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Boxing is our most controversial American sport, always, it seems, on the brink of being abolished. Its detractors speak of it in contempt as a "so-called 'sport,'" and surely their logic is correct: if "sport" means harmless play, boxing is not a sport; it is certainly not a game. But "sport" can signify a paradigm of life, a reduction of its complexities in terms of a single symbolic action--in this case its competitiveness, the cruelty of its Darwinian enterprise--defined and restrained by any number of rules, regulations, and customs: in which case boxing is probably, as the ex-heavyweight champion George Foreman has said, the sport to which all other sports aspire. It is the quintessential image of human struggle, masculine or otherwise, against not only other people but one's own divided self. 
-- Joyce Carol Oates

Someday, they're gonna write a blues song just for fighters. It'll be for slow guitar, soft trumpet and a bell.
-- Sonny Liston

As a child somewhere on the journey towards adolescence in the mid-to-late 1980s, there were certain names that brought with them entire worlds. "Maradona" was one this little Canadian Scot spent a lot of time rolling around his tongue, while balls rolled around football pitches marked out by jumpers and trees, at the feet of players far more capable than he. "Schwarzenegger" and "Stallone" made for air machine guns, bandannas, throwing each other in the mud and learning to love the art of gratuitious bloodshed.

Then there was Tyson. Tyson was what the older kids who worked at the slaughterhouse would name their dogs (and, eventually, their children). Tyson was huddled conversations under the bridge about sixty second knockouts, older cousins with cigarettes in their mouths, replaying the fist swings with a slow and sincere reverence. Tyson was in the playground, our heads smashed against walls by the bulkier and more slowly moving amongst us, games of British Bulldogs suddenly turning to the heavyweight championship for inspiration. Seconds out, they'd shout, and the bricks were only ever those seconds away.

At the time, Joyce Carol Oates was writing very smart and eventually legendary work on Tyson, contextualising him amongst the greats. But the rumble in the jungle, to us, was probably an episode of GI Joe. We were becoming vaguely aware that Cassius Clay and Muhammad Ali were the same person but could not tell you the reasons why. Frank Bruno was on the Saturday telly, that lovely Irish McGuigan lad too. But those weren't the word that made the world shake.

That word was Tyson.

I knew nothing of boxing, but I knew what I saw. That vicious, raw, pure distillation of the fight. Kid Dynamite transformed into Iron Mike. The purists hated him. He wasn't the art. The world did not dance on his fists. It was pummelled. He was unbeatable because you can't beat rage like that. You can't beat the streets, and the prisons, and the anger.

You know what happened. Others have written it better. Those who actually know something about boxing. Start with David Remnick and go on from there. There was the rape. The prison sentence. The comeback. Evander Holyfield. The ear bite. Fuck you til you love me, faggot. Don King. The collapse. Dragging boxing down with him.

And always, at the center, that man, that strange, self-victimising madman with the motor mouth. With his mansions abandoned, he is reduced to that hoariest of cliches, the fallen heavyweight champ. The Raging Bull. The Sonny Liston. Long ago a realisation there would be no triumphant Balboa return, horns ablaze. This was it.

Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis have an interesting article in The Nation this week following up on the situation they documented a couple of years back in the extraordinary documentary The Take.

The Take is a document partly of the destructive tendencies of neoliberal capitalism, but more of the forms and structures that emerge in the wake of its collapse. When the Argentinian economy was detonated by a Menem-bomb at the turn of the decade, workers in the factories of Buenos Aires were left jobless, their bosses having fled for higher ground. At the end of every street, factories stood intact but empty. Dusting off the most basic sentences of Marx, workers realised the means of production were right there in front of them.

The story of how collectives formed, broke the gates and began to produce in these ghost factories--some more profitable than they ever were before--provides a strange sort of optimism that we're not used to seeing in the protest documentary. It shows a tangible model for real social change, and a brief glimmer of possibility of a better, fairer world. There's little more inspiring than a vanguard of aging seamstresses, storming a police line, fighting for their right to work and support each other. Nothing more, nothing less.

