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MLS All-Stars Slipped A Mickey.A new year, a new All-star format. This year, hoards of K-mart dwelling twelve year olds have voted three Metros into the MLS All-star Game. Diego Sonora, strangely enough, will play on a World Eleven to face Meola, Ramos and Lalas amongst eleven US crowd favorites. Alexi Lalas' inclusion ensures that selection was not based upon on-field performance, and with the addition of Cobi Jones, Marcelo Balboa, El Pibe Valderama, and Jamie Moreno, the choices seem more likely to have been made on the basis of bad hair styles. That said, last years all star game, a tradition perhaps strange to those raised on world soccer, was a lot of fun to watch. An attacking free-for-all and goal fest, America's soccer characters, if not their most skilled twenty-two, should put on a good show again this time. While the new choice in formats seems a wise one, a new choice in location should raise alarm bells. Walt Disney's Wide World of Sports, part of the spralling Disney complex continuing to envelop central Florida. No one can't question Disney's ability to
host a soccer game. With multiple stadiums, venues for
'soccer celebrations' and assorted marketing events, not
to mention parking spaces for every man, woman and child
in Paraguay, Disney and its affiliated lands look like a
dream come true for the MLS. Its the baggage that Disney
carries that worries me. First off, it seems as though the corporate sponsor is doing next to nothing to promote the event, ensuring what crowds arrive will be passive and dissinterested. Disney's web site makes no mention of the multi-day All-Star Event, and its schedule for Wide World of Sports sandwitches it in small print between a variety of regional under-16 boys softball tournies. If fact, a number of the All-Star Events of which the MLS speaks so proudly, will take place dozens of miles away at Kissimmee municipal facilities, while Disney W.W.S. hosts a glut of under-10 basketball games. So much for high priority from a powerful corporate sponsor. Disney IS useful for one thing. As ABC will brodcast the All-Star match "Live from Disney World", American suburbanites might see some of the almost religious esteem in which so many hold Disney rub off onto the MLS. Much of the world equates anything Disney with being American. No group believes this more rabidly than the American suburban middle class. Such an association is one more step in putting to rest the old hack that soccer is somehow a 'foreign' game. But that this association is, like the wholesome gleam on the Disney empire, a fake. The truth is much darker. Its a history of corporate abuse, greed, and raw power that has become thickly masked in a invented, small-minded and totalitarian vision of American culture. Its all the things soccer isn't, and it would be a tragedy if either the brutal corporate reality or the sacarine artiface came to characterize the MLS. To get the lurid details out of the way, Walt Disney, the corporate megolith's founder, was a real shit. Journalist Marc Elliot's biography gallops gleefully through the particulars of Walt's life, and it seems undenialble that the man whose institiutional heirs never miss a chance to venerate with frightening fervor, was an anti-semite, theif, and union buster, with a weakness for extreme-right politics. Today's neo-nazi, in fact, count him amongst their most prestigous fellow travelers. Walt was an open and vehment anti-semite, he bullied his employees, and stole his most lucrative creations (including Mickey Mouse) from them. He was an admirer of Hitler in the thirties, yet saved his company from collapse through a huge government contract to make military films during World War II. From 1940, until his death in 1966, Walt was an informer for crazed cross-dressing fascist and FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover. Disney took a leading role in the blacklisting and inquisition of the McCarthy hearings in the 1950's, and was named a "full Special Agent in Charge Contact" by Hoover. In return, Hoover aided Disney in witch hunts against employees he feared would unionize the film industry, set up hearings to repress films deemed "un-American", and gave Disney sole sanction to dramatize the shoot-em-up exploits of the FBI. Disney gave the agency power to review scripts, but managed to resist commands to alter "That Darn Cat", as the G-Men felt that the title charecter of a housecat-cum-FBI agent would bring disrepute upon the agency when he was depicted rumaging through trashcans between assignments. Walt left his corportate progeny a quite different empire from that of the 1950's, mostly because of his expansion into holiday themeparks. The Anaheim, California Disney Land was soon eclipsed by the mamoth Disney World, the land for which was bought by anonomous third parties so as not to arrouse resistance amongst the locals. Ten's of millions from the film empire turned to hundreds of millions of dollars, and funded a host of associated theme parks and resorts, including the infamous EuroDisney. Decreeing to the French that the corrupting influnce of wine would be banned from the park, or that employees must conform to restricitons in dress and appearence that would be constricting