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How political sports boycotts (really) work
In recent days, America's pastime has become deeply embroiled in America's politics. US Major League Baseball pulled its annual All-Star Game (an annual friendly matchup of the sport's best players at every position) out of Atlanta to protest the Georgia state legislature's recent passage of restrictive new voting laws.
Just a week into baseball season, the move is a big deal in the US. But more broadly, it's the latest in a series of increasingly high-stakes sports decisions around the world that have a lot to do with politics.
China under the spotlight. Human right groups outraged by China's genocide in Xinjiang are putting pressure on Western governments and corporate sponsors to withdraw from the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. At the same time, Chinese sports fans have turned on Nike — which makes the kits for China's national football and basketball teams — for expressing "concern" over allegations of forced labor in Xinjiang's cotton industry.
Meanwhile, European football (soccer) players have defied a FIFA ban on political statements in order to join a growing chorus of protest over the rampant mistreatment of migrant workers in Qatar, which is set to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup. (Some 6,500 migrant laborers building the stadiums have died in the decade since the gas-rich Gulf kingdom was awarded the tournament under fishy circumstances.)
But what these boycotts actually intend to achieve is probably not what you think. All of these major sports events — watched by hundreds of millions of fans across the world and which draw in billions of dollars from corporate sponsorships — will surely take place as scheduled.
The odds of Georgia expanding voting rights for minorities to get back the All-Star Game in Atlanta are as slim as those of China admitting it holds Uighurs in mass internment camps and uses them as modern-day slaves to pick cotton to ensure all nations attend the Olympics. Interestingly, Qatar caved somewhat by promising long-overdue reforms to improve the conditions of migrant workers.
That's because sports boycotts are not usually designed to reverse the policies they are opposing. But they can be quite effective in achieving other outcomes.
First, their unique combination of cultural and economic power make sports an outsize arena for political disputes to play out.
The MLB's decision to drop Atlanta is less about weighing on the latest US political culture war than taking a stand on not further restricting voting rights, which most Americans support. It also follows the tournament organizer's own efforts in recent years to attract younger, more racially diverse fans.
Second, boycotts raise the cost of pursuing certain policies. While the specter of Western countries pulling out of Beijing 2022 may not be enough for China to reverse course on Xinjiang, a mass withdrawal of corporate sponsors could lead Beijing to lose billions of dollars in revenue from the games.
However, the domestic boycott against Nike is being led by Chinese celebrities and consumers who want the American brand to stop talking about the Uighurs. This puts Nike into an impossible position in China: on the one hand it risks a backlash from its Western clients if it doesn't speak out (which is what the NBA did when it kowtowed to China regarding Hong Kong's democracy protests in 2019), and on the other hand it can lose a lot of business in China if it does.
To further complicate things, China is also in a tough spot: stoking nationalist sentiments by unilaterally terminating these agreements would be immensely expensive. And all of this is going to get worse as US-China relations continue to deteriorate.
Third, boycotts are a great way to draw wider attention to problems that boycotts alone won't solve.
In the 1960s, bans on white-only sports teams in international tournaments, including the Olympics, helped rally public opinion against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Today, with many sports superstars among the world's top influencers on social media, it's a lot easier for them to raise awareness about any issue, and reach a wider audience.
But wading into political minefields in the current highly polarized environment can also be immensely risky for athletes, sports leagues and governments if they make the wrong call. Just ask Colin Kaepernick.
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Biden infrastructure plan would boost jobs; Georgia voter law tensions
Jon Lieber, Managing Director of the United States for the Eurasia Group, shares his insights on US politics:
What specifics do you expect to be in Biden's "build back better" infrastructure plan?
Well, this is really a two-part plan. The first part Biden's rolling out this week, and it's focused mainly on infrastructure. Bridges, roads, tunnels, transit, the whole infrastructure smorgasbord, including on broadband deployment, as well as investing in things like rural hospitals, schools and upgrading buildings to be more energy efficient. Biden's proposed between $2 and $2.5 trillion depending on how you do the math, paid for by tax increases primarily falling on the corporate sector that actually spread out over 15 years, as opposed to the bill's spending, which spreads out over 10. That means the bill will be mildly stimulative to the economy on top of creating potentially new jobs through the direct spending that's going to happen.
The tax increases are focused largely on corporate America, higher corporate tax rate, changes in the way US taxes its multinational corporations, and other changes that come on the individual side, which will be primarily used to fund the second half of the plan, which is going to be focused on more of a human services element. These are things like education, healthcare, subsidies for daycare, universal pre-K, community college, and other things that the Biden administration contends have to be invested in to keep the American economy going. Now, these tax increases are going to be really controversial with Republicans, which means you're probably not going to see a lot of Republicans vote for this. But Democrats are pretty aligned around doing something big and meaningful in advance of the 2022 midterms. So both of these bills probably pass into law before the end of the year.
What's going on with the Georgia voter law?
Well, in the wake of a 2020 election, where President Trump claimed there was widespread fraud, Republican politicians are now moving across the country to roll back some of the expansions that were done during the coronavirus pandemic to make it easier to vote. In Georgia, this has meant curtailing the ability to vote on Sundays, it's meant requiring a photo ID, and it's meant limiting to some extent, the ability to apply for an absentee ballot. Most of these changes are rolling the voting rules back by a couple of years. This is not the apocalyptic changes that the Democrats have been claiming, but the Democrats are really motivated to stop all of this from happening because they want to open up voting and make it as easy as possible for their constituents to get out. They typically do better at higher turnout elections. Republicans typically do better in lower turnout elections.
So for Democrats this is really, for both parties, this is really considered an existential threat, and the voting rules are going to be a really important battleground over the next 12 to 18 months. At the federal level, the Democrats are pushing a bill, H.R. 1, that would fundamentally alter the way elections are conducted in this country, including by changing money in politics and eliminating partisan gerrymandering, by requiring each state to use a nonpartisan commission to draw the districts for the House of Representatives. If it passes, and I don't think it will because it would require today 60 votes in the Senate, but if it were to pass, it would be a big structural shift towards the Democrats in US elections.