fifa. and so the big banners in the streets were, we want fifa-quality hospitals. we want fifa-quality schools. and that became an in international news story, this idea of, no, the stadium doesn't represent civic pride, it represents why i have a bad hospital and why my kid goes to a failing school. that, to me, is a huge step. you know, that there's that expression that sometimes in struggle, days are like years, and sometimes years are like days. like what was happening in brazil was like years of work happening in a matter of days. and so the argument is now an easier one to make with people. the second thing that's encouraging is just popular opinion. i mean, it used to be they would do these sort of showcase referenda for new stadiums and whatnot. they don't do the referendums anymore. the former mayor here, rudolph giuliani was asked why there wasn't a referendum for the new yankee stadium. and he said, well, if we have a referendum, we'll lose, which was about as honest as you could get. so it starts with education, it starts with public awareness. and i think -- >> and anger, doesn't it? i mean -- >> it has to start with anger. >> in brazil, you could watch the people protesting the inequities brought on by the spending for the world cup facilities, and they're saying, we're mad as hell, we're not going to take it anymore. >> yeah, that's we are going to need a lot of that in this country. and i think we need to actually organize with sports fans and say, okay, you love sports, but do you really want to feel like you're subsidizing the person who owns this team? does that seem right to you? and go to unions and say, okay, you think there's union labor in building this stadium and that's why you support this project, but what happens when it's done? and then your kids are working for $8 an hour and the only way you'll ever go into this stadium is if you're selling beer. >> here we are at the convergence of two sports seasons that always get fans excited, me included. the opening of football, and the fall drive in baseball towards the world series. but then you have a controversy like alex rodriguez, a-rod. >> sure. >> with a 211 game suspension hanging over his head that he is going to appeal, alex rodriguez about to take his first at bat of the season. >> a-rod, appealing his suspension for cheating, he used performance enhancing drugs that he and other players got from that anti-aging clinic in florida, biogenesis. talk about a-rod. >> oh, yeah. i mean, it's so interesting, because on so many levels, i think alex rodriguez, there's a lot about him that's very loathsome. i live ten minutes away from a horrific slum with mold and ventilation problems and rats. alex rodriguez owns the slum. it's called newport ventures. and this has become a big local story in washington d.c. that alex rodriguez owns this horrific building. i mean, so the guy has made $350 million in his career. he's loathsome on a lot of levels in terms of how he uses his money and how he uses his fame. but at the same time, all of that being said what major league baseball is doing in terms of attacking him is precisely because he is such low-hanging fruit in that regard. he's not going to get a lot of defenders. but the part of the a-rod story which i think needs to be talked about more is less about alex rodriguez and more about the other players who were pinched in this biogenesis case. if you take alex rodriguez out of the picture, all the players who were just disciplined in the last couple of weeks, they all came through baseball's dominican republic pipeline. they were all players either from the dominican republic or from nicaragua or venezuela and they all go through the dominican to be trained before coming to the u.s. today, one out of every three minor league players is from the dominican republic, a country that has a poverty rate of over 40%. one out of three minor league players. now the other thing about the dominican republic is that steroids are legal and available over the counter. and so i look at major league baseball and i think, "these are people who want to have their anabolic cake and eat it too." they want to be able to develop a huge portion of their talent in a place that's a wild west for performance-enhancing drugs. and then in the 1990s, when they weren't testing, they made billions of dollars with the power surge and the increase in home runs. and now today, as the wheel has shifted, they've become the teetotalers who are cracking down in the name of public relations. i mean, every major league owner is like claude rains in casablanca saying, "i'm shocked there's gambling going on here. your winnings, sir." >> so is there a pattern in how baseball chooses its culprits? >> it's just like we were talking about before with our cities and with inequality. i mean, i also think that sports mirrors and reflects globalization. and so what you have baseball doing is investing billions of dollars in the dominican republic, where they can sign kids as young as 15-years-old for a couple thousand dollars. they get scouted before their tenth birthday. they go through these baseball academies that, i mean, it's been exposed so many times, like the substandard health and sanitation in these places. a young prospect for the, my hometown team now, the washington nationals died in one of these academies, a young man named yewri guillen. and we're at a point now where i think baseball has decided that it's better to be able to develop talent cheaply because 99% of them won't make major league baseball anyway, and to sign a bunch of people at higher rates when 99% of them won't make it anyway. so it's like a kind of brutal, brutal farm system that takes place down there. >> have we seen any of the owners penalized for failing to enforce the rules about steroids? >> not only have you not seen that, you didn't see one owner dragged in front of congress when the congress was doing their steroid investigations. you've never seen an owner asked, what did you know and when did you know it? even though we know for a fact that in the late '80s, you had trainers going to ownership meetings saying, hey, there's these things called synthetic testosterone, steroids, that they are going to flood the locker room in the next few years. and yet they either chose the policy of benign neglect or malignant intent. and we honestly, we don't know the answer precisely because they haven't been asked. you know, player once said to me, and this is kind of like my guiding compass to this whole issue. a player once said to me, when it comes to steroids punishment is an individual issue, but distribution is a team issue. and he was trying to make the point that when they crack down, they always go after the individual. and it's like the magical fishing net that catches the minnows while the whales go free. >> so now let's talk about football. a lot of attention is being paid to the scientific link between routine football plays and permanent brain damage. i want to play you a clip from a frontline documentary called "football high." >> starting in 2009, scientists at purdue university put sensors into the helmets of two high school football teams. the sensors measured every impact the athletes took over the course of a season. >> the original intent for this study was to study concussions. but we didn't experience any concussions for quite a few weeks, so we decided we would start bringing in some of our players who had not experienced concussions to just begin to understand whether or not there were any consequences from the blows that they were getting to their head. >> to the researchers' surprise, neurological tests revealed that players who had never reported symptoms of a concussion had suffered significant damage to their memories. >> you know what to do. this is the letters test, zero back, one back and two back. >> the sensors in helmets find that high school kids take more force to the brain than college kids. and the reality is, we know from the literature that the young, developing brain is far more vulnerable to this trauma. >> how do you change the game so that you're not getting all these small little hits that don't rise to the level of concussion? that's sort of the nature of the game. that's how it's being played. every time we line up, even in a practice, that's what's happening. so we're going to have to make dramatic changes or we don't change, we don't change the face of this disease. >> do you see those changes coming, given the fact that football is so deeply imbedded, as you have written and said, in the psyche of america? we love the violent sport. >> there will be changes and people need to recognize that they will be almost entirely cosmetic. think what we have to accept as a society, as a football-loving society, is that football is a lot like a cigarette. you can give it a bigger filter, you can tell people it has less tar, but no one has invented a safe cigarette. >> you don't think better helmets will work? >> horribly, some of the studies show that better helmets can make things actually more damaging, because it's harder to detect when you're actually hurt, when you actually get your so-called, your "bell rung" as they used to say. because it becomes the sort of thing where your brain is banging against your skull, which is banging against the sides of the helmet. and because there are less exterior injuries, which might be a telltale sign, you don't see them. so it actually becomes worse and more dangerous. that's the scary thing about this. i mean, we don't, what we know now is that you don't need a diagnosis of a concussion to have a concussion. i mean, these sub-concussive hits are actually more dangerous. i mean, i think we're so attune to thinking that the danger of football is some 6'4" 250-pound linebacker running at four or five speed and knocking your block off. but that's not the danger. it's the mundane, daily knocking into the next person. that's where the danger is. >> i have been a football fan all my life because i love the surprise of it. the hail mary pass that's in the air, the beauty of the last-minute tackle. but the beauty and the surprise seem to be less compelling to me, given these reports on concussions. and given the suicides of several professional football players. >> yeah, junior seau who played 20 years and was not diagnosed with a concussion once. dave duerson, who took his own life by shooting himself in the heart, just so his brain could be studied. and junior seau also took his own life by shooting himself in the heart. these are things that i think need to weigh heavily on the minds of football fans when they watch the game. i mean, people like violent movies, they like violent video games they like violent sports. but i'll tell you something. boxing is profoundly less popular now than it was in muhammad ali's day, and that's because people actually saw with their own eyes what people like muhammad ali went through after their careers. and i think the more people know about how players suffer after they leave the game, the more the sport is going to be in crisis. >> dave zirin, thank you very much for being with me. >> my privilege, thank you. >> when thomas jefferson wrote that all men are created equal, his monticello farm team was obviously not what he had in mind. they were chattel, possessions toiling in his fields. so it's not lightly that dave zirin and other observers invoke the plantation mentality to describe college football today, or the national football league. tom van riper, who covers sports for "forbes" magazine, points out that of the 31 owners of nfl teams, seventeen, more than half, are billionaires. many boast of being self-made in the image of horatio alger, and are now ensconced in luxury skyboxes far above the proletarians whose own dreams of glory ride vicariously on the grunts and groans of bulky but agile gladiators only one play away from a career's end. a collision with the laws of physics. football, like politics, ain't beanbag. the fortunes of players can vanish in a single blow, while high in their plush digs, owners reap continuing gains from tv and advertising and the tax breaks and subsidies showered on them by compliant politicians. big-time sports now mirrors the vast inequality that has come to define america in this century. soon after the taping of my interview with dave zirin, the nfl settled a class-action suit brought by more than four thousand retired players and their families seeking damages from injuries linked to concussions. to the casual fan, it was a win for the players, a sum of $765 million. but even if they finally have to cough up, the owners will feel no pain. that's just a fraction of the estimated $10 billion the league generates in revenue each year. the average payout per plaintiff will amount to around $150,000, not nearly enough to cover a lifetime of lost wages and medical bills faced by the victims of serious brain trauma. these players and their families haven't won much. it isn't even a tie. as another formidable sleuth of journalism, david cay johnston, recently asked in the "columbia settlement does not r the costs of medical care, much less lost future wages, who wil. when players are no longer insured by the league and find themselves unable to afford ati enduring afflictions, taxpayers, that includes you and me, will be the ones to pay, through medicaid and social security disability. we won't even be allowed to see the nfl's own extensive research into the neurological damage caused by concussions. the settlement allows the league and the owners to keep it under lock and key. something else to remember as we relax in our favorite easy chair, dazzled and thrilled by men who can be hurt for life. if the world were just, they would not be so matter-of-factly tossed aside, we might think twice about how we want to be entertained, and the owners of capital would be amply penalized for unsportsmanlike conduct. we began the series last year with three broadcasts on winner take all politics, based on the book of that name by political scientists jacob hacker and paul pierson. their theme was the political engineering of inequality, or "how washington made the rich richer and turned its back on the middle class." in the next few months we will be returning to those core issues. next week, robert reich, named one of the best cabinet officers of the 20th century, will be with us to talk about his new documentary "inequality for all." >> now the thing you want to know about this mini cooper is it is small. we are in proportion, me and my car. my name is robert reich, i was secretary of labor under bill clinton. before that the carter administration. before that i was a special aid to abraham lincoln. of all developed nations, the united states has the most unequal distribution of income and we're surging toward even greater inequality. 1928 and 2007 become the peak years for income concentration, it looks like a suspension bridge. >> last year we made $36,000. >> think i probably make $50,000 a year working 70 hours a week. >> the middle class is struggling. people occasionally say to me, "now what nation does it better?" the answer is, the united states. in the decades after world war ii, the economy boomed but you had very low inequality. >> do you know robert reich? >> i do. >> he's a communist. >> when i was a kid, bigger boys would pick on me. i think it changed my life. i had to protect people from the people who would beat them up economically. who is actually looking out for the american worker? the answer is, nobody. if workers don't have power, if they don't have a voice, their wages and benefits start eroding. we are losing equal opportunity in america. anyone of you who feels cynical just consider where we have been. >>one of the purposes of this film, bill, is to make sure people understand that the only way we're going to get the economy to work for everybody and our society, once again to live up to the values of equal opportunity that at least we aspire to, is if we're mobilized, if we're energized. if we take citizenship to mean not simply voting and paying taxes and showing up for jury duty. but actually, participating in an active way, shutting off the television -- >> with some exceptions. >> there's some exception. and spending an hour or two a day in our communities, on our state, even on national politics, and putting pressure on people who should be doing the public's business instead of the business of the moneyed interests to actually respond to what's needed. >> at our website billmoyers.com there's a thought provoking variety of analysis and commentary. that's all at billmoyers.com. i'll see you there and i'll see you here, next time. this episode of "moyers & company" is available on dvd for $19.95. to order call 1-800-336-1917 or write to the address on your screen. funding is provided by -- carnegie corporation of new york, celebrating 100 years of philanthropy, and committed to doing real and permanent good in the world. the kohlberg foundation. independent production fund, with support from the partridge foundation, a john and polly guth charitable fund. the clements foundation. park foundation, dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. the herb alpert foundation, supporting organizations whose mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society. the bernard and audre rapoport foundation. the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. more information at macfound.org. anne gumowitz. the betsy and jesse fink foundation. the hkh foundation. barbara g. fleischman. and by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america, designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. i'm alan cumming, and this is masterpiece mystery! bright: the royal party will arrive at 11:45 sharp. the purpose of this visit is to help promote british industry abroad. this station will be providing additional security. the world will be watching. a body's been found in the factory. is it murder? yes, ma'am. man: this couldn't be more inconvenient for the company. rather more than inconvenient for the victim, wouldn't 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members to perform tasks once limited to health care professionals. >> what i learned was by watching the nurses. i was never instructed how to do anything, they never did demonstrations, had me try anything. we kind of learned by trial and error. >> woodruff: those are just some of the stories we're covering on tonight's pbs newshour. >> major funding for the pbs newshour has been provided by: >> at bae systems, our pride and dedication show in everything we do; from electronics systems to intelligence analysis and cyber- operations; from combat vehicles and weapons to the maintenance and modernization of ships, aircraft, and critical infrastructure. knowing our work makes a difference inspires us everyday. that's bae systems. that's inspired work. >> i've been around long enough to recognize the people who are out there owning it. the ones getting involved, staying engaged. they are not afraid to question the path they're on. because the one question they never want to ask is, "how did i end up here?" i started schwab with those people. people who want to take ownership of their investments, like they do in every other aspect of their lives. >> and the william and flora hewlett foundation, helping people build immeasurably better lives. >> and with the ongoing support of these institutions and foundations. and... >> this program was made possible by the corporation for public broadcasting. and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. >> woodruff: search crews in the indian ocean failed today to pick up more underwater pings from a malaysian jetliner, one month after it disappeared. officials acknowledged time is short, since locator beacons on the two black box recorders were designed to transmit just a month, before their batteries die. in perth, australia, defense minister david johnston said it's a herculean task. >> this is day 32. a lot are concerned that we have at least several days of intense action ahead of us. the weather out there today is reasonable, and, so, you can be assured that we are throwing everything at this difficult, complex task in at least these next several days while we believe the pingers are still active. >> woodruff: an australian ship towing a u.s. navy deepwater sound detector picked up pings on saturday and sunday. they were consistent with the sort the black boxes would emit. crews digging through the mudslide in washington state have found a 34th body. officials also said about a dozen people are still listed as missing. and the white house announced that president obama will visit the site on april 22nd, and meet with victims' families, survivors and recovery workers. u.s. defense secretary chuck hagel got an earful in china today, over territorial disputes with japan and the philippines. the chinese defense minister warned his government is ready to use force, if needed, to defend islands it claims. hagel took part in an honor cordon with his chinese counterpart, and held a two-hour long meeting. afterward, he said the u.s. will protect it's allies, and he warned against miscalculations. >> every nation has a right to establish air defense zones, but not a right to do it unilaterally with no collaboration, no consultation. that adds to tensions, misunderstandings and could eventually add to and eventually get to dangerous conflict. >> woodruff: hagel was in japan earlier this week, where he reassured it's leaders of on- going u.s. support. in vienna, talks on curbing iran's nuclear program resumed today, with the focus turning to concrete steps iran would have to take. the u.s. and five other world powers are offering to remove economic sanctions if a long-term deal can be reached. july is the informal deadline for an agreement. on wall street, stocks broke a three-day losing streak. the dow jones industrial average gained ten points to close at 16,256. the nasdaq rose 33 points to close just shy of 4,113. and the s-and-p 500 added nearly seven, and finished near 1,852. >> woodruff: still to come on the newshour: kiev clamps down on the unrest in eastern ukraine; president obama's push to ensure women get equal pay in the workplace; western africa grapples with a deadly ebola outbreak; the challenge of providing long-term care to loved ones; and, college sports at a crossroads. >> woodruff: there was more unrest in ukraine today as the government pushed back at pro-russian supporters in the country's east. but as chief foreign affairs correspondent margaret warner reports, the demonstrators still hold control of government buildings in two key cities. >> warner: riot police surrounded the regional government headquarters in kharkiv today after ukrainian security forces late last night ousted scores of pro-russian separatists. the protesters, who declared the that eastern region's independence yesterday, were taken into custody. ukraine's interior minister was in charge. >> ( translated ): around 70 people were detained, weapons were taken and fire was extinguished. right now the city administration building is under control. >> warner: but armed separatists remain entrenched at the regional government building in donetsk, also in the east. where the governor told us on our visit three weeks ago that he thought he had the situation in hand. >> ( translated ): when i arrived, this building was blocked and the russian flag was flying on the roof. today the situation is quite different. >> warner: but last weekend, pro-russian protesters stormed the building, barricaded it with tires and barbed wire, and vowed to stay until a vote is held on separating from ukraine to join russia, just as crimea did a month ago. >> ( translated ): we are here for the sake of our families, for our salaries, for our health, for all those people who have already shed their blood. we will not leave this place until we will make the referendum happen. >> russia! russia! >> warner: a similar weekend scene played out at the state security building in luhansk. authorities said protesters wired the building with explosives and are holding some 60 hostages, a claim the demonstrators denied. the unrest in the east also stoked tensions at ukraine's parliament. a fistfight broke out after the head of the communist party blamed ukrainian nationalists for provoking russia. at a senate hearing in washington today, secretary of state john kerry laid the blame for the unrest squarely on moscow. >> russia's clear and unmistakable involvement in destabilizing and engaging in separatist activities in the east of ukraine is more than deeply disturbing. no one should be fooled-- and believe me, no one is fooled by what could potentially be a contrived pretext for military intervention just as we saw in crimea. it is clear that russian special forces and agents have been the catalysts behind the chaos of the last 24 hours. >> warner: in moscow, russian foreign minister sergei lavrov flatly rejected the allegation. >> ( translated ): our american partners are probably trying to analyze the situation, attaching their own habits to others. we are deeply convinced, and nobody has so far challenged this conviction, that the situation cannot be calmed down and changed into national dialogue if the ukrainian authorities go on ignoring the interests of the southeastern regions of the country. >> warner: meanwhile, tens of thousands of russian troops remain massed just across ukraine's eastern border. that brought a new warning from n.a.t.o. secretary-general anders fogh rasmussen, against further russian incursion into ukraine. >> it would be an historic mistake. it would have grave consequences for our relationship with russia and it would further isolate russia internationally. >> warner: there are plans underway for diplomats from russia, ukraine, the u.s., and the european union to hold talks on the crisis, but no date has been set. >> woodruff: and margaret joins me now. how much of an escalation is this on the part of these pro-russian elements? >> a pretty serious one. right after crimea, you had a flurry of lookalikes taking over parliament in the eastern regions. but they were quickly beaten back, new governors appointed and brought in forces. they left peacefully, no blood was shed. demonstrations in the plazas. this weekend was different. gangs came in, stormed the buildings, there are suspicions that the police kind of let them do it. and then at least in donetsk, i talked to a couple of chief aides of the governor today said now armed people are control in the very building where he and i had spoken and said they've trashed the building, steal computers, trashed comparts, steel personal effects. in one building they're holding people hostage. so it is a quality that's more violent, and they are armed. this one fellow said, ukraine doesn't have any armed countries so they must be getting these guns from criminal gangs or across the border, and the theory is that putin has been somewhat stymied at the border in terms of moving troops in so he's creating a pretext from within that would allow him to come in as secretary kerry said and say, well, i'm here to save the russian speakers of eastern ukraine. >> woodruff: we see the ukrainian governor took back the administrative building in kharkiv, but how is the government handling this? >> the governors are letting kiev do it. before where they didn't give a lot of assistance, this time they deployed forces, their secret service into eastern ukraine, and the throw stop security officials, the minister in my piece and two other top ones, each one went to one of these regions and they are running the operations. the game plan is, one, to identify the units they think they can trust because, remember, the donetsk region is where yanukovich, the former president who fled, despite that he has deep tentacles, a multibillionaire oligarch in all the security services, so they feel they need kiev's help to do this and i think you will try to see them take back each one of these buildings. but it is very delicate because if they do it with any bloodshed that, too, creates a pretext. >> woodruff: this comes while the ukrainian government trying to get the country back on track economically and other ways, this has to be damaging. >> definitely. they say it isn't damaging, the governor wasn't in the building at the time, he's now in another building controlled by kiev and doing his work. however, the most telling anecdote i heard -- you know, as you know, the government in kiev, as you said, trying to get the i.n.s. in place, get an infusion of foreign, western capital to do infrastructure projects and a lot of things this region in particular needs. so the governor was hosting, this weekend, a major polish official and south korean official to talk about investments they can make, a plan in donetsk. then this erupts. so it definitely doesn't send the right message and makes it harder for them to stay on that track, not to mention to geto the elections may 25 which is another important political milestone. >> woodruff: whose turn is it to move next and what do people expect? >> i think it is the security forces turn to make further moves. what they will try to do is they're offering negotiations, they're going to try to things like turn off the water and electricity to a couple of buildings, try to persuade them to leave but looking for opportunities to do in these other two places what they did in kharkiv. the fear is that one person said, you know, we may be facing terrorism. i said, what do you mean? he said, you remember putin stained a terrorist attack in russia as a pretext for starting the second chechen war, and now that there's more violence and weapons, we are very worried something like that could erupt. >> woodruff: very quickly, margaret, what about the international response? what are other countries and organizations saying? >> secretary kerry pushed back at the hearing today when senator mccain said you should be arming the ukraine military and the u.s. is putting money on helping kiev make an economic transition. ukrainians feel their future lies with the west. there is logistical and some intelligence help being given. but the ukrainian military forces are to a great degree on their own. the big hope is to have at least this meeting which i referred to at the end of the piece where finally the russians would sit down with the ukrainians which they won't admit is a legit government. i got an email three minutes ago saying that actually is going to happen next week. >> woodruff: you were just there and now things are moving very fast. >> very fast. >> woodruff: yet again. margaret, thank you. >> woodruff: president obama and congressional democrats launched a coordinated effort today to draw attention to women's wages. republicans on capitol hill said the push had little to do with policy and everything to do with politics. >> woodruff: women in the workforce, and how much they earn, were the focus at the white house on this equal pay day. >> it's nice to have a day, but it's even better to have equal pay. >> woodruff: the president was joined by advocates, including lilly ledbetter, famous for her lawsuit that led to pay-equity legislation, the first bill mr. obama signed after taking office. today, he took two executive actions, aimed at federal contractors. one bars companies from retaliating against workers who discuss their pay with each other. the other requires compensation data broken down by race and gender. census data shows women make 77% of what men make, and equal pay day marks the date when the average woman's earnings finally equal a man's total earnings for the previous year. the president challenged republicans to support a senate bill that would make it easier for workers to sue over pay discrimination. >> if republicans in congress want to prove me wrong, if they want to show that they in fact do care about women being paid the same as men, then show me. >> warner: in the senate, democrats, led by maryland's barbara mikulski, joined in trying to ratchet up the pressure. >> we want the same pay for the same job. and we want it in our lawbooks and we want it in our checkbooks. >> warner: republicans accused the president and democrats of using the pay issue purely for political gain. cathy mcmorris rodgers represents a district in washington state. >> on this equal pay day, let's stop politicizing women and focus on the policies that are going to empower women and create a higher paycheck, more opportunities, and that opportunity for a better life. >> warner: house majority leader eric cantor, said both sides should take a look at existing laws. >> it's probably better for us to sit down and see that the law is being properly implemented, rather than play politics. >> warner: the political volleys underscore the key role of women voters in elections. mr. obama won women by double digits in the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. as did democrats in the 2006 mid-terms, when they captured majorities in both the house and senate. but republicans narrowly won women in 2010 when they took back control of the house. now, democrats are hoping equal pay will turn out women in their favor, and help fend off a republican bid to win the senate. the paycheck fairness bill faces a procedural vote in the senate tomorrow. >> woodruff: we explore the broader issues raised by this political fight with: genevieve wood, a senior contributor to the foundry, a news and commentary site affiliated with the heritage foundation. and ariane hegewisch, the study director at the institute for women's policy research. we welcome you both to the "newshour". ariane hegewisch, do you first, how serious is the gap in wages between men and women today in this country? >> it's pretty serious. w omen who work full time, year-round, the most committed workers only make 77 cents on average for every dollar made by a man, so if you accumulate that over a year, over a lifetime, it makes for a lot of less money and less money to pay for pensions and to buy cars and to invest in your family, so it's a big issue. >> woodruff: genevieve, do you agree it's a serious gap? >> well, i think the problem is the way people calculate the numbers, judy. look, if you compare apples to apples, a woman and a man in the same job, they bring similar experience to the table, they bring similar skills and education background to the table, when you look at it that way, the wage gap all but disappears. as a matter of fact, that's even according to the department of labor who did a study on this. where you get the larger discrepancy is when you combine all jobs. so a high school teach who are, let's say, is a woman with many members of congress who happen to be men who make more money, when you look at it that way, looks like men are making more. but the you compare a female member of congress to a male member of congress, they're making the same amount of money, and i think it's really important to look at that because i'm a woman, i think women should make equal to what men should make if we're doing the same job and bringing the same to the table, but i think it's very discouraging and a disservice to young women who are entering to the workforce now to say to them, you need to be nervous about this. you need not have confidence to walk in to a new job and ask for a raise if you think you deserve one and i think that's what this political rhetoric does, a disservice to young women as to posed to telling them, we've made great strides, go for it, you can make the same. >> woodruff: what about this point, ariane hegewisch, what about this point, men and women are earning the same thing doing the same job, it's just that women happen to occupy lower-paying job. >> in congress, male and female representatives do make the same money. we just analyzed the 20 most common occupations, and in none of them do women make the same as men. you know, there's a pay gap in each of them. and if you take something like financial advisors, women have the same training, same qualifications, but they make less because there is discrimination in who gets access to the best jobs. >> woodruff: discrimination. it's discrimination. >> woodruff: genevieve, what about that? >> you have to look at the labor department study on. this they did that very thing. they looked at men and women in the same professions with similar years in the workforce, similar backgrounds, and said the wage gap basically disappears anywhere from 96 cents to a man making a dollar up to 98 cents. so there's 2 cents we need to make up. but men and women make different choices. georgetown did an interesting study, they looked at what majors guys choose when they go to college and what majors women choose. men tend to outnumber women in the top ten wage earners, ending up making the most when they get out of college. women outnumber men in the bottom set. if you want to make a lot of money, be a petroleum engineer. those who major in visual arts make less. that's a choice people make. >> ariane hegewisch, is it all about the choices women are making? they're not choosing to go into the more lucrative jobs? >> i think it's an issue of women being more likely to work in lower-paid occupations. the question is whether this is choice or whether it's the way jobs are. we need teachers, and to say a teacher ought to be paid -- you know, all teachers have to become engineers or i.t. professionals would be rue ton our economy because we need teachers and teachers need to be well paid. the second issue is how much -- we just did a study on women working blue-collar jobs, and a lot of those are electricians, you know, carpenters, they pay very well, and you don't have to pay for your education because it's apprenticeship. not one of the women we interviewed had been told about this prospect by counselors in schools, you know, it was all happenstance, and then a lot of them face discrimination. and there are some cases of petroleum engineers, and you don't want to look at what happened to the women who do that. it's not quite as easy. >> i was going to say maybe we should pay teachers what we pay congressmen and reverse it out. but one thing we should look at is if you look at young women today in metropolitan cities, single, childless, they are actually making 8% more than their male counterparts in those places. so i think there's a lot of good news, and i think we should talk about that, and we should not distort the numbers, which i think the white house is doing and, judy, i think your piece set it up. it's a political year. they want women to think there's a war going on against them. the fact is women are doing pretty well. >> woodruff: sounds like there's going to be a disagreement about how serious the gap is, but just in the little bit of time we have left, ariane hegewisch, what needs to be done? contractors say they need to disclose how much they're paying whether, women are earning the same as men in government contracts, and you're saying there needs to be an even playing field. >> exactly. if there's transparency and social science research to show it, if there's transparency, the gender wage gap disappears. there might be some women who are better than men and some men better than women but they get paid more but you need objective criteria. >> woodruff: genevieve, what about the notion of disclosing how much everyone is paid, whether a government contractor or someone else which would require congressional legislation? >> well, i don't think we ought to be forcing private industry to do such a thing, but the fact is, with all these things, good intentions of what sounds good, you've got to look at the repercussions of this, and i think we should be very concerned that if we have washington, the government telling employers, here's what you've got to pay people. people need different jobs, the same amount. what you're going to do is actually end up having employers say, you know what? if i've got to pay everyone the same wages to come down, performance pay and bonuses go out the window, that's bad for women and men. >> well, employers have had to do this for a long time. they have to monitor their pay and they're not allowed to discriminate, and performance-related pay hasn't disappeared more pay deferences disappeared, you just want the discrimination to disappear. there's one more point, it's not a war on women. women are really angry about discrimination. it's an issue that women bring to the government and they're trying to do something about it. >> woodruff: we are going to leave it there. we thank you both for being with us, genevieve wood and ariane hegewisch. thank you. >> thank you. >> woodruff: several countries in west africa are now