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A specter is haunting the NBA the specter of socialism. The league already has in place a redistributive model, with wealthy teams paying taxes to help bankroll small-market franchises. But recently, Michele Roberts, the new Players Association executive director, issued a bold opening salvo in her early tenure, speaking in terms that can only be described as Marxist and asserting the singular value of the players. NBA Owners Expendable, ran an ESPN headline in response to Roberts remarks. A leading voice on the sports network wondered if Roberts was leading the players toward the previously unthinkable: a player-owned league. Such a development would be the most bold experiment in socialism in decades, at least.

After years of negotiating, the NBAs economy now resembles a standard postwar Keynesian national model, with a familiar four-bracket marginal progressive tax structure used to redistribute revenue to smaller teams. Its plainly clear in a sports league, if not in a nation, that systems seize and break down when inequality reaches untenable levels. For all our disagreement on such matters at the polls, Americans like the result of rigidly redistributive sports economies. In the NFL, the nations most popular league, nearly 61 percent of total revenue is collected and redistributed about the league, maintaining the relative parity that fans demand. All three big U.S. professional sports leagues have adopted redistributive practices. Even fans of the NBAs coastal goliaths knowif deep, deep downthat Milwaukee has to have a chance to be champion. For all her conservative currency, Ayn Rands ideological absurdity would have been readily apparent were she to have written a sports novel where a dynastic New York team wins 34 trophies in a row. Americans do, in fact, like redistribution.

But if the NBA currently operates according to a sort of Keynesian, redistributive model, Roberts has provoked an imagination of a socialistic league, a revolutionary model that is, strictly speaking, non-capitalist. (It is socialistic in the broad sense of the term, not in the way it gets used to describe welfare-state models, which are, in the final analysis, mostly capitalist economies with socialistic salves to grease the gears, smooth out cyclical troughs and ward off unrest.)

Why dont we have the owners play half the games? challenged Roberts when asked about the roughly 50-50 revenue split among players and owners. A Marxist truism now becomes a joke when considered in the case of the NBA; its the workers who create the value, not the owners. So while, say, the Koch brothers might appear necessary to the functioning of Koch Industries, NBA owners complete and total lack of hoops skill lays bare their superfluousness. No one wants to hear And starting at power forward Donaaaald Sterrrrrliiiing!

Roberts drives the point home: There would be no money if not for the players There. Would. Be. No. Money. Owners are expendable, she suggests: Thirty more owners can come in, and nothing will change. These guys [the players] go? The game will change. So lets stop pretending.

Worker-owned businesses are fairly rare, especially wholly owned, large entities. But a trend toward the model has accompanied a changing attitude toward capitalism, writes University of Maryland professor Gar Alperovitz in the New York Times. We may, in fact, be moving toward a hybrid system, Alperovitz writes, something different from both traditional capitalism and socialism. This third way, first attempted on a large scale by Sweden during the height of its radicalism in the 1970s, might well find a foothold in the wake of the Occupy movement. The Swedish experiment was never permitted to play out; corporate capitalism and nascent neoliberalism were set to dominate for the next few decades, and Swedens plan might not have been birthed at the right historical moment. But Occupy brought to public attention the non-hierarchical, participatory, democratic structures that had been incubated on the left during the last several decades of capitalist triumph and communisms defeat. Many on the left, unsatisfied with what they saw as a false choice between failed models of state socialism and corporate capitalism, explored this third way, neither capitalist nor socialist in their traditional senses. Stepping out into the vacuum of ideas in the wake of the 2007-08 economic crisis and Great Recession, Occupy was a sort of coming-out party for this leftist thought. Following Argentinas own economic disaster in 2001, the fbricas recuperadas movement in Argentina, documented by Naomi Klein and husband Avi Lewis in their 2004 documentary The Take, demonstrated the surprising ease with which workers can supplant capitalist ownership and management.

But the fbricas recuperadas and Occupy movements are not the NBA. An anti- or post-capitalist move by the NBA would bring revolutionary ideas into living rooms, sports bars and playgrounds across the country. It is conceivable that such a remedy for the league might rouse the imagination of Paul family libertarians, Bernie Sanders-wing progressives, and many in the great swath in between. Why cant we all own where we work? Americans might start to ask. Would not a democratic people begin to chafe at democracys antithesis in the workplace?

The eventual effects of that simple notion might do much to cure our current, stubborn ills, both economic and political. Imagine a Koch brothers-less Koch Industries, where employee ownership eliminated that concentration of wealth and influence. Wall Street, allegedly a scene of distributed ownership, is, of course, largely a means for concentrated ownership and control, and employee ownership would begin to erode that power maligned by the left and the right, both Occupy and the Tea Party. President George W. Bush rallied Americans around his ownership society, but ownership is kept from even some of the nations most highly paid employees: professional athletes. The dynamic of owner and employee is still at work in the NBA, NFL and Major League Baseball; the players are bought and sold, traded and dismissed in a way that, in the end, differs little from fast food or Wal-Mart workers. They are, in that way, powerless, despite Roberts almost self-evident assertion: There would be no money if not for the players. There would be no money if not for the fry-cook and the cashier, too.

