The Chicago Cubs won big Wednesday night, with their first World Series victory since 1908. Now, the team’s owners — the billionaire Ricketts family — are looking for another win next week. The Nebraska ballot referendum to reinstate the death penalty that they’ve helped bankroll goes before the voters on Tuesday.
The Nebraska legislature succeeded in repealing the death penalty in 2015 — overriding the veto by Republican Governor Pete Ricketts. Almost immediately following the repeal, supporters of capital punishment, backed by the governor, launched a ballot drive to put the issue directly before voters in November 2016.
Governor Ricketts is a part-owner of the Cubs team; his family, which made its fortune founding the brokerage giant TD Ameritrade, purchased a 95 percent stake in the team in 2009.
It is unusual for a sitting governor to spend money backing a ballot initiative, but Pete Ricketts has spent $300,000 backing Nebraskans for the Death Penalty, which is campaigning to bring back capital punishment. Meanwhile, his father Joe Ricketts, the founder of TD Ameritrade, pitched in $100,000.
The elder Ricketts is a prolific right-wing political spender. He also gave $1 million to a pro-Donald Trump Super PAC in September.
Cubs fans celebrating their World Series win outside Wrigley Field in Chicago on November 2
He can get the Death Rowers to watch baseball, then when they start slipping into a coma get a bear cub to chew their fucking heads off and televise it all on Pay Per View.
Your President is murdering with impunity so I guess a few more won’t matter one jot.
Good article.
There is another angle to this execution thing…
Conditioning American youth into believing that Thou shalt not kill is some joker’s fantasy makes it a whole lot easier to recruit persons into the military to kill or be killed. Nebraska is big on military. Real Christians need not apply. ISIS actually does have a commandment they ascribe to, “Thou shalt kill”.
Glad for the fan base and those whom always kept believing, past and present. As for the death penalty, if abolition came part of the U.S. Constitution it sure would save many thousands of innocent’s lives throughout time and space. If I were big brother I’d volunteer for being the last person to be executed, so that from it’s ashes can raise the Phoenix! Looking forward to next week’s elections, a shame that Bernie is not on the ballot. Good luck with the recovery.
I live in Nebraska, Pete Ricketts is a douche. http://www.omaha.com/news/nebraska/out-for-lethal-injection-drugs-nebraska-wants-its-money-back/article_619e349c-457e-5a50-8044-235145f130e5.html
Baseball is boring.
I tried to watch but fell asleep. I wish the media would watch some of these sports franchise owners closer like they did with that basketball guy. this story seems just as important given that children watch and participate in this sport. Would you let your child participate or watch an execution?
Winning ugly…
(?)
Seriously? Why would you post this story unless you wanted to become known as the most humorless spoilsports on the Internet? Let everyone who loves the Cubs have their celebrations.
Foul ball.
Now I know why I had that over whelming desire to root for Cleveland.
HAD I ONLY KNOWN! I did not root for Cleveland because of their LOGO which disgusted me. A caricature of a noble race. IF I (Hypothetically) started a team called the Black Skins and used a caricature of a black man from the Jim Crowe era I would lose the franchise rights faster than you can say the word ball.
Even more worrisome is that the Chicago Cubs have won the World Series.
This is clearly a sign of the end times.
Well actually, the world just ended. The world in which the Cubs can’t win the World Series is over.
Here we have wealthy catholics who want to execute people
because they can’t wait for their god’s judgement
(like so many other religious people) and they don’t believe
in their supposed ten commandments.
Last time I checked, there have been 156 human beings
who were placed on death row in the faking U$A
and who were later exonerated.
People who want the death penalty reinstated are indifferent to
their own bloodthirsty corruption.
Dude, today was not the day for this.
This is a reality check and you and many others want
feel good ignorance instead.
Naaa, I want feel good ignorance today. I’ll take the reality check tomorrow.
You want a reality check? OK, let’s start with the most important issues: Do you have more than 2 kids? Do you drive? Do you have solar panels on your roof? Do you consume needless crap like a smart phone?
Doing ANY of that is far worse than rooting for a sports team.
I have 5 kids. The 2 boys play catcher and 3rd. I drive an F150 that I use to haul stuff around for my growing business that employs 40 people. I don’t have solar, because it is a waste of money. I have guns, too. Lots of them.
So you check all the boxes; you’re about as evil as it gets. And unfortunately for our planet, there are many of you.
I have no children. I drive a Prius C because it is the only car
with better MPG which I could afford and I drive as little as possible.
I have planted trees all around my smallish house (900 square feet)
to reduce the heat in summer and I have added a lot of insulation.
I rarely travel beyond an hour’s distance and I have no
cell or “smart” phone. I do have this computer which I often
think is a source of embarrassment, at best.