I had a fascinating conversation with Avi Lewis (son of the equally inspiring Stephen Lewis) a couple of years back which I've always meant to get around to posting. So here's a wonderful excuse.

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Technorati Tags: argentina, interviews, politics

So, after all that, Ken Lay, Former CEO of Enron, is dead. Had he faced sentencing in October, he could have served up to 45 years.

Idle speculation as to the convenient timing of heart attacks is for people with less dignity than myself, but suffice to say that there is now a real question as to whether his criminal fines and damages will have to be paid by his estate. According to Salon, quirks of law mean that because he died between conviction and sentencing, the records will show that Lay is no longer technically a criminal.

As the Time article suggests, one of the most bizarre and horrific chapters in the history of big twentieth century business has stumbled towards the kind of ending usually reserved for Shakespeare's tragic bad guys. He faced justice, he was convicted, but his final punishment lays beyond our world. In death, as in life, Lay has managed to reserve the true indignities for those further down the chain.

I wrote about Enron earlier this year, but as a commemoration of this strange twist at the end of things, I thought I'd post the full audio of my interview with Bethany McLean, the journalist who first asked questions about the corporation's suspicious profits in Fortune and co-author of Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room.

Technorati Tags: corporation, enron

In 2000, the United Nations established eight Millennium Development Goals, a series of targets designed to tackle poverty, hunger and the spread of HIV/AIDS. The world's countries and development agencies agreed to meet these goals by 2015. We're almost half-way there, and throughout continental Africa, things are no better.

I've said it a thousand times on here and in other media. We ignore Africa. We ignore it at our peril, but we ignore it and it is our greatest shame. One man who has not ignored it is Stephen Lewis, United Nations Special Envoy to Africa for HIV and AIDS. Truly one of the greatest and most decent men on the planet -- father in law of Naomi Klein and father of Avi Lewis (with whom I spoke last year regarding his film The Take, an interview I will post someday soon), former Canadian ambassador to the UN, Canadian of the year and one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world, there are few people as qualified to speak on the west's failings in Africa as he. He has recently published a book, Race Against Time: Searching for Hope in AIDS-ravaged Africa, which examines the complicity of the United Nations and the G8 in Africa's plight, and surveys the situation from his meetings with Rwandan orphans to his frustrations at the highest levels of global bureaucracy. Promises? The West has those by the sackful. But we've been making and breaking them for far too long.

There's a tendency to think of Africa as hopelessly, endemically sick, moribund almost, and there's often an assumption that this is purely a legacy of colonialism and everything that's happened since. This is not an interview focussing on the worst ravages of corruption that tear Africa apart. If you want that, I recommend the first part of Allan Little's extraordinary Faultlines series for the BBC World Service. Lewis is a man who, despite all he has seen since his early visits in his youth, insists on searching for the hope in the continent that few others seem willing to see.

As this was recorded for radio, and Lewis is such an eloquent, passionate speaker, it only made sense to post this as audio as well as transcript (and as the first interview in a planned series of podcasts). Click the hot pink play button to listen.

In your book you talk of the visits to Africa in your youth, your real romance with the continent. It was a very, very different place then...

I was in Africa in the immediate post-colonial period when there were very high expectations, enormous enthusiasm, great excitement. You break through the basis of slavery and all of the neo-colonial angry, nasty, manipulative, controlling impulses and suddenly you're out into the light of day with all of the possibilities stretching out before you. The place was alive with music and enthusiasm and hope, and it was pretty depressing to see the decline of the continent over the subsequent number of years.

Simple question, then. What happened?

