Category Archives: politics

The Ballad of Steve and Kawhi

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I’ve been watching, horrified and fascinated, as Pablo Torre has, on a weekly basis, been exposing more alleged salary cap circumvention shenanigans on the part of the richest team owner in professional sports, Steve Ballmer. But before I lay out the dramatis personae and the various deals, I want to say here that a rule of thumb of mine has evolved from:

Every billionaire is a policy failure.

to:

Billionaires are equivalent to loose nukes.

(in their threat to civil society). I think this post, All the Things That You Need a Billion Dollars to Buy Are Bad, sums it up nicely.

All of the stuff that you need more than a billion dollars to buy is stuff that it is bad for you to be able to buy. Stuff that we do not want you to be able to buy. Unfair power over other people. The ability to impose your will on others. The ability to override the democratic process. It is understandable that people think that fairness demands that people be allowed to achieve the American dream of getting rich and living a lavish lifestyle. Fine. But a billion dollars—or ten billion, or a hundred billion, or four hundred billion—are not necessary for that lavish lifestyle. The only thing that that amount of wealth is necessary for is the domination of others. In other words, at a certain point, wealth shifts from being something that enables freedom to something that can only be used to take freedom away from the public.*

Don’t get me wrong – (potentially) circumventing the NBA salary cap is not on the same plane as shuttering USAID and causing thousands? millions? of deaths, but this story encapsulates a lot of the billionaire loose nuke dynamic. It’s got:

  • Steve Ballmer, ex-CEO of Microsoft, owner of the LA Clippers, and per Wikipedia, the 9th richest person in the world – personal wealth = ~151 billion US dollars.
  • Kawhi Leonard, NBA superstar and famously frugal individual.
  • Andrei Cherny and Joseph Sanberg, founders of Aspiration, a carbon credit broker, and both big wheels in the Democratic party establishment (I highlight this because of my huge frustration with the Dem consultant bullshit that makes registered Democrats furious with the big D wheels).

What finally pushed me to write this post – it’s been kicking around in my head for a couple weeks – was this skeet:

Will I be the first to suggest the carbon offsets worked exactly as planned: they delayed real action for another 25 years

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— Prof. Ian Walker (@ianwalker.bsky.social) October 6, 2025 at 1:32 PM

Linked study here: Are Carbon Offsets Fixable?

This article provides a systematic review of the literature on carbon offsets. A growing number of studies have found that the most widely used offset programs continue to greatly overestimate their probable climate impact often by a factor of five to ten or more. Credit quality has remained a problem since the inception of carbon credits, despite repeated efforts to address the core challenges of additionality, leakage, double counting, environmental injustice, verification, and permanence. Combined, these issues have led many to conclude that overcrediting in carbon offsets is an intractable problem.*

Aspiration, the carbon credit broker, was multiple layers of scam – they sold credits for 5 to 10 times what they were “worth”, didn’t follow through to see if trees were really being planted, and, as climate activists have been telling us, were selling stuff that just plain doesn’t work.

On to Pablo Torre! Pro sports have, built in to their collective bargaining agreements with player’s unions, salary caps: limits on individual team’s total player payroll. The intent is to level the playing field for team owners; to prevent a single super wealthy owner from buying league dominance, And the cap includes anything of value a team give to a player – no free tickets,no nothing. Aspiration was, briefly a major sponsor of Ballmer’s team, the LA clippers. While looking through Aspiration’s bankruptcy filing, Pablo noticed that Aspiration was paying BIG endorsement money to Kawhi Leonard. And as he dug deeper, things looked worse. And worse. And worse. There are plenty of summaries of Pablo Torre’s findings out there – I’m not going to duplicate them – tl;dr a case can be made that Ballmer funneled millions of dollars to Kawhi via Aspiration.. I am going to embed/link the relevant Pablo Torre Finds Out episodes. If you are at all interested, give them a watch – super entertaining, fascinating, and (re the behavior he uncovers) appalling.

Before we get there, I had 2 big takeaways:

  • If the NBA finds that Ballmer did indeed circumvent the cap, the max financial penalty they can hit Steve with, though huge for a non billionaire, would not be noticed by the 9th richest guy in the world.
  • The appetite of the other owners for penalizing Ballmer may be limited, He’s rich and the lesser richies who own teams want to be him! He’s rich enough to buy the entire league! That kind of moolah distorts notions of right and wrong.

Episode links below.

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Weimar Berlin

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The proximate cause of this post is friend K’s recent re-instagram of Drawn & Quarterly’s book announcement.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BnJuVG4FZBu/

Initially I figured that it was a combined re-issue of books 1 & 2: Berlin: City of Stones and Berlin: City of Smoke. Turns out it’s more than that – the third book in the series, Berlin: City of Light comes out tomorrow as does Berlin (referenced in the instagram) which collects all 3. Even though I should not be buying any additional books *Snake from the Simpsons voice* YOINK! Maybe the Berlin trilogy will live at the Scriptorium for a while… All three books (the 3rd, sight unseen, obv) get my highest possible recommendation.

