by John Pilger from Green Left.
Pilger, although he doesn't name the culprit, essentially describes how the system of capitalism contaminates even the leisure time of people wanting to enjoy, either as participants or as spectators, organized sports. The organizations of professional sports are primarily designed to extract profits from those activities, and only secondarily to serve the needs of leisure and recreation that working people must have to face the daily grind of most of their lives.
However, he only focuses on the "sharks" and fails to point out the fundamental problem of the system that inevitably attracts "sharks" or predators, sociopaths, etc. Hence, the title naively suggests that we could have "good guys" running these organizations and everything would be different.
Has he, like most other people, been brainwashed into believing that "there is no alternative" to capitalism, or is he merely playing it safe so that his article will be published in more of the liberal-left media that will pay him? I certainly don't criticize him if it is the latter. A journalist has a very hard time surviving these days. It is up to the rest of us to critically read such articles in order to glean the real truth that they contain.