to a mormon missionary sure didn't help. Equally famed have been Disney's forays into planned communities. One of their model subdivisons was caught in the hurricane that hit Homestead, Florida in the early 1990s, where residents discovered in the aftermath that their roofs had not been nailed on. Disneys model city near Orlando is an orwellian nightmare. Every aspect of their property is regulated by the company, where model schools are turning to disasters, and where Disney leaned on the government to legislate loopholes which would ensure the company received all the benifits of encorporation as a city, while avoiding and cumpunction to create an elected government, or to be legally accountable to its citizens. In a recent case, Disney Security Services engaged in a high-speed chase through their Magic Kingdom, which ended in the death of one man. When the actual police tried to supeanea radio and other records of the chase, Disney blocked the investigation on the grounds that Disney security were a private company, and thus not open to the public review. Welcome to the absolute monarchy of King Walt. But the modern Disney empire, and its transformation into one of the richest conglomerates in the world, have been overseen by King Micheal (Eisner). Eisner, since his asscention less than a decade ago, has purchased newspapers, film studios like Tristar, and the Capital Cities/ABC teleivision network. Carl Hiaasen, columnist for the Miami Herald, and writer of Team Disney, a study of Disney World's manipulation of Florida's people and land, claimed in a recent radio interview, that he was told he could not be interviewd by ABC and "was not welcome" on ABC's late-night chat show, Politically Correct. Since the Disney/ABC merger, the Disney resort kingdom has been used rather unconventionally to increase ABC viewership. Prior to the 1997 television season, thousands of television critics were treated to an all expense paid 'conference' to soak up the wonders of ABC's programming and to rub sholders with its stars. Presumably paid vacations provide the perfect venue for objective criticism. With the launch of the Disney's Animal Kingdom wildlife park, many became concerned as to how wild animals would cope with an artificial environment, designed more to appeal to tourists fantasies than to species well being. A flock of migrating birds that had the audacity to roost in what was once their natural habitat were exterminated by Disney, who blithely paid the fines leveled for animal cruelty in the aftermath. The stir following the deaths of some recently transplanted zoo animals quieted considerably after three thousand journalists were given an expense paid 'fact-finding' weekend at the resort. But animals aren't the ones who suffer most at the hands of the Magic Kingdom. According to a 1996 report by the non-profit National Labor Committee, Disney contracted sweat shops in Haiti to produce childrens clothing in conditions, and for pay, that was illegal even in this, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Employees were paid 28 cents an hour, and subjected to routine abuse at the hands of a contractor who had been an official in the FRAPH death-squads prior to the U.S. invasion. Three different contractors were cited in the report. One reporter described living conditions of the Disney workers: "Since milk is too expensive, children are given sugar water. Parents are unable to afford medicines or meat for their children. Cough syrup costs a day's wage, $1.54, and a can of powdered milk $3.08. Since workers' neighborhoods do not have running water they must buy it by the bucket. A one- room shack may be home for an entire family, and often several families must share a hole in the ground as a toilet." When the Haitian governement stepped in to enforce the minimum wage of 56 cents an hour, the contractors almost doubled the workers piece-rates to make up the difference. Disney contracts in deplorable conditions to sweat shops in El Salvador, Honduras, and the US, including the sweatshops of Manhattan. In one Los Angeles sweat shop, a twelve year old girl was found working on Disney merchandise. Meanwhile, CEO Michael Eisner was being was being paid $97,600 an hour. A shareholder resolution in 1997, demanding management ensure a "sustainable community wage," limit the number of work hours required of factory workers each week and recognize the right of workers to organize was opposed by the board, and replaced with a code of conduct that does little to monitor the actual conditions under which contractors operate. 13 and 14 year old children have been found producing Disney products in Thailand, and since the aquisition of Capital Cities/ABC, American employees have been subjected to cut backs, pension suspensions, and the removal of union employees. Where has this savings gone. Eisner and other top executives have pocketed it, with Eisner negotiating a recent pay deal of more than $771 million, the largest in American history. And the economies contine. The Disney's board has found a loophole to avoid paying taxes on the recent sale of its newspaper chain, amounting to a $600 million dollar windfall for the company. That's $5 for every American taxpayer.
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