Monday, June 6, 2011

Sam Webb's favorite sports team

Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wis., is home to one of America's lastest communist experiments; and it's a near century-long success story. Founded in 1919 (same year as the founding of Communist Party USA in Chicago), the Green Bay Packers remain the only major league franchise in American professional sports without traditional private owners. There are certainly no billionaires in their board room.

There are, technically, private stockholders in the form of more than 100,000 people in possession of nearly five million shares in the team. But these owners have stock certificates that can officially never pay a dividend, and so they amount to little more than novelty memorabilia sold to support the club. For all intents and purposes, they might be viewed as oversized, if expensive (last sold in 1998 at $200 per share), trading cards.

They might think about the impact that money could have for, say, the 20,000 students enrolled in Green Bay public schools. The math works out to $50,000 per child, and the comrades of Green Bay, Wis., could send all of their children to college, free of charge!

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