There are a couple reasons Weimar Germany has been front and center for me. The first and critically important reason is the current political. moment. If a Washingtonian can reassure a federal government employee that a dinner party will be judenfrei… Do I have to diagram it for you? A less world-historically awful reason is a fantastic show – Babylon Berlin on Netflix. I enjoyed the heck out of it. Politics! Drugs! Crime! Sex! Subtitles! Watch it!

[EDITED]*

Babylon Berlin‘s creators have said that part of the appeal of setting a narrative in that particular era is to be able to show that the Nazis didn’t appear in a vacuum. There were forces at work in society that Adolf Hitler effectively tapped into to propel his own vision forward, and show is a good framework in which to let them play out. In fact, you’ll only hear the name Hitler once throughout the 16-episode run (the equivalent of two seasons), but his shadow looms large, namely through a number of language cues that indicate a growing nationalistic base.*

Triple bonus points for a paternoster, by the way. I think I’ll read Lutes’ Berlin trilogy and re-stream Babylon Berlin. And while I’m on the subject, I’ll take the opportunity to post a couple pieces by George Grosz:

Methusalem. Costume design for the play Methusalem
(1922)

 

Daum marries her pedantic automaton George in May 1920, John Heartfield is very glad of it

*  I removed a link to The New Yorker. As I hit ‘publish’ on this post word came in about an event they’re sponsoring featuring Steve Bannon. Nope. Always. Be. Punching. Nazis.

Indy punches a nazi.

 

 

 

Institutional Collapse

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*

Who lived in a pineapple under the sea?

SpongeBob! SquarePants!

Who died in an oil spill because of BP?

SpongeBob! SquarePants!

*

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/india-heatwave-deaths *I see the climate-crisis massacres are recommencing

*Maybe atmospheric scientists made up all those dead Indians for money, and invented the oil spill, too

http://www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentre/press_releases/pr_869_en.html *Good thing a cold snap on K Street equals a cooler world

9-11, Enron, Iraq, Katrina, mortgage crisis, bailout, euro crisis, climate crisis, oil spill — we’re led by liars and sleepwalkers

Every major event that hits us is a fake, a fraud, a provocation, a panic or an organized denial — never anything we foresaw or averted

We’re way past the point of rationally managing events and into a business and politics of “lemming retention”

*And I’m not even angry — I’m saving my temper for the endless, ugly, Soviet-style ordeal of watching the Gulf Coast drown in tar

– tweets from @bruces (Bruce Sterling)

I’m not in the ‘it’s our (collective) fault’ camp. Yes, it’s impossible to argue that our oil addiction is not at the root of the Gulf disaster. But we, as a civilization, do a lot of things that involve risk – develop drugs, fly aircraft, drill and refine oil – and we have institutions/mechanisms in place that are supposed to mitigate these risks and ensure that there are good plans for when things go pear-shaped. The proximate cause of the Gulf spill (wrapping safety issues, inspection issues, lack or inadequacy of disaster planning into one package) is regulatory capture. Interior’s Minerals Management Service was not doing their job, to put it mildly. To paraphrase, power elites have always been with us, but it seems that in the past 15 years or so the world has gotten tougher to manage, while the (American, at least) power elite, aka Villagers, has become populated by nepotistically placed incompetents. If we’re going to make it through the crisis bottleneck that looms, we need to do better. My suggestions:

  • Go local. Though it’s like trying to change the course of a supertanker by hitting it with a feather, it needs to be done. Garden. Gather. Walk. Find your local farmer’s markets.
  • Learn whats up. One of the most dangerous trends of the past couple of decades has been the complete collapse/capture of the traditional media who are now fluffing power like there’s no tomorrow (with any luck, for many of them there won’t be – see Newsweek). There are people committing acts of journalism – mostly on the web. Seek ’em out. Look for who can back assertions up with facts.
  • This one may get me in trouble – vote. The government (local, state, federal) is _our_ tool. Although corporations are people (a court decision I’ll never understand), they can’t vote. If your Senator represents Big Oil or Wall Street or the RIAA/MPAA more effectively than s/he represents your interests primary her (if D) or vote him out (if R). Sorry conservatives – if you are firm in your beliefs and honest about what’s going on , it’s third party (and NOT teatardism) for you. Although both parties are well integrated into the oligarchy, one (R) is a bought and paid for subsidiary of corporate power.

I’d love to see full cleanup costs extracted from, and Clean Water Act fines levied against, BP. If that means BP’s US assets are auctioned off and the company ceases to do business in this country, all the better. It would be a salutary lesson for many large entities.