Donald Stirling is an 81 year old man who has owned an NBA basketball team, the Clippers, a bad team until recent years, since 1981.  He is also a big real estate mogul with a long history of racist practices, which of course is a part of business.  In 2009, he was compelled to pay a fine of nearly 3 million dollars for refusing to rent apartments to Blacks, Latinos, and families with children, which I am sure was about maintaining "property values" and profits He was born into a Jewish family as Donald Tolkowitz, something that is being commented on, the press reports in Israel. He changed his name a long time ago.  That too I am sure is about business.  If one looks carefully I suspect that one would find examples of Stirling discriminating against Jewish people.  He reminds me of the  kind of department store owner of Jewish background who had a policy in the early 1930s of not hiring Jewish store clerks.  My mother tried to get a job in that store.  An Italian Christian friend of hers told her to wear a cross to get the job, which she indignantly refused to do.  I am sure Stirling would wear anything to close on a deal.

Stirling is now and has long been very much of a wreck of a human being, someone who flouts traditional morality, bourgeois morality one might say, by openly cavorting with "mistresses"(in his case concubine might be better) engaging in legal battles with them, his wife, with whom he has been married since 1955.  In 2003, for example, he sued a former "mistress" to try to get back a house he gave her, claiming that she was merely a prostitute and  his relatonship with her was "purely sex for money"  He lost.

  Out of those truly bizarre battles(his wife is currently suing his current concubine(a woman generations his junior of Mexican-American and African American background according to her own comments). As the concubine of the owner, she gets great tickets of course to Clippers games and has a fetish for having her picture taken with famous athletes at the games, African-American athletes in a sport withich is overwhelmingly African- American. 

Stirling, even though he himself failed, it has been alledged to cut jobs when he was a young man because of his Jewish background, advanced under our capitalist system by absorbing nad reflecting the worst prejudices of the the society.  Thanks to the existence of civil rights laws, he has been sued over and over again, by Elgin Baylor, the great Los Angeles Laker basketball player who was the team's general manager for a long time and who claimed that his salary was frozen even with his fame  and that Stirling told him in the 1980s that he wanted a "team of poor black boys from the South and a white head coach."

The rich they are different, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote famously in the 1920s.  They really aren't so different, but they can get away with so much more because of their wealth.  Also,in the world of "market capitalism" it is much easier and usually, without regulation, more lucrative to be dishonorable then honorable.

Stirling has had the money to profit from his bigotry, to refuse to rent apartments to Blacks and Latinos in certain areas of LA(and in the law suits against him make obscene racist comments about Blacks and Latinos). 

Although much of his wealth and all of his fame comes from his ownership of an overwhelmingly African-American NBA team in a league that is overwhelming African-American(a sport with relatively low overhead because of the small player rosters and spectacular profits for owners and investors) his attitudes toward  his players, at leasr those he expressed to his "mistress" in the recorded phone call which touched off the scandal, was that of  paternalistic plantation slaveholder. 

Below I have cut and pasted what I consider to be the key excerpt from the tape.   

V. Stiviano: I don’t understand, I don’t see your views. I wasn’t raised the way you were raised.

Donald Sterling: Well then, if you don’t feel — don’t come to my games. Don’t bring black people, and don’t come.

V: Do you know that you have a whole team that’s black, that plays for you?

DS: You just, do I know? I support them and give them food, and clothes, and cars, and houses. Who gives it to them? Does someone else give it to them? Do I know that I have — Who makes the game? Do I make the game, or do they make the game? Is there 30 owners, that created the league?

 At first, Stirling is the tells the concubine, Stiviano, not to bring Blacks to a game to see Black players, as if the Staple center were the gangster controlled cotton club where black artists performed to segregated white audiences.  Then, he assumes the role of the benevolent slaveholder, proclaiming that he gives the players "food and clothes, and cars and houses"  Of course, they buy those things with their salaries, since they really are workers, albeit among the highest paid workers in the world, in a capitalist economy.  And finally. Stirling challenges the the labor theory of value, associated with Karl Marx, when he claims that he and the owners "make the game." 

The odds are overwhelming that Stirling will as an NBA owner go down on this one.  The league is too lucrative and his open racism too disruptive to let him get away with these acts with the kind of token punishments that he can easily afford.  But, if his victims were people of color with wealth, fame, and celebrity, if they were like the Black and Latino people whom he discriminated against as a landlord, or like my mother looking for a job in the  depression at that department store in the Bronx,  it would of course not be so simple

 The bond between capitalism and racism will of course continue institutionally as long as capitalism lasts, although it can and has been reduced through active anti-racist struggle and the use of public power against it.  Below, I have cut and pasted, from his conversations with his concubine, Donald Stirling's rationalization of his attitudes as "normal" and the way of the world

Donald Sterling: It’s the world! You go to Israel, the blacks are just treated like dogs.
V. Stiviano: So do you have to treat them like that too?
DS: The white Jews, there’s white Jews and black Jews, do you understand?
V: And are the black Jews less than the white Jews?
DS: A hundred percent, fifty, a hundred percent.
V: And is that right?
DS: It isn’t a question—we don’t evaluate what’s right and wrong, we live in a society. We live in a culture. We have to live within that culture.

The final comments sum it all up---namely "we don't evaluate what's right and wrong, we live in a society.  We live in a culture.  We have to live within that culture."  In short, we live to enrich ourselves and if that means that the way to do that is to become a slaveholder, a Nazi "Aryan property custodian," a warlord, whatever, we do that.

This tawdry little story will end soon  Hopefully, we will be able to educate working people, who understand spectator sports and are more involved in it as spectators than they are unfortunately in politics, about the attitudes of the unions of capital to their workers, and how out of touch with real life those owners and investors, for whom their workers are, whether they are white or black things, not people, really are