A combination of things. I think that the colonial powers continued unexpectedly to manipulate Africa from a distance, to use African leaders as their pawns. There's no questions that Africa got caught in the cold war and sawed off between east and west, as it was availed by the communist bloc on the one hand and the western bloc on the other. I think that the international financial institutions -- the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund -- engaged in an imposition of constraints on the African economies, they imposed conditions, they made it very difficult, particularly in the social sectors. All in all, it was rough for Africa, and as a result, in this manipulative orgy, you had a number of African leaders who themselves became corrupt and totalitarian, and that made things even worse.

So now you have a continent that's being simultaneously ravaged by AIDS on the one hand and criminal governance on the other. They're interlinked problems. It seems that you have a continent that is dying.

I don't agree with the analysis. I don't think AIDS and criminality are intertwined. I think what is intertwined is AIDS and poverty. Terrible and desperate and almost incomprehensible poverty. The relative aspects of corruption, there are countries which are obviously corrupt, but there are 53 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and the great majority of them are increasingly re-elected in democratic traditions and they're working very, very hard to quell corruption.

My god, I'm on a continent where in the United States, corruption is dealt with before grand juries almost on a daily basis. In my own country of Canada, the last election was fought on an issue of corruption and the government was defeated on an issue of corruption. One shouldn't be too smug and self-righteous about it. Africa is a continent which is desperately poor, which has a lot of disease, it has incidental conflict, not unlike other continents, but it also has, at the grassroots level, a tremendous resilience and generosity of spirit and sophistication and if Africa had the resources which are constantly promised it and forever betrayed in the delivery, Africa could break the back of the AIDS pandemic and Africa could come out of the economic doldrums.

Technorati Tags: africa, aids, economics, united nations, stephenlewis

When Enron, America's largest energy company, collapsed in 2001, what began as a shocking and sudden bankruptcy quickly became one of the greatest business scandals in history.

At the start of 2001, Enron employed 21,000 people - it claimed revenues of over $100 billion the year before in the areas of electricity, natural gas and communications. By the end of November that year, the company was filing for bankruptcy. The men at the top walked away with over a billion dollars, while investors and employees, particularly those at the bottom of the scale, lost everything, including their retirement funds. What had been the most blue chip of stocks was suddenly completely worthless.

The story of Enron -- as told in the Oscar-nominated documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room -- is the story of the multinational corporate globe as depicted by Goya in his black period. Around the dwindling dollars and the escalating lies, monsters circle. It's kind of a comic opera, only real people get hurt, and Arnold Schwarzenegger ends up governing a state. For years, billions of dollars of imaginary money were being pushed around by the corporation, at the behest of Chairman Ken Lay and CEO Jeff Skilling, and nobody was asking any questions. Not the banks, not the analysts, not the journalists.

It was only nine months before the corporation declared bankruptcy that a journalist at Fortune, Bethany McLean, became the first journalist to seriously ask in print -- just where do these guys make their money? She was surprised to find that Jeff Skilling could not answer such a simple question. Her article set in motion the events that would lead to the collapse. Speaking to her via telephone for the release of the documentary, I asked her just why it was that the checks and balances failed, and why nobody was asking any questions.

"I think it's slightly the same answer for the media and the analysts, and a slightly different answer," she replies. "One difference is that the analysts were financially rewarded for not questioning Enron.

"There was this unholy relationship between what was supposedly research and investment banking business. All the analysts had to have a buy rating on the stock and not question Enron if their firms were going to get any money from Enron. There was very much a quid pro quo there.

"That was not true of journalists -- nobody was getting paid not to question Enron. But I think the deeper issue that was true of both analysts and journalists was a lack of skepticism. This was coming off the biggest bull market in American history and we were all sort of naive back then. Enron was a very intellectually intimidating company; they would accuse people who asked too many questions of just not getting it, and no one wanted to not get it."

In February 2001, in the middle of the Californian energy crisis that was to define the dying days of Enron, McLean was contacted at Fortune by an analyst friend beginning to smell something fishy swimming in the energy reserves and oil wells controlled by the company. The company was trading at 55 times its earnings, and the stock was never going down.

Technorati Tags: enron, corporation