coping with the worst outbreak of the ebola virus in years. the world health organization describes it as one of the most challenging episodes of the disease it's ever faced. more than 100 people have died so far. ebola, which is spread by a virus initially transmitted from wild animals, has a high fatality rate. jeffrey brown has more on the struggle to contain it. >> brown: one of the concerns is that ebola has crossed borders. guinea is where the outbreak began and was first made public in march. more than 100 deaths and 150 cases have been reported there. another troubling aspect: the disease has turned up in a wide area. from tropical forests to the capital of conarky to the liberian border. in liberia, investigators believe there are at least 10 deaths. health officials are now investigating possible cases in both in mali and ghana. more than 60% of infected people have died. laurie garrett of the council of foreign relations has tracked outbreaks in the past as a journalist and author of several books on global health and disease. she joins us now. lori, welcome back to the program. first, remind us a bit about what ebola is and exactly how it's transmitted. >> thank you. yeah, ebola is an rna virus, a very small virus that attacks the endothelial linings that maintain the blood veins, capillaries. first, a microscopic holes through which blood and fluids leak until they're larger and larger holes till the individual hemorrhages internally, and hemorrhaging blood through tears, the mouth, the nose, all over the body so they become quite frightening to see, and individuals will get a high fever. they may get blood in the brain which will lead to even more insane behavior, a kind of deranged look in their eyes, all of which contributes to a great deal of fear. on top of it all, the fluids contain virus, so they're highly, highly contagious to the touch. >> brown: so in the current situation, we're seeing it spreading into several countries. that's unusual, right? >> we've never seen this before. and as nsf put it correctly, this is unprecedented. we've had outbreaks before but they've always stayed within a country and even within a pretty confined part of the country. the outbreak, i was in zaire in 1995, it only got to a few peripheral villages, a large distance but walking distance. there were no ways to get around other than walking and land rovers. no streets, no roads, no real airports, and so on. this is different because this is a real city with a real airport, senegal is next door, has one of the biggest airports in all of west africa. it has crossed borders, involved multiple governments, multiple sets of policies. it's in all different kinds of religious communities, cultural communities, different languages, all of which makes conquering it much more difficult because your number one obstacle with ebola is fear and how the public responds. >> brown: but at the same time, health officials have said, they're reporting they've traced the sources of transmission for everyone who's sick. now, that sounds like a good sign for trying to contain this. >> could be. could be. but there are some fundamental mysteries here. something's going on in the rain forest because what these countries share is a special ecology, a special rain forest region in which the bats that normally carry the virus to the bat population but with pass it to other primates which can be eaten by humans or to people, hunters who may be in the rain forests. it's possible we're getting multiple introductions, or at least more than one, across the region. so if something's out in the rain forest which is why the bats are stressed and passing the virus, then we'll see multiple rounds of reintroduction. but the bottom line is to extract individuals from their homes, put them in quarantine, give them safe and, you know, humane care, and make sure that all the caregivers have proper protective gear. >> brown: and all that hasn't really changed all that much since ebola was first found in 1976, right? i mean, in terms of what can be done once an outbreak begins? >> we understand it a little better, but we don't have any different technology today than we've had all along since we've known of the ebola virus in 1976. it's all and hand washing, latex gloves, protective gear, masks and a kind of infection control. >> brown: on the one hand the w.h.o. is saying we're getting a handle on this but they're also saying it may take months to deal with. what does that tell you? >> well, it tells me that we have a real problem because it's so dispersed. it's across a broad, broad territory. multiple different ecologies, different cultures and, let's not forget, this is a region that has recently been through civil wars -- liberia, mahli, ongoing conflict. there are a lot of nerves, people are raw, there's suspicious and countersuspicious in populations for or against government, so trying to conquer a problem like this means overcoming a lot of larger political issues that have been in the region a long time. >> brown: lowe lori garrett, ths so much. >> woodruff: next, americans are being released from hospitals quicker, and sicker. that's put new demands on the family members who care for them. special correspondent kathleen mccleery reports from oklahoma as part of our "taking care" series. >> make sure we get all of the air out. >> reporter: cheryl mitchem never imagined retirement would look like this. when she and her husband alphus stopped working, they planned travel and other adventures. then, a year ago, a severe headache and a diagnosis of a malignant brain tumor upended the family's dreams. >> glioblastoma, which is a form of malignant brain cancer, but it stretches all over the whole brain, its not confined to one area. >> reporter: their 37 year old daughter kristin left her job as a pastry chef in north carolina to come home to oklahoma city to help. >> you want me to get you something to eat? >> you spend your whole life kind of in the care of your parents, and now that role has changed, where im kind of, you know, providing care, making sure that he has everything he needs. >> reporter: cheryl and kristin are among the 42 million americans caring for loved ones at home. and the tasks they perform have become increasingly complex. cleaning a feeding tube, for instance, capping a catheter line, checking blood sugar, administering an injection, and managing multiple prescriptions. >> when we have to flush his picc line, or clean his peg tube, or take his blood glucose, or his blood pressure, you know, none of us went to school for that, i mean were not educated that way. what i learned was by watching the nurses. i was never instructed how to do anything, they never did demonstrations, had me try anything. i don't feel like i had enough training at all for this. we kind of learned by trial and error. >> reporter: family members do 90% of care-giving and nearly half perform chores once limited to trained nurses. that's according to an a.a.r.p. sampling of more than 1,600 caregivers nationwide. >> hey, mom. did you take your medicine? >> reporter: that trend has prompted the organization to focus attention on caregivers and push state legislators to pass what they call the care act. >> reporter: oklahoma state director sean voskuhl is urging members to support it. >> so a.a.r.p. has been taking a hard look and making this a priority, but we also thought it was important to take a public policy approach, and giving a legal designation of a family caregiver in that process, because we find so many folks that are burdened, overwhelmed, and they want to know what do i do, where do i go for help? >> reporter: the bill would require the hospitals to list the caregiver on the patients chart to notify him or her before the patient is discharged, and to mandate training for the skills they'll need when the patient comes home. in oklahoma, its sponsor, state senator brian crain, understands the toll care-giving can take. >> my mother, the last five years of her life, suffered from alzheimers, and i know firsthand, as well as the rest of my family, the long goodbye that is alzheimers. my father, though, served as her caregiver. >> reporter: the care act passed the state senate in february and is being considered in the house. >> we recognize, as a state, that everyone needs to have a caregiver if they want one, and that caregiver needs to have some understanding of when you're going to be released from the hospital, and what it is that the hospital thinks needs to be done, so that you are not re-admitted unnecessarily. >> reporter: oklahoma lawmakers aren't alone in their quest to support family caregivers. hawaii, illinois and new jersey are all considering their own versions. here and elsewhere, the opposition comes mainly from those who will have to abide by new rules. >> we just do not feel like this is a necessary piece of legislation >> reporter: lawanna halstead is a vice president for the oklahoma hospital association. she's also a registered nurse. and she argues hospitals already follow strict guidelines, including medicare regulations, that require a smooth transition when patients are released. >> there is a multi-page chapter about discharge planning. if you are going to participate with medicare, meaning you're going to receive medicare funding for taking care of patients, then you have to follow these conditions. hospitals put in place multiple things, such as calling the patients twenty four hours, and forty eight hours after their discharged to ask them if they have any further questions, did you in fact get your prescriptions filled, do you remember that you have this physician visit, do you remember what your physical activity is, and what your diet is? >> reporter: a sampling of 400 likely voters in january showed strong support in oklahoma for caregivers and the new legislation. for pollster bill shapard, the issue hit home just before his data came in. >> my father fell and had a severe concussion, and i think what was impactful for me was that i got to see beyond just what i'm asking oklahoma voters to consider through polling, i got to live it. >> reporter: his mother, veda shapard, faced a flurry of confusing information when her husband was ready to come home. >> leaving the hospital was a bit of a challenge. i like to think of myself as somebody that's detail oriented, but the nurse came in and had all of the discharge papers, there was 22 pages of information for me. so, it was so pretty intense moments there for a while because you didn't know what to do. >> and its a little overwhelming. >> reporter: at st. anthony hospital, dr. robert rader coordinates a patients stay from admission to discharge. he says his staff does a good job instructing caregivers, but he worries about the possible impact of new regulations. >> hospitals are getting more and more crunched for resources and so i'm afraid that patient care might suffer as we begin to fragment things, trying to check boxes on another form that we have to check, i really think we need to not be distracted from the care that's being taken to the patient. >> reporter: not getting the right care is one reason some patients return to the hospital. 58% of oklahoma hospitals were penalized by medicare and medicaid for excessive re- admissions, that's about average nationally. the bills backers hope training caregivers will help reduce those multiple stays. the mitchems say they've already made serious mistakes that landed alphus back in the hospital. >> there have been some instances with one of the medications that we gave him, there were certain side effects that we needed to be looking out for, and we weren't told that we needed to look for those things, and so he had like, a reaction to one of those medications, and i felt really bad because the morning that we took him back to the emergency room, it was my morning to give that medication, and i did. >> reporter: but representative doug cox, an emergency room doctor himself, has reservations about whether legislation will make a difference. >> i'm not sure that we need to put another mandate on the hospitals when they're kind of moving in that direction, anyway. as you know, medicare and now even private insurance companies are holding hospitals liable for patients that are re-admitted within a close time of discharge, and so hospitals are being even more diligent about teaching home care at time of dismissal, to try to prevent those re-admissions. >> reporter: family caregivers don't get paid but the congressional budget office put a price tag on all those contributions, worth $234 billion to the u.s. economy in 2011. those jobs may have to be done by paid workers in the decades ahead. as the baby boomers age, they'll move from providing care to needing it. and because the next generation is smaller, the demand for, and on, family caregivers is sure to increase. >> woodruff: how many hours a week does the typical long-term caregiver donate to a sick parent or spouse? we have a by-the-numbers breakdown on what kind of impact this can have on their finances. that's on our homepage. >> woodruff: more than 21 million viewers tuned into last night's n.c.a.a. men's championship basketball game. a heady moment for university of connecticut fans. but also coming at a point when schools are facing new pressures about how they balance competing interests among athletics, academics and money. jeff is back with that story. >> brown: march madness, spilling over into april, a time when millions enjoy the thrills of college sports. last night, confetti filled the air of a.t.&.t. stadium, in arlington, texas, after the university of connecticut beat kentucky for the men's basketball championship. tonight, the u-conn women have their turn at a title tonight against notre dame, in a first- ever battle of un-beatens. but amid the on-court battles, a national debate grows over the big-time college sports, and the status and role of what are called student-athletes. one potentially ground-shifting decision came last month, when a regional director of the national labor relations board ruled that northwestern football players have the right to unionize. the team's former quarterback kain colter led the push. he told the aspen institute last week that most college athletes, who don't go pro, need protection. >> i mean, what this all boils down to is, you know, setting up these, you know, talented young men and women up for success down the road and the public should want that. >> reporter: the n.c.a.a., which governs college athletics, strongly disagrees. on sunday, it's president, mark emmert, called the concept of a players union grossly inappropriate. >> to convert to a unionized employee model is essentially to throw away the entire collegiate model for athletics. you can't split that one in two. you're either a student at a university playing your sports or you're an employee of that university. >> brown: the n.c.a.a. also faces a class action lawsuit, started by former u.c.l.a. basketball player ed o'bannon. he's asking a federal court to strike down the prohibition on student athletes gaining financially when their names and likenesses are used commercially. and kentucky's basketball success has further underscored the whole question of whether players are in fact students or athletes. the wildcats started five freshmen, and have become known for "one and done" players who play one year, and turn pro. coach john calipari says it's up to them. >> they sacrificed, they surrendered to each other now-- for our team, and for our program, and our school. season's over. now it's about them. i kind of stay out of the decision making. >> brown: in the coming weeks, several of calipari's freshmen stars are expected to announce they'll join the n.b.a. draft. >> brown: we get a pair of perspectives on some of these bigger issues that are being debated. patrick harker is president of the university of delaware and a member of the board of directors of the n.c.a.a. division one. and kevin blackistone, he is a panelist for e.s.p.n. and teaches sports journalism at the university of maryland kevin blackistone, let me start with you. put aside for the moment specific cases or solutions. what's the overall problem you see in college sports? >> inequity. inequity in money. it's inequity in power. it's inequity in resources. the resources are what this unionization of northwestern football players is all about. it's really not about compensation, but it's about things like health care, workers' compensation, protection for scholarships should they be injured and no longer able to play. most people in this country don't realize that scholarships are one-year renewable contracts with the university stamped by the athletic department. so if a player is hurt and he or she can no longer play, they can lose their scholarship. so it's really basic things like that, and it's really not very much about compensation in terms of hard dollars. >> brown: let me ask patrick harker, generally, first, is the word "crisis," do you accept that? what is the situation for college sports today? >> i think it's a crisis in losing sight of the fact that the most important part of the phrase "student athlete" is "student." i say that not just as a university president but a former student athlete. i'm here today because athletics opened doors for me. i'm worried starting middle school through college, we've lost sight of the fact that students need an education to be successful, even if they have a pro career. they're not going to do that forever, and after their career is over, they need another career, they need to be successful in something else, and they need an education. >> brown: pat harker, is the very term "student athlete" one we should use or discard, do you agree? >> yeah, because if you think about the university of delaware and most members of ncaa division 1, we use money on athletics, substantial sums of money. but you have to think of it as a subsidy. we're subsidizing an opportunity for students just like in theater and music. in this case, through athletics, to learn things they can't in the classroom and to provide in community the sense of competition, camaraderie and pride. but if you lose sight of that fact, then i think there is a problem. i mean, we lose money on lots of things. we lose money on every student that comes to the university if they're subsidized but we do it because there's a greater purpose, a great educational experience. >> brown: what do you think about the term "student athlete"? >> it should be discarded and it is a cover. as cover. it was invented by walter byers. he invented it back in the '60s to provide the ncaa cover from having exactly what is happening today happen then, and that was to have student athletes looked at as employees. the member institutions and ncaa had face add number of very serious lawsuits from players who had been critically injured on the field and they wanted their member institutions to take care of them as if they were what they are and that is employees of the university and walter byers explains in his confession in the mid '90s called unsportsmanlike conduct how he came up with the terms and what he meant by it. so the phrase student athlete in the media which we regurgitated has given cover to member institutions and courts when people try to challenge the notion. >> brown: president harker, when you say you think the student part of that is still the key, you argue against, for example, the idea of unions for college athletes. explain why you think that would be a bad idea. >> well, look, we lose money on every sport we offer at the university of delaware and every school at our level. so if we're required to spend more money and we're required to take our eye off the ball, giving these students a real education, then everybody loses, and we don't want to do that. again, personally, as a former student athlete, where doors opened for me because of that experience, i want to make sure this next generation has the same opportunities. >> brown: about what paying them, compensating them in any form? is that possible? >> well, we pay them through their scholarship today, but only half of our students are on scholarship. many, again -- we often think about men's basketball and football, but there are many student athletes on campus to take advantage of this opportunity. some are scholarships, but they're doing it for sport and what they learn. >> brown: kevin blackistone, he's making an important point we sometimes forget. we focus on these bigtime programs and bigtime sports and forget about everything else. >> well, right now there's an erosion going on in college athletics and has been for some time. the university of delaware is one of the schools that is suffering the erosion and, sooner or later, there is going to be, if there isn't, already, a core of 50, maybe 60 schools, at least half of which do make profit off their athletics who are going to be controlling the sport. so i think, sooner or later, as we've seen through the formation of the b.c.s. over the years, which -- and a new football contract playoff which they were still opposed to a few years ago have decided to do it for $5.6 billion from espn, i think you will see those schools start to circle around the pile of money that they are able to generate and keep that for themselves. >> brown: what harm do you see in that system? >> well, if that system continues, i think the harm is going to be to the schools that cannot participate in it, and we know that there has been an arms race, an athletics race over the years. every year, there's another very small school which plurchtion down a few million dollars to start up a football program. why? just because it brings marketing and public relations to your university and also from the idea that maybe somehow you can make a buck off of this. i think that that's the problem here. so a union, once again, really what these kids are talking about really is not the compensation, but resources and power and a seat at the table with the ncaa so they can bargain for their own rights. >> brown: so pat harker, you can respond to that in the last minute. what would you like to see happen? >> first, remember the conferences kevin is talking about are the exception, not the rule. we -- universities like the university of delaware are the majority of division one. what i worry about is, in this conversation, we're letting five conferences potentially through the media drive the debate. for colleges at our level, i'd like to see, as i said earlier, a renewed focus on the student athlete, and that means not only the success on the field but their success in the classroom to make sure that they can get the major of choice. sometimes we've set this up where it's a little difficult to do. we have geographically dispersed conferences whether on trains or planes, i think we need to concentrate on geographic consolidation so students are away from campus so they can get a degree that involves a lab or a research project. that's what i did when i was a student athlete and led me to the career i have today. >> brown: patrick harker, president of the university of delaware, kevin blackistone. thank you both very much. >> thank you. >> woodruff: again, the major developments of the day. government forces in ukraine regained control of a regional headquarters in one eastern city. pro-russian separatists were holding out in two other cities. search crews in the indian ocean failed to pick up more underwater pings from a malaysian jetliner, one month after it disappeared. and president obama took execution actions to press the cause of equal pay for women. on the newshour online right now, we have a follow-up to our story on the fight within the air force over the retiring of the a-10 warthog. what do the men who call in air strikes think about the decision? we have their reaction on our world page. all that and more is on our web site, newshour.pbs.org. and that's the newshour for tonight. on wednesday, a look at what has and hasn't changed for bangladesh's garment industry, one year after a factory collapsed, killing more than 1,000 workers. i'm judy woodruff. we'll see you on-line, and again here tomorrow evening. for all of us here at the pbs newshour, thank you and good night. >> major funding for the pbs newshour has been provided by: ♪ ♪ moving our economy for 160 years. bnsf, the engine that connects us. >> and by the alfred p. sloan foundation. supporting science, technology, and improved economic performance and financial literacy in the 21st century. >> and with the ongoing support of these institutions and foundations. and... >> this program was made possible by the corporation for public broadcasting. and by contributions to 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members to perform tasks once limited to health care professionals. >> what i learned was by watching the nurses. i was never instructed how to do anything, they never did demonstrations, had me try anything. we kind of learned by trial and error. >> woodruff: those are just some of the stories we're covering on tonight's pbs newshour. >> major funding for the pbs newshour has been provided by: >> at bae systems, our pride and dedication show in everything we do; from electronics systems to intelligence analysis and cyber- operations; from combat vehicles and weapons to the maintenance and modernization of ships, aircraft, and critical infrastructure. knowing our work makes a difference inspires us everyday. that's bae systems. that's inspired work. >> i've been around long enough to recognize the people who are out there owning it. the ones getting involved, staying engaged. they are not afraid to question the path they're on. because the one question they never want to ask is, "how did i end up here?" i started schwab with those people. people who want to take ownership of their investments, like they do in every other aspect of their lives. >> and the william and flora hewlett foundation, helping people build immeasurably better lives. >> and with the ongoing support of these institutions and foundations. and... >> this program was made possible by the corporation for public broadcasting. and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. >> woodruff: search crews in the indian ocean failed today to pick up more underwater pings from a malaysian jetliner, one month after it disappeared. officials acknowledged time is short, since locator beacons on the two black box recorders were designed to transmit just a month, before their batteries die. in perth, australia, defense minister david johnston said it's a herculean task. >> this is day 32. a lot are concerned that we have at least several days of intense action ahead of us. the weather out there today is reasonable, and, so, you can be assured that we are throwing everything at this difficult, complex task in at least these next several days while we believe the pingers aretill active. >> woodruff: an australian ship towing a u.s. navy deepwater sound detector picked up pings on saturday and sunday. they were consistent with the sort the black boxes would emit. crews digging through the mudslide in washington state have found a 34th body. officials also said about a dozen people are still listed as missing. and the white house announced that president obama will visit the site on april 22nd, and meet with victims' families, survivors and recovery workers. u.s. defense secretary chuck hagel got an earful in china today, over territorial disputes with japan and the philippines. the chinese defense minister warned his government is ready to use force, if needed, to defend islands it claims. hagel took part in an honor cordon with his chinese counterpart, and held a two-hour long meeting. afterward, he said the u.s. will protect it's allies, and he warned against miscalculations. >> every nation has a right to establish air defense zones, but not a right to do it unilaterally with no collaboration, no consultation. that adds to tensions, misunderstandings and could eventually add to and eventually get to dangerous conflict. >> woodruff: hagel was in japan earlier this week, where he reassured it's leaders of on- going u.s. support. in vienna, talks on curbing iran's nuclear program resumed today, with the focus turning to concrete steps iran would have to take. the u.s. and five other world powers are offering to remove economic sanctions if a long-term deal can be reached. july is the informal deadline for an agreement. on wall street, stocks broke a three-day losing streak. the dow jones industrial average gained ten points to close at 16,256. the nasdaq rose 33 points to close just shy of 4,113. and the s-and-p 500 added nearly seven, and finished near 1,852. >> woodruff: still to come on the newshour: kiev clamps down on the unrest in eastern ukraine; president obama's push to ensure women get equal pay in the workplace; western africa grapples with a deadly ebola outbreak; the challenge of providing long-term care to loved ones; and, college sports at a crossroads. >> woodruff: there was more unrest in ukraine today as the government pushed back at pro-russian supporters in the country's east. but as chief foreign affairs correspondent margaret warner reports, the demonstrators still hold control of government buildings in two key cities. >> warner: riot police surrounded the regional government headquarters in kharkiv today after ukrainian security forces late last night ousted scores of pro-russian separatists. the protesters, who declared the that eastern region's independence yesterday, were taken into custody. ukraine's interior minister was in charge. >> ( translated ): around 70 people were detained, weapons were taken and fire was extinguished. right now the city administration building is under control. >> warner: but armed separatists remain entrenched at the regional government building in donetsk, also in the east. where the governor told us on our visit three weeks ago that he thought he had the situation in hand. >> ( translated ): when i arrived, this building was blocked and the russian flag was flying on the roof. today the situation is quite different. >> warner: but last weekend, pro-russian protesters stormed the building, barricaded it with tires and barbed wire, and vowed to stay until a vote is held on separating from ukraine to joiia, just as crimea did a month ago. >> ( translated ): we are here for the sake of our families, for our salaries, for our health, for all those people who have already shed their blood. we will not leave this place until we will make the referendum happen. >> russia! russia! >> warner: a similar weekend scene played out at the state security building in luhansk. authorities said protesters wired the building with explosives and are holding some 60 hostages, a claim the demonstrators denied. the unrest in the east also stoked tensions at ukraine's parliament. a fistfight broke out after the head of the communist party blamed ukrainian nationalists for provoking russia. at a senate hearing in washington today, secretary of state john kerry laid the blame for the unrest squarely on moscow. >> russia's clear and unmistakable involvement in destabilizing and engaging in separatist activities in the east of ukraine is more than deeply disturbing. no one should be fooled-- and believe me, no one is fooled by what could potentially be a contrived pretext for military intervention just as we saw in crimea. it is clear that russian special forces and agents have been the catalysts behind the chaos of the last 24 hours. >> warner: in moscow, russian foreign minister sergei lavrov flatly rejected the allegation. >> ( translated ): our american partners are probably trying to analyze the situation, attaching their own habits to others. we are deeply convinced, and nobody has so far challenged this conviction, that the situation cannot be calmed down and changed into national dialogue if the ukrainian authorities go on ignoring the interests of the southeastern regions of the country. >> warner: meanwhile, tens of thousands of russian troops remain massed just across ukraine's eastern border. that brought a new warning from n.a.t.o. secretary-general anders fogh rasmussen, against further russian incursion into ukraine. >> it would be an historic mistake. it would have grave consequences for our relationship with russia and it would further isolate russia internationally. >> warner: there are plans underway for diplomats from russia, ukraine, the u.s., and the european union to hold talks on the crisis, but no date has been set. >> woodruff: and margaret joins me now. how much of an escalation is this on the part of these pro-russian elements? >> a pretty serious one. right after crimea, you had a flurry of lookalikes taking over parliament in the eastern regions. but they were quickly beaten back, new governors appointed and brought in forces. they left peacefully, no blood was shed. demonstrations in the plazas. this weekend was different. gangs came in, stormed the buildings, there are suspicions that the police kind of let them do it. and then at least in donetsk, i talked to a couple of chief aides of the governor today said now armed people are control in the very building where he and i had spoken and said they've trashed the building, steal computers, trashed comparts, steel personal effects. in one building they're holding people hostage. so it is a quality that's more violent, and they are armed. this one fellow said, ukraine doesn't have any armed countries so they must be getting these guns from criminal gangs or across the border, and the theory is that putin has been somewhat stymied at the border in terms of moving troops in so he's creating a pretext from within that would allow him to come in as secretary kerry said and say, well, i'm here to save the russian speakers of eastern ukraine. >> woodruff: we see the ukrainian governor took back the administrative building in kharkiv, but how is the government handling this? >> the governors are letting kiev do it. before where they didn't give a lot of assistance, this time they deployed forces, their secret service into eastern ukraine, and the throw stop security officials, the minister in my piece and two other top ones, each one went to one of these regions and they are running the operations. the game plan is, one, to identify the units they think they can trust because, remember, the donetsk region is where yanukovich, the former president who fled, despite that he has deep tentacles, a multibillionaire oligarch in all the security services, so they feel they need kiev's help to do this and i think you will try to see them take back each one of these buildings. but it is very delicate because if they do it with any bloodshed that, too, creates a pretext. >> woodruff: this comes while the ukrainian government trying to get the country back on track economically and other ways, this has to be damaging. >> definitely. they say it isn't damaging, the governor wasn't in the building at the time, he's now in another building controlled by kiev and doing his work. however, the most telling anecdote i heard -- you know, as you know, the government in kiev, as you said, trying to get the i.n.s. in place, get an infusion of foreign, western capital to do infrastructure projects and a lot of things this region in particular needs. so the governor was hosting, this weekend, a major polish official and south korean official to talk about investments they can make, a plan in donetsk. then this erupts. so it definitely doesn't send the right message and makes it harder for them to stay on that track, not to mention to geto the elections may 25 which is another important political milestone. >> woodruff: whose turn is it to move next and what do people expect? >> i think it is the security forces turn to make further moves. what they will try to do is they're offering negotiations, they're going to try to things like turn off the water and electricity to a couple of buildings, try to persuade them to leave but looking for opportunities to do in these other two places what they did in kharkiv. the fear is that one person said, you know, we may be facing terrorism. i said, what do you mean? he said, you remember putin stained a terrorist attack in russia as a pretext for starting the second chechen war, and now that there's more violence and weapons, we are very worried something like that could erupt. >> woodruff: very quickly, margaret, what about the international response? what are other countries and organizations saying? >> secretary kerry pushed back at the hearing today when senator mccain said you should be arming the ukraine military and the u.s. is putting money on helping kiev make an economic transition. ukrainians feel their future lies with the west. there is logistical and some intelligence help being given. but the ukrainian military forces are to a great degree on their own. the big hope is to have at least this meeting which i referred to at the end of the piece where finally the russians would sit down with the ukrainians which they won't admit is a legit government. i got an email three minutes ago saying that actually is going to happen next week. >> woodruff: you were just there and now things are moving very fast. >> very fast. >> woodruff: yet again. margaret, thank you. >> woodruff: president obama and congressional democrats launched a coordinated effort today to draw attention to women's wages. republicans on capitol hill said the push had little to do with policy and everything to do with politics. >> woodruff: women in the workforce, and how much they earn, were the focus at the white house on this equal pay day. >> it's nice to have a day, but it's even better to have equal pay. >> woodruff: the president was joined by advocates, including lilly ledbetter, famous for her lawsuit that led to pay-equity legislation, the first bill mr. obama signed after taking office. today, he took two executive actions, aimed at federal contractors. one bars companies from retaliating against workers who discuss their pay with each other. the other requires compensation data broken down by race and gender. census data shows women make 77% of what men make, and equal pay day marks the date when the average woman's earnings finally equal a man's total earnings for the previous year. the president challenged republicans to support a senate bill that would make it easier for workers to sue over pay discrimination. >> if republicans in congress want to prove me wrong, if they want to show that they in fact do care about women being paid the same as men, then show me. >> warner: in the senate, democrats, led by maryland's barbara mikulski, joined in trying to ratchet up the pressure. >> we want the same pay for the same job. and we want it in our lawbooks and we want it in our checkbooks. >> warner: republicans accused the president and democrats of using the pay issue purely for political gain. cathy mcmorris rodgers represents a district in washington state. >> on this equal pay day, let's stop politicizing women and focus on the policies that are going to empower women and create a higher paycheck, more opportunities, and that opportunity for a better life. >> warner: house majority leader eric cantor, said both sides should take a look at existing laws. >> it's probably better for us to sit down and see that the law is being properly implemented, rather than play politics. >> warner: the political volleys underscore the key role of women voters in elections. mr. obama won women by double digits in the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. as did democrats in the 2006 mid-terms, when they captured majorities in both the house and senate. but republicans narrowly won women in 2010 when they took back control of the house. now, democrats are hoping equal pay will turn out women in their favor, and help fend off a republican bid to win the senate. the paycheck fairness bill faces a procedural vote in the senate tomorrow. >> woodruff: we explore the broader issues raised by this political fight with: genevieve wood, a senior contributor to the foundry, a news and commentary site affiliated with the heritage foundation. and ariane hegewisch, the study director at the institute for women's policy research. we welcome you both to the "newshour". ariane hegewisch, do you first, how serious is the gap in wages between men and women today in this country? >> it's pretty serious. w omen who work full time, year-round, the most committed workers only make 77 cents on average for every dollar made by a man, so if you accumulate that over a year, over a lifetime, it makes for a lot of less money and less money to pay for pensions and to buy cars and to invest in your family, so it's a big issue. >> woodruff: