Corporate WATCH
Commentary by Joe SchaefferNBA superstar LeBron James drew a withering backlash a couple of weeks ago after he tweeted out a menacing threat against the Columbus, Ohio police officer who saved the life of a black female teen by shooting the black female teen who was about to stab her with a knife. “You’re Next,” James wrote above a picture of the officer, in reference to the guilty verdict in the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.
As should be obvious by now, James’s half-cocked attempt at social justice pandering is hardly an outlier in the world of professional sports today. And it is only going to continue to get worse.
Did you know that NBA Commissioner Adam Silver sits on the Board of Trustees of the arch-globalist Rockefeller Foundation?
Funny how this really hasn’t been reported at all. Wonder why?
Silver officially joined the Board last June.
The Rockefeller Foundation welcoming tweet says it all. The NBA commissioner and the former president of Colombia are listed together... because a U.S. pro sports commissioner today is as just as important – or even more so – than the former head of a sovereign nation.
Tellingly, Silver took the opportunity to pronounce that he was excited to be able to use sports to "transform" society (bold added throughout this column):
“I am grateful for the opportunity to serve on the Board of The Rockefeller Foundation and support its invaluable and innovative work at such a crucial time,” said Mr. Silver. “Whether it is through sports or science, global engagement is critically important, and the Foundation is uniquely positioned to solve some of the world’s toughest challenges and transform countless lives.”
Silver’s official Rockefeller bio shows that he is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a fact also mentioned on his NBA.com bio.
The "synergy" – to use a corporate expression – that will now be at work here between the NBA and the Rockefeller Foundation should be seamless. The two powerhouse organizations are in perfect symmetry on issues such as racial agitation, abortion and embracing communist China.
As we wrote about the NBA last year:
The NBA just announced the creation of the NBA Foundation, a social justice fund that will start off with $300 million in seed money to fund “black empowerment.” There is every reason to believe that this marks the beginning of an overt, vigorous financial activism for the league. It’s not hard to detect where an expanded agenda will lead.
The Rockefeller Foundation is similarly engaged in radical expressions of “black empowerment.” Race-baiter extraordinaire Ibram X. Kendi is founding director of Boston University’s new Center for Antiracist Research.
“There is no such thing as a not-racist idea,” Kendi has written, only “racist ideas and antiracist ideas.” Kendi literally sees racism everywhere. “Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity,” he has stated.
The Rockefeller Foundation gave the BU Center a $1.5 million grant. "It's a game-changing gift for us," a grateful Kendi gushed.
BU for its part acknowledges the "Rockefeller Foundation’s role as a founding funder of the center."
Otis Rolley III, senior vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation’s U.S. Equity and Economic Opportunity Initiative, was quoted extensively supporting the Center’s radical rabble-rousing:
“Racism is finally at or near the top of America’s agenda,” he says. “The racial wealth gap in America is both striking and durable, as a result of systemic racist policies and practices. It takes wealth to make wealth, and Black and Brown Americans have largely been excluded from international access to capital and finance.” He says the Center for Antiracist Research will help provide solutions to systemic issues “that have long restricted BIPoC [Black, indigenous, people of color] from obtaining wealth, and will work toward equity and justice for all.”
And then there is abortion. From our 2020 NBA article:
Kate Jhaveri was appointed Chief Marketing Officer of the NBA in 2019. Her official NBA.com bio proudly states that “Jhaveri serves as secretary of the national board for Planned Parenthood Action Fund.” Jhaveri’s LinkedIn page boasts of her role at Planned Parenthood right under her NBA listing. “Working with a supremely talented organization to ensure millions of women have access to the healthcare they deserve,” it reads. This woman is simultaneously serving as a top staffer for the world’s preeminent basketball league and the Western world’s leading baby murdering operation.
The Rockefeller Foundation is renowned for being one of the leading promoters of population control since the early days of the 20th Century. It played a crucial role in the growth of Planned Parenthood into the leading abortion retail giant in America today. The foundation itself freely admits that population control plays an integral part of its history.
As we wrote in another article last year:
The foundation openly boasts of the pivotal role it has played in advancing population control. “Issues of family planning and concerns over population growth have long interested the Rockefeller family and their philanthropies,” its “Digital History” website proclaims. “A variety of projects relating to these interests have received Rockefeller support over the past century.”
The post explains that John D. Rockefeller III “made his interest in the issue clear to RF trustees, and he pressured them to act more definitively on population control issues.” This led to a June 1952 conference in which the creation of “a permanent council devoted to population control” was proposed. “By November of 1952, The Population Council, Inc.” was born. The archive explains that it is still active today. “While the RF no longer counts population sciences among its programmatic areas, the Population Council continues its work,” the article states.
And then there is China. When former Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey made the grave mistake of expressing sympathy for Hong Kong freedom protesters in 2019, Adam Silver immediately began crawling to China:
NBA commissioner Adam Silver’s original statement on the controversy was equally subservient, mournfully admitting that Morey’s comment had “deeply offended many of our friends and fans in China, which is regrettable.” Silver went on to stress the league’s “great respect for the history and culture of China.”
The Rockefeller Foundation has similarly long been awash in love for the blood-stained tyrannical Asian communist superpower. From a 2019 article on the foundation’s website:
China represents a significant new market opportunity for impact investing to grow, and institutions like The Rockefeller Foundation can help. The Rockefeller Foundation has worked with China for more than 100 years to create solutions in health, food, education, and innovation that accelerate progress and prosperity for the Chinese people. Today, as China’s philanthropic sector continues to grow explosively, we believe collaboration and partnership between Chinese and international impact investors can unlock a new era of global philanthropy – not only elevating China’s philanthropic and social impact investing ecosystem, but also helping to solve global problems together.
We recently wrote about how leftist Ford Foundation President Darren Walker sits on the Board of Directors for Pepsi. Adam Silver serving on the Board of the Rockefeller Foundation represents the latest in what is an important development.
The moneyed elites are increasingly coming out into the sunlight with their anti-commoner alignment. The extreme wealth generated by powerful corporate brands such as Pepsi and the NBA has induced these institutions to openly betray their one-time core customer base just so they can accumulate more concentrated wealth and power. Here’s a quote we featured in our expose of Glenn Hutchins, billionaire private equity investor, top Democratic Party donor and part owner of the Boston Celtics:
“A person in Africa who runs a big African bank and went to Harvard might have more in common with me than he does with his neighbors, and I could well share more overlapping concerns and experiences with him than with my neighbors.” The circles we move in, Hutchins explains, are defined by “interests” and “activities” rather than “geography”: “Beijing has a lot in common with New York, London, or Mumbai. You see the same people, you eat in the same restaurants, you stay in the same hotels. But most important, we are engaged as global citizens in crosscutting commercial, political, and social matters of common concern. We are much less place-based than we used to be.”
This betrayal is particularly pathetic when it comes to professional sports. Examples of grand manipulations and cons on the general public abound throughout history. But you don’t often see peasants donning the colors and rabidly cheering on the antics of private enterprises that are actively working to destroy the very communities and nations in which they live.
In the past, strongman dictators exploited the people via carefully crafted cults of personality. Today’s dangerous demagogues merely have to bounce an orange ball and dunk it through a hoop.
Joe Schaeffer is the former Managing Editor of The Washington Times National Weekly Edition. His columns appear at WorldTribune.com and FreePressInternational.org.
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