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NBAs socialist revolution: How a new plan could radicalize the league and America

Cuba and The US Normalize Relations, is Socialism Over?
The major news that everyone is talking about is the opening up of relations between the US and Cuba. Obama has announced that there will be economic cooperation between the two countries form...

By: Jason Unruhe

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Cuba and The US Normalize Relations, is Socialism Over? - Video

Cuban President Raul Castro has hailed a recent U.S. move to normalize bilateral relations, but stressed that Havana will not give up socialism.

Speaking at the National Assembly in Havana on Saturday, Castro said he is open to discussing a wide range of issues with Washington, but added his country would not bow to pressure to change its core political principles.

Just as we have never proposed to the United States to change its political system, we will demand respect for ours, Castro said.

"There are profound differences between the governments of the United States and Cuba that include, among others, differing concepts about exercising national sovereignty, democracy, political models and international relations," the Cuban president said.

The thawing of U.S.-Cuba relations follows 18 months of talks between the longtime foes. In his speech to the assembly, Castro said change would come slowly.

"This will be a long and difficult struggle," he said.

In related business, members of parliament gave a standing ovation to three men convicted of spying in the United States who were released as part of an historic agreement to restore relations between the two long-hostile countries.

Since taking over from his ailing brother in 2008, Raul Castro has pushed through market-style economic reforms, but he told the National Assembly that Cuba would not abandon its socialist principles. (Ramon Espinosa/Associated Press)

The three men, known as the "Cuban Five" and long regarded as heroes in Cuba, appeared before the National Assembly along with family members.

Seated behind them in the audience was Elian Gonzalez, the young Cuban who in 2000 was at the centre of a bitter custody battle between relatives in Miami and his father in Cuba.

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Castro says dtente won't change socialism in Cuba

Saturday December 20, 2014 03:12 PM

By Tim Johnson, McClatchy Foreign Staff (TNS)

HAVANA Cuban President Raul Castro said Saturday that Cuba would not renounce its core socialist ideals as part of a deal he struck this week with President Barack Obama to renew diplomatic relations after more than five decades.

Castro, speaking at a session of the National Assembly, praised Obama, highlighted the profound political differences that still divide Cuba and the United States, and noted that normalization would not come quickly.

An important step was taken, but the most essential part is still pending, which is the end to the economic, commercial and financial embargo of Cuba, Castro said.

Earlier in his speech, the Cuban leader said that the economy lurched along with 1.4 percent growth in 2014 and pledged new steps to promote a nascent private sector in Cuba, one of the worlds last socialist holdouts.

But he said change would come slowly.

This will be a long and difficult struggle, Castro told the assembly.

He praised Obama, the Vatican and Canada for their roles in hosting secret talks that led to Wednesdays surprise announcement of a breakthrough that could ease the greatest lingering source of tension in the Western Hemisphere.

I salute the proposal of President Obama to open a new chapter in the relations between our two nations and to introduce the most significant change in policies of the United States in the past 50 years, Castro said. We are not unaware of the virulent criticism that President Obama has had to endure from the forces opposed to the normalization of relations with Cuba because of this announcement. They will do all they can to sabotage this process.

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Cuban president praises new US ties, but wont abandon socialism

(Saurabh Gupta is Correspondent with NDTV 24X7)

Around 70 politicians, writers, academicians, religious and business leaders have gathered in Goa for an intellectual gathering, along with 400 participants, for the India Ideas Conclave.

The event is being billed as the right wing's answer to Nehruvian socialists who have dominated think-tanks and policy making since independence. Organised by the India Foundation, the central theme of this three-day event is Sangh ideologue Deen Dayal Upadhaya's philosophy of integral humanism.

BJP leader Subramaniam Swamy says, "We are believers in market economy and nationalism. Many of us have suffered at the hands of fanatic Nehruvian socialism and now it's our turn."

Social worker and writer Harsh Mander, who is a believer in Nehruvian socialism, told NDTV, "Let people who believe in markets function outside the framework of state provisioning bodies which plan state provisions. As far as the other right wing is concerned, which is the idea of the majoritarianism, to me, it is not a negotiable idea because the country has a constitution."

Among the attendees of the conclave are eminent economist Lord Meghnad Desai, Chairman of European Parliament Committee on Foreign Affairs Elmar Brok, economist Arvind Panagariya, former Comptroller and General Vinod Rai and author Amish Tripathi.

Shourya Doval, who has played a major role in organising the event, told NDTV "Certain elements of Nehruvian socialism did not fit at all in India. And we see it in the outcome of what we tried to do and what we ended up doing. The Planning Commission was one of them. These are borrowed concepts which have lost their relevance."

The organisers say the meet is being organised so that India can reclaim its leadership position in intellectual thought.

Ram Madhav, a former leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh who recently joined the BJP, told NDTV, "This is not about politics. This is simply an answer to those who made us reach intellectual bankruptcy by constantly borrowing from the west and forgetting our own ideas."

He adds, "The topics and speakers have been chosen to create a nationalistic agenda." As opposed to Leftists and American academia, who rely on western concepts and have dominated the intellectual arena for years, this is the right wing intellectuals' comeback moment.

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Right-Wing Intellectuals Say This is Their Conclave