genevieve, do you agree it's a serious gap? >> well, i think the problem is the way people calculate the numbers, judy. look, if you compare apples to apples, a woman and a man in the same job, they bring similar experience to the table, they bring similar skills and education background to the table, when you look at it that way, the wage gap all but disappears. as a matter of fact, that's even according to the department of labor who did a study on this. where you get the larger discrepancy is when you combine all jobs. so a high school teach who are, let's say, is a woman with many members of congress who happen to be men who make more money, when you look at it that way, looks like men are making more. but the you compare a female member of congress to a male member of congress, they're making the same amount of money, and i think it's really important to look at that because i'm a woman, i think women should make equal to what men should make if we're doing the same job and bringing the same to the table, but i think it's very discouraging and a disservice to young women who are entering to the workforce now to say to them, you need to be nervous about this. you need not have confidence to walk in to a new job and ask for a raise if you think you deserve one and i think that's what this political rhetoric does, a disservice to young women as to posed to telling them, we've made great strides, go for it, you can make the same. >> woodruff: what about this point, ariane hegewisch, what about this point, men and women are earning the same thing doing the same job, it's just that women happen to occupy lower-paying job. >> in congress, male and female representatives do make the same money. we just analyzed the 20 most common occupations, and in none of them do women make the same as men. you know, there's a pay gap in each of them. and if you take something like financial advisors, women have the same training, same qualifications, but they make less because there is discrimination in who gets access to the best jobs. >> woodruff: discrimination. it's discrimination. >> woodruff: genevieve, what about that? >> you have to look at the labor department study on. this they did that very thing. they looked at men and women in the same professions with similar years in the workforce, similar backgrounds, and said the wage gap basically disappears anywhere from 96 cents to a man making a dollar up to 98 cents. so there's 2 cents we need to make up. but men and women make different choices. georgetown did an interesting study, they looked at what majors guys choose when they go to college and what majors women choose. men tend to outnumber women in the top ten wage earners, ending up making the most when they get out of college. women outnumber men in the bottom set. if you want to make a lot of money, be a petroleum engineer. those who major in visual arts make less. that's a choice people make. >> ariane hegewisch, is it all about the choices women are making? they're not choosing to go into the more lucrative jobs? >> i think it's an issue of women being more likely to work in lower-paid occupations. the question is whether this is choice or whether it's the way jobs are. we need teachers, and to say a teacher ought to be paid -- you know, all teachers have to become engineers or i.t. professionals would be rue ton our economy because we need teachers and teachers need to be well paid. the second issue is how much -- we just did a study on women working blue-collar jobs, and a lot of those are electricians, you know, carpenters, they pay very well, and you don't have to pay for your education because it's apprenticeship. not one of the women we interviewed had been told about this prospect by counselors in schools, you know, it was all happenstance, and then a lot of them face discrimination. and there are some cases of petroleum engineers, and you don't want to look at what happened to the women who do that. it's not quite as easy. >> i was going to say maybe we should pay teachers what we pay congressmen and reverse it out. but one thing we should look at is if you look at young women today in metropolitan cities, single, childless, they are actually making 8% more than their male counterparts in those places. so i think there's a lot of good news, and i think we should talk about that, and we should not distort the numbers, which i think the white house is doing and, judy, i think your piece set it up. it's a political year. they want women to think there's a war going on against them. the fact is women are doing pretty well. >> woodruff: sounds like there's going to be a disagreement about how serious the gap is, but just in the little bit of time we have left, ariane hegewisch, what needs to be done? contractors say they need to disclose how much they're paying whether, women are earning the same as men in government contracts, and you're saying there needs to be an even playing field. >> exactly. if there's transparency and social science research to show it, if there's transparency, the gender wage gap disappears. there might be some women who are better than men and some men better than women but they get paid more but you need objective criteria. >> woodruff: genevieve, what about the notion of disclosing how much everyone is paid, whether a government contractor or someone else which would require congressional legislation? >> well, i don't think we ought to be forcing private industry to do such a thing, but the fact is, with all these things, good intentions of what sounds good, you've got to look at the repercussions of this, and i think we should be very concerned that if we have washington, the government telling employers, here's what you've got to pay people. people need different jobs, the same amount. what you're going to do is actually end up having employers say, you know what? if i've got to pay everyone the same wages to come down, performance pay and bonuses go out the window, that's bad for women and men. >> well, employers have had to do this for a long time. they have to monitor their pay and they're not allowed to discriminate, and performance-related pay hasn't disappeared more pay deferences disappeared, you just want the discrimination to disappear. there's one more point, it's not a war on women. women are really angry about discrimination. it's an issue that women bring to the government and they're trying to do something about it. >> woodruff: we are going to leave it there. we thank you both for being with us, genevieve wood and ariane hegewisch. thank you. >> thank you. >> woodruff: several countries in west africa are now coping with the worst outbreak of the ebola virus in years. the world health organization describes it as one of the most challenging episodes of the disease it's ever faced. more than 100 people have died so far. ebola, which is spread by a virus initially transmitted from wild animals, has a high fatality rate. jeffrey brown has more on the struggle to contain it. >> brown: one of the concerns is that ebola has crossed borders. guinea is where the outbreak began and was first made public in march. more than 100 deaths and 150 cases have been reported there. another troubling aspect: the disease has turned up in a wide area. from tropical forests to the capital of conarky to the liberian border. in liberia, investigators believe there are at least 10 deaths. health officials are now investigating possible cases in both in mali and ghana. more than 60% of infected people have died. laurie garrett of the council of foreign relations has tracked outbreaks in the past as a journalist and author of several books on global health and disease. she joins us now. lori, welcome back to the program. first, remind us a bit about what ebola is and exactly how it's transmitted. >> thank you. yeah, ebola is an rna virus, a very small virus that attacks the endothelial linings that maintain the blood veins, capillaries. first, a microscopic holes through which blood and fluids leak until they're larger and larger holes till the individual hemorrhages internally, and hemorrhaging blood through tears, the mouth, the nose, all over the body so they become quite frightening to see, and individuals will get a high fever. they may get blood in the brain which will lead to even more insane behavior, a kind of deranged look in their eyes, all of which contributes to a great deal of fear. on top of it all, the fluids contain virus, so they're highly, highly contagious to the touch. >> brown: so in the current situation, we're seeing it spreading into several countries. that's unusual, right? >> we've never seen this before. and as nsf put it correctly, this is unprecedented. we've had outbreaks before but they've always stayed within a country and even within a pretty confined part of the country. the outbreak, i was in zaire in 1995, it only got to a few peripheral villages, a large distance but walking distance. there were no ways to get around other than walking and land rovers. no streets, no roads, no real airports, and so on. this is different because this is a real city with a real airport, senegal is next door, has one of the biggest airports in all of west africa. it has crossed borders, involved multiple governments, multiple sets of policies. it's in all different kinds of religious communities, cultural communities, different languages, all of which makes conquering it much more difficult because your number one obstacle with ebola is fear and how the public responds. >> brown: but at the same time, health officials have said, they're reporting they've traced the sources of transmission for everyone who's sick. now, that sounds like a good sign for trying to contain this. >> could be. could be. but there are some fundamental mysteries here. something's going on in the rain forest because what these countries share is a special ecology, a special rain forest region in which the bats that normally carry the virus to the bat population but with pass it to other primates which can be eaten by humans or to people, hunters who may be in the rain forests. it's possible we're getting multiple introductions, or at least more than one, across the region. so if something's out in the rain forest which is why the bats are stressed and passing the virus, then we'll see multiple rounds of reintroduction. but the bottom line is to extract individuals from their homes, put them in quarantine, give them safe and, you know, humane care, and make sure that all the caregivers have proper protective gear. >> brown: and all that hasn't really changed all that much since ebola was first found in 1976, right? i mean, in terms of what can be done once an outbreak begins? >> we understand it a little better, but we don't have any different technology today than we've had all along since we've known of the ebola virus in 1976. it's all and hand washing, latex gloves, protective gear, masks and a kind of infection control. >> brown: on the one hand the w.h.o. is saying we're getting a handle on this but they're also saying it may take months to deal with. what does that tell you? >> well, it tells me that we have a real problem because it's so dispersed. it's across a broad, broad territory. multiple different ecologies, different cultures and, let's not forget, this is a region that has recently been through civil wars -- liberia, mahli, ongoing conflict. there are a lot of nerves, people are raw, there's suspicious and countersuspicious in populations for or against government, so trying to conquer a problem like this means overcoming a lot of larger political issues that have been in the region a long time. >> brown: lowe lori garrett, ths so much. >> woodruff: next, americans are being released from hospitals quicker, and sicker. that's put new demands on the family members who care for them. special correspondent kathleen mccleery reports from oklahoma as part of our "taking care" series. >> make sure we get all of the air out. >> reporter: cheryl mitchem never imagined retirement would look like this. when she and her husband alphus stopped working, they planned travel and other adventures. then, a year ago, a severe headache and a diagnosis of a malignant brain tumor upended the family's dreams. >> glioblastoma, which is a form of malignant brain cancer, but it stretches all over the whole brain, its not confined to one area. >> reporter: their 37 year old daughter kristin left her job as a pastry chef in north carolina to come home to oklahoma city to help. >> you want me to get you something to eat? >> you spend your whole life kind of in the care of your parents, and now that role has changed, where im kind of, you know, providing care, making sure that he has everything he needs. >> reporter: cheryl and kristin are among the 42 million americans caring for loved ones at home. and the tasks they perform have become increasingly complex. cleaning a feeding tube, for instance, capping a catheter line, checking blood sugar, administering an injection, and managing multiple prescriptions. >> when we have to flush his picc line, or clean his peg tube, or take his blood glucose, or his blood pressure, you know, none of us went to school for that, i mean were not educated that way. what i learned was by watching the nurses. i was never instructed how to do anything, they never did demonstrations, had me try anything. i don't feel like i had enough training at all for this. we kind of learned by trial and error. >> reporter: family members do 90% of care-giving and nearly half perform chores once limited to trained nurses. that's according to an a.a.r.p. sampling of more than 1,600 caregivers nationwide. >> hey, mom. did you take your medicine? >> reporter: that trend has prompted the organization to focus attention on caregivers and push state legislators to pass what they call the care act. >> reporter: oklahoma state director sean voskuhl is urging members to support it. >> so a.a.r.p. has been taking a hard look and making this a priority, but we also thought it was important to take a public policy approach, and giving a legal designation of a family caregiver in that process, because we find so many folks that are burdened, overwhelmed, and they want to know what do i do, where do i go for help? >> reporter: the bill would require the hospitals to list the caregiver on the patients chart to notify him or her before the patient is discharged, and to mandate training for the skills they'll need when the patient comes home. in oklahoma, its sponsor, state senator brian crain, understands the toll care-giving can take. >> my mother, the last five years of her life, suffered from alzheimers, and i know firsthand, as well as the rest of my family, the long goodbye that is alzheimers. my father, though, served as her caregiver. >> reporter: the care act passed the state senate in february and is being considered in the house. >> we recognize, as a state, that everyone needs to have a caregiver if they want one, and that caregiver needs to have some understanding of when you're going to be released from the hospital, and what it is that the hospital thinks needs to be done, so that you are not re-admitted unnecessarily. >> reporter: oklahoma lawmakers aren't alone in their quest to support family caregivers. hawaii, illinois and new jersey are all considering their own versions. here and elsewhere, the opposition comes mainly from those who will have to abide by new rules. >> we just do not feel like this is a necessary piece of legislation >> reporter: lawanna halstead is a vice president for the oklahoma hospital association. she's also a registered nurse. and she argues hospitals already follow strict guidelines, including medicare regulations, that require a smooth transition when patients are released. >> there is a multi-page chapter about discharge planning. if you are going to participate with medicare, meaning you're going to receive medicare funding for taking care of patients, then you have to follow these conditions. hospitals put in place multiple things, such as calling the patients twenty four hours, and forty eight hours after their discharged to ask them if they have any further questions, did you in fact get your prescriptions filled, do you remember that you have this physician visit, do you remember what your physical activity is, and what your diet is? >> reporter: a sampling of 400 likely voters in january showed strong support in oklahoma for caregivers and the new legislation. for pollster bill shapard, the issue hit home just before his data came in. >> my father fell and had a severe concussion, and i think what was impactful for me was that i got to see beyond just what i'm asking oklahoma voters to consider through polling, i got to live it. >> reporter: his mother, veda shapard, faced a flurry of confusing information when her husband was ready to come home. >> leaving the hospital was a bit of a challenge. i like to think of myself as somebody that's detail oriented, but the nurse came in and had all of the discharge papers, there was 22 pages of information for me. so, it was so pretty intense moments there for a while because you didn't know what to do. >> and its a little overwhelming. >> reporter: at st. anthony hospital, dr. robert rader coordinates a patients stay from admission to discharge. he says his staff does a good job instructing caregivers, but he worries about the possible impact of new regulations. >> hospitals are getting more and more crunched for resources and so i'm afraid that patient care might suffer as we begin to fragment things, trying to check boxes on another form that we have to check, i really think we need to not be distracted from the care that's being taken to the patient. >> reporter: not getting the right care is one reason some patients return to the hospital. 58% of oklahoma hospitals were penalized by medicare and medicaid for excessive re- admissions, that's about average nationally. the bills backers hope training caregivers will help reduce those multiple stays. the mitchems say they've already made serious mistakes that landed alphus back in the hospital. >> there have been some instances with one of the medications that we gave him, there were certain side effects that we needed to be looking out for, and we weren't told that we needed to look for those things, and so he had like, a reaction to one of those medications, and i felt really bad because the morning that we took him back to the emergency room, it was my morning to give that medication, and i did. >> reporter: but representative doug cox, an emergency room doctor himself, has reservations about whether legislation will make a difference. >> i'm not sure that we need to put another mandate on the hospitals when they're kind of moving in that direction, anyway. as you know, medicare and now even private insurance companies are holding hospitals liable for patients that are re-admitted within a close time of discharge, and so hospitals are being even more diligent about teaching home care at time of dismissal, to try to prevent those re-admissions. >> reporter: family caregivers don't get paid but the congressional budget office put a price tag on all those contributions, worth $234 billion to the u.s. economy in 2011. those jobs may have to be done by paid workers in the decades ahead. as the baby boomers age, they'll move from providing care to needing it. and because the next generation is smaller, the demand for, and on, family caregivers is sure to increase. >> woodruff: how many hours a week does the typical long-term caregiver donate to a sick parent or spouse? we have a by-the-numbers breakdown on what kind of impact this can have on their finances. that's on our homepage. >> woodruff: more than 21 million viewers tuned into last night's n.c.a.a. men's championship basketball game. a heady moment for university of connecticut fans. but also coming at a point when schools are facing new pressures about how they balance competing interests among athletics, academics and money. jeff is back with that story. >> brown: march madness, spilling over into april, a time when millions enjoy the thrills of college sports. last night, confetti filled the air of a.t.&.t. stadium, in arlington, texas, after the university of connecticut beat kentucky for the men's basketball championship. tonight, the u-conn women have their turn at a title tonight against notre dame, in a first- ever battle of un-beatens. but amid the on-court battles, a national debate grows over the big-time college sports, and the status and role of what are called student-athletes. one potentially ground-shifting decision came last month, when a regional director of the national labor relations board ruled that northwestern football players have the right to unionize. the team's former quarterback kain colter led the push. he told the aspen institute last week that most college athletes, who don't go pro, need protection. >> i mean, what this all boils down to is, you know, setting up these, you know, talented young men and women up for success down the road and the public should want that. >> reporter: the n.c.a.a., which governs college athletics, strongly disagrees. on sunday, it's president, mark emmert, called the concept of a players union grossly inappropriate. >> to convert to a unionized employee model is essentially to throw away the entire collegiate model for athletics. you can't split that one in two. you're either a student at a university playing your sports or you're an employee of that university. >> brown: the n.c.a.a. also faces a class action lawsuit, started by former u.c.l.a. basketball player ed o'bannon. he's asking a federal court to strike down the prohibition on student athletes gaining financially when their names and likenesses are used commercially. and kentucky's basketball success has further underscored the whole question of whether players are in fact students or athletes. the wildcats started five freshmen, and have become known for "one and done" players who play one year, and turn pro. coach john calipari says it's up to them. >> they sacrificed, they surrendered to each other now-- for our team, and for our program, and our school. season's over. now it's about them. i kind of stay out of the decision making. >> brown: in the coming weeks, several of calipari's freshmen stars are expected to announce they'll join the n.b.a. draft. >> brown: we get a pair of perspectives on some of these bigger issues that are being debated. patrick harker is president of the university of delaware and a member of the board of directors of the n.c.a.a. division one. and kevin blackistone, he is a panelist for e.s.p.n. and teaches sports journalism at the university of maryland kevin blackistone, let me start with you. put aside for the moment specific cases or solutions. what's the overall problem you see in college sports? >> inequity. inequity in money. it's inequity in power. it's inequity in resources. the resources are what this unionization of northwestern football players is all about. it's really not about compensation, but it's about things like health care, workers' compensation, protection for scholarships should they be injured and no longer able to play. most people in this country don't realize that scholarships are one-year renewable contracts with the university stamped by the athletic department. so if a player is hurt and he or she can no longer play, they can lose their scholarship. so it's really basic things like that, and it's really not very much about compensation in terms of hard dollars. >> brown: let me ask patrick harker, generally, first, is the word "crisis," do you accept that? what is the situation for college sports today? >> i think it's a crisis in losing sight of the fact that the most important part of the phrase "student athlete" is "student." i say that not just as a university president but a former student athlete. i'm here today because athletics opened doors for me. i'm worried starting middle school through college, we've lost sight of the fact that students need an education to be successful, even if they have a pro career. they're not going to do that forever, and after their career is over, they need another career, they need to be successful in something else, and they need an education. >> brown: pat harker, is the very term "student athlete" one we should use or discard, do you agree? >> yeah, because if you think about the university of delaware and most members of ncaa division 1, we use money on athletics, substantial sums of money. but you have to think of it as a subsidy. we're subsidizing an opportunity for students just like in theater and music. in this case, through athletics, to learn things they can't in the classroom and to provide in community the sense of competition, camaraderie and pride. but if you lose sight of that fact, then i think there is a problem. i mean, we lose money on lots of things. we lose money on every student that comes to the university if they're subsidized but we do it because there's a greater purpose, a great educational experience. >> brown: what do you think about the term "student athlete"? >> it should be discarded and it is a cover. as cover. it was invented by walter byers. he invented it back in the '60s to provide the ncaa cover from having exactly what is happening today happen then, and that was to have student athletes looked at as employees. the member institutions and ncaa had face add number of very serious lawsuits from players who had been critically injured on the field and they wanted their member institutions to take care of them as if they were what they are and that is employees of the university and walter byers explains in his confession in the mid '90s called unsportsmanlike conduct how he came up with the terms and what he meant by it. so the phrase student athlete in the media which we regurgitated has given cover to member institutions and courts when people try to challenge the notion. >> brown: president harker, when you say you think the student part of that is still the key, you argue against, for example, the idea of unions for college athletes. explain why you think that would be a bad idea. >> well, look, we lose money on every sport we offer at the university of delaware and every school at our level. so if we're required to spend more money and we're required to take our eye off the ball, giving these students a real education, then everybody loses, and we don't want to do that. again, personally, as a former student athlete, where doors opened for me because of that experience, i want to make sure this next generation has the same opportunities. >> brown: about what paying them, compensating them in any form? is that possible? >> well, we pay them through their scholarship today, but only half of our students are on scholarship. many, again -- we often think about men's basketball and football, but there are many student athletes on campus to take advantage of this opportunity. some are scholarships, but they're doing it for sport and what they learn. >> brown: kevin blackistone, he's making an important point we sometimes forget. we focus on these bigtime programs and bigtime sports and forget about everything else. >> well, right now there's an erosion going on in college athletics and has been for some time. the university of delaware is one of the schools that is suffering the erosion and, sooner or later, there is going to be, if there isn't, already, a core of 50, maybe 60 schools, at least half of which do make profit off their athletics who are going to be controlling the sport. so i think, sooner or later, as we've seen through the formation of the b.c.s. over the years, which -- and a new football contract playoff which they were still opposed to a few years ago have decided to do it for $5.6 billion from espn, i think you will see those schools start to circle around the pile of money that they are able to generate and keep that for themselves. >> brown: what harm do you see in that system? >> well, if that system continues, i think the harm is going to be to the schools that cannot participate in it, and we know that there has been an arms race, an athletics race over the years. every year, there's another very small school which plurchtion down a few million dollars to start up a football program. why? just because it brings marketing and public relations to your university and also from the idea that maybe somehow you can make a buck off of this. i think that that's the problem here. so a union, once again, really what these kids are talking about really is not the compensation, but resources and power and a seat at the table with the ncaa so they can bargain for their own rights. >> brown: so pat harker, you can respond to that in the last minute. what would you like to see happen? >> first, remember the conferences kevin is talking about are the exception, not the rule. we -- universities like the university of delaware are the majority of division one. what i worry about is, in this conversation, we're letting five conferences potentially through the media drive the debate. for colleges at our level, i'd like to see, as i said earlier, a renewed focus on the student athlete, and that means not only the success on the field but their success in the classroom to make sure that they can get the major of choice. sometimes we've set this up where it's a little difficult to do. we have geographically dispersed conferences whether on trains or planes, i think we need to concentrate on geographic consolidation so students are away from campus so they can get a degree that involves a lab or a research project. that's what i did when i was a student athlete and led me to the career i have today. >> brown: patrick harker, president of the university of delaware, kevin blackistone. thank you both very much. >> thank you. >> woodruff: again, the major developments of the day. government forces in ukraine regained control of a regional headquarters in one eastern city. pro-russian separatists were holding out in two other cities. search crews in the indian ocean failed to pick up more underwater pings from a malaysian jetliner, one month after it disappeared. and president obama took execution actions to press the cause of equal pay for women. on the newshour online right now, we have a follow-up to our story on the fight within the air force over the retiring of the a-10 warthog. what do the men who call in air strikes think about the decision? we have their reaction on our world page. all that and more is on our web site, newshour.pbs.org. and that's the newshour for tonight. on wednesday, a look at what has and hasn't changed for bangladesh's garment industry, one year after a factory collapsed, killing more than 1,000 workers. i'm judy woodruff. we'll see you on-line, and again here tomorrow evening. for all of us here at the pbs newshour, thank you and good night. >> major funding for the pbs newshour has been provided by: ♪ ♪ moving our economy for 160 years. bnsf, the engine that connects us. >> and by the alfred p. sloan foundation. supporting science, technology, and improved economic performance and financial literacy in the 21st century. >> and with the ongoing support of these institutions and foundations. and... >> this program was made possible by the corporation for public broadcasting. and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. captioning sponsored by macneil/lehrer productions captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org this is "nightly business report," with tyler mathisen and susie gharib. failure to comply, general motors safina ed fined by its safety regular later for not answering all the questions on the safety recall. what it all means for the automaker. and they're off, alcoa out of the gate with a mixed bag of earnings, but the season is not expected to be strong and too cou that could lead to a bumpy road. and tax deadline, one week to go, if you have not filed your taxes yet. we have a few strategies you can still use to all of your advantages, all this and more for tuesday april 8th. good evening everybody.
supporting organizations whose mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society. the bernard and audre rapoport foundation. the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. more information at macfound.org. anne gumowitz. the betsy and jesse fink foundation. the hkh foundation. barbara g. fleischman. and by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america, designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. >> welcome. let us now praise common sense. once again a president was about to plunge us into the darkest waters of foreign policy where the ruling principle becomes, "when in doubt, bomb someone." strategists in the white house, militarists in the think tanks, the powerful pro-israel lobby aipac, and arm-chair warriors of all stripes, neo-conservatives and liberal humanitarians alike, were all telling barack obama to strike syria, no matter the absence of any law or treaty to justify it, no matter the chaos to follow. do it, they said, to show you can, or what's a super power for? but they hadn't reckoned on public opinion. the people said no, not this time. not after more than ten years of soldiers coming home broken in body, screaming nightmares in their brains, their families devastated. not when our politics is an egregious fraud, unable to accomplish anything except enable the rich, while everyday people struggle to make ends meet. jeannette baskin, who lives on staten island not far from the statue of liberty, who describes herself as neither republican nor democrat, told the "new york times," "we invest all this money in foreign countries and fixing their problems, and this country is falling apart." don't think these people callous, those pictures of children gassed in syria sicken them. but there are limits to military power when religious rivalries and secular passions come armed with blowtorches. a retired educator named alice ridinger in hanover, pennsylvania, spoke for multitudes when she also told the "times" that while she finds the use of chemical weapons "terrible," she fears the deeper involvement that could follow a military strike. "i don't think that would be the end of it," she said. truth is, no one knows what would happen once the missiles fly. not the white house or pentagon. not the cia or nsa. not even the all-seeing oracles of cable television, the editorial writers of "the wall street journal," or the seers of such influential publications as "the economist," hawkish now on syria despite having been wrong on iraq. in time, the white house, congress, and the punditry could all be grateful to a suddenly attentive and stubborn public. they may have been spared a folly, thanks to this collective common sense that became so palpable it was a force in its own right. now politics and diplomacy have a chance. perhaps only a slight chance, the "washington post" reports that the cia has just begun delivering weapons to rebels in syria, deepening america's stake in the civil war. but we can't know if politics and diplomacy work unless we give them a try. meanwhile, give a cheer for common sense. so with the drums of war quieted for the moment, millions of us will take a deep breath and turn our attention from all syria all the time to the yankees and the red sox, the giants and the broncos. yes, it's that time of year, when our national pastimes compete and collide, and there simply aren't enough hours in the day or night for all the alluring distractions offered. the weekend's so packed with games it's hard to keep up with who's on first and who's been knocked flat on their backs. or, to be a bit more cynical, who's on steroids and who's being carried unconscious to the locker room. which is why i've asked dave zirin to help us keep score. he's been called "the best sportswriter in the united states." the reporter who, you may remember, challenged the president of bridgestone firestone on whether his product should be the "official tire sponsor" of the super bowl while the company was fighting a lawsuit for allegedly using child labor in liberia. zirin's the first sportswriter in the long history of "the nation" magazine. he hosts sirius xm radio's popular show "edge of sports." and he's written several provocative, even scathing books on sports and society, including, "bad sports: how owners are ruining the games we love," and this his most recent, "game over: how politics has turned the sports world upside down." oh, yes, utne reader named dave zirin one of the "50 visionaries who are changing the world." welcome to the show. >> oh, it's great to be here. >> you go back a long way with your chronicling of sports. how did sports grab you? >> well, i mean, i grew up in new york city just an absolute sports freak. i mean, i memorized statistics, i followed all those great new york city teams in the '80s, the mets, knicks, unbelievable. my room was a shrine to these people. i mean, folks like darryl strawberry, keith hernandez, lawrence taylor. and i never really thought about or cared about politics very much. and that really changed for me in 1996 when i was in college in minnesota. at the time, there was a player for the denver nuggets named mahmoud abdul-rauf who made the decision to not go out for the national anthem before games. and when -- >> because? >> because he said he felt like it violated his religious principles. and he didn't believe that there should be a conflation of sports, and as he put it, paying worship to a flag. and so a reporter got wind of it and went to him and said, "what are you doing? don't you realize that that flag is a symbol of freedom and democracy throughout the world?" and rauf said, "well, it may be a symbol of freedom and democracy to some, but it's a symbol of oppression and tyranny to others." now when he said this, the sports world just blew up. i mean, espn was, like, rauf spits on the flag. boo-yah. and everybody was crowding around and watching this. and i remember seeing one of the talking heads say, well, rauf must see himself as an athlete activist, you know, like muhammad ali or billie jean king. and i'll never forget watching that and thinking to myself, athlete activist? what the heck is that? i thought i was this huge sports fan and memorizing all the stats. it seems like there's this whole world that i didn't know existed. and so i went to library, i've started reading a lot of old articles, started digging in the crates, reading old biographies. found a book co-written by taylor branch, actually, called "second wind," it's one of bill russell's books. and it opened this world to me. and so i started to think to myself, okay, if this applies to the past, how does it apply to the present and how does sports shape our political lives today? >> and you made a beat for yourself out of focusing on the ground between politics and sports. >> well, it's such a rich vein because, i mean, on a given week, it's never a what am i going to write about? it's, what am i not going to write about? because there's always so much happening in the world of sports, and there's always so many different ways in which sports, not just reflects our lives, but actually shapes our lives. i mean, it shapes our understanding of things like racism, sexism, homophobia. it shapes our understanding of our country. it shapes our understanding of corporations and what's happening to our cities. i mean, in so many different ways, sports stories are stories of american life in the 21st century. >> i know you've seen bill siegel's documentary, a new documentary on "the trials of muhammad ali." what do you think about it? >> it's absolutely brilliant. look, i have seen every muhammad ali documentary. and this is by far the best one i've ever seen for a couple of reasons. first and foremost, there is about an hour of footage in there that i have never seen before. all this incredible footage of muhammad ali speaking on college campuses in 1968. speaking out with incredible eloquence against the war in vietnam. and it's a remarkable thing to be able to see footage that has so long been underground actually get unearthed for people to see, and to truly appreciate what it was that made muhammad ali so dangerous. because i think that's what we've really forgotten. >> and the old-time leaders of the civil rights movement were concerned that he was going to take them over the deep end, that they -- >> exactly. >> would lose support in the white house and elsewhere. >> i think that's something that people today don't really understand is that you had these two titanic social movements in the 1960s, the struggle against the war in vietnam and the african american freedom struggle. and then here you have the most famous athlete on earth with one foot in both. >> no, i will not go ten thousand miles from here to help murder and kill another poor people simply to continue the domination of white slave masters over the darker people of the earth. >> mr. muhammad ali has just refused to be inducted into the united states armed forces. notification of his refusal is being made to the united states attorney and the local selective service board for whatever action deemed to be appropriate. >> so he's transgressive on all these different levels. but the other thing when we look at ali is we also have to remember that he didn't show up in the 1960s, like, coming down from planet awesome to educate all of us about politics and sports. i mean, he wasn't malcolm x in boxing gloves or anything. when you look at his life, here he is in 1960, he's 18-years-old, he wins a gold medal at the rome olympics. and his hero was a professional wrestler named gorgeous george wagner -- >> gorgeous george. >> and he wanted to bring the showmanship of professional wrestling into boxing. and then the '60s kind of happened to him. and so, and that's one of the things that the movie does, which is so brilliant, is that it shows the way, the time shaped muhammad ali, and then muhammad ali turned and shaped his times. >> were you taken by surprise at the range of voices that were arrayed against him across a spectrum from the right, william f. buckley, to the left, david susskind? >> i find nothing amusing or interesting or tolerable about this man. he's a disgrace to his country his race and what he laughingly describes as his profession, he's a convicted felon in the united states. he has been found guilty. he is out on bail. he will inevitably go to prison, as well he should. he's a simplistic fool and a pawn. >> that's the part that i think people don't know today and don't understand today, because we really, we've done to muhammad ali what we've done to martin luther king, is we've turned them into these kind of harmless icons who live above the fray of messy politics. and so just like we don't learn about the martin luther king who spoke out against inequality and spoke for government intervention to solve social ills, things that would make him, of course, politically controversial today, we don't talk about the muhammad ali who said things like, the real enemy of my people is here. i am not going to speak out against people in vietnam who are fighting for their own liberation, while here at home my own people in louisville are treated like dogs. >> you've been drawn and written about martin luther king and sports. how did you come to that? >> well, it just, it was a fascinating thing in reading biographies of dr. martin luther king, particularly the magisterial work of taylor branch and then reading some sports biographies about athletes in the 1960s, how much overlap there is. and how much connection there is or the way that martin luther king was somebody who just kept a close eye about what was happening in the world of sports. i think dr. king was greatly influenced by jackie robinson and jackie robinson's breaking of baseball's color barrier in 1947. >> and years later he said of jackie robinson, he was a sit-iner before sit-ins. he was a freedom rider before freedom rides. and he got how important jackie robinson was to the struggle. he got that you couldn't talk about the civil rights movement without talking about robinson. and so because of that and because i think of a sense in dr. king that, you know, the arc of history bends towards justice, that when there was an athlete speaking out, he never said, that person needs to just shut up and play. so when his closest advisors like, for example, roy wilkins, spoke out incredibly harshly against muhammad ali, dr. king was someone who would not do that and would actually exchange private conversations. and they even appeared together in public at a rally in louisville for fair housing. and most significantly when there was a movement in the late '60s by african american athletes to boycott the '68 olympics in mexico city, which of course resulted in tommie smith and john carlos and their famous raised fist. dr. martin luther king defended their right to boycott, calling it an amazing act of nonviolent civil disobedience. and when martin luther king decided in 1967 that he would go public with his opposition to the war in vietnam, one of the things that he said was, well, it's like muhammad ali says, we're all victims of a system of oppression. >> it is my hope that every young man in this country who finds this war objectionable, and abominable, and unjust will file as a conscientious objector. and no matter what you think of mr. muhammad ali's religion, you certainly have to admire his courage. >> and so what you had there was martin luther king drawing upon the experience of muhammad ali as a way to defend his own position, which at the time, was extremely unpopular. so i always found that incredible fascinating that here's martin luther king, his own advisors are telling him, don't stand against the war in vietnam. keep your focus on domestic issues. and not only does king take that risk, but he mentions muhammad ali's name. he mentions the name of a boxer as a way to justify it. and i would encourage people today to really think about, imagine if a similar figure referenced lebron james to say why they were taking a political stand. i mean, it says something about the kind of stature that muhammad ali had. >> is there a sports giant today who is speaking to issues of social justice the way muhammad ali did? >> the main issue is, are there movements in the streets? because when there are movements off the playing field, they reflect on the playing field. so in the last couple of years, we've seen things like the entire miami heat team with lebron james and dwyane wade, they're superstars in the lead, all wearing hoods in protest of, at the time at the fact that george zimmerman had not been arrested for the shooting of trayvon martin. and many athletes like carmelo anthony of the new york knicks, he was very vocal about that as well. so you saw something there where it connected with players, particularly of african american players, very strongly, that there needed to be justice as a result of the trayvon martin case. the other issue that of course is huge right now is the issue of lgbt athletes, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender athletes standing up and speaking out for their right to their own humanity inside a locker room. now historically, a locker room has been, it's been called "the last closet," like an incredible bastion of homophobia. i mean, this goes back to theodore roosevelt, who encouraged young boys to play tackle football, and said if they didn't they were sissies. so, and he popularized that phrase, the sissy. and it was a way of differentiating, are you going to be a leader, are you going to be tough, are you going to lead the new american century and play football? or are you going to be a sissy? and for women who wanted to play sports, you had a similar dynamic where wait a minute, what does it say about you that you want these so-called male attributes like leadership and strength and, you know, physical daring? like, what does it say about you? well, you must, there must be something wrong with you. you must be a lesbian or they would say all kinds of things about women who wanted to play sports. and what you're seeing now in the 21st century are people really pushing back against that. so in the last, even just few months, you've had jason collins become the first active male player to come out of the closet in the history of north american sports. you had robbie rogers, a professional soccer player who came out and then retired at the same time, even though he was just 25-years-old, because he said he didn't think he could be out in the locker room. and then after jason collins came out, he got back on the field and played and said, jason collins inspired me. and you've had brittney griner who is arguably the best woman's basketball player of her generation. she came out of the closet so smoothly, you wondered if she was ever in. and so you have a new generation of athletes who are using that platform of sports to speak out about sexuality and human rights and dignity in a way that i think would do the people from the 1960s very proud. >> as you know, there's a controversy brewing over the olympic games being held next winter in russia. president putin has enacted a law threatening fines or even prison for anything considered to be gay propaganda. and some people are calling for a boycott of those games. >> i don't think that the united states should boycott, even though i'm horrified by not just the laws, but some of the attendant violence that's taking place in russia against the lgbt community and even their, their allies and supporters. i'm not for a boycott, because i think first of all the athletes themselves are going to be prime to go over there and make a statement when they're in russia. and i think that history shows that has a profoundly more powerful effect on the political culture than if you just stay home. i had the great fortune of doing a book with john carlos. and i asked what he thought about the russia olympics. and i said, "should people go over there and protest or should they stay home?" and he said, "well, if i'd stayed home, no one would ever have heard what i had to say. and who would remember that i stayed home today? but people remember that i went and i said my piece. so i think you've got to give people the chance to say their piece." >> but it's still very difficult for them, isn't it? >> yeah, absolutely. and i think there are two big reasons why it's so difficult in the world of sports. the first reason is of course that people want sports to be as apolitical as possible because it's escape. you know, people just want to sit back, relax, and enjoy the game. >> and it is. >> and, yes. >> don't you go to games for escapism? are you always looking at what this means that we're not seeing? >> oh no, i like the escapism too, but it's a little hard to go see the mets and be sitting in a place called citi field named after a bank that was paid for by billions in public dollars, and not think to yourself, yeah, i think that there's some political things maybe going on here that we should pay attention to. but also, i think owners tend to be politically on the right wing of the spectrum. and when they say, and when a lot of their friends in the sports media say, sports and politics shouldn't mix, what they're really saying is sports and a certain kind of politics shouldn't mix. because when it comes to the politics of things like militarism and corporatism, those politics are blaring at a typical game. but when it comes to a player actually trying to use their hyper-exalted, brought to you by nike platform to say something about the world in which they live, well, then that can be, as you said, there can be not a very graceful response to that. >> you mentioned the historian taylor branch who wrote that magnificent series on the civil, history of the civil rights movement. he said not too long ago that college sports in particular still reeks with the whiff of the plantation. >> right. >> you think that's true? >> oh, absolutely. i mean, you know, the first person who i could find who made that analysis of calling college sports a plantation was a man named walter byers. walter byers headed the ncaa from 1951 to 1988. he is responsible for the shaping of the ncaa. and when he left the sport, he said, we've turned it into a plantation system, meaning that there is a tremendous amount of money being generated that would flow into very few hands, and none of that money, obviously, going into the hands of the people on the field or on the court themselves. i mean, it is such a wild scam what happens in college sports in this country. and it's only getting worse. >> do you think college athletes should be paid? >> i think they should because of the revenue that they generate. i mean, think about it like this, woody hayes, he's the coach over at ohio state, his last year coaching there, he made $43,000 a year. today the coach at ohio state, urban meyer, makes $4 million a year as a base salary, $4 million a year. the head of the ncaa, mark emmert, makes almost $2 million a year. now keep in mind, the ncaa is a nonprofit. i mean, i'd hate to think of how it would operate if it was a industry for profit. >> the coach at my alma mater, university of texas, mack brown, had a so-so record two years ago, eight and five, and yet he got $5 million because essentially he took the team to the holiday bowl -- >> right. >> the university officials defended that, saying, well, look our athletics brought in $103 million revenue last year. >> well, i mean, there's some really basic reforms that should happen right away, because the argument you always hear when people say that athletes shouldn't be paid is, well, they get a four-year scholarship. and so the first thing we need to say in response to that is, that's factually not true. college athletes get one-year scholarships that are renewed on an annual basis. so you could have a 4.0 gpa and be your class president. but if you're not performing on the field, you're gone. so to even call them student-athletes isn't even true. i once interviewed a former all-american, and the way he put it is the way i always carry with me, he said, "we're not student-athletes, we're athlete-students, because the second we get on campus it's made clear to us what our priority should be." so the reality at this point, it's basically they're campus workers who don't get paid. and that kind of injustice i don't think should be allowed to stand. >> what would you do about college, football in particular? >> if i could wave a magic wand, i would absolutely delink these kinds of sports from a university setting. and i would say look -- >> it wouldn't be the university of texas longhorns? >> i'm sorry, but i said magic wand, this is just the magic wand. i have a feeling i wouldn't get very far in texas with this argument. but -- >> you might get into the state, but not out. >> i wouldn't get into the state -- but this is the point though, is that web du bois wrote about this a hundred years ago, about the way that he felt like football was distorting, or as he put it, king football was distorting the atmosphere at yale university. and it's actually quaint what he wrote. he said, "the football budget is seven times the classics budget." and it's like, well, just seven times, my goodness. and so you fast forward to today, i would want the nfl with all of its billions to pony up for its own minor league. i would want the nba to do the same. because it really shouldn't shock us that sports that draw the most heavily on people of color, are also the sports that put them in a completely disempowered position, where they're training for these professional leagues without getting a dime in their pocket. so if we could delink them, i absolutely would. we're not going to. i get how deep this is in the vein of the culture. so i think a much more sane approach is first and foremost, if players can make money off their individual image, they should be free to do so. i mean, there's something obscene about a college player who boosters are paying literally $20,000 to have dinner with, but they don't get anything from that. or they sign a million things and they each get sold and the money goes to the university, but not even a little bit of it goes to them. but i think a much more sane thing would be to put caps on coaches' salaries, caps on assistant coaches' salaries. i mean, would it really be so terrible if mack brown made $1 million a year instead of $5 million or $6 million a year? i mean, would the talent pool for people who want to coach really dry up. i don't think so. that money could then go to a stipend for all people who play sports, male or female. and there is, i mean, this has been worked out that there's totally enough money in the system to make this happen, especially if colleges give up their addiction to stadium funding. i mean, at texas a&m where this kid johnny manziel, the heisman trophy winner is in so much trouble for allegedly taking a couple of grand for signing autographs. they're about to open up $450 million in renovations on their foot, and they said they want it to be a megaphone to the world. that's how it was described by the athletic director. and so they want it to be a megaphone, but the person who's actually been yelling through the megaphone, so everybody knows about texas a&m, johnny manziel, doesn't see anything of that. >> supporters of the present system, critics of yours would say, but this money, going to the coaches, going into the program, doesn't come from taxes. it comes from the revenue generated by the television contracts and all of that. >> there's a lot of truth to that argument. in some cases though it does actually draw in, at the state colleges, from state monies, especially when there are budget shortfalls. there's been terrible instances of this in california, for example, where they were cutting classes at cal berkeley while at the same time giving their coach jeff tedford a raise and doing hundreds of millions of dollars in renovations on the stadium. but the bigger issue is that the television money is just growing. espn just inked with the power conferences a 12-year, almost $6 billion contract to broadcast these college games. that's new revenue. that's $6 billion. and then people say, well no, that just goes back into the athletic department. and it's like, well, let's look at these coaches' salaries and how they're rising and still rising. let's look at now there's an arms race, if you will, of assistant coaches, where they're now making millions of dollars a year. and so what you're seeing is capitalism for some and i don't even know what you would call it, indentured servitude for the masses of athletes. and the concern is that a lot of these schools are becoming sports franchises where people happen to go to classes in between games. >> no one i know has covered so well the extent to which the world of sports has changed. what would you say is the defining feature of that change? >> the defining feature of that change can be seen in any city in this country where there is a publicly-funded, billion-dollar stadium. that to me is both a symbol and an expression of everything that's changed about the economics of sports. now look, i'm not saying that owners back in the day were these kindhearted creatures. but there was an economic system in sports where if you were an owner and you were going to make a profit, you needed to make sure that largely working-class fans would be able to pay money and put their butts in the seats and go to the park. now fans have largely become scenery. the way owners measure profits in this day and age are public subsidies for stadiums, luxury boxes at the stadium, and sweetheart cable deals. now what's so horrible about two of those three things, the cable aspect and the public subsidies for stadiums, is that we're paying for this whether we're sports fans or not. our cable bills go up, our taxes go up, to subsidize these kinds of ventures. and every single economic study shows that they don't work. so what these stadiums -- >> you mean they don't produce the revenue. >> no, it's more like a neo-liberal trojan horse. where people end up agreeing to things that they would never otherwise agree to, because it becomes wrapped in sports. and the idea, or maybe a fear that the team will move. or maybe excitement at the thought of a new building. yet we all pay a very serious price for this. i went to college in minnesota, i remember going to see the twins at the hubert h. humphrey metrodome. and it was not a good stadium. billy martin once famously walked in and said, how could hubert humphrey's parents name him after this dump? so it was a pretty awful stadium. and so, and i'm all for them having a new stadium, except the new stadium was built entirely with public money, even though it had been rejected a dozen times by the voters in various referendum. but the owner, carl pohlad, who's the richest owner in major league sports at the time, he devoted, and i, this is without exaggeration, the last 25 years of his life, from age 72 to 97, to lobbying to get this new stadium. that was his dream. and the very week they were going to break ground on the new stadium the bridge collapsed in minneapolis, sending about a dozen people to their deaths. a five-minute walk from where i live in d.c., the metro went off the rails the year after the new washington nationals' billion-dollar stadium opened. so people have to realize whether you're a sports fan or not, very real choices get made about the limited amount of public infrastructure dollars that we have. and if they don't get spent on infrastructure that safeguards our basic safety, then we all pay a price for that. >> what's the hold these billionaire owners have over the city fathers and sometimes city mothers of a place like detroit? i mean, you saw the headlines in detroit recently. one day the headline says, city declares bankruptcy. the next day, the headline says, multi-million dollar new arena. >> detroit red wings. over $400 million for a new hockey stadium, the same week that they talk about detroit declaring bankruptcy. i mean, first and foremost, it's not being built for detroit, it's being built for a gentleman named mike ilitch, founder of little caesars pizza, the man is in his 80's, he's worth $2.7 billion. and he's getting over $400 million in public money for a $650 million arena. this was signed off on by rick snyder, the same governor who enacted the anti-labor laws that are in michigan that caused so much controversy last year, and making it a right-to-work state. >> but he says this is a rebuilding project that they're doing it for jobs. >> what a wonderful opportunity to see excitement. and this will have a big multiplier effect in terms of additional development in that whole area of detroit. so it's a good win for detroit. >> yeah, once again, it's like, what kind of jobs are you creating? and could that money be used for different kinds of jobs in detroit? detroit is a place you leave, not a place you settle. you need to have real jobs that create a real tax base that can fund real schools that actually work. and you've got to keep the street lights on and you've got to have a garbage collection. and first of all, the kinds of jobs that it creates, it doesn't produce tax revenue. it produces revenue for mike ilitch which he can then hide and not pay. but it doesn't produce tax revenue for the people who are going to, who actually have to live in detroit after this. >> so what's your intuition, if not your evidence, for what, how that happened? >> well, i do have a lot of evidence on this one, because fortunately, the public records are good on this stuff. and this is about mike ilitch having a lobbying wing at the michigan capital and having the ear of rick snyder, i mean, mike ilitch -- >> the governor. >> yes. mike ilitch wanted a new arena, the same way the steinbrenners wanted a new yankee stadium. the same way in this town fred wilpon, even though we didn't know it at the time, but he was borrowing money on the new mets stadium, citi field, and giving it to his best friend, who happened to be named bernie madoff to invest it for him. i mean, and that's the part of it that just boggles my mind, especially as someone who grew up a mets fan, the idea that sports can be used as a kind of economic shell game for people in power. and i think that really is how it happens. because there's an agenda at the top of society that wants corporate welfare. that's a huge part of that kind of 1% agenda. and sports is a way to do that without arousing the kind of ire that otherwise might exist. >> you've said that what's happened to sports in the last 30 years was actually preparing the public psyche, for what? >> i think for the wall street bailout more than anything else. i mean, if you think about the trillion dollars of public money that went to bailing out wall street after the 2008 financial crisis, and the terms of that bailout as well, asking nothing of wall street, prosecuting nobody, and preparing people for this idea that says the role of public spending is really to bail out private capital. and that's the way our society is going to work. money will flow up. we have a trickle-up economic program in this country. so instead of a more classical economic model that says, if you get money in the hands of working people, they will spend that money, and that will stimulate more demand and make the economy grow, the other thing the other model is now it's a finance model that says, get as much money as possible in the hands of big business. and that's going to be the basis of our economy, even though it's going to, in an incredible sense, be like inequality on steroids. now i think the way that sports has operated over the last, particularly in the go-go 1990s, when the economy was growing starting really in camden yard in baltimore you had this preparing of the public psyche to say, you know what the role of public money should be? to give it to private capital so they can build these stadiums. >> so what do we do about this? >> well, i think one of the things that's exciting about this moment, right here, right now, is that you have examples in places like brazil of people standing up. >> they're building all the stadiums for the world cup and people think of brazil as this soccer-mad country. and, of course, the organization that governs soccer is called fifa. and so the big banners in the streets were, we want fifa-quality hospitals. we want fifa-quality schools. and that became an in international news story, this idea of, no, the stadium doesn't represent civic pride, it represents why i have a bad hospital and why my kid goes to a failing school. that, to me, is a huge step. you know, that there's that expression that sometimes in struggle, days are like years, and sometimes years are like days. like what was happening in brazil was like years of work happening in a matter of days. and so the argument is now an easier one to make with people. the second thing that's encouraging is just popular opinion. i mean, it used to be they would do these sort of showcase referenda for new stadiums and whatnot. they don't do the referendums anymore. the former mayor here, rudolph giuliani was asked why there wasn't a referendum for the new yankee stadium. and he said, well, if we have a referendum, we'll lose, which was about as honest as you could get. so it starts with education, it starts with public awareness. and i think -- >> and anger, doesn't it? i mean -- >> it has to start with anger. >> in brazil, you could watch the people protesting the inequities brought on by the spending for the world cup facilities, and they're saying, we're mad as hell, we're not going to take it anymore. >> yeah, that's we are going to need a lot of that in this country. and i think we need to actually organize with sports fans and say, okay, you love sports, but do you really want to feel like you're subsidizing the person who owns this team? does that seem right to you? and go to unions and say, okay, you think there's union labor in building this stadium and that's why you support this project, but what happens when it's done? and then your kids are working for $8 an hour and the only way you'll ever go into this stadium is if you're selling beer. >> here we are at the convergence of two sports seasons that always get fans excited, me included. the opening of football, and the fall drive in baseball towards the world series. but then you have a controversy like alex rodriguez, a-rod. >> sure. >> with a 211 game suspension hanging over his head that he is going to appeal, alex rodriguez about to take his first at bat of the season. >> a-rod, appealing his suspension for cheating, he used performance enhancing drugs that he and other players got from that anti-aging clinic in florida, biogenesis. talk about a-rod. >> oh, yeah. i mean, it's so interesting, because on so many levels, i think alex rodriguez, there's a lot about him that's very loathsome. i live ten minutes away from a horrific slum with mold and ventilation problems and rats. alex rodriguez owns the slum. it's called newport ventures. and this has become a big local story in washington d.c. that alex rodriguez owns this horrific building. i mean, so the guy has made $350 million in his career. he's loathsome on a lot of levels in terms of how he uses his money and how he uses his fame. but at the same time, all of that being said what major league baseball is doing in terms of attacking him is precisely because he is such low-hanging fruit in that regard. he's not going to get a lot of defenders. but the part of the a-rod story which i think needs to be talked about more is less about alex rodriguez and more about the other players who were pinched in this biogenesis case. if you take alex rodriguez out of the picture, all the players who were just disciplined in the last couple of weeks, they all came through baseball's dominican republic pipeline. they were all players either from the dominican republic or from nicaragua or venezuela and they all go through the dominican to be trained before coming to the u.s. today, one out of every three minor league players is from the dominican republic, a country that has a poverty rate of over 40%. one out of three minor league players. now the other thing about the dominican republic is that steroids are legal and available over the counter. and so i look at major league baseball and i think, "these are people who want to have their anabolic cake and eat it too." they want to be able to develop a huge portion of their talent in a place that's a wild west for performance-enhancing drugs. and then in the 1990s, when they weren't testing, they made billions of dollars with the power surge and the increase in home runs. and now today, as the wheel has shifted, they've become the teetotalers who are cracking down in the name of public relations. i mean, every major league owner is like claude rains in casablanca saying, "i'm shocked there's gambling going on here. your winnings, sir." >> so is there a pattern in how baseball chooses its culprits? >> it's just like we were talking about before with our cities and with inequality. i mean, i also think that sports mirrors and reflects globalization. and so what you have baseball doing is investing billions of dollars in the dominican republic, where they can sign kids as young as 15-years-old for a couple thousand dollars. they get scouted before their tenth birthday. they go through these baseball academies that, i mean, it's been exposed so many times, like the substandard health and sanitation in these places. a young prospect for the, my hometown team now, the washington nationals died in one of these academies, a young man named yewri guillen. and we're at a point now where i think baseball has decided that it's better to be able to develop talent cheaply because 99% of them won't make major league baseball anyway, and to sign a bunch of people at higher rates when 99% of them won't make it anyway. so it's like a kind of brutal, brutal farm system that takes place down there. >> have we seen any of the owners penalized for failing to enforce the rules about steroids? >> not only have you not seen that, you didn't see one owner dragged in front of congress when the congress was doing their steroid investigations. you've never seen an owner asked, what did you know and when did you know it? even though we know for a fact that in the late '80s, you had trainers going to ownership meetings saying, hey, there's these things called synthetic testosterone, steroids, that they are going to flood the locker room in the next few years. and yet they either chose the policy of benign neglect or malignant intent. and we honestly, we don't know the answer precisely because they haven't been asked. you know, player once said to me, and this is kind of like my guiding compass to this whole issue. a player once said to me, when it comes to steroids punishment is an individual issue, but distribution is a team issue. and he was trying to make the point that when they crack down, they always go after the individual. and it's like the magical fishing net that catches the minnows while the whales go free. >> so now let's talk about football. a lot of attention is being paid to the scientific link between routine football plays and permanent brain damage. i want to play you a clip from a frontline documentary called "football high." >> starting in 2009, scientists at purdue university put sensors into the helmets of two high school football teams. the sensors measured every impact the athletes took over the course of a season. >> the original intent for this study was to study concussions. but we didn't experience any concussions for quite a few weeks, so we decided we would start bringing in some of our players who had not experienced concussions to just begin to understand whether or not there were any consequences from the blows that they were getting to their head. >> to the researchers' surprise, neurological tests revealed that players who had never reported symptoms of a concussion had suffered significant damage to their memories. >> you know what to do. this is the letters test, zero back, one back and two back. >> the sensors in helmets find that high school kids take more force to the brain than college kids. and the reality is, we know from the literature that the young, developing brain is far more vulnerable to this trauma. >> how do you change the game so that you're not getting all these small little hits that don't rise to the level of concussion? that's sort of the nature of the game. that's how it's being played. every time we line up, even in a practice, that's what's happening. so we're going to have to make dramatic changes or we don't change, we don't change the face of this disease. >> do you see those changes coming, given the fact that football is so deeply imbedded, as you have written and said, in the psyche of america? we love the violent sport. >> there will be changes and people need to recognize that they will be almost entirely cosmetic. think what we have to accept as a society, as a football-loving society, is that football is a lot like a cigarette. you can give it a bigger filter, you can tell people it has less tar, but no one has invented a safe cigarette. >> you don't think better helmets will work? >> horribly, some of the studies show that better helmets can make things actually more damaging, because it's harder to detect when you're actually hurt, when you actually get your so-called, your "bell rung" as they used to say. because it becomes the sort of thing where your brain is banging against your skull, which is banging against the sides of the helmet. and because there are less exterior injuries, which might be a telltale sign, you don't see them. so it actually becomes worse and more dangerous. that's the scary thing about this. i mean, we don't, what we know now is that you don't need a diagnosis of a concussion to have a concussion. i mean, these sub-concussive hits are actually more dangerous. i mean, i think we're so attune to thinking that the danger of football is some 6'4" 250-pound linebacker running at four or five speed and knocking your block off. but that's not the danger. it's the mundane, daily knocking into the next person. that's where the danger is. >> i have been a football fan all my life because i love the surprise of it. the hail mary pass that's in the air, the beauty of the last-minute tackle. but the beauty and the surprise seem to be less compelling to me, given these reports on concussions. and given the suicides of several professional football players. >> yeah, junior seau who played 20 years and was not diagnosed with a concussion once. dave duerson, who took his own life by shooting himself in the heart, just so his brain could be studied. and junior seau also took his own life by shooting himself in the heart. these are things that i think need to weigh heavily on the minds of football fans when they watch the game. i mean, people like violent movies, they like violent video games they like violent sports. but i'll tell you something. boxing is profoundly less popular now than it was in muhammad ali's day, and that's because people actually saw with their own eyes what people like muhammad ali went through after their careers. and i think the more people know about how players suffer after they leave the game, the more the sport is going to be in crisis. >> dave zirin, thank you very much for being with me. >> my privilege, thank you. >> when thomas jefferson wrote that all men are created equal, his monticello farm team was obviously not what he had in mind. they were chattel, possessions toiling in his fields. so it's not lightly that dave zirin and other observers invoke the plantation mentality to describe college football today, or the national football league. tom van riper, who covers sports for "forbes" magazine, points out that of the 31 owners of nfl teams, seventeen, more than half, are billionaires. many boast of being self-made in the image of horatio alger, and are now ensconced in luxury skyboxes far above the proletarians whose own dreams of glory ride vicariously on the grunts and groans of bulky but agile gladiators only one play away from a career's end. a collision with the laws of physics. football, like politics, ain't beanbag. the fortunes of players can vanish in a single blow, while high in their plush digs, owners reap continuing gains from tv and advertising and the tax breaks and subsidies showered on them by compliant politicians. big-time sports now mirrors the vast inequality that has come to define america in this century. soon after the taping of my interview with dave zirin, the nfl settled a class-action suit brought by more than four thousand retired players and their families seeking damages from injuries linked to concussions. to the casual fan, it was a win for the players, a sum of $765 million. but even if they finally have to cough up, the owners will feel no pain. that's just a fraction of the estimated $10 billion the league generates in revenue each year. the average payout per plaintiff will amount to around $150,000, not nearly enough to cover a lifetime of lost wages and medical bills faced by the victims of serious brain trauma. these players and their families haven't won much. it isn't even a tie. as another formidable sleuth of journalism, david cay johnston, recently asked in the "columbia journalism review", "if the settlement does not cover all the costs of medical care, much less lost future wages, who will bear that burden?" his answer, taxpayers. when players are no longer insured by the league and find themselves unable to afford private insurance for their enduring afflictions, taxpayers, that includes you and me, will be the ones to pay, through medicaid and social security disability. we won't even be allowed to see the nfl's own extensive research into the neurological damage caused by concussions. the settlement allows the league and the owners to keep it under lock and key. something else to remember as we relax in our favorite easy chair, dazzled and thrilled by men who can be hurt for life. if the world were just, they would not be so matter-of-factly tossed aside, we might think twice about how we want to be entertained, and the owners of capital would be amply penalized for unsportsmanlike conduct. we began the series last year with three broadcasts on winner take all politics, based on the book of that name by political scientists jacob hacker and paul pierson. their theme was the political engineering of inequality, or "how washington made the rich richer and turned its back on the middle class." in the next few months we will be returning to those core issues. next week, robert reich, named one of the best cabinet officers of the 20th century, will be with us to talk about his new documentary "inequality for all." >> now the thing you want to know about this mini cooper is it is small. we are in proportion, me and my car. my name is robert reich, i was secretary of labor under bill clinton. before that the carter administration. before that i was a special aid to abraham lincoln. of all developed nations, the united states has the most unequal distribution of income and we're surging toward even greater inequality. 1928 and 2007 become the peak years for income concentration, it looks like a suspension bridge. >> last year we made $36,000. >> think i probably make $50,000 a year working 70 hours a week. >> the middle class is struggling. people occasionally say to me, "now what nation does it better?" the answer is, the united states. in the decades after world war ii, the economy boomed but you had very low inequality. >> do you know robert reich? >> i do. >> he's a communist. >> when i was a kid, bigger boys would pick on me. i think it changed my life. i had to protect people from the people who would beat them up economically. who is actually looking out for the american worker? the answer is, nobody. if workers don't have power, if they don't have a voice, their wages and benefits start eroding. we are losing equal opportunity in america. anyone of you who feels cynical just consider where we have been. >>one of the purposes of this film, bill, is to make sure people understand that the only way we're going to get the economy to work for everybody and our society, once again to live up to the values of equal opportunity that at least we aspire to, is if we're mobilized, if we're energized. if we take citizenship to mean not simply voting and paying taxes and showing up for jury duty. but actually, participating in an active way, shutting off the television -- >> with some exceptions. >> there's some exception. and spending an hour or two a day in our communities, on our state, even on national politics, and putting pressure on people who should be doing the public's business instead of the business of the moneyed interests to actually respond to what's needed. >> at our website billmoyers.com there's a thought provoking variety of analysis and commentary. that's all at billmoyers.com. i'll see you there and i'll see you here, next time. this episode of "moyers & company" is available on dvd for $19.95. to order call 1-800-336-1917 or write to the address on your screen. funding is provided by -- carnegie corporation of new york, celebrating 100 years of philanthropy, and committed to doing real and permanent good in the world. the kohlberg foundation. independent production fund, with support from the partridge foundation, a john and polly guth charitable fund. the clements foundation. park foundation, dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. the herb alpert foundation, supporting organizations whose mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society. the bernard and audre rapoport foundation. the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. more information at macfound.org. anne gumowitz. the betsy and jesse fink foundation. the hkh foundation. barbara g. fleischman. and by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america, designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. captioning by vitac, underwritten by fireman's fund a last-minute scramble for hundreds of bills in sacramento. what passed, what didn't and what happens next. silicon valley companies fight back against the nsa surveillance program in an attempt to salvage their reputatio reputations. suspicious deaths and misconduct in nursing homes. the agency in charge of investigating now facing questions of neglect. plus, from cutting-edge exhibitions to world premiere performances, sy reveals his top entertainment picks. coming up next.