I grow as much of my vegetables as I can and I rarely eat meat
(and That is usually when someone else is hosting me).
My income is shrinking in relation to the cost of living and
I have never had a big income.
Come on Zaid. That’s not the stance the #Muj buy into. Get on the bus. Mujaheddin 2020!
This is horribly disappointing.
Do any businesses occupying space in the fancy building on the 5th Ave in New York city ( including FLM ) know ALL the details about the owners of the building and what their political philosophy is???
CUBS won, fair and square and the matter ends there. Leave them out if you do not have a word of congratulations for them. This is CERTAINLY NOT JOURNALISM. Awful awful story…… sad to say… expect better at TI.
what is unfortunate is the imbeciles with money who drag a club of baseball players into being owned.
Sports clubs should be publicly owned by the people of that city. Wealthy crappers should have their own island where they can live in peace by themselves amongst their like minded imbeciles.
Dont elect me for president because i would make that happen.
Yes you have my vote……totally agree…..maybe something like the Green Bay Packers….
If stadiums can be built with tax payers’ money, teams should be owned by the people of the city…. you are right….
Here, the cubs as a team have no connection to their owner’s position on Capital punishment and it is TOTALLY irrelevant. The title of the article suggests otherwise, intended or not. And the TIMING is even worse.
ps and CUBS are the only franchise to play continuously in the same city since the formation of the National League in 1876.
A publicly owned team makes sense, yes. But the issue goes deeper than that. Why are so many people obsessed with *watching somebody else play a game*? I don’t know, but my guess is that the first person who called baseball the American pastime was thinking of playing baseball, not watching it on TV. And just try to tell me that three or four kids on a side road near a cul-de-sac with a plastic bat cannot match all the drama of a major league game as they argue whether hitting the light pole counts as a run or not.
As for how “the timing” – well, the election is next week, so I’d say it is better than average. Who cares which company prevailed in some competition they had? To me they’re just corporations doing a publicity stunt – I don’t see them as having any relation to me at all.
I have to admit, I do not know anything about Baseball and have never watched a game. Also, I am absolutely and totally against Capital Punishment….. a very serious topic definitely to be discussed. And yes, games are to be played for enjoyment and not for profits for big corporations.
HOWEVER, my disappointment is with connecting the two.
ALSO, the CUBS played ONLY DAYTIME games till some yrs ago….. families took off and took their children to the ball park. Games under lights did not start without community opposition. AND, for the CUBS fans, it is all about the game…. and playing….. they would not be attending the games if it was all about JUST winning.In any case, I will end here. Hopefully, there will be a serious discussion about Capital Punishment in another post!
ps I got involved with CUBS THIS time thanks to my Chicago friends’ children!!
The only sports writer I read ( not for sports… ) whose stories have human connections, Human Rights, Justice ……
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-sweetest-escape-the-chicago-cubs-win-the-world-series/
Just look at that angry mob of Chicagoans demanding fresh cornhusker blood.
People tend to think of the Death Penalty as some ultimate philosophical question that’s to be personally mulled over from the perspective of their own morality.
It’s not for the ‘public’ to weigh in on at all.
It should be reserved for the victims family members or relatives to choose as an option if defendant is found guilty. They are the ones most directly impacted by the aftermath of the horrific violence that warranted a Death Penalty in the first place. They are the ones who have to find peace now and justice for the lost loved one. The ‘public’ & politicians can stay the hell out of it. If the family or relatives want the guilty to rot in jail because it’s helps ease their minds – great. If they want the piece of filth scrubbed from the face of the earth because it’s helps ease their minds – great too. If it didn’t happen to you, it’s none of your damn business to get involved, you’re not the one(s) suffering.
You should move to a nice Pashtun village in Afghanistan or Pakistan. You are utterly clueless about modern Western concepts of justice.
@Doug Salzmann
You mean the best justice money can buy? Who’s clueless here.
(btw – nice job of putting forth a formed rebuttal. The first sentence is ‘Love it or Leave it”. And the second sentence continues the pure ‘ad hominem’ attack while claiming understanding of something without offering anything to back it up. )
If a judge or jury decides, after all the expense of trials, years of appeals, private investigators hired, forensics, expert witnesses, etc. etc. that the defendant is guilty and eligible for life or consecutive life and/or the death penalty then it is well within the ‘modern’ system to grant weight to the discretion of the victims family in these cases.
Or perhaps you’re above all this, eh Saint Salzman?
No understanding of how law works at all, have you.
@Vic Perry
Apparently you don’t either. What’s stopping you from illuminating all of us with your prowess.
I hear what you’re saying, usually from the slow guy in front of me who’s buying smokes and lottery tickets.
I really shouldn’t be surprised though – neither one of you seem to be able to read even