KAEP & FROWN
Nike ad highlights corporate hypocrisy
BROTHERS and sisters, go tell it on the mountain! It’s all a con. Colin Kaepernick, now soulfully introduced as an across-the-board Nike prophet for profit, via a Nike ad campaign, suggests we “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.”
A noble sentiment, for sure, but let’s take a look at Nike’s beliefs.
It believes in Third World labor being paid pennies per hour to make sneakers sold here as status symbols to the most vulnerable among us — children and teens — at obscene prices.
Labor rights investigators have regularly listed Nike among the worst of the worst in operating Asian factories under draconian authorities and inhumane conditions. Just do it!
Nike once explained that it wasn’t Nike that was responsible for the abuse of workers, blaming it on foreign subcontractors. Another con. The subcontractors were contracted by Nike to make Nikes. But I guess Kaepernick’s good with that.
Nike doesn’t operate on the blind or a wish. It knows who buys, how often and for how much — including paying with their lives for a $250 pair of Air Jordans.
Starting in the late 1980s, reports began to pile up about kids, overwhelmingly African-American, being mugged and murdered by other black kids for their Nike Air Jordans. But Nike, likely licking its chops, stayed silent. Nike believes in such selective silence. How about you, Colin?
If you knew that kids were killing each other for a product you made, what would you do? Clam up while stepping on the gas? The closest Nike came to acknowledging the issue was its pathetic and defensive ads in which Charles Barkley said, “I am not a role model.”
In other words, in Barkley Nike chose a TV salesman/basketball star to declare himself unfit for kids’ admiration.
As the phony racial hustler Spike Lee years ago said in an Air Jordans Nike TV ad, “And all you homeboys should be bum-rushin’ to get some.” To whom do you suppose Lee was speaking?
Thirty years later, those assaults and murders for unreasonably priced and illogically prized Nikes continues as Nike sticks to its plan to create feeding frenzies among the young. Keep the supplies limited, the demand high, the prices higher, and let the blood money run deep.
Thirty years ago Nike began to further corrupt college sports by paying off schools and coaches to do as Nike orders.
From Nike-paid high school and AAU coaches funneling players to Nike-paid colleges and coaches, to the scheduling of televised basketball tournaments for only Nike schools, to the betrayal of 100-yearold school colors uniform traditions, replacing them with gang colors, Nike rewards obedience to Nike. That’s one of its corporate core beliefs.
It was Nike college basketball influence peddler Sonny Vaccaro who said, “It’s a cesspool and we start the process.” And that cesspool, still untreated, has flooded big-time college sports, adding to the toxic stench.
Nike’s ad campaigns are often disgusting and dishonest while selling selfish immodest “Nike attitude.”
As Shalene Flanagan hit the tape to win last year’s NYC Marathon, she cried, “F**k, yeah!” Nike quickly made “F**k, yeah!” into an ad campaign. Classy.
In Tiger Woods’ first TV ad, Nike turned Woods, the most privileged amateur in golf history, into a victim of racism, so much so he’s denied opportunities to play many courses. Total nonsense.
Then, while selling Woods as the young man who will inspire poor minority kids to golf, Nike made his signature golf gear and clothing the most expensive on the shelves.
Yet, Kaepernick aside, Nike and its paid athletes have shown their patriotic side.
After the 1992 “Dream Team” won Olympic gold, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Barkley — all under contract to Nike — draped American flags over their shoulders to conceal the logo of a competing company. O, say can you see?
As for political activist Kaepernick, while I know he has been busy, has he yet registered to vote? Last we heard he still hadn’t. It doesn’t take much time or effort. Just do it.