this week on "moyers & company" -- >> sports, not just reflects our lives, but actually shapes our lives. i mean, it shapes our understanding of things like racism, sexism, homophobia. it shapes our understanding of our country. it shapes our understanding of corporations and what's happening to our cities. i mean, in so many different ways, sports stories are stories of american life in the 21st century. >> announcer: funding is provided by -- carnegie corporation of new york, celebrating 100 years of philanthropy, and committed to doing real and permanent good in the world. the kohlberg foundation. independent production fund, with support from the partridge foundation, a john and polly guth charitable fund. the clements foundation. park foundation, dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. the herb alpert foundation, supporting organizations whose mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society. the bernard and audre rapoport foundation. the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. more information at macfound.org. anne gumowitz. the betsy and jesse fink foundation. the hkh foundation. barbara g. fleischman. and by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america, designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. >> welcome. let us now praise common sense. once again a president was about to plunge us into the darkest waters of foreign policy where the ruling principle becomes, "when in doubt, bomb someone." strategists in the white house, militarists in the think tanks, the powerful pro-israel lobby aipac, and arm-chair warriors of all stripes, neo-conservatives and liberal humanitarians alike, were all telling barack obama to strike syria, no matter the absence of any law or treaty to justify it, no matter the chaos to follow. do it, they said, to show you can, or what's a super power for? but they hadn't reckoned on public opinion. the people said no, not this time. not after more than ten years of soldiers coming home broken in body, screaming nightmares in their brains, their families devastated. not when our politics is an egregious fraud, unable to accomplish anything except enable the rich, while everyday people struggle to make ends meet. jeannette baskin, who lives on staten island not far from the statue of liberty, who describes herself as neither republican nor democrat, told the "new york times," "we invest all this money in foreign countries and fixing their problems, and this country is falling apart." don't think these people callous, those pictures of children gassed in syria sicken them. but there are limits to military power when religious rivalries and secular passions come armed with blowtorches. a retired educator named alice ridinger in hanover, pennsylvania, spoke for multitudes when she also told the "times" that while she finds the use of chemical weapons "terrible," she fears the deeper involvement that could follow a military strike. "i don't think that would be the end of it," she said. truth is, no one knows what would happen once the missiles fly. not the white house or pentagon. not the cia or nsa. not even the all-seeing oracles of cable television, the editorial writers of "the wall street journal," or the seers of such influential publications as "the economist," hawkish now on syria despite having been wrong on iraq. in time, the white house, congress, and the punditry could all be grateful to a suddenly attentive and stubborn public. they may have been spared a folly, thanks to this collective common sense that became so palpable it was a force in its own right. now politics and diplomacy have a chance. perhaps only a slight chance, the "washington post" reports that the cia has just begun delivering weapons to rebels in syria, deepening america's stake in the civil war. but we can't know if politics and diplomacy work unless we give them a try. meanwhile, give a cheer for common sense. so with the drums of war quieted for the moment, millions of us will take a deep breath and turn our attention from all syria all the time to the yankees and the red sox, the giants and the broncos. yes, it's that time of year, when our national pastimes compete and collide, and there simply aren't enough hours in the day or night for all the alluring distractions offered. the weekend's so packed with games it's hard to keep up with who's on first and who's been knocked flat on their backs. or, to be a bit more cynical, who's on steroids and who's being carried unconscious to the locker room. which is why i've asked dave zirin to help us keep score. he's been called "the best sportswriter in the united states." the reporter who, you may remember, challenged the president of bridgestone firestone on whether his product should be the "official tire sponsor" of the super bowl while the company was fighting a lawsuit for allegedly using child labor in liberia. zirin's the first sportswriter in the long history of "the nation" magazine. he hosts sirius xm radio's popular show "edge of sports." and he's written several provocative, even scathing books on sports and society, including, "bad sports: how owners are ruining the games we love," and this his most recent, "game over: how politics has turned the sports world upside down." oh, yes, utne reader named dave zirin one of the "50 visionaries who are changing the world." welcome to the show. >> oh, it's great to be here. >> you go back a long way with your chronicling of sports. how did sports grab you? >> well, i mean, i grew up in new york city just an absolute sports freak. i mean, i memorized statistics, i followed all those great new york city teams in the '80s, the mets, knicks, unbelievable. my room was a shrine to these people. i mean, folks like darryl strawberry, keith hernandez, lawrence taylor. and i never really thought about or cared about politics very much. and that really changed for me in 1996 when i was in college in minnesota. at the time, there was a player for the denver nuggets named mahmoud abdul-rauf who made the decision to not go out for the national anthem before games. and when -- >> because? >> because he said he felt like it violated his religious principles. and he didn't believe that there should be a conflation of sports, and as he put it, paying worship to a flag. and so a reporter got wind of it and went to him and said, "what are you doing? don't you realize that that flag is a symbol of freedom and democracy throughout the world?" and rauf said, "well, it may be a symbol of freedom and democracy to some, but it's a symbol of oppression and tyranny to others." now when he said this, the sports world just blew up. i mean, espn was, like, rauf spits on the flag. boo-yah. and everybody was crowding around and watching this. and i remember seeing one of the talking heads say, well, rauf must see himself as an athlete activist, you know, like muhammad ali or billie jean king. and i'll never forget watching that and thinking to myself, athlete activist? what the heck is that? i thought i was this huge sports fan and memorizing all the stats. it seems like there's this whole world that i didn't know existed. and so i went to library, i've started reading a lot of old articles, started digging in the crates, reading old biographies. found a book co-written by taylor branch, actually, called "second wind," it's one of bill russell's books. and it opened this world to me. and so i started to think to myself, okay, if this applies to the past, how does it apply to the present and how does sports shape our political lives today? >> and you made a beat for yourself out of focusing on the ground between politics and sports. >> well, it's such a rich vein because, i mean, on a given week, it's never a what am i going to write about? it's, what am i not going to write about? because there's always so much happening in the world of sports, and there's always so many different ways in which sports, not just reflects our lives, but actually shapes our lives. i mean, it shapes our understanding of things like racism, sexism, homophobia. it shapes our understanding of our country. it shapes our understanding of corporations and what's happening to our cities. i mean, in so many different ways, sports stories are stories of american life in the 21st century. >> i know you've seen bill siegel's documentary, a new documentary on "the trials of muhammad ali." what do you think about it? >> it's absolutely brilliant. look, i have seen every muhammad ali documentary. and this is by far the best one i've ever seen for a couple of reasons. first and foremost, there is about an hour of footage in there that i have never seen before. all this incredible footage of muhammad ali speaking on college campuses in 1968. speaking out with incredible eloquence against the war in vietnam. and it's a remarkable thing to be able to see footage that has so long been underground actually get unearthed for people to see, and to truly appreciate what it was that made muhammad ali so dangerous. because i think that's what we've really forgotten. >> and the old-time leaders of the civil rights movement were concerned that he was going to take them over the deep end, that they -- >> exactly. >> would lose support in the white house and elsewhere. >> i think that's something that people today don't really understand is that you had these two titanic social movements in the 1960s, the struggle against the war in vietnam and the african american freedom struggle. and then here you have the most famous athlete on earth with one foot in both. >> no, i will not go ten thousand miles from here to help murder and kill another poor people simply to continue the domination of white slave masters over the darker people of the earth. >> mr. muhammad ali has just refused to be inducted into the united states armed forces. notification of his refusal is being made to the united states attorney and the local selective service board for whatever action deemed to be appropriate. >> so he's transgressive on all these different levels. but the other thing when we look at ali is we also have to remember that he didn't show up in the 1960s, like, coming down from planet awesome to educate all of us about politics and sports. i mean, he wasn't malcolm x in boxing gloves or anything. when you look at his life, here he is in 1960, he's 18-years-old, he wins a gold medal at the rome olympics. and his hero was a professional wrestler named gorgeous george wagner -- >> gorgeous george. >> and he wanted to bring the showmanship of professional wrestling into boxing. and then the '60s kind of happened to him. and so, and that's one of the things that the movie does, which is so brilliant, is that it shows the way, the time shaped muhammad ali, and then muhammad ali turned and shaped his times. >> were you taken by surprise at the range of voices that were arrayed against him across a spectrum from the right, william f. buckley, to the left, david susskind? >> i find nothing amusing or interesting or tolerable about this man. he's a disgrace to his country his race and what he laughingly describes as his profession, he's a convicted felon in the united states. he has been found guilty. he is out on bail. he will inevitably go to prison, as well he should. he's a simplistic fool and a pawn. >> that's the part that i think people don't know today and don't understand today, because we really, we've done to muhammad ali what we've done to martin luther king, is we've turned them into these kind of harmless icons who live above the fray of messy politics. and so just like we don't learn about the martin luther king who spoke out against inequality and spoke for government intervention to solve social ills, things that would make him, of course, politically controversial today, we don't talk about the muhammad ali who said things like, the real enemy of my people is here. i am not going to speak out against people in vietnam who are fighting for their own liberation, while here at home my own people in louisville are treated like dogs. >> you've been drawn and written about martin luther king and sports. how did you come to that? >> well, it just, it was a fascinating thing in reading biographies of dr. martin luther king, particularly the magisterial work of taylor branch and then reading some sports biographies about athletes in the 1960s, how much overlap there is. and how much connection there is or the way that martin luther king was somebody who just kept a close eye about what was happening in the world of sports. i think dr. king was influenced by jackie robinson and jackie robinson's breaking of baseball's color barrier in 1947. >> and years later he said of jackie robinson, he was a sit-iner before sit-ins. he was a freedom rider before freedom rides. and he got how important jackie robinson was to the struggle. he got that you couldn't talk about the civil rights movement without talking about robinson. and so because of that and because i think of a sense in dr. king that, you know, the arc of history bends towards justice, that when there was an athlete speaking out, he never said, that person needs to just shut up and play. so when his closest advisors like, for example, roy wilkins, spoke out incredibly harshly against muhammad ali, dr. king was someone who would not do that and would actually exchange private conversations. and they even appeared together in public at a rally in louisville for fair housing. and most significantly when there was a movement in the late '60s by african american athletes to boycott the '68 olympics in mexico city, which of course resulted in tommie smith and john carlos and their famous raised fist. dr. martin luther king defended their right to boycott, calling it an amazing act of nonviolent civil disobedience. and when martin luther king decided in 1967 that he would go public with his opposition to the war in vietnam, one of the things that he said was, well, it's like muhammad ali says, we're all victims of a system of oppression. >> it is my hope that every young man in this country who finds this war objectionable, and abominable, and unjust will file as a conscientious objector. and no matter what you think of mr. muhammad ali's religion, you certainly have to admire his courage. >> and so what you had there was martin luther king drawing upon the experience of muhammad ali as a way to defend his own position, which at the time, was extremely unpopular. so i always found that incredible fascinating that here's martin luther king, his own advisors are telling him, don't stand against the war in vietnam. keep your focus on domestic issues. and not only does king take that risk, but he mentions muhammad ali's name. he mentions the name of a boxer as a way to justify it. and i would encourage people today to really think about, imagine if a similar figure referenced lebron james to say why they were taking a political stand. i mean, it says something about the kind of stature that muhammad ali had. >> is there a sports giant today who is speaking to issues of social justice the way muhammad ali did? >> the main issue is, are there movements in the streets? because when there are movements off the playing field, they reflect on the playing field. so in the last couple of years, we've seen things like the entire miami heat team with lebron james and dwyane wade, they're superstars in the lead, all wearing hoods in protest of, at the time at the fact that george zimmerman had not been arrested for the shooting of trayvon martin. and many athletes like carmelo anthony of the new york knicks, he was very vocal about that as well. so you saw something there where it connected with players, particularly of african american players, very strongly, that there needed to be justice as a result of the trayvon martin case. the other issue that of course is huge right now is the issue of lgbt athletes, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender athletes standing up and speaking out for their right to their own humanity inside a locker room. now historically, a locker room has been, it's been called "the last closet," like an incredible bastion of homophobia. i mean, this goes back to theodore roosevelt, who encouraged young boys to play tackle football, and said if they didn't they were sissies. so, and he popularized that phrase, the sissy. and it was a way of differentiating, are you going to be a leader, are you going to be tough, are you going to lead the new american century and play football? or are you going to be a sissy? and for women who wanted to play sports, you had a similar dynamic where wait a minute, what does it say about you that you want these so-called male attributes like leadership and strength and, you know, physical daring? like, what does it say about you? well, you must, there must be something wrong with you. you must be a lesbian or they would say all kinds of things about women who wanted to play sports. and what you're seeing now in the 21st century are people really pushing back against that. so in the last, even just few months, you've had jason collins become the first active male player to come out of the closet in the history of north american sports. you had robbie rogers, a professional soccer player who came out and then retired at the same time, even though he was just 25-years-old, because he said he didn't think he could be out in the locker room. and then after jason collins came out, he got back on the field and played and said, jason collins inspired me. and you've had brittney griner who is arguably the best woman's basketball player of her generation. she came out of the closet so smoothly, you wondered if she was ever in. and so you have a new generation of athletes who are using that platform of sports to speak out about sexuality and human rights and dignity in a way that i think would do the people from the 1960s very proud. >> as you know, there's a controversy brewing over the olympic games being held next winter in russia. president putin has enacted a law threatening fines or even prison for anything considered to be gay propaganda. and some people are calling for a boycott of those games. >> i don't think that the united states should boycott, even though i'm horrified by not just the laws, but some of the attendant violence that's taking place in russia against the lgbt community and even their, their allies and supporters. i'm not for a boycott, because i think first of all the athletes themselves are going to be prime to go over there and make a statement when they're in russia. and i think that history shows that has a profoundly more powerful effect on the political culture than if you just stay home. i had the great fortune of doing a book with john carlos. and i asked what he thought about the russia olympics. and i said, "should people go over there and protest or should they stay home?" and he said, "well, if i'd stayed home, no one would ever have heard what i had to say. and who would remember that i stayed home today? but people remember that i went and i said my piece. so i think you've got to give people the chance to say their piece." >> but it's still very difficult for them, isn't it? >> yeah, absolutely. and i think there are two big reasons why it's so difficult in the world of sports. the first reason is of course that people want sports to be as apolitical as possible because it's escape. you know, people just want to sit back, relax, and enjoy the game. >> and it is. >> and, yes. >> don't you go to games for escapism? are you always looking at what this means that we're not seeing? >> oh no, i like the escapism too, but it's a little hard to go see the mets and be sitting in a place called citi field named after a bank that was paid for by billions in public dollars, and not think to yourself, yeah, i think that there's some political things maybe going on here that we should pay attention to. but also, i think owners tend to be politically on the right wing of the spectrum. and when they say, and when a lot of their friends in the sports media say, sports and politics shouldn't mix, what they're really saying is sports and a certain kind of politics shouldn't mix. because when it comes to the politics of things like militarism and corporatism, those politics are blaring at a typical game. but when it comes to a player actually trying to use their hyper-exalted, brought to you by nike platform to say something about the world in which they live, well, then that can be, as you said, there can be not a very graceful response to that. >> you mentioned the historian taylor branch who wrote that magnificent series on the civil, history of the civil rights movement. he said not too long ago that college sports in particular still reeks with the whiff of the plantation. >> right. >> you think that's true? >> oh, absolutely. i mean, you know, the first person who i could find who made that analysis of calling college sports a plantation was a man named walter byers. walter byers headed the ncaa from 1951 to 1988. he is responsible for the shaping of the ncaa. and when he left the sport, he said, we've turned it into a plantation system, meaning that there is a tremendous amount of money being generated that would flow into very few hands, and none of that money, obviously, going into the hands of the people on the field or on the court themselves. i mean, it is such a wild scam what happens in college sports in this country. and it's only getting worse. >> do you think college athletes should be paid? >> i think they should because of the revenue that they generate. i mean, think about it like this, woody hayes, he's the coach over at ohio state, his last year coaching there, he made $43,000 a year. today the coach at ohio state, urban meyer, makes $4 million a year as a base salary, $4 million a year. the head of the ncaa, mark emmert, makes almost $2 million a year. now keep in mind, the ncaa is a nonprofit. i mean, i'd hate to think of how it would operate if it was a industry for profit. >> the coach at my alma mater, university of texas, mack brown, had a so-so record two years ago, eight and five, and yet he got $5 million because essentially he took the team to the holiday bowl -- >> right. >> the university officials defended that, saying, well, look our athletics brought in $103 million revenue last year. >> well, i mean, there's some really basic reforms that should happen right away, because the argument you always hear when people say that athletes shouldn't be paid is, well, they get a four-year scholarship. and so the first thing we need to say in response to that is, that's factually not true. college athletes get one-year scholarships that are renewed on an annual basis. so you could have a 4.0 gpa and be your class president. but if you're not performing on the field, you're gone. so to even call them student-athletes isn't even true. i once interviewed a former all-american, and the way he put it is the way i always carry with me, he said, "we're not student-athletes, we're athlete-students, because the second we get on campus it's made clear to us what our priority should be." so the reality at this point, it's basically they're campus workers who don't get paid. and that kind of injustice i don't think should be allowed to stand. >> what would you do about college, football in particular? >> if i could wave a magic wand, i would absolutely delink these kinds of sports from a university setting. and i would say look -- >> it wouldn't be the university of texas longhorns? >> i'm sorry, but i said magic wand, this is just the magic wand. i have a feeling i wouldn't get very far in texas with this argument. but -- >> you might get into the state, but not out. >> i wouldn't get into the state -- but this is the point though, is that web du bois wrote about this a hundred years ago, about the way that he felt like football was distorting, or as he put it, king football was distorting the atmosphere at yale university. and it's actually quaint what he wrote. he said, "the football budget is seven times the classics budget." and it's like, well, just seven times, my goodness. and so you fast forward to today, i would want the nfl with all of its billions to pony up for its own minor league. i would want the nba to do the same. because it really shouldn't shock us that sports that draw the most heavily on people of color, are also the sports that put them in a completely disempowered position, where they're training for these professional leagues without getting a dime in their pocket. so if we could delink them, i absolutely would. we're not going to. i get how deep this is in the vein of the culture. so i think a much more sane approach is first and foremost, if players can make money off their individual image, they should be free to do so. i mean, there's something obscene about a college player who boosters are paying literally $20,000 to have dinner with, but they don't get anything from that. or they sign a million things and they each get sold and the money goes to the university, but not even a little bit of it goes to them. but i think a much more sane thing would be to put caps on coaches' salaries, caps on assistant coaches' salaries. i mean, would it really be so terrible if mack brown made $1 million a year instead of $5 million or $6 million a year? i mean, would the talent pool for people who want to coach really dry up. i don't think so. that money could then go to a stipend for all people who play sports, male or female. and there is, i mean, this has been worked out that there's totally enough money in the system to make this happen, especially if colleges give up their addiction to stadium funding. i mean, at texas a&m where this kid johnny manziel, the heisman trophy winner is in so much trouble for allegedly taking a couple of grand for signing autographs. they're about to open up $450 million in renovations on their foot, and they said they want it to be a megaphone to the world. that's how it was described by the athletic director. and so they want it to be a megaphone, but the person who's actually been yelling through the megaphone, so everybody knows about texas a&m, johnny manziel, doesn't see anything of that. >> supporters of the present system, critics of yours would say, but this money, going to the coaches, going into the program, doesn't come from taxes. it comes from the revenue generated by the television contracts and all of that. >> there's a lot of truth to that argument. in some cases though it does actually draw in, at the state colleges, from state monies, especially when there are budget shortfalls. there's been terrible instances of this in california, for example, where they were cutting classes at cal berkeley while at the same time giving their coach jeff tedford a raise and doing hundreds of millions of dollars in renovations on the stadium. but the bigger issue is that the television money is just growing. espn just inked with the power conferences a 12-year, almost $6 billion contract to broadcast these college games. that's new revenue. that's $6 billion. and then people say, well no, that just goes back into the athletic department. and it's like, well, let's look at these coaches' salaries and how they're rising and still rising. let's look at now there's an arms race, if you will, of assistant coaches, where they're now making millions of dollars a year. and so what you're seeing is capitalism for some and i don't even know what you would call it, indentured servitude for the masses of athletes. and the concern is that a lot of these schools are becoming sports franchises where people happen to go to classes in between games. >> no one i know has covered so well the extent to which the world of sports has changed. what would you say is the defining feature of that change? >> the defining feature of that change can be seen in any city in this country where there is a publicly-funded, billion-dollar stadium. that to me is both a symbol and an expression of everything that's changed about the economics of sports. now look, i'm not saying that owners back in the day were these kindhearted creatures. but there was an economic system in sports where if you were an owner and you were going to make a profit, you needed to make sure that largely working-class fans would be able to pay money and put their butts in the seats and go to the park. now fans have largely become scenery. the way owners measure profits in this day and age are public subsidies for stadiums, luxury boxes at the stadium, and sweetheart cable deals. now what's so horrible about two of those three things, the cable aspect and the public subsidies for stadiums, is that we're paying for this whether we're sports fans or not. our cable bills go up, our taxes go up, to subsidize these kinds of ventures. and every single economic study shows that they don't work. so what these stadiums -- >> you mean they don't produce the revenue. >> no, it's more like a neo-liberal trojan horse. where people end up agreeing to things that they would never otherwise agree to, because it becomes wrapped in sports. and the idea, or maybe a fear that the team will move. or maybe excitement at the thought of a new building. yet we all pay a very serious price for this. i went to college in minnesota, i remember going to see the twins at the hubert h. humphrey metrodome. and it was not a good stadium. billy martin once famously walked in and said, how could hubert humphrey's parents name him after this dump? so it was a pretty awful stadium. and so, and i'm all for them having a new stadium, except the new stadium was built entirely with public money, even though it had been rejected a dozen times by the voters in various referendum. but the owner, carl pohlad, who's the richest owner in major league sports at the time, he devoted, and i, this is without exaggeration, the last 25 years of his life, from age 72 to 97, to lobbying to get this new stadium. that was his dream. and the very week they were going to break ground on the new stadium the bridge collapsed in minneapolis, sending about a dozen people to their deaths. a five-minute walk from where i live in d.c., the metro went off the rails the year after the new washington nationals' billion-dollar stadium opened. so people have to realize whether you're a sports fan or not, very real choices get made about the limited amount of public infrastructure dollars that we have. and if they don't get spent on infrastructure that safeguards our basic safety, then we all pay a price for that. >> what's the hold these billionaire owners have over the city fathers and sometimes city mothers of a place like detroit? i mean, you saw the headlines in detroit recently. one day the headline says, city declares bankruptcy. the next day, the headline says, multi-million dollar new arena. >> detroit red wings. over $400 million for a new hockey stadium, the same week that they talk about detroit declaring bankruptcy. i mean, first and foremost, it's not being built for detroit, it's being built for a gentleman named mike ilitch, founder of little caesars pizza, the man is in his 80's, he's worth $2.7 billion. and he's getting over $400 million in public money for a $650 million arena. this was signed off on by rick snyder, the same governor who enacted the anti-labor laws that are in michigan that caused so much controversy last year, and making it a right-to-work state. >> but he says this is a rebuilding project that they're doing it for jobs. >> what a wonderful opportunity to see excitement. and this will have a big multiplier effect in terms of additional development in that whole area of detroit. so it's a good win for detroit. >> yeah, once again, it's like, what kind of jobs are you creating? and could that money be used for different kinds of jobs in detroit? detroit is a place you leave, not a place you settle. you need to have real jobs that create a real tax base that can fund real schools that actually work. and you've got to keep the street lights on and you've got to have a garbage collection. and first of all, the kinds of jobs that it creates, it doesn't produce tax revenue. it produces revenue for mike ilitch which he can then hide and not pay. but it doesn't produce tax revenue for the people who are going to, who actually have to live in detroit after this. >> so what's your intuition, if not your evidence, for what, how that happened? >> well, i do have a lot of evidence on this one, because fortunately, the public records are good on this stuff. and this is about mike ilitch having a lobbying wing at the michigan capital and having the ear of rick snyder, i mean, mike ilitch -- >> the governor. >> yes. mike ilitch wanted a new arena, the same way the steinbrenners wanted a new yankee stadium. the same way in this town fred wilpon, even though we didn't know it at the time, but he was borrowing money on the new mets stadium, citi field, and giving it to his best friend, who happened to be named bernie madoff to invest it for him. i mean, and that's the part of it that just boggles my mind, especially as someone who grew up a mets fan, the idea that sports can be used as a kind of economic shell game for people in power. and i think that really is how it happens. because there's an agenda at the top of society that wants corporate welfare. that's a huge part of that kind of 1% agenda. and sports is a way to do that without arousing the kind of ire that otherwise might exist. >> you've said that what's happened to sports in the last 30 years was actually preparing the public psyche, for what? >> i think for the wall street bailout more than anything else. i mean, if you think about the trillion dollars of public money that went to bailing out wall street after the 2008 financial crisis, and the terms of that bailout as well, asking nothing of wall street, prosecuting nobody, and preparing people for this idea that says the role of public spending is really to bail out private capital. and that's the way our society is going to work. money will flow up. we have a trickle-up economic program in this country. so instead of a more classical economic model that says, if you get money in the hands of working people, they will spend that money, and that will stimulate more demand and make the economy grow, the other thing the other model is now it's a finance model that says, get as much money as possible in the hands of big business. and that's going to be the basis of our economy, even though it's going to, in an incredible sense, be like inequality on steroids. now i think the way that sports has operated over the last, particularly in the go-go 1990s, when the economy was growing starting really in camden yard in baltimore you had this preparing of the public psyche to say, you know what the role of public money should be? to give it to private capital so they can build these stadiums. >> so what do we do about this? >> well, i think one of the things that's exciting about this moment, right here, right now, is that you have examples in places like brazil of people standing up. >> they're building all the stadiums for the world cup and people think of brazil as this soccer-mad country. and, of course, the organization that governs soccer is called fifa. and so the big banners in the streets were, we want fifa-quality hospitals. we want fifa-quality schools. and that became an in international news story, this idea of, no, the stadium doesn't represent civic pride, it represents why i have a bad hospital and why my kid goes to a failing school. that, to me, is a huge step. you know, that there's that expression that sometimes in struggle, days are like years, and sometimes years are like days. like what was happening in brazil was like years of work happening in a matter of days. and so the argument is now an easier one to make with people. the second thing that's encouraging is just popular opinion. i mean, it used to be they would do these sort of showcase referenda for new stadiums and whatnot. they don't do the referendums anymore. the former mayor here, rudolph giuliani was asked why there wasn't a referendum for the new yankee stadium. and he said, well, if we have a referendum, we'll lose, which was about as honest as you could get. so it starts with education, it starts with public awareness. and i think -- >> and anger, doesn't it? i mean -- >> it has to start with anger. >> in brazil, you could watch the people protesting the inequities brought on by the spending for the world cup facilities, and they're saying, we're mad as hell, we're not going to take it anymore. >> yeah, that's we are going to need a lot of that in this country. and i think we need to actually organize with sports fans and say, okay, you love sports, but do you really want to feel like you're subsidizing the person who owns this team? does that seem right to you? and go to unions and say, okay, you think there's union labor in building this stadium and that's why you support this project, but what happens when it's done? and then your kids are working for $8 an hour and the only way you'll ever go into this stadium is if you're selling beer. >> here we are at the convergence of two sports seasons that always get fans excited, me included. the opening of football, and the fall drive in baseball towards the world series. but then you have a controversy like alex rodriguez, a-rod. >> sure. >> with a 211 game suspension hanging over his head that he is going to appeal, alex rodriguez about to take his first at bat of the season. >> a-rod, appealing his suspension for cheating, he used performance enhancing drugs