You closed on the right note. Supply is not the problem. Under capitalism, it is never the problem. Demand is. Half a dozen East Asian nations took advantage of the growth of the US and European markets in an age of unparalleled growth in the period 1950-1988 and churned out huge amounts of consumer goods that First World corporations no longer wanted to make using union labour in the advanced capitalist world. If anyone hasn't noticed, except for China and India (which have fairly large internal markets and powrful state apparatuses) the "tigers" ain't what they used to be, especially Indonesia and Thailand. Their overheated economies melted down like Three Mile Island in the late 1990s and they have not matched their pre-1999 growth rates since. The question is, who would absorb the excess production that an African "economic miracle" would generate? All good businessmen (but almost no economists) ask one simple question before they invest: what's my market? Businessmen who depend on Say's Law that every product generates its own demand go out of business quick. You have to know who you are selling to, and the likelihood that they will buy. Too bad you can never find a Harvard or Standford-trained economist who gets it (they prefer blaming the victims of the global order and spouting free market balderdash).

I've been fascinated for years by the disconnect between the baseball draft and the NBA/NFL drafts. The first surmise I can make, and its only a surmise, is that athletic ability and baseball greatness are related but not coequal. This may explain the persistent lament that "baseball is losing [black] talent to football and basketball." Well, perhaps those young black kids are a bit smarter than some people imagine. They may understand that their athletic ability may never translate into sustained major league success, but it will go a long way to keeping them in the NBA and NFL. If you're a middle-class white kid with some talent from California or Florida, you can give the Minor Leagues a try because a) you've very often got a family that will not let you fall on your face financially, and b) if you don't grasp the brass ring, you've got viable middle-class options to fall back on (especially if you bothered to get your college degree while playing sports). It also says something about those who lambaste the white players of the segregated era of major league baseball--I've seen them ridiculed for not having to face black talent. Well, that is absolutely true, but it makes the assumption that a) black men are ipso facto more "talented" than white guys, and that this athletic ability would have translated into mucho baseball success. Both claims are possibly true but rather suspect on the aggregate level. Thanks, King, for a hell of a good column to ponder.

I am sure that the statement about Ruth hitting some fewer numbers of HRs if black pitchers had been in the league is correct, but here's another thought: how about replacing the worst white leadoff hitters with the best black leadoff hitters? Might this have boosted Ruth and Gerhig's huge RBI totals? Or gotten hack Wilson to 200? I sure know that Rickey Henderson made Don Mattingly look like a better hitter than he really was (although he was a very good hitter). I also know that the embarrassingly white NY Yankees were the dominant team of the 1950s, although many of the best individual players of that decade were black. Again, baseball is not always abut the best individual players the way basketball for sure, and football partially, are. Otherwise, my hated crosstown rivals (the Yankees) would have won the last six World Series in a row. This again points out how baseball is unlike (and in my mind, better than) its other big American competitors.

I meant embarrassingly in the sense that they discriminated against black ball players, which I think is embarrassing. Being white is great--excluding blacks isn't. And please don't tell me they had no black talent to choose from (unless you'd like to argue that Billy Martin was a better second baseman than Jackie Robinson!). In final response to your point, I think pople should have two standards: is this guy good enough to do his job? can you stand being around him long enough to allow him to do it? If you pass those two tests, then you should be in, black, white, Asian, whatever. If you can't do the job, or are an intolerable asshole, then you've off the team.

This show is for Fascists and Stalinoids only. It reflects the demented "break a few eggs to make an omlete" morality of shit like The Sopranos and the Bush Administration. I doesn't condone violence and criminal behavior (especially against blacks)? Yeh, right. We are talking about MURDER here, folks, not fake parking tickets, murder. Do you people read this magazine? Do you see what this mentality has done to this country? Are you fucking blind?