Loyal football fans shouldn’t pay the penalty for corruption

Regular readers know the saying: You should never miss a football game. But shouldn’t you watch a football game for moral reasons? Only the little people are expected to wrestle this alligator.

They must feel guilty when they see Senegal against the Netherlands, despite the fact that they are reportedly registering a protest by withdrawing their interest in the tournament – the same people who are utterly innocent of the corruption that has made this latest conquest of a great culture possible institution of the super-rich. The same folks who took the hit that roughly uprooted this tournament from June to November.

There may be some who would condemn a person for showing an unhealthy interest in Mexico vs Poland, but I wouldn’t be one of them. In fact, I probably won’t even judge myself too harshly for going there on free-to-air terrestrial TV – like I’m making a more meaningful contribution that day by watching Judge Judy instead of this?

In fact, apart from most of the planet’s football-loving population, journalists are among the few who can’t really be blamed for this desecration. For several years, the only voices against the degeneration of this fifa-Qatar falsification have been those of journalists.

The strongest evidence of this in recent weeks is the Netflix documentary on Fifa. In four episodes covering the years when Sepp Blatter was the Fifa overlord, it presents a comprehensive portrait of what was essentially an organized crime syndicate that happened to have football as its main source of income.

Journalists have done what journalists do and yet the World Cup begins today in winter in Qatar, after a week of scenes of security guards threatening a Danish TV crew and other brutal absurdities that are best practice in your oil-rich oligarchies.

Journalists have long drawn attention to the heinous abuses that have killed so many migrant workers, creating an awareness that could mark a watershed moment – the moment when the super-rich themselves realize that even if you can buy a World Cup, it can can bring such shame that you may be better off with a more discreet purchase such as the President of the United States.

Yes, the media has done some of the hard work – sometimes the only work – of raising “problems”. Some of the players will wear armbands in solidarity with LGBTQ+ people in particular and against the malice of the authorities.

So when you condemn the journalists for bringing you their analysis of USA v Wales and berate the players for being there, you are again asking a lot more of the little folks than of the powers that be who really had it all can change .

These are governments and corporations, which in turn are vulnerable to a major weakness – the fact that some of them actually seek the terms of the rulers of Qatar.

There’s no part of the idea of ​​an irresponsible elite they don’t like, no part of a corrupt oligarchy that doesn’t appeal to a deep yearning at the core of their being.

In every aspect of their endeavors, governments bend the knee to corporations and the super-rich that they would hardly bother with at something as important as the World Cup.

In Qatar’s conquest of this sacred thing, there was a push for a new frontier in the oligarchs’ ongoing assault on the masses. Not only did they bring the crushing power of unlimited money, they engaged in a hostile takeover of what is indeed a major world religion.

All they needed was the knowledge that members of that religion’s hierarchy would “take a bung.”

And yet they don’t really understand that their “culture” is not respectable. They think they can control everything, even football, even drinking beer at a tournament. But because of some of the freedoms we enjoy in these decadent Western democracies, we’re sometimes able to fit two ideas in our heads at once.

So we can love the World Cup and despise the place where it is held. We can “focus on football” and also focus on the badness of the host country. You should never miss a football match – not even in Qatar. Especially in Qatar.

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Kaiser Musk gambles while his Twitter empire burns

Our theme of the last few weeks about the relentless advance of the oligarchs seems to be reaching its climax. Elon Musk’s destruction of Twitter may be awe-inspiring in its sheer criminality, but it requires all serious people we’ve left in public life to take a serious look at how such things can continue to happen.

This isn’t just a Kaiser Nero action by a megalomaniac; these guys burn everything down as a matter of course, even on principle.

In America they set fire to democracy itself at every opportunity, and when this scaled-down World Cup is over we will return to a Premier League slowly being sucked out of competitive juices by like-minded people. Interestingly, most of the protagonists in this world domination game have a relaxed attitude towards Putin, the ultimate billionaire delinquent.

Perhaps Jeff Bezos felt the need for a symbolic gesture when he handed Dolly Parton $100 million to use as Dolly directed. Which reminded me of two things: the absolute tragedy that we live in a world ruled by a Bezos rather than a Parton; and the spectacular meanness of a gazillionaire making his big leap into the charity game with a relatively pitiful $100 million.

If Amazon were willing to pay taxes at a rate that might make a small difference to Bezos and somehow channeled it to Parton, this amazing woman would truly be able to change the whole world for the better.

But it seems beyond the ingenuity of governments to require billionaires to behave vaguely like everyone else by engaging meaningfully with tax or other regulatory regimes. And this isn’t just about the concept of fairness anymore, it’s about the concept of these characters getting the good out of everything.

However, there is an example. Michael O’Leary pays taxes at a reasonable rate. He wasn’t forced to, of course, and no doubt he could just give it to Parton instead if he’d prefer. But still…

We hear of a “God-molded hole” in our way of life. We didn’t think we were looking at an O’Leary shaped hole.

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Trump wants to score an authoritarian hat-trick

Donald Trump’s announcement that he was running for president in 2024 wasn’t even attended to by some of the more depraved elements in the Republican Party — but Trump is beyond minutiae like “party politics.”

It’s a pity George W. Bush made it useless for future generations, but the “axis of evil” is almost perfect to describe the Trump movement and its international allies. If the next World Cup is mostly held in the US, it’s officially a 4-1 shot for Trump to become president – making it a hat-trick for authoritarian regimes after Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022.

Everything that is good is constantly in danger.