that he and other players got from that anti-aging clinic in florida, biogenesis. talk about a-rod. >> oh, yeah. i mean, it's so interesting, because on so many levels, i think alex rodriguez, there's a lot about him that's very loathsome. i live ten minutes away from a horrific slum with mold and ventilation problems and rats. alex rodriguez owns the slum. it's called newport ventures. and this has become a big local story in washington d.c. that alex rodriguez owns this horrific building. i mean, so the guy has made $350 million in his career. he's loathsome on a lot of levels in terms of how he uses his money and how he uses his fame. but at the same time, all of that being said what major league baseball is doing in terms of attacking him is precisely because he is such low-hanging fruit in that regard. he's not going to get a lot of defenders. but the part of the a-rod story which i think needs to be talked about more is less about alex rodriguez and more about the other players who were pinched in this biogenesis case. if you take alex rodriguez out of the picture, all the players who were just disciplined in the last couple of weeks, they all came through baseball's dominican republic pipeline. they were all players either from the dominican republic or from nicaragua or venezuela and they all go through the dominican to be trained before coming to the u.s. today, one out of every three minor league players is from the dominican republic, a country that has a poverty rate of over 40%. one out of three minor league players. now the other thing about the dominican republic is that steroids are legal and available over the counter. and so i look at major league baseball and i think, "these are people who want to have their anabolic cake and eat it too." they want to be able to develop a huge portion of their talent in a place that's a wild west for performance-enhancing drugs. and then in the 1990s, when they weren't testing, they made billions of dollars with the power surge and the increase in home runs. and now today, as the wheel has shifted, they've become the teetotalers who are cracking down in the name of public relations. i mean, every major league owner is like claude rains in casablanca saying, "i'm shocked there's gambling going on here. your winnings, sir." >> so is there a pattern in how baseball chooses its culprits? >> it's just like we were talking about before with our cities and with inequality. i mean, i also think that sports mirrors and reflects globalization. and so what you have baseball doing is investing billions of dollars in the dominican republic, where they can sign kids as young as 15-years-old for a couple thousand dollars. they get scouted before their tenth birthday. they go through these baseball academies that, i mean, it's been exposed so many times, like the substandard health and sanitation in these places. a young prospect for the, my hometown team now, the washington nationals died in one of these academies, a young man named yewri guillen. and we're at a point now where i think baseball has decided that it's better to be able to develop talent cheaply because 99% of them won't make major league baseball anyway, and to sign a bunch of people at higher rates when 99% of them won't make it anyway. so it's like a kind of brutal, brutal farm system that takes place down there. >> have we seen any of the owners penalized for failing to enforce the rules about steroids? >> not only have you not seen that, you didn't see one owner dragged in front of congress when the congress was doing their steroid investigations. you've never seen an owner asked, what did you know and when did you know it? even though we know for a fact that in the late '80s, you had trainers going to ownership meetings saying, hey, there's these things called synthetic testosterone, steroids, that they are going to flood the locker room in the next few years. and yet they either chose the policy of benign neglect or malignant intent. and we honestly, we don't know the answer precisely because they haven't been asked. you know, player once said to me, and this is kind of like my guiding compass to this whole issue. a player once said to me, when it comes to steroids punishment is an individual issue, but distribution is a team issue. and he was trying to make the point that when they crack down, they always go after the individual. and it's like the magical fishing net that catches the minnows while the whales go free. >> so now let's talk about football. a lot of attention is being paid to the scientific link between routine football plays and permanent brain damage. i want to play you a clip from a frontline documentary called "football high." >> starting in 2009, scientists at purdue university put sensors into the helmets of two high school football teams. the sensors measured every impact the athletes took over the course of a season. >> the original intent for this study was to study concussions. but we didn't experience any concussions for quite a few weeks, so we decided we would start bringing in some of our players who had not experienced concussions to just begin to understand whether or not there were any consequences from the blows that they were getting to their head. >> to the researchers' surprise, neurological tests revealed that players who had never reported symptoms of a concussion had suffered significant damage to their memories. >> you know what to do. this is the letters test, zero back, one back and two back. >> the sensors in helmets find that high school kids take more force to the brain than college kids. and the reality is, we know from the literature that the young, developing brain is far more vulnerable to this trauma. >> how do you change the game so that you're not getting all these small little hits that don't rise to the level of concussion? that's sort of the nature of the game. that's how it's being played. every time we line up, even in a practice, that's what's happening. so we're going to have to make dramatic changes or we don't change, we don't change the face of this disease. >> do you see those changes coming, given the fact that football is so deeply imbedded, as you have written and said, in the psyche of america? we love the violent sport. >> there will be changes and people need to recognize that they will be almost entirely cosmetic. think what we have to accept as a society, as a football-loving society, is that football is a lot like a cigarette. you can give it a bigger filter, you can tell people it has less tar, but no one has invented a safe cigarette. >> you don't think better helmets will work? >> horribly, some of the studies show that better helmets can make things actually more damaging, because it's harder to detect when you're actually hurt, when you actually get your so-called, your "bell rung" as they used to say. because it becomes the sort of thing where your brain is banging against your skull, which is banging against the sides of the helmet. and because there are less exterior injuries, which might be a telltale sign, you don't see them. so it actually becomes worse and more dangerous. that's the scary thing about this. i mean, we don't, what we know now is that you don't need a diagnosis of a concussion to have a concussion. i mean, these sub-concussive hits are actually more dangerous. i mean, i think we're so attune to thinking that the danger of football is some 6'4" 250-pound linebacker running at four or five speed and knocking your block off. but that's not the danger. it's the mundane, daily knocking into the next person. that's where the danger is. >> i have been a football fan all my life because i love the surprise of it. the hail mary pass that's in the air, the beauty of the last-minute tackle. but the beauty and the surprise seem to be less compelling to me, given these reports on concussions. and given the suicides of several professional football players. >> yeah, junior seau who played 20 years and was not diagnosed with a concussion once. dave duerson, who took his own life by shooting himself in the heart, just so his brain could be studied. and junior seau also took his own life by shooting himself in the heart. these are things that i think need to weigh heavily on the minds of football fans when they watch the game. i mean, people like violent movies, they like violent video games they like violent sports. but i'll tell you something. boxing is profoundly less popular now than it was in muhammad ali's day, and that's because people actually saw with their own eyes what people like muhammad ali went through after their careers. and i think the more people know about how players suffer after they leave the game, the more the sport is going to be in crisis. >> dave zirin, thank you very much for being with me. >> my privilege, thank you. >> when thomas jefferson wrote that all men are created equal, his monticello farm team was obviously not what he had in mind. they were chattel, possessions toiling in his fields. so it's not lightly that dave zirin and other observers invoke the plantation mentality to describe college football today, or the national football league. tom van riper, who covers sports for "forbes" magazine, points out that of the 31 owners of nfl teams, seventeen, more than half, are billionaires. many boast of being self-made in the image of horatio alger, and are now ensconced in luxury skyboxes far above the proletarians whose own dreams of glory ride vicariously on the grunts and groans of bulky but agile gladiators only one play away from a career's end. a collision with the laws of physics. football, like politics, ain't beanbag. the fortunes of players can vanish in a single blow, while high in their plush digs, owners reap continuing gains from tv and advertising and the tax breaks and subsidies showered on them by compliant politicians. big-time sports now mirrors the vast inequality that has come to define america in this century. soon after the taping of my interview with dave zirin, the nfl settled a class-action suit brought by more than four thousand retired players and their families seeking damages from injuries linked to concussions. to the casual fan, it was a win for the players, a sum of $765 million. but even if they finally have to cough up, the owners will feel no pain. that's just a fraction of the estimated $10 billion the league generates in revenue each year. the average payout per plaintiff will amount to around $150,000, not nearly enough to cover a lifetime of lost wages and medical bills faced by the victims of serious brain trauma. these players and their families haven't won much. it isn't even a tie. as another formidable sleuth of journalism, david cay johnston, recently asked in the "columbia journalism review", "if the settlement does not cover all the costs of medical care, much less lost future wages, who will bear that burden?" his answer, taxpayers. when players are no longer insured by the league and find themselves unable to afford private insurance for their enduring afflictions, taxpayers, that includes you and me, will be the ones to pay, through medicaid and social security disability. we won't even be allowed to see the nfl's own extensive research into the neurological damage caused by concussions. the settlement allows the league and the owners to keep it under lock and key. something else to remember as we relax in our favorite easy chair, dazzled and thrilled by men who can be hurt for life. if the world were just, they would not be so matter-of-factly tossed aside, we might think twice about how we want to be entertained, and the owners of capital would be amply penalized for unsportsmanlike conduct. we began the series last year with three broadcasts on winner take all politics, based on the book of that name by political scientists jacob hacker and paul pierson. their theme was the political engineering of inequality, or "how washington made the rich richer and turned its back on the middle class." in the next few months we will be returning to those core issues. next week, robert reich, named one of the best cabinet officers of the 20th century, will be with us to talk about his new documentary "inequality for all." >> now the thing you want to know about this mini cooper is it is small. we are in proportion, me and my car. my name is robert reich, i was secretary of labor under bill clinton. before that the carter administration. before that i was a special aid to abraham lincoln. of all developed nations, the united states has the most unequal distribution of income and we're surging toward even greater inequality. 1928 and 2007 become the peak years for income concentration, it looks like a suspension bridge. >> last year we made $36,000. >> think i probably make $50,000 a year working 70 hours a week. >> the middle class is struggling. people occasionally say to me, "now what nation does it better?" the answer is, the united states. in the decades after world war ii, the economy boomed but you had very low inequality. >> do you know robert reich? >> i do. >> he's a communist. >> when i was a kid, bigger boys would pick on me. i think it changed my life. i had to protect people from the people who would beat them up economically. who is actually looking out for the american worker? the answer is, nobody. if workers don't have power, if they don't have a voice, their wages and benefits start eroding. we are losing equal opportunity in america. anyone of you who feels cynical just consider where we have been. >>one of the purposes of this film, bill, is to make sure people understand that the only way we're going to get the economy to work for everybody and our society, once again to live up to the values of equal opportunity that at least we aspire to, is if we're mobilized, if we're energized. if we take citizenship to mean not simply voting and paying taxes and showing up for jury duty. but actually, participating in an active way, shutting off the television -- >> with some exceptions. >> there's some exception. and spending an hour or two a day in our communities, on our state, even on national politics, and putting pressure on people who should be doing the public's business instead of the business of the moneyed interests to actually respond to what's needed. >> at our website billmoyers.com there's a thought provoking variety of analysis and commentary. that's all at billmoyers.com. i'll see you there and i'll see you here, next time. this episode of "moyers & company" is available on dvd for $19.95. to order call 1-800-336-1917 or write to the address on your screen. funding is provided by -- carnegie corporation of new york, celebrating 100 years of philanthropy, and committed to doing real and permanent good in the world. the kohlberg foundation. independent production fund, with support from the partridge foundation, a john and polly guth charitable fund. the clements foundation. park foundation, dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. the herb alpert foundation, supporting organizations whose mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society. the bernard and audre rapoport foundation. the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. more information at macfound.org. anne gumowitz. the betsy and jesse fink foundation. the hkh foundation. barbara g. fleischman. and by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america, designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. tonight, a conversation with three people directly affected by the birmingham church bombing that took the lives of four little girls, denise mcnair, carol robinson, since the deaths it was fun and fannie mae collins. with lisa mcnair, the sister denise mcnair, and diane braddock, the sister of carol robertson. we will also talk with douglas jones, the persecuting attorney of the klansmen responsible for those murders. those conversations coming up right now.
this week on "moyers & company" -- >> sports, not just reflects our lives, but actually shapes our lives. i mean, it shapes our understanding of things like racism, sexism, homophobia. it shapes our understanding of our country. it shapes our understanding of corporations and what's happening to our cities. i mean, in so many different ways, sports stories are stories of american life in the 21st century. >> announcer: funding is provided by -- carnegie corporation of new york, celebrating 100 years of philanthropy, and committed to doing real and permanent good in the world. the kohlberg foundation. independent production fund, with support from the partridge foundation, a john and polly guth charitable fund. the clements foundation. park foundation, dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. the herb alpert foundation, supporting organizations whose mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society. the bernard and audre rapoport foundation. the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. more information at macfound.org. anne gumowitz. the betsy and jesse fink foundation. the hkh foundation. barbara g. fleischman. and by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america, designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. >> welcome. let us now praise common sense. once again a president was about to plunge us into the darkest waters of foreign policy where the ruling principle becomes, "when in doubt, bomb someone." strategists in the white house, militarists in the think tanks, the powerful pro-israel lobby aipac, and arm-chair warriors of all stripes, neo-conservatives and liberal humanitarians alike, were all telling barack obama to strike syria, no matter the absence of any law or treaty to justify it, no matter the chaos to follow. do it, they said, to show you can, or what's a super power for? but they hadn't reckoned on public opinion. the people said no, not this time. not after more than ten years of soldiers coming home broken in body, screaming nightmares in their brains, their families devastated. not when our politics is an egregious fraud, unable to accomplish anything except enable the rich, while everyday people struggle to make ends meet. jeannette baskin, who lives on staten island not far from the statue of liberty, who describes herself as neither republican nor democrat, told the "new york times," "we invest all this money in foreign countries and fixing their problems, and this country is falling apart." don't think these people callous, those pictures of children gassed in syria sicken them. but there are limits to military power when religious rivalries and secular passions come armed with blowtorches. a retired educator named alice ridinger in hanover, pennsylvania, spoke for multitudes when she also told the "times" that while she finds the use of chemical weapons "terrible," she fears the deeper involvement that could follow a military strike. "i don't think that would be the end of it," she said. truth is, no one knows what would happen once the missiles fly. not the white house or pentagon. not the cia or nsa. not even the all-seeing oracles of cable television, the editorial writers of "the wall street journal," or the seers of such influential publications as "the economist," hawkish now on syria despite having been wrong on iraq. in time, the white house, congress, and the punditry could all be grateful to a suddenly attentive and stubborn public. they may have been spared a folly, thanks to this collective common sense that became so palpable it was a force in its own right. now politics and diplomacy have a chance. perhaps only a slight chance, the "washington post" reports that the cia has just begun delivering weapons to rebels in syria, deepening america's stake in the civil war. but we can't know if politics and diplomacy work unless we give them a try. meanwhile, give a cheer for common sense. so with the drums of war quieted for the moment, millions of us will take a deep breath and turn our attention from all syria all the time to the yankees and the red sox, the giants and the broncos. yes, it's that time of year, when our national pastimes compete and collide, and there simply aren't enough hours in the day or night for all the alluring distractions offered. the weekend's so packed with games it's hard to keep up with who's on first and who's been knocked flat on their backs. or, to be a bit more cynical, who's on steroids and who's being carried unconscious to the locker room. which is why i've asked dave zirin to help us keep score. he's been called "the best sportswriter in the united states." the reporter who, you may remember, challenged the president of bridgestone firestone on whether his product should be the "official tire sponsor" of the super bowl while the company was fighting a lawsuit for allegedly using child labor in liberia. zirin's the first sportswriter in the long history of "the nation" magazine. he hosts sirius xm radio's popular show "edge of sports." and he's written several provocative, even scathing books on sports and society, including, "bad sports: how owners are ruining the games we love," and this his most recent, "game over: how politics has turned the sports world upside down." oh, yes, utne reader named dave zirin one of the "50 visionaries who are changing the world." welcome to the show. >> oh, it's great to be here. >> you go back a long way with your chronicling of sports. how did sports grab you? >> well, i mean, i grew up in new york city just an absolute sports freak. i mean, i memorized statistics, i followed all those great new york city teams in the '80s, the mets, knicks, unbelievable. my room was a shrine to these people. i mean, folks like darryl strawberry, keith hernandez, lawrence taylor. and i never really thought about or cared about politics very much. and that really changed for me in 1996 when i was in college in minnesota. at the time, there was a player for the denver nuggets named mahmoud abdul-rauf who made the decision to not go out for the national anthem before games. and when -- >> because? >> because he said he felt like it violated his religious principles. and he didn't believe that there should be a conflation of sports, and as he put it, paying worship to a flag. and so a reporter got wind of it and went to him and said, "what are you doing? don't you realize that that flag is a symbol of freedom and democracy throughout the world?" and rauf said, "well, it may be a symbol of freedom and democracy to some, but it's a symbol of oppression and tyranny to others." now when he said this, the sports world just blew up. i mean, espn was, like, rauf spits on the flag. boo-yah. and everybody was crowding around and watching this. and i remember seeing one of the talking heads say, well, rauf must see himself as an athlete activist, you know, like muhammad ali or billie jean king. and i'll never forget watching that and thinking to myself, athlete activist? what the heck is that? i thought i was this huge sports fan and memorizing all the stats. it seems like there's this whole world that i didn't know existed. and so i went to library, i've started reading a lot of old articles, started digging in the crates, reading old biographies. found a book co-written by taylor branch, actually, called "second wind," it's one of bill russell's books. and it opened this world to me. and so i started to think to myself, okay, if this applies to the past, how does it apply to the present and how does sports shape our political lives today? >> and you made a beat for yourself out of focusing on the ground between politics and sports. >> well, it's such a rich vein because, i mean, on a given week, it's never a what am i going to write about? it's, what am i not going to write about? because there's always so much happening in the world of sports, and there's always so many different ways in which sports, not just reflects our lives, but actually shapes our lives. i mean, it shapes our understanding of things like racism, sexism, homophobia. it shapes our understanding of our country. it shapes our understanding of corporations and what's happening to our cities. i mean, in so many different ways, sports stories are stories of american life in the 21st century. >> i know you've seen bill siegel's documentary, a new documentary on "the trials of muhammad ali." what do you think about it? >> it's absolutely brilliant. look, i have seen every muhammad ali documentary. and this is by far the best one i've ever seen for a couple of reasons. first and foremost, there is about an hour of footage in there that i have never seen before. all this incredible footage of muhammad ali speaking on college campuses in 1968. speaking out with incredible eloquence against the war in vietnam. and it's a remarkable thing to be able to see footage that has so long been underground actually get unearthed for people to see, and to truly appreciate what it was that made muhammad ali so dangerous. because i think that's what we've really forgotten. >> and the old-time leaders of the civil rights movement were concerned that he was going to take them over the deep end, that they -- >> exactly. >> would lose support in the white house and elsewhere. >> i think that's something that people today don't really understand is that you had these two titanic social movements in the 1960s, the struggle against the war in vietnam and the african american freedom struggle. and then here you have the most famous athlete on earth with one foot in both. >> no, i will not go ten thousand miles from here to help murder and kill another poor people simply to continue the domination of white slave masters over the darker people of the earth. >> mr. muhammad ali has just refused to be inducted into the united states armed forces. notification of his refusal is being made to the united states attorney and the local selective service board for whatever action deemed to be appropriate. >> so he's transgressive on all these different levels. but the other thing when we look at ali is we also have to remember that he didn't show up in the 1960s, like, coming down from planet awesome to educate all of us about politics and sports. i mean, he wasn't malcolm x in boxing gloves or anything. when you look at his life, here he is in 1960, he's 18-years-old, he wins a gold medal at the rome olympics. and his hero was a professional wrestler named gorgeous george wagner -- >> gorgeous george. >> and he wanted to bring the showmanship of professional wrestling into boxing. and then the '60s kind of happened to him. and so, and that's one of the things that the movie does, which is so brilliant, is that it shows the way, the time shaped muhammad ali, and then muhammad ali turned and shaped his times. >> were you taken by surprise at the range of voices that were arrayed against him across a spectrum from the right, william f. buckley, to the left, david susskind? >> i find nothing amusing or interesting or tolerable about this man. he's a disgrace to his country his race and what he laughingly describes as his profession, he's a convicted felon in the united states. he has been found guilty. he is out on bail. he will inevitably go to prison, as well he should. he's a simplistic fool and a pawn. >> that's the part that i think people don't know today and don't understand today, because we really, we've done to muhammad ali what we've done to martin luther king, is we've turned them into these kind of harmless icons who live above the fray of messy politics. and so just like we don't learn about the martin luther king who spoke out against inequality and spoke for government intervention to solve social ills, things that would make him, of course, politically controversial today, we don't talk about the muhammad ali who said things like, the real enemy of my people is here. i am not going to speak out against people in vietnam who are fighting for their own liberation, while here at home my own people in louisville are treated like dogs. >> you've been drawn and written about martin luther king and sports. how did you come to that? >> well, it just, it was a fascinating thing in reading biographies of dr. martin luther king, particularly the magisterial work of taylor branch and then reading some sports biographies about athletes in the 1960s, how much overlap there is. and how much connection there is or the way that martin luther king was somebody who just kept a close eye about what was happening in the world of sports. i think dr. king was greatly influenced by jackie robinson and jackie robinson's breaking of baseball's color barrier in 1947. >> and years later he said of jackie robinson, he was a sit-iner before sit-ins. he was a freedom rider before freedom rides. and he got how important jackie robinson was to the struggle. he got that you couldn't talk about the civil rights movement without talking about robinson. and so because of that and because i think of a sense in dr. king that, you know, the arc of history bends towards justice, that when there was an athlete speaking out, he never said, that person needs to just shut up and play. so when his closest advisors like, for example, roy wilkins, spoke out incredibly harshly against muhammad ali, dr. king was someone who would not do that and would actually exchange private conversations. and they even appeared together in public at a rally in louisville for fair housing. and most significantly when there was a movement in the late '60s by african american athletes to boycott the '68 olympics in mexico city, which of course resulted in tommie smith and john carlos and their famous raised fist. dr. martin luther king defended their right to boycott, calling it an amazing act of nonviolent civil disobedience. and when martin luther king decided in 1967 that he would go public with his opposition to the war in vietnam, one of the things that he said was, well, it's like muhammad ali says, we're all victims of a system of oppression. >> it is my hope that every young man in this country who finds this war objectionable, and abominable, and unjust will file as a conscientious objector. and no matter what you think of mr. muhammad ali's religion, you certainly have to admire his courage. >> and so what you had there was martin luther king drawing upon the experience of muhammad ali as a way to defend his own position, which at the time, was extremely unpopular. so i always found that incredible fascinating that here's martin luther king, his own advisors are telling him, don't stand against the war in vietnam. keep your focus on domestic issues. and not only does king take that risk, but he mentions muhammad ali's name. he mentions the name of a boxer as a way to justify it. and i would encourage people today to really think about, imagine if a similar figure referenced lebron james to say why they were taking a political stand. i mean, it says something about the kind of stature that muhammad ali had. >> is there a sports giant today who is speaking to issues of social justice the way muhammad ali did? >> the main issue is, are there movements in the streets? because when there are movements off the playing field, they reflect on the playing field. so in the last couple of years, we've seen things like the entire miami heat team with lebron james and dwyane wade, they're superstars in the lead, all wearing hoods in protest of, at the time at the fact that george zimmerman had not been arrested for the shooting of trayvon martin. and many athletes like carmelo anthony of the new york knicks, he was very vocal about that as well. so you saw something there where it connected with players, particularly of african american players, very strongly, that there needed to be justice as a result of the trayvon martin case. the other issue that of course is huge right now is the issue of lgbt athletes, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender athletes standing up and speaking out for their right to their own humanity inside a locker room. now historically, a locker room has been, it's been called "the last closet," like an incredible bastion of homophobia. i mean, this goes back to theodore roosevelt, who encouraged young boys to play tackle football, and said if they didn't they were sissies. so, and he popularized that phrase, the sissy. and it was a way of differentiating, are you going to be a leader, are you going to be tough, are you going to lead the new american century and play football? or are you going to be a sissy? and for women who wanted to play sports, you had a similar dynamic where wait a minute, what does it say about you that you want these so-called male attributes like leadership and strength and, you know, physical daring? like, what does it say about you? well, you must, there must be something wrong with you. you must be a lesbian or they would say all kinds of things about women who wanted to play sports. and what you're seeing now in the 21st century are people really pushing back against that. so in the last, even just few months, you've had jason collins become the first active male player to come out of the closet in the history of north american sports. you had robbie rogers, a professional soccer player who came out and then retired at the same time, even though he was just 25-years-old, because he said he didn't think he could be out in the locker room. and then after jason collins came out, he got back on the field and played and said, jason collins inspired me. and you've had brittney griner who is arguably the best woman's basketball player of her generation. she came out of the closet so smoothly, you wondered if she was ever in. and so you have a new generation of athletes who are using that platform of sports to speak out about sexuality and human rights and dignity in a way that i think would do the people from the 1960s very proud. >> as you know, there's a controversy brewing over the olympic games being held next winter in russia. president putin has enacted a law threatening fines or even prison for anything considered to be gay propaganda. and some people are calling for a boycott of those games. >> i don't think that the united states should boycott, even though i'm horrified by not just the laws, but some of the attendant violence that's taking place in russia against the lgbt community and even their, their allies and supporters. i'm not for a boycott, because i think first of all the athletes themselves are going to be prime to go over there and make a statement when they're in russia. and i think that history shows that has a profoundly more powerful effect on the political culture than if you just stay home. i had the great fortune of doing a book with john carlos. and i asked what he thought about the russia olympics. and i said, "should people go over there and protest or should they stay home?" and he said, "well, if i'd stayed home, no one would ever have heard what i had to say. and who would remember that i stayed home today? but people remember that i went and i said my piece. so i think you've got to give people the chance to say their piece." >> but it's still very difficult for them, isn't it? >> yeah, absolutely. and i think there are two big reasons why it's so difficult in the world of sports. the first reason is of course that people want sports to be as apolitical as possible because it's escape. you know, people just want to sit back, relax, and enjoy the game. >> and it is. >> and, yes. >> don't you go to games for escapism? are you always looking at what this means that we're not seeing? >> oh no, i like the escapism too, but it's a little hard to go see the mets and be sitting in a place called citi field named after a bank that was paid for by billions in public dollars, and not think to yourself, yeah, i think that there's some political things maybe going on here that we should pay attention to. but also, i think owners tend to be politically on the right wing of the spectrum. and when they say, and when a lot of their friends in the sports media say, sports and politics shouldn't mix, what they're really saying is sports and a certain kind of politics shouldn't mix. because when it comes to the politics of things like militarism and corporatism, those politics are blaring at a typical game. but when it comes to a player actually trying to use their hyper-exalted, brought to you by nike platform to say something about the world in which they live, well, then that can be, as you said, there can be not a very graceful response to that. >> you mentioned the historian taylor branch who wrote that magnificent series on the civil, history of the civil rights movement. he said not too long ago that college sports in particular still reeks with the whiff of the plantation. >> right. >> you think that's true? >> oh, absolutely. i mean, you know, the first person who i could find who made that analysis of calling college sports a plantation was a man named walter byers. walter byers headed the ncaa from 1951 to 1988. he is responsible for the shaping of the ncaa. and when he left the sport, he said, we've turned it into a plantation system, meaning that there is a tremendous amount of money being generated that would flow into very few hands, and none of that money, obviously, going into the hands of the people on the field or on the court themselves. i mean, it is such a wild scam what happens in college sports in this country. and it's only getting worse. >> do you think college athletes should be paid? >> i think they should because of the revenue that they generate. i mean, think about it like this, woody hayes, he's the coach over at ohio state, his last year coaching there, he made $43,000 a year. today the coach at ohio state, urban meyer, makes $4 million a year as a base salary, $4 million a year. the head of the ncaa, mark emmert, makes almost $2 million a year. now keep in mind, the ncaa is a nonprofit. i mean, i'd hate to think of how it would operate if it was a industry for profit. >> the coach at my alma mater, university of texas, mack brown, had a so-so record two years ago, eight and five, and yet he got $5 million because essentially he took the team to the holiday bowl -- >> right. >> the university officials defended that, saying, well, look our athletics brought in $103 million revenue last year. >> well, i mean, there's some really basic reforms that should happen right away, because the argument you always hear when people say that athletes shouldn't be paid is, well, they get a four-year scholarship. and so the first thing we need to say in response to that is, that's factually not true. college athletes get one-year scholarships that are renewed on an annual basis. so you could have a 4.0 gpa and be your class president. but if you're not performing on the field, you're gone. so to even call them student-athletes isn't even true. i once interviewed a former all-american, and the way he put it is the way i always carry with me, he said, "we're not student-athletes, we're athlete-students, because the second we get on campus it's made clear to us what our priority should be." so the reality at this point, it's basically they're campus workers who don't get paid. and that kind of injustice i don't think should be allowed to stand. >> what would you do about college, football in particular? >> if i could wave a magic wand, i would absolutely delink these kinds of sports from a university setting. and i would say look -- >> it wouldn't be the university of texas longhorns? >> i'm sorry, but i said magic wand, this is just the magic wand. i have a feeling i wouldn't get very far in texas with this argument. but -- >> you might get into the state, but not out. >> i wouldn't get into the state -- but this is the point though, is that web du bois wrote about this a hundred years ago, about the way that he felt like football was distorting, or as he put it, king football was distorting the atmosphere at yale university. and it's actually quaint what he wrote. he said, "the football budget is seven times the classics budget." and it's like, well, just seven times, my goodness. and so you fast forward to today, i would want the nfl with all of its billions to pony up for its own minor league. i would want the nba to do the same. because it really shouldn't shock us that sports that draw the most heavily on people of color, are also the sports that put them in a completely disempowered position, where they're training for these professional leagues without getting a dime in their pocket. so if we could delink them, i absolutely would. we're not going to. i get how deep this is in the vein of the culture. so i think a much more sane approach is first and foremost, if players can make money off their individual image, they should be free to do so. i mean, there's something obscene about a college player who boosters are paying literally $20,000 to have dinner with, but they don't get anything from that. or they sign a million things and they each get sold and the money goes to the university, but not even a little bit of it goes to them. but i think a much more sane thing would be to put caps on coaches' salaries, caps on assistant coaches' salaries. i mean, would it really be so terrible if mack brown made $1 million a year instead of $5 million or $6 million a year? i mean, would the talent pool for people who want to coach really dry up. i don't think so. that money could then go to a stipend for all people who play sports, male or female. and there is, i mean, this has been worked out that there's totally enough money in the system to make this happen, especially if colleges give up their addiction to stadium funding. i mean, at texas a&m where this kid johnny manziel, the heisman trophy winner is in so much trouble for allegedly taking a couple of grand for signing autographs. they're about to open up $450 million in renovations on their foot, and they said they want it to be a megaphone to the world. that's how it was described by the athletic director. and so they want it to be a megaphone, but the person who's actually been yelling through the megaphone, so everybody knows about texas a&m, johnny manziel, doesn't see anything of that. >> supporters of the present system, critics of yours would say, but this money, going to the coaches, going into the program, doesn't come from taxes. it comes from the revenue generated by the television contracts and all of that. >> there's a lot of truth to that argument. in some cases though it does actually draw in, at the state colleges, from state monies, especially when there are budget shortfalls. there's been terrible instances of this in california, for example, where they were cutting classes at cal berkeley while at the same time giving their coach jeff tedford a raise and doing hundreds of millions of dollars in renovations on the stadium. but the bigger issue is that the television money is just growing. espn just inked with the power conferences a 12-year, almost $6 billion contract to broadcast these college games. that's new revenue. that's $6 billion. and then people say, well no, that just goes back into the athletic department. and it's like, well, let's look at these coaches' salaries and how they're rising and still rising. let's look at now there's an arms race, if you will, of assistant coaches, where they're now making millions of dollars a year. and so what you're seeing is capitalism for some and i don't even know what you would call it, indentured servitude for the masses of athletes. and the concern is that a lot of these schools are becoming sports franchises where people happen to go to classes in between games. >> no one i know has covered so well the extent to which the world of sports has changed. what would you say is the defining feature of that change? >> the defining feature of that change can be seen in any city in this country where there is a publicly-funded, billion-dollar stadium. that to me is both a symbol and an expression of everything that's changed about the economics of sports. now look, i'm not saying that owners back in the day were these kindhearted creatures. but there was an economic system in sports where if you were an owner and you were going to make a profit, you needed to make sure that largely working-class fans would be able to pay money and put their butts in the seats and go to the park. now fans have largely become scenery. the way owners measure profits in this day and age are public subsidies for stadiums, luxury boxes at the stadium, and sweetheart cable deals. now what's so horrible about two of those three things, the cable aspect and the public subsidies for stadiums, is that we're paying for this whether we're sports fans or not. our cable bills go up, our taxes go up, to subsidize these kinds of ventures. and every single economic study shows that they don't work. so what these stadiums -- >> you mean they don't produce the revenue. >> no, it's more like a neo-liberal trojan horse. where people end up agreeing to things that they would never otherwise agree to, because it becomes wrapped in sports. and the idea, or maybe a fear that the team will move. or maybe excitement at the thought of a new building. yet we all pay a very serious price for this. i went to college in minnesota, i remember going to see the twins at the hubert h. humphrey metrodome. and it was not a good stadium. billy martin once famously walked in and said, how could hubert humphrey's parents name him after this dump? so it was a pretty awful stadium. and so, and i'm all for them having a new stadium, except the new stadium was built entirely with public money, even though it had been rejected a dozen times by the voters in various referendum. but the owner, carl pohlad, who's the richest owner in major league sports at the time, he devoted, and i, this is without exaggeration, the last 25 years of his life, from age 72 to 97, to lobbying to get this new stadium. that was his dream. and the very week they were going to break ground on the new stadium the bridge collapsed in minneapolis, sending about a dozen people to their deaths. a five-minute walk from where i live in d.c., the metro went off the rails the year after the new washington nationals' billion-dollar stadium opened. so people have to realize whether you're a sports fan or not, very real choices get made about the limited amount of public infrastructure dollars that we have. and if they don't get spent on infrastructure that safeguards our basic safety, then we all pay a price for that. >> what's the hold these billionaire owners have over the city fathers and sometimes city mothers of a place like detroit? i mean, you saw the headlines in detroit recently. one day the headline says, city declares bankruptcy. the next day, the headline says, multi-million dollar new arena. >> detroit red wings. over $400 million for a new hockey stadium, the same week that they talk about detroit declaring bankruptcy. i mean, first and foremost, it's not being built for detroit, it's being built for a gentleman named mike ilitch, founder of little caesars pizza, the man is in his 80's, he's worth $2.7 billion. and he's getting over $400 million in public money for a $650 million arena. this was signed off on by rick snyder, the same governor who enacted the anti-labor laws that are in michigan that caused so much controversy last year, and making it a right-to-work state. >> but he says this is a rebuilding project that they're doing it for jobs. >> what a wonderful opportunity to see excitement. and this will have a big multiplier effect in terms of additional development in that whole area of detroit. so it's a good win for detroit. >> yeah, once again, it's like, what kind of jobs are you creating? and could that money be used for different kinds of jobs in detroit? detroit is a place you leave, not a place you settle. you need to have real jobs that create a real tax base that can fund real schools that actually work. and you've got to keep the street lights on and you've got to have a garbage collection. and first of all, the kinds of jobs that it creates, it doesn't produce tax revenue. it produces revenue for mike ilitch which he can then hide and not pay. but it doesn't produce tax revenue for the people who are going to, who actually have to live in detroit after this. >> so what's your intuition, if not your evidence, for what, how that happened? >> well, i do have a lot of evidence on this one, because fortunately, the public records are good on this stuff. and this is about mike ilitch having a lobbying wing at the michigan capital and having the ear of rick snyder, i mean, mike ilitch -- >> the governor. >> yes. mike ilitch wanted a new arena, the same way the steinbrenners wanted a new yankee stadium. the same way in this town fred wilpon, even though we didn't know it at the time, but he was borrowing money on the new mets stadium, citi field, and giving it to his best friend, who happened to be named bernie madoff to invest it for him. i mean, and that's the part of it that just boggles my mind, especially as someone who grew up a mets fan, the idea that sports can be used as a kind of economic shell game for people in power. and i think that really is how it happens. because there's an agenda at the top of society that wants corporate welfare. that's a huge part of that kind of 1% agenda. and sports is a way to do that without arousing the kind of ire that otherwise might exist. >> you've said that what's happened to sports in the last 30 years was actually preparing the public psyche, for what? >> i think for the wall street bailout more than anything else. i mean, if you think about the trillion dollars of public money that went to bailing out wall street after the 2008 financial crisis, and the terms of that bailout as well, asking nothing of wall street, prosecuting nobody, and preparing people for this idea that says the role of public spending is really to bail out private capital. and that's the way our society is going to work. money will flow up. we have a trickle-up economic program in this country. so instead of a more classical economic model that says, if you get money in the hands of working people, they will spend that money, and that will stimulate more demand and make the economy grow, the other thing the other model is now it's a finance model that says, get as much money as possible in the hands of big business. and that's going to be the basis of our economy, even though it's going to, in an incredible sense, be like inequality on steroids. now i think the way that sports has operated over the last, particularly in the go-go 1990s, when the economy was growing starting really in camden yard in baltimore you had this preparing of the public psyche to say, you know what the role of public money should be? to give it to private capital so they can build these stadiums. >> so what do we do about this? >> well, i think one of the things that's exciting about this moment, right here, right now, is that you have examples in places like brazil of people standing up. >> they're building all the stadiums for the world cup and people think of brazil as this soccer-mad country. and, of course, the organization that governs soccer is called fifa. and so the big banners in the streets were, we want fifa-quality hospitals. we want fifa-quality schools. and that became an in international news story, this idea of, no, the stadium doesn't represent civic pride, it represents why i have a bad hospital and why my kid goes to a failing school. that, to me, is a huge step. you know, that there's that expression that sometimes in struggle, days are like years, and sometimes years are like days. like what was happening in brazil was like years of work happening in a matter of days. and so the argument is now an easier one to make with people. the second thing that's encouraging is just popular opinion. i mean, it used to be they would do these sort of showcase referenda for new stadiums and whatnot. they don't do the referendums anymore. the former mayor here, rudolph giuliani was asked why there wasn't a referendum for the new yankee stadium. and he said, well, if we have a referendum, we'll lose, which was about as honest as you could get. so it starts with education, it starts with public awareness. and i think -- >> and anger, doesn't it? i mean -- >> it has to start with anger. >> in brazil, you could watch the people protesting the inequities brought on by the spending for the world cup facilities, and they're saying, we're mad as hell, we're not going to take it anymore. >> yeah, that's we are going to need a lot of that in this country. and i think we need to actually organize with sports fans and say, okay, you love sports, but do you really want to feel like you're subsidizing the person who owns this team? does that seem right to you? and go to unions and say, okay, you think there's union labor in building this stadium and that's why you support this project, but what happens when it's done? and then your kids are working for $8 an hour and the only way you'll ever go into this stadium is if you're selling beer. >> here we are at the convergence of two sports seasons that always get fans excited, me included. the opening of football, and the fall drive in baseball towards the world series. but then you have a controversy like alex rodriguez, a-rod. >> sure. >> with a 211 game suspension hanging over his head that he is going to appeal, alex rodriguez about to take his first at bat of the season. >> a-rod, appealing his suspension for cheating, he used performance enhancing drugs that he and other players got from that anti-aging clinic in florida, biogenesis. talk about a-rod. >> oh, yeah. i mean, it's so interesting, because on so many levels, i think alex rodriguez, there's a lot about him that's very loathsome. i live ten minutes away from a horrific slum with mold and ventilation problems and rats. alex rodriguez owns the slum. it's called newport ventures. and this has become a big local story in washington d.c. that alex rodriguez owns this horrific building. i mean, so the guy has made $350 million in his career. he's loathsome on a lot of levels in terms of how he uses his money and how he uses his fame. but at the same time, all of that being said what major league baseball is doing in terms of attacking him is precisely because he is such low-hanging fruit in that regard. he's not going to get a lot of defenders. but the part of the a-rod story which i think needs to be talked about more is less about alex rodriguez and more about the other players who were pinched in this biogenesis case. if you take alex rodriguez out of the picture, all the players who were just disciplined in the last couple of weeks, they all came through baseball's dominican republic pipeline. they were all players either from the dominican republic or from nicaragua or venezuela and they all go through the dominican to be trained before coming to the u.s. today, one out of every three minor league players is from the dominican republic, a country that has a poverty rate of over 40%. one out of three minor league players. now the other thing about the dominican republic is that steroids are legal and available over the counter. and so i look at major league baseball and i think, "these are people who want to have their anabolic cake and eat it too." they want to be able to develop a huge portion of their talent in a place that's a wild west for performance-enhancing drugs. and then in the 1990s, when they weren't testing, they made billions of dollars with the power surge and the increase in home runs. and now today, as the wheel has shifted, they've become the teetotalers who are cracking down in the name of public relations. i mean, every major league owner is like claude rains in casablanca saying, "i'm shocked there's gambling going on here. your winnings, sir." >> so is there a pattern in how baseball chooses its culprits? >> it's just like we were talking about before with our cities and with inequality. i mean, i also think that sports mirrors and reflects globalization. and so what you have baseball doing is investing billions of dollars in the dominican republic, where they can sign kids as young as 15-years-old for a couple thousand dollars. they get scouted before their tenth birthday. they go through these baseball academies that, i mean, it's been exposed so many times, like the substandard health and sanitation in these places. a young prospect for the, my hometown team now, the washington nationals died in one of these academies, a young man named yewri guillen. and we're at a point now where i think baseball has decided that it's better to be able to develop talent cheaply because 99% of them won't make major league baseball anyway, and to sign a bunch of people at higher rates when 99% of them won't make it anyway. so it's like a kind of brutal, brutal farm system that takes place down there. >> have we seen any of the owners penalized for failing to enforce the rules about steroids? >> not only have you not seen that, you didn't see one owner dragged in front of congress when the congress was doing their steroid investigations. you've never seen an owner asked, what did you know and when did you know it? even though we know for a fact that in the late '80s, you had trainers going to ownership meetings saying, hey, there's these things called synthetic testosterone, steroids, that they are going to flood the locker room in the next few years. and yet they either chose the policy of benign neglect or malignant intent. and we honestly, we don't know the answer precisely because they haven't been asked. you know, player once said to me, and this is kind of like my guiding compass to this whole issue. a player once said to me, when it comes to steroids punishment is an individual issue, but distribution is a team issue. and he was trying to make the point that when they crack down, they always go after the individual. and it's like the magical fishing net that catches the minnows while the whales go free. >> so now let's talk about football. a lot of attention is being paid to the scientific link between routine football plays and permanent brain damage. i want to play you a clip from a frontline documentary called "football high." >> starting in 2009, scientists at purdue university put sensors into the helmets of two high school football teams. the sensors measured every impact the athletes took over the course of a season. >> the original intent for this study was to study concussions. but we didn't experience any concussions for quite a few weeks, so we decided we would start bringing in some of our players who had not experienced concussions to just begin to understand whether or not there were any consequences from the blows that they were getting to their head. >> to the researchers' surprise, neurological tests revealed that players who had never reported symptoms of a concussion had suffered significant damage to their memories. >> you know what to do. this is the letters test, zero back, one back and two back. >> the sensors in helmets find that high school kids take more force to the brain than college kids. and the reality is, we know from the literature that the young, developing brain is far more vulnerable to this trauma. >> how do you change the game so that you're not getting all these small little hits that don't rise to the level of concussion? that's sort of the nature of the game. that's how it's being played. every time we line up, even in a practice, that's what's happening. so we're going to have to make dramatic changes or we don't change, we don't change the face of this disease. >> do you see those changes coming, given the fact that football is so deeply imbedded, as you have written and said, in the psyche of america? we love the violent sport. >> there will be changes and people need to recognize that they will be almost entirely cosmetic. think what we have to accept as a society, as a football-loving society, is that football is a lot like a cigarette. you can give it a bigger filter, you can tell people it has less tar, but no one has invented a safe cigarette. >> you don't think better helmets will work? >> horribly, some of the studies show that better helmets can make things actually more damaging, because it's harder to detect when you're actually hurt, when you actually get your so-called, your "bell rung" as they used to say. because it becomes the sort of thing where your brain is banging against your skull, which is banging against the sides of the helmet. and because there are less exterior injuries, which might be a telltale sign, you don't see them. so it actually becomes worse and more dangerous. that's the scary thing about this. i mean, we don't, what we know now is that you don't need a diagnosis of a concussion to have a concussion. i mean, these sub-concussive hits are actually more dangerous. i mean, i think we're so attune to thinking that the danger of football is some 6'4" 250-pound linebacker running at four or five speed and knocking your block off. but that's not the danger. it's the mundane, daily knocking into the next person. that's where the danger is. >> i have been a football fan all my life because i love the surprise of it. the hail mary pass that's in the air, the beauty of the last-minute tackle. but the beauty and the surprise seem to be less compelling to me, given these reports on concussions. and given the suicides of several professional football players. >> yeah, junior seau who played 20 years and was not diagnosed with a concussion once. dave duerson, who took his own life by shooting himself in the heart, just so his brain could be studied. and junior seau also took his own life by shooting himself in the heart. these are things that i think need to weigh heavily on the minds of football fans when they watch the game. i mean, people like violent movies, they like violent video games they like violent sports. but i'll tell you something. boxing is profoundly less popular now than it was in muhammad ali's day, and that's because people actually saw with their own eyes what people like muhammad ali went through after their careers. and i think the more people know about how players suffer after they leave the game, the more the sport is going to be in crisis. >> dave zirin, thank you very much for being with me. >> my privilege, thank you. >> when thomas jefferson wrote that all men are created equal, his monticello farm team was obviously not what he had in mind. they were chattel, possessions toiling in his fields. so it's not lightly that dave zirin and other observers invoke the plantation mentality to describe college football today, or the national football league. tom van riper, who covers sports for "forbes" magazine, points out that of the 31 owners of nfl teams, seventeen, more than half, are billionaires. many boast of being self-made in the image of horatio alger, and are now ensconced in luxury skyboxes far above the proletarians whose own dreams of glory ride vicariously on the grunts and groans of bulky but agile gladiators only one play away from a career's end. a collision with the laws of physics. football, like politics, ain't beanbag. the fortunes of players can vanish in a single blow, while high in their plush digs, owners reap continuing gains from tv and advertising and the tax breaks and subsidies showered on them by compliant politicians. big-time sports now mirrors the vast inequality that has come to define america in this century. soon after the taping of my interview with dave zirin, the nfl settled a class-action suit brought by more than four thousand retired players and their families seeking damages from injuries linked to concussions. to the casual fan, it was a win for the players, a sum of $765 million. but even if they finally have to cough up, the owners will feel no pain. that's just a fraction of the estimated $10 billion the league generates in revenue each year. the average payout per plaintiff will amount to around $150,000, not nearly enough to cover a lifetime of lost wages and medical bills faced by the victims of serious brain trauma. these players and their families haven't won much. it isn't even a tie. as another formidable sleuth of journalism, david cay johnston, recently asked in the "columbia journalism review", "if the settlement does not cover all the costs of medical care, much less lost future wages, who will bear that burden?" his answer, taxpayers. when players are no longer insured by the league and find themselves unable to afford private insurance for their enduring afflictions, taxpayers, that includes you and me, will be the ones to pay, through medicaid and social security disability. we won't even be allowed to see the nfl's own extensive research into the neurological damage caused by concussions. the settlement allows the league and the owners to keep it under lock and key. something else to remember as we relax in our favorite easy chair, dazzled and thrilled by men who can be hurt for life. if the world were just, they would not be so matter-of-factly tossed aside, we might think twice about how we want to be entertained, and the owners of capital would be amply penalized for unsportsmanlike conduct. we began the series last year with three broadcasts on winner take all politics, based on the book of that name by political scientists jacob hacker and paul pierson. their theme was the political engineering of inequality, or "how washington made the rich richer and turned its back on the middle class." in the next few months we will be returning to those core issues. next week, robert reich, named one of the best cabinet officers of the 20th century, will be with us to talk about his new documentary "inequality for all." >> now the thing you want to know about this mini cooper is it is small. we are in proportion, me and my car. my name is robert reich, i was secretary of labor under bill clinton. before that the carter administration. before that i was a special aid to abraham lincoln. of all developed nations, the united states has the most unequal distribution of income and we're surging toward even greater inequality. 1928 and 2007 become the peak years for income concentration, it looks like a suspension bridge. >> last year we made $36,000. >> think i probably make $50,000 a year working 70 hours a week. >> the middle class is struggling. people occasionally say to me, "now what nation does it better?" the answer is, the united states. in the decades after world war ii, the economy boomed but you had very low inequality. >> do you know robert reich? >> i do. >> he's a communist. >> when i was a kid, bigger boys would pick on me. i think it changed my life. i had to protect people from the people who would beat them up economically. who is actually looking out for the american worker? the answer is, nobody. if workers don't have power, if they don't have a voice, their wages and benefits start eroding. we are losing equal opportunity in america. anyone of you who feels cynical just consider where we have been. >>one of the purposes of this film, bill, is to make sure people understand that the only way we're going to get the economy to work for everybody and our society, once again to live up to the values of equal opportunity that at least we aspire to, is if we're mobilized, if we're energized. if we take citizenship to mean not simply voting and paying taxes and showing up for jury duty. but actually, participating in an active way, shutting off the television -- >> with some exceptions. >> there's some exception. and spending an hour or two a day in our communities, on our state, even on national politics, and putting pressure on people who should be doing the public's business instead of the business of the moneyed interests to actually respond to what's needed. >> at our website billmoyers.com there's a thought provoking variety of analysis and commentary. that's all at billmoyers.com. i'll see you there and i'll see you here, next time. this episode of "moyers & company" is available on dvd for $19.95. to order call 1-800-336-1917 or write to the address on your screen. funding is provided by -- carnegie corporation of new york, celebrating 100 years of philanthropy, and committed to doing real and permanent good in the world. the kohlberg foundation. independent production fund, with support from the partridge foundation, a john and polly guth charitable fund. the clements foundation. park foundation, dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. the herb alpert foundation, supporting organizations whose mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society. the bernard and audre rapoport foundation. the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. more information at macfound.org. anne gumowitz. the betsy and jesse fink foundation. the hkh foundation. barbara g. fleischman. and by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america, designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. zoboomafoo is made possible in part by the makers of danimals yogurt. proud to help kick start your child's growth and development for life. zoboomafoo was made possible by contributions pbs station from viewers like you. with the kratt brothers! ♪ while walking in the woods one day ♪ ♪ chris and martin saw something strange ♪ ♪ a little leaping lemur who liked to bounce and play ♪ ♪ they followed their new bouncing friend ♪ ♪ not knowing where this adventure would end ♪ ♪ the animals were headed just around the bend ♪ ♪ where are they going? i don't know ♪ ♪ how do we get there? come on, let's go ♪ ♪ me and you and zoboomafoo
the clements foundation. park foundation, dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. the herb alpert foundation, supporting organizations whose mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society. the bernard and audre rapoport foundation. the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. more information at macfound.org. anne gumowitz. the betsy and jesse fink foundation. the hkh foundation. barbara g. fleischman. and by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america, designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. >> welcome. let us now praise common sense. once again a president was about to plunge us into the darkest waters of foreign policy where the ruling principle becomes, "when in doubt, bomb someone." strategists in the white house, militarists in the think tanks, the powerful pro-israel lobby aipac, and arm-chair warriors of all stripes, neo-conservatives and liberal humanitarians alike, were all telling barack obama to strike syria, no matter the absence of any law or treaty to justify it, no matter the chaos to follow. do it, they said, to show you can, or what's a super power for? but they hadn't reckoned on public opinion. the people said no, not this time. not after more than ten years of soldiers coming home broken in body, screaming nightmares in their brains, their families devastated. not when our politics is an egregious fraud, unable to accomplish anything except enable the rich, while everyday people struggle to make ends meet. jeannette baskin, who lives on staten island not far from the statue of liberty, who describes herself as neither republican nor democrat, told the "new york times," "we invest all this money in foreign countries and fixing their problems, and this country is falling apart." don't think these people callous, those pictures of children gassed in syria sicken them. but there are limits to military power when religious rivalries and secular passions come armed with blowtorches. a retired educator named alice ridinger in hanover, pennsylvania, spoke for multitudes when she also told the "times" that while she finds the use of chemical weapons "terrible," she fears the deeper involvement that could follow a military strike. "i don't think that would be the end of it," she said. truth is, no one knows what would happen once the missiles fly. not the white house or pentagon. not the cia or nsa. not even the all-seeing oracles of cable television, the editorial writers of "the wall street journal," or the seers of such influential publications as "the economist," hawkish now on syria despite having been wrong on iraq. in time, the white house, congress, and the punditry could all be grateful to a suddenly attentive and stubborn public. they may have been spared a folly, thanks to this collective common sense that became so palpable it was a force in its own right. now politics and diplomacy have a chance. perhaps only a slight chance, the "washington post" reports that the cia has just begun delivering weapons to rebels in syria, deepening america's stake in the civil war. but we can't know if politics and diplomacy work unless we give them a try. meanwhile, give a cheer for common sense. so with the drums of war quieted for the moment, millions of us will take a deep breath and turn our attention from all syria all the time to the yankees and the red sox, the giants and the broncos. yes, it's that time of year, when our national pastimes compete and collide, and there simply aren't enough hours in the day or night for all the alluring distractions offered. the weekend's so packed with games it's hard to keep up with who's on first and who's been knocked flat on their backs. or, to be a bit more cynical, who's on steroids and who's being carried unconscious to the locker room. which is why i've asked dave zirin to help us keep score. he's been called "the best sportswriter in the united states." the reporter who, you may remember, challenged the president of bridgestone firestone on whether his product should be the "official tire sponsor" of the super bowl while the company was fighting a lawsuit for allegedly using child labor in liberia. zirin's the first sportswriter in the long history of "the nation" magazine. he hosts sirius xm radio's popular show "edge of sports." and he's written several provocative, even scathing books on sports and society, including, "bad sports: how owners are ruining the games we love," and this his most recent, "game over: how politics has turned the sports world upside down." oh, yes, utne reader named dave zirin one of the "50 visionaries who are changing the world." welcome to the show. >> oh, it's great to be here. >> you go back a long way with your chronicling of sports. how did sports grab you? >> well, i mean, i grew up in new york city just an absolute sports freak. i mean, i memorized statistics, i followed all those great new york city teams in the '80s, the mets, knicks, unbelievable. my room was a shrine to these people. i mean, folks like darryl strawberry, keith hernandez, lawrence taylor. and i never really thought about or cared about politics very much. and that really changed for me in 1996 when i was in college in minnesota. at the time, there was a player for the denver nuggets named mahmoud abdul-rauf who made the decision to not go out for the national anthem before games. and when -- >> because? >> because he said he felt like it violated his religious principles. and he didn't believe that there should be a conflation of sports, and as he put it, paying worship to a flag. and so a reporter got wind of it and went to him and said, "what are you doing? don't you realize that that flag is a symbol of freedom and democracy throughout the world?" and rauf said, "well, it may be a symbol of freedom and democracy to some, but it's a symbol of oppression and tyranny to others." now when he said this, the sports world just blew up. i mean, espn was, like, rauf spits on the flag. boo-yah. and everybody was crowding around and watching this. and i remember seeing one of the talking heads say, well, rauf must see himself as an athlete activist, you know, like muhammad ali or billie jean king. and i'll never forget watching that and thinking to myself, athlete activist? what the heck is that? i thought i was this huge sports fan and memorizing all the stats. it seems like there's this whole world that i didn't know existed. and so i went to library, i've started reading a lot of old articles, started digging in the crates, reading old biographies. found a book co-written by taylor branch, actually, called "second wind," it's one of bill russell's books. and it opened this world to me. and so i started to think to myself, okay, if this applies to the past, how does it apply to the present and how does sports shape our political lives today? >> and you made a beat for yourself out of focusing on the ground between politics and sports. >> well, it's such a rich vein because, i mean, on a given week, it's never a what am i going to write about? it's, what am i not going to write about? because there's always so much happening in the world of sports, and there's always so many different ways in which sports, not just reflects our lives, but actually shapes our lives. i mean, it shapes our understanding of things like racism, sexism, homophobia. it shapes our understanding of our country. it shapes our understanding of corporations and what's happening to our cities. i mean, in so many different ways, sports stories are stories of american life in the 21st century. >> i know you've seen bill siegel's documentary, a new documentary on "the trials of muhammad ali." what do you think about it? >> it's absolutely brilliant. look, i have seen every muhammad ali documentary. and this is by far the best one i've ever seen for a couple of reasons. first and foremost, there is about an hour of footage in there that i have never seen before. all this incredible footage of muhammad ali speaking on college campuses in 1968. speaking out with incredible eloquence against the war in vietnam. and it's a remarkable thing to be able to see footage that has so long been underground actually get unearthed for people to see, and to truly appreciate what it was that made muhammad ali so dangerous. because i think that's what we've really forgotten. >> and the old-time leaders of the civil rights movement were concerned that he was going to take them over the deep end, that they -- >> exactly. >> would lose support in the white house and elsewhere. >> i think that's something that people today don't really understand is that you had these two titanic social movements in the 1960s, the struggle against the war in vietnam and the african american freedom struggle. and then here you have the most famous athlete on earth with one foot in both. >> no, i will not go ten thousand miles from here to help murder and kill another poor people simply to continue the domination of white slave masters over the darker people of the earth. >> mr. muhammad ali has just refused to be inducted into the united states armed forces. notification of his refusal is being made to the united states attorney and the local selective service board for whatever action deemed to be appropriate. >> so he's transgressive on all these different levels. but the other thing when we look at ali is we also have to remember that he didn't show up in the 1960s, like, coming down from planet awesome to educate all of us about politics and sports. i mean, he wasn't malcolm x in boxing gloves or anything. when you look at his life, here he is in 1960, he's 18-years-old, he wins a gold medal at the rome olympics. and his hero was a professional wrestler named gorgeous george wagner -- >> gorgeous george. >> and he wanted to bring the showmanship of professional wrestling into boxing. and then the '60s kind of happened to him. and so, and that's one of the things that the movie does, which is so brilliant, is that it shows the way, the time shaped muhammad ali, and then muhammad ali turned and shaped his times. >> were you taken by surprise at the range of voices that were arrayed against him across a spectrum from the right, william f. buckley, to the left, david susskind? >> i find nothing amusing or interesting or tolerable about this man. he's a disgrace to his country his race and what he laughingly describes as his profession, he's a convicted felon in the united states. he has been found guilty. he is out on bail. he will inevitably go to prison, as well he should. he's a simplistic fool and a pawn. >> that's the part that i think people don't know today and don't understand today, because we really, we've done to muhammad ali what we've done to martin luther king, is we've turned them into these kind of harmless icons who live above the fray of messy politics. and so just like we don't learn about the martin luther king who spoke out against inequality and spoke for government intervention to solve social ills, things that would make him, of course, politically controversial today, we don't talk about the muhammad ali who said things like, the real enemy of my people is here. i am not going to speak out against people in vietnam who are fighting for their own liberation, while here at home my own people in louisville are treated like dogs. >> you've been drawn and written about martin luther king and sports. how did you come to that? >> well, it just, it was a fascinating thing in reading biographies of dr. martin luther king, particularly the magisterial work of taylor branch and then reading some sports biographies about athletes in the 1960s, how much overlap there is. and how much connection there is or the way that martin luther king was somebody who just kept a close eye about what was happening in the world of sports. i think dr. king was greatly influenced by jackie robinson and jackie robinson's breaking of baseball's color barrier in 1947. >> and years later he said of jackie robinson, he was a sit-iner before sit-ins. he was a freedom rider before freedom rides. and he got how important jackie robinson was to the struggle. he got that you couldn't talk about the civil rights movement without talking about robinson. and so because of that and because i think of a sense in dr. king that, you know, the arc of history bends towards justice, that when there was an athlete speaking out, he never said, that person needs to just shut up and play. so when his closest advisors like, for example, roy wilkins, spoke out incredibly harshly against muhammad ali, dr. king was someone who would not do that and would actually exchange private conversations. and they even appeared together in public at a rally in louisville for fair housing. and most significantly when there was a movement in the late '60s by african american athletes to boycott the '68 olympics in mexico city, which of course resulted in tommie smith and john carlos and their famous raised fist. dr. martin luther king defended their right to boycott, calling it an amazing act of nonviolent civil disobedience. and when martin luther king decided in 1967 that he would go public with his opposition to the war in vietnam, one of the things that he said was, well, it's like muhammad ali says, we're all victims of a system of oppression. >> it is my hope that every young man in this country who finds this war objectionable, and abominable, and unjust will file as a conscientious objector. and no matter what you think of mr. muhammad ali's religion, you certainly have to admire his courage. >> and so what you had there was martin luther king drawing upon the experience of muhammad ali as a way to defend his own position, which at the time, was extremely unpopular. so i always found that incredible fascinating that here's martin luther king, his own advisors are telling him, don't stand against the war in vietnam. keep your focus on domestic issues. and not only does king take that risk, but he mentions muhammad ali's name. he mentions the name of a boxer as a way to justify it. and i would encourage people today to really think about, imagine if a similar figure referenced lebron james to say why they were taking a political stand. i mean, it says something about the kind of stature that muhammad ali had. >> is there a sports giant today who is speaking to issues of social justice the way muhammad ali did? >> the main issue is, are there movements in the streets? because when there are movements off the playing field, they reflect on the playing field. so in the last couple of years, we've seen things like the entire miami heat team with lebron james and dwyane wade, they're superstars in the lead, all wearing hoods in protest of, at the time at the fact that george zimmerman had not been arrested for the shooting of trayvon martin. and many athletes like carmelo anthony of the new york knicks, he was very vocal about that as well. so you saw something there where it connected with players, particularly of african american players, very strongly, that there needed to be justice as a result of the trayvon martin case. the other issue that of course is huge right now is the issue of lgbt athletes, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender athletes standing up and speaking out for their right to their own humanity inside a locker room. now historically, a locker room has been, it's been called "the last closet," like an incredible bastion of homophobia. i mean, this goes back to theodore roosevelt, who encouraged young boys to play tackle football, and said if they didn't they were sissies. so, and he popularized that phrase, the sissy. and it was a way of differentiating, are you going to be a leader, are you going to be tough, are you going to lead the new american century and play football? or are you going to be a sissy? and for women who wanted to play sports, you had a similar dynamic where wait a minute, what does it say about you that you want these so-called male attributes like leadership and strength and, you know, physical daring? like, what does it say about you? well, you must, there must be something wrong with you. you must be a lesbian or they would say all kinds of things about women who wanted to play sports. and what you're seeing now in the 21st century are people really pushing back against that. so in the last, even just few months, you've had jason collins become the first active male player to come out of the closet in the history of north american sports. you had robbie rogers, a professional soccer player who came out and then retired at the same time, even though he was just 25-years-old, because he said he didn't think he could be out in the locker room. and then after jason collins came out, he got back on the field and played and said, jason collins inspired me. and you've had brittney griner who is arguably the best woman's basketball player of her generation. she came out of the closet so smoothly, you wondered if she was ever in. and so you have a new generation of athletes who are using that platform of sports to speak out about sexuality and human rights and dignity in a way that i think would do the people from the 1960s very proud. >> as you know, there's a controversy brewing over the olympic games being held next winter in russia. president putin has enacted a law threatening fines or even prison for anything considered to be gay propaganda. and some people are calling for a boycott of those games. >> i don't think that the united states should boycott, even though i'm horrified by not just the laws, but some of the attendant violence that's taking place in russia against the lgbt community and even their, their allies and supporters. i'm not for a boycott, because i think first of all the athletes themselves are going to be prime to go over there and make a statement when they're in russia. and i think that history shows that has a profoundly more powerful effect on the political culture than if you just stay home. i had the great fortune of doing a book with john carlos. and i asked what he thought about the russia olympics. and i said, "should people go over there and protest or should they stay home?" and he said, "well, if i'd stayed home, no one would ever have heard what i had to say. and who would remember that i stayed home today? but people remember that i went and i said my piece. so i think you've got to give people the chance to say their piece." >> but it's still very difficult for them, isn't it? >> yeah, absolutely. and i think there are two big reasons why it's so difficult in the world of sports. the first reason is of course that people want sports to be as apolitical as possible because it's escape. you know, people just want to sit back, relax, and enjoy the game. >> and it is. >> and, yes. >> don't you go to games for escapism? are you always looking at what this means that we're not seeing? >> oh no, i like the escapism too, but it's a little hard to go see the mets and be sitting in a place called citi field named after a bank that was paid for by billions in public dollars, and not think to yourself, yeah, i think that there's some political things maybe going on here that we should pay attention to. but also, i think owners tend to be politically on the right wing of the spectrum. and when they say, and when a lot of their friends in the sports media say, sports and politics shouldn't mix, what they're really saying is sports and a certain kind of politics shouldn't mix. because when it comes to the politics of things like militarism and corporatism, those politics are blaring at a typical game. but when it comes to a player actually trying to use their hyper-exalted, brought to you by nike platform to say something about the world in which they live, well, then that can be, as you said, there can be not a very graceful response to that. >> you mentioned the historian taylor branch who wrote that magnificent series on the civil, history of the civil rights movement. he said not too long ago that college sports in particular still reeks with the whiff of the plantation. >> right. >> you think that's true? >> oh, absolutely. i mean, you know, the first person who i could find who made that analysis of calling college sports a plantation was a man named walter byers. walter byers headed the ncaa from 1951 to 1988. he is responsible for the shaping of the ncaa. and when he left the sport, he said, we've turned it into a plantation system, meaning that there is a tremendous amount of money being generated that would flow into very few hands, and none of that money, obviously, going into the hands of the people on the field or on the court themselves. i mean, it is such a wild scam what happens in college sports in this country. and it's only getting worse. >> do you think college athletes should be paid? >> i think they should because of the revenue that they generate. i mean, think about it like this, woody hayes, he's the coach over at ohio state, his last year coaching there, he made $43,000 a year. today the coach at ohio state, urban meyer, makes $4 million a year as a base salary, $4 million a year. the head of the ncaa, mark emmert, makes almost $2 million a year. now keep in mind, the ncaa is a nonprofit. i mean, i'd hate to think of how it would operate if it was a industry for profit. >> the coach at my alma mater, university of texas, mack brown, had a so-so record two years ago, eight and five, and yet he got $5 million because essentially he took the team to the holiday bowl -- >> right. >> the university officials defended that, saying, well, look our athletics brought in $103 million revenue last year. >> well, i mean, there's some really basic reforms that should happen right away, because the argument you always hear when people say that athletes shouldn't be paid is, well, they get a four-year scholarship. and so the first thing we need to say in response to that is, that's factually not true. college athletes get one-year scholarships that are renewed on an annual basis. so you could have a 4.0 gpa and be your class president. but if you're not performing on the field, you're gone. so to even call them student-athletes isn't even true. i once interviewed a former all-american, and the way he put it is the way i always carry with me, he said, "we're not student-athletes, we're athlete-students, because the second we get on campus it's made clear to us what our priority should be." so the reality at this point, it's basically they're campus workers who don't get paid. and that kind of injustice i don't think should be allowed to stand. >> what would you do about college, football in particular? >> if i could wave a magic wand, i would absolutely delink these kinds of sports from a university setting. and i would say look -- >> it wouldn't be the university of texas longhorns? >> i'm sorry, but i said magic wand, this is just the magic wand. i have a feeling i wouldn't get very far in texas with this argument. but -- >> you might get into the state, but not out. >> i wouldn't get into the state -- but this is the point though, is that web du bois wrote about this a hundred years ago, about the way that he felt like football was distorting, or as he put it, king football was distorting the atmosphere at yale university. and it's actually quaint what he wrote. he said, "the football budget is seven times the classics budget." and it's like, well, just seven times, my goodness. and so you fast forward to today, i would want the nfl with all of its billions to pony up for its own minor league. i would want the nba to do the same. because it really shouldn't shock us that sports that draw the most heavily on people of color, are also the sports that put them in a completely disempowered position, where they're training for these professional leagues without getting a dime in their pocket. so if we could delink them, i absolutely would. we're not going to. i get how deep this is in the vein of the culture. so i think a much more sane approach is first and foremost, if players can make money off their individual image, they should be free to do so. i mean, there's something obscene about a college player who boosters are paying literally $20,000 to have dinner with, but they don't get anything from that. or they sign a million things and they each get sold and the money goes to the university, but not even a little bit of it goes to them. but i think a much more sane thing would be to put caps on coaches' salaries, caps on assistant coaches' salaries. i mean, would it really be so terrible if mack brown made $1 million a year instead of $5 million or $6 million a year? i mean, would the talent pool for people who want to coach really dry up. i don't think so. that money could then go to a stipend for all people who play sports, male or female. and there is, i mean, this has been worked out that there's totally enough money in the system to make this happen, especially if colleges give up their addiction to stadium funding. i mean, at texas a&m where this kid johnny manziel, the heisman trophy winner is in so much trouble for allegedly taking a couple of grand for signing autographs. they're about to open up $450 million in renovations on their foot, and they said they want it to be a megaphone to the world. that's how it was described by the athletic director. and so they want it to be a megaphone, but the person who's actually been yelling through the megaphone, so everybody knows about texas a&m, johnny manziel, doesn't see anything of that. >> supporters of the present system, critics of yours would say, but this money, going to the coaches, going into the program, doesn't come from taxes. it comes from the revenue generated by the television contracts and all of that. >> there's a lot of truth to that argument. in some cases though it does actually draw in, at the state colleges, from state monies, especially when there are budget shortfalls. there's been terrible instances of this in california, for example, where they were cutting classes at cal berkeley while at the same time giving their coach jeff tedford a raise and doing hundreds of millions of dollars in renovations on the stadium. but the bigger issue is that the television money is just growing. espn just inked with the power conferences a 12-year, almost $6 billion contract to broadcast these college games. that's new revenue. that's $6 billion. and then people say, well no, that just goes back into the athletic department. and it's like, well, let's look at these coaches' salaries and how they're rising and still rising. let's look at now there's an arms race, if you will, of assistant coaches, where they're now making millions of dollars a year. and so what you're seeing is capitalism for some and i don't even know what you would call it, indentured servitude for the masses of athletes. and the concern is that a lot of these schools are becoming sports franchises where people happen to go to classes in between games. >> no one i know has covered so well the extent to which the world of sports has changed. what would you say is the defining feature of that change? >> the defining feature of that change can be seen in any city in this country where there is a publicly-funded, billion-dollar stadium. that to me is both a symbol and an expression of everything that's changed about the economics of sports. now look, i'm not saying that owners back in the day were these kindhearted creatures. but there was an economic system in sports where if you were an owner and you were going to make a profit, you needed to make sure that largely working-class fans would be able to pay money and put their butts in the seats and go to the park. now fans have largely become scenery. the way owners measure profits in this day and age are public subsidies for stadiums, luxury boxes at the stadium, and sweetheart cable deals. now what's so horrible about two of those three things, the cable aspect and the public subsidies for stadiums, is that we're paying for this whether we're sports fans or not. our cable bills go up, our taxes go up, to subsidize these kinds of ventures. and every single economic study shows that they don't work. so what these stadiums -- >> you mean they don't produce the revenue. >> no, it's more like a neo-liberal trojan horse. where people end up agreeing to things that they would never otherwise agree to, because it becomes wrapped in sports. and the idea, or maybe a fear that the team will move. or maybe excitement at the thought of a new building. yet we all pay a very serious price for this. i went to college in minnesota, i remember going to see the twins at the hubert h. humphrey metrodome. and it was not a good stadium. billy martin once famously walked in and said, how could hubert humphrey's parents name him after this dump? so it was a pretty awful stadium. and so, and i'm all for them having a new stadium, except the new stadium was built entirely with public money, even though it had been rejected a dozen times by the voters in various referendum. but the owner, carl pohlad, who's the richest owner in major league sports at the time, he devoted, and i, this is without exaggeration, the last 25 years of his life, from age 72 to 97, to lobbying to get this new stadium. that was his dream. and the very week they were going to break ground on the new stadium the bridge collapsed in minneapolis, sending about a dozen people to their deaths. a five-minute walk from where i live in d.c., the metro went off the rails the year after the new washington nationals' billion-dollar stadium opened. so people have to realize whether you're a sports fan or not, very real choices get made about the limited amount of public infrastructure dollars that we have. and if they don't get spent on infrastructure that safeguards our basic safety, then we all pay a price for that. >> what's the hold these billionaire owners have over the city fathers and sometimes city mothers of a place like detroit? i mean, you saw the headlines in detroit recently. one day the headline says, city declares bankruptcy. the next day, the headline says, multi-million dollar new arena. >> detroit red wings. over $400 million for a new hockey stadium, the same week that they talk about detroit declaring bankruptcy. i mean, first and foremost, it's not being built for detroit, it's being built for a gentleman named mike ilitch, founder of little caesars pizza, the man is in his 80's, he's worth $2.7 billion. and he's getting over $400 million in public money for a $650 million arena. this was signed off on by rick snyder, the same governor who enacted the anti-labor laws that are in michigan that caused so much controversy last year, and making it a right-to-work state. >> but he says this is a rebuilding project that they're doing it for jobs. >> what a wonderful opportunity to see excitement. and this will have a big multiplier effect in terms of additional development in that whole area of detroit. so it's a good win for detroit. >> yeah, once again, it's like, what kind of jobs are you creating? and could that money be used for different kinds of jobs in detroit? detroit is a place you leave, not a place you settle. you need to have real jobs that create a real tax base that can fund real schools that actually work. and you've got to keep the street lights on and you've got to have a garbage collection. and first of all, the kinds of jobs that it creates, it doesn't produce tax revenue. it produces revenue for mike ilitch which he can then hide and not pay. but it doesn't produce tax revenue for the people who are going to, who actually have to live in detroit after this. >> so what's your intuition, if not your evidence, for what, how that happened? >> well, i do have a lot of evidence on this one, because fortunately, the public records are good on this stuff. and this is about mike ilitch having a lobbying wing at the michigan capital and having the ear of rick snyder, i mean, mike ilitch -- >> the governor. >> yes. mike ilitch wanted a new arena, the same way the steinbrenners wanted a new yankee stadium. the same way in this town fred wilpon, even though we didn't know it at the time, but he was borrowing money on the new mets stadium, citi field, and giving it to his best friend, who happened to be named bernie madoff to invest it for him. i mean, and that's the part of it that just boggles my mind, especially as someone who grew up a mets fan, the idea that sports can be used as a kind of economic shell game for people in power. and i think that really is how it happens. because there's an agenda at the top of society that wants corporate welfare. that's a huge part of that kind of 1% agenda. and sports is a way to do that without arousing the kind of ire that otherwise might exist. >> you've said that what's happened to sports in the last 30 years was actually preparing the public psyche, for what? >> i think for the wall street bailout more than anything else. i mean, if you think about the trillion dollars of public money that went to bailing out wall street after the 2008 financial crisis, and the terms of that bailout as well, asking nothing of wall street, prosecuting nobody, and preparing people for this idea that says the role of public spending is really to bail out private capital. and that's the way our society is going to work. money will flow up. we have a trickle-up economic program in this country. so instead of a more classical economic model that says, if you get money in the hands of working people, they will spend that money, and that will stimulate more demand and make the economy grow, the other thing the other model is now it's a finance model that says, get as much money as possible in the hands of big business. and that's going to be the basis of our economy, even though it's going to, in an incredible sense, be like inequality on steroids. now i think the way that sports has operated over the last, particularly in the go-go 1990s, when the economy was growing starting really in camden yard in baltimore you had this preparing of the public psyche to say, you know what the role of public money should be? to give it to private capital so they can build these stadiums. >> so what do we do about this? >> well, i think one of the things that's exciting about this moment, right here, right now, is that you have examples in places like brazil of people standing up. >> they're building all the stadiums for the world cup and people think of brazil as this soccer-mad country. and, of course, the organization that governs soccer is called fifa. and so the big banners in the streets were, we want fifa-quality hospitals. we want fifa-quality schools. and that became an in international news story, this idea of, no, the stadium doesn't represent civic pride, it represents why i have a bad hospital and why my kid goes to a failing school. that, to me, is a huge step. you know, that there's that expression that sometimes in struggle, days are like years, and sometimes years are like days. like what was happening in brazil was like years of work happening in a matter of days. and so the argument is now an easier one to make with people. the second thing that's encouraging is just popular opinion. i mean, it used to be they would do these sort of showcase referenda for new stadiums and whatnot. they don't do the referendums anymore. the former mayor here, rudolph giuliani was asked why there wasn't a referendum for the new yankee stadium. and he said, well, if we have a referendum, we'll lose, which was about as honest as you could get. so it starts with education, it starts with public awareness. and i think -- >> and anger, doesn't it? i mean -- >> it has to start with anger. >> in brazil, you could watch the people protesting the inequities brought on by the spending for the world cup facilities, and they're saying, we're mad as hell, we're not going to take it anymore. >> yeah, that's we are going to need a lot of that in this country. and i think we need to actually organize with sports fans and say, okay, you love sports, but do you really want to feel like you're subsidizing the person who owns this team? does that seem right to you? and go to unions and say, okay, you think there's union labor in building this stadium and that's why you support this project, but what happens when it's done? and then your kids are working for $8 an hour and the only way you'll ever go into this stadium is if you're selling beer. >> here we are at the convergence of two sports seasons that always get fans excited, me included. the opening of football, and the fall drive in baseball towards the world series. but then you have a controversy like alex rodriguez, a-rod. >> sure. >> with a 211 game suspension hanging over his head that he is going to appeal, alex rodriguez about to take his first at bat of the season. >> a-rod, appealing his suspension for cheating, he used performance enhancing drugs that he and other players got from that anti-aging clinic in florida, biogenesis. talk about a-rod. >> oh, yeah. i mean, it's so interesting, because on so many levels, i think alex rodriguez, there's a lot about him that's very loathsome. i live ten minutes away from a horrific slum with mold and ventilation problems and rats. alex rodriguez owns the slum. it's called newport ventures. and this has become a big local story in washington d.c. that alex rodriguez owns this horrific building. i mean, so the guy has made $350 million in his career. he's loathsome on a lot of levels in terms of how he uses his money and how he uses his fame. but at the same time, all of that being said what major league baseball is doing in terms of attacking him is precisely because he is such low-hanging fruit in that regard. he's not going to get a lot of defenders. but the part of the a-rod story which i think needs to be talked about more is less about alex rodriguez and more about the other players who were pinched in this biogenesis case. if you take alex rodriguez out of the picture, all the players who were just disciplined in the last couple of weeks, they all came through baseball's dominican republic pipeline. they were all players either from the dominican republic or from nicaragua or venezuela and they all go through the dominican to be trained before coming to the u.s. today, one out of every three minor league players is from the dominican republic, a country that has a poverty rate of over 40%. one out of three minor league players. now the other thing about the dominican republic is that steroids are legal and available over the counter. and so i look at major league baseball and i think, "these are people who want to have their anabolic cake and eat it too." they want to be able to develop a huge portion of their talent in a place that's a wild west for performance-enhancing drugs. and then in the 1990s, when they weren't testing, they made billions of dollars with the power surge and the increase in home runs. and now today, as the wheel has shifted, they've become the teetotalers who are cracking down in the name of public relations. i mean, every major league owner is like claude rains in casablanca saying, "i'm shocked there's gambling going on here. your winnings, sir." >> so is there a pattern in how baseball chooses its culprits? >> it's just like we were talking about before with our cities and with inequality. i mean, i also think that sports mirrors and reflects globalization. and so what you have baseball doing is investing billions of dollars in the dominican republic, where they can sign kids as young as 15-years-old for a couple thousand dollars. they get scouted before their tenth birthday. they go through these baseball academies that, i mean, it's been exposed so many times, like the substandard health and sanitation in these places. a young prospect for the, my hometown team now, the washington nationals died in one of these academies, a young man named yewri guillen. and we're at a point now where i think baseball has decided that it's better to be able to develop talent cheaply because 99% of them won't make major league baseball anyway, and to sign a bunch of people at higher rates when 99% of them won't make it anyway. so it's like a kind of brutal, brutal farm system that takes place down there. >> have we seen any of the owners penalized for failing to enforce the rules about steroids? >> not only have you not seen that, you didn't see one owner dragged in front of congress when the congress was doing their steroid investigations. you've never seen an owner asked, what did you know and when did you know it? even though we know for a fact that in the late '80s, you had trainers going to ownership meetings saying, hey, there's these things called synthetic testosterone, steroids, that they are going to flood the locker room in the next few years. and yet they either chose the policy of benign neglect or malignant intent. and we honestly, we don't know the answer precisely because they haven't been asked. you know, player once said to me, and this is kind of like my guiding compass to this whole issue. a player once said to me, when it comes to steroids punishment is an individual issue, but distribution is a team issue. and he was trying to make the point that when they crack down, they always go after the individual. and it's like the magical fishing net that catches the minnows while the whales go free. >> so now let's talk about football. a lot of attention is being paid to the scientific link between routine football plays and permanent brain damage. i want to play you a clip from a frontline documentary called "football high." >> starting in 2009, scientists at purdue university put sensors into the helmets of two high school football teams. the sensors measured every impact the athletes took over the course of a season. >> the original intent for this study was to study concussions. but we didn't experience any concussions for quite a few weeks, so we decided we would start bringing in some of our players who had not experienced concussions to just begin to understand whether or not there were any consequences from the blows that they were getting to their head. >> to the researchers' surprise, neurological tests revealed that players who had never reported symptoms of a concussion had suffered significant damage to their memories. >> you know what to do. this is the letters test, zero back, one back and two back. >> the sensors in helmets find that high school kids take more force to the brain than college kids. and the reality is, we know from the literature that the young, developing brain is far more vulnerable to this trauma. >> how do you change the game so that you're not getting all these small little hits that don't rise to the level of concussion? that's sort of the nature of the game. that's how it's being played. every time we line up, even in a practice, that's what's happening. so we're going to have to make dramatic changes or we don't change, we don't change the face of this disease. >> do you see those changes coming, given the fact that football is so deeply imbedded, as you have written and said, in the psyche of america? we love the violent sport. >> there will be changes and people need to recognize that they will be almost entirely cosmetic. think what we have to accept as a society, as a football-loving society, is that football is a lot like a cigarette. you can give it a bigger filter, you can tell people it has less tar, but no one has invented a safe cigarette. >> you don't think better helmets will work? >> horribly, some of the studies show that better helmets can make things actually more damaging, because it's harder to detect when you're actually hurt, when you actually get your so-called, your "bell rung" as they used to say. because it becomes the sort of thing where your brain is banging against your skull, which is banging against the sides of the helmet. and because there are less exterior injuries, which might be a telltale sign, you don't see them. so it actually becomes worse and more dangerous. that's the scary thing about this. i mean, we don't, what we know now is that you don't need a diagnosis of a concussion to have a concussion. i mean, these sub-concussive hits are actually more dangerous. i mean, i think we're so attune to thinking that the danger of football is some 6'4" 250-pound linebacker running at four or five speed and knocking your block off. but that's not the danger. it's the mundane, daily knocking into the next person. that's where the danger is. >> i have been a football fan all my life because i love the surprise of it. the hail mary pass that's in the air, the beauty of the last-minute tackle. but the beauty and the surprise seem to be less compelling to me, given these reports on concussions. and given the suicides of several professional football players. >> yeah, junior seau who played 20 years and was not diagnosed with a concussion once. dave duerson, who took his own life by shooting himself in the heart, just so his brain could be studied. and junior seau also took his own life by shooting himself in the heart. these are things that i think need to weigh heavily on the minds of football fans when they watch the game. i mean, people like violent movies, they like violent video games they like violent sports. but i'll tell you something. boxing is profoundly less popular now than it was in muhammad ali's day, and that's because people actually saw with their own eyes what people like muhammad ali went through after their careers. and i think the more people know about how players suffer after they leave the game, the more the sport is going to be in crisis. >> dave zirin, thank you very much for being with me. >> my privilege, thank you. >> when thomas jefferson wrote that all men are created equal, his monticello farm team was obviously not what he had in mind. they were chattel, possessions toiling in his fields. so it's not lightly that dave zirin and other observers invoke the plantation mentality to describe college football today, or the national football league. tom van riper, who covers sports for "forbes" magazine, points out that of the 31 owners of nfl teams, seventeen, more than half, are billionaires. many boast of being self-made in the image of horatio alger, and are now ensconced in luxury skyboxes far above the proletarians whose own dreams of glory ride vicariously on the grunts and groans of bulky but agile gladiators only one play away from a career's end. a collision with the laws of physics. football, like politics, ain't beanbag. the fortunes of players can vanish in a single blow, while high in their plush digs, owners reap continuing gains from tv and advertising and the tax breaks and subsidies showered on them by compliant politicians. big-time sports now mirrors the vast inequality that has come to define america in this century. soon after the taping of my interview with dave zirin, the nfl settled a class-action suit brought by more than four thousand retired players and their families seeking damages from injuries linked to concussions. to the casual fan, it was a win for the players, a sum of $765 million. but even if they finally have to cough up, the owners will feel no pain. that's just a fraction of the estimated $10 billion the league generates in revenue each year. the average payout per plaintiff will amount to around $150,000, not nearly enough to cover a lifetime of lost wages and medical bills faced by the victims of serious brain trauma. these players and their families haven't won much. it isn't even a tie. as another formidable sleuth of journalism, david cay johnston, recently asked in the "columbia journalism review", "if the settlement does not cover all the costs of medical care, much less lost future wages, who will bear that burden?" his answer, taxpayers. when players are no longer insured by the league and find themselves unable to afford private insurance for their enduring afflictions, taxpayers, that includes you and me, will be the ones to pay, through medicaid and social security disability. we won't even be allowed to see the nfl's own extensive research into the neurological damage caused by concussions. the settlement allows the league and the owners to keep it under lock and key. something else to remember as we relax in our favorite easy chair, dazzled and thrilled by men who can be hurt for life. if the world were just, they would not be so matter-of-factly tossed aside, we might think twice about how we want to be entertained, and the owners of capital would be amply penalized for unsportsmanlike conduct. we began the series last year with three broadcasts on winner take all politics, based on the book of that name by political scientists jacob hacker and paul pierson. their theme was the political engineering of inequality, or "how washington made the rich richer and turned its back on the middle class." in the next few months we will be returning to those core issues. next week, robert reich, named one of the best cabinet officers of the 20th century, will be with us to talk about his new documentary "inequality for all." >> now the thing you want to know about this mini cooper is it is small. we are in proportion, me and my car. my name is robert reich, i was secretary of labor under bill clinton. before that the carter administration. before that i was a special aid to abraham lincoln. of all developed nations, the united states has the most unequal distribution of income and we're surging toward even greater inequality. 1928 and 2007 become the peak years for income concentration, it looks like a suspension bridge. >> last year we made $36,000. >> think i probably make $50,000 a year working 70 hours a week. >> the middle class is struggling. people occasionally say to me, "now what nation does it better?" the answer is, the united states. in the decades after world war ii, the economy boomed but you had very low inequality. >> do you know robert reich? >> i do. >> he's a communist. >> when i was a kid, bigger boys would pick on me. i think it changed my life. i had to protect people from the people who would beat them up economically. who is actually looking out for the american worker? the answer is, nobody. if workers don't have power, if they don't have a voice, their wages and benefits start eroding. we are losing equal opportunity in america. anyone of you who feels cynical just consider where we have been. >>one of the purposes of this film, bill, is to make sure people understand that the only way we're going to get the economy to work for everybody and our society, once again to live up to the values of equal opportunity that at least we aspire to, is if we're mobilized, if we're energized. if we take citizenship to mean not simply voting and paying taxes and showing up for jury duty. but actually, participating in an active way, shutting off the television -- >> with some exceptions. >> there's some exception. and spending an hour or two a day in our communities, on our state, even on national politics, and putting pressure on people who should be doing the public's business instead of the business of the moneyed interests to actually respond to what's needed. >> at our website billmoyers.com there's a thought provoking variety of analysis and commentary. that's all at billmoyers.com. i'll see you there and i'll see you here, next time. this episode of "moyers & company" is available on dvd for $19.95. to order call 1-800-336-1917 or write to the address on your screen. funding is provided by -- carnegie corporation of new york, celebrating 100 years of philanthropy, and committed to doing real and permanent good in the world. the kohlberg foundation. independent production fund, with support from the partridge foundation, a john and polly guth charitable fund. the clements foundation. park foundation, dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. the herb alpert foundation, supporting organizations whose mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society. the bernard and audre rapoport foundation. the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. more information at macfound.org. anne gumowitz. the betsy and jesse fink foundation. the hkh foundation. barbara g. fleischman. and by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america, designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. tonight on "quest" -- nanoscience has a miraculous new toy! come along as "quest" peers through the world's most powerful microscope for a glimpse of the smallest things ever seen by the human eye. and, the pure simplicity of america's game: just throw, hit and catch, right? not so! we lift the veil on the fascinating physics of baseball, just in time for opening day. >> major funding for "quest" is
That one belonged to guard Lynette Woodard, who scored 3,649 points while playing for the University of Kansas from 1978 to 1981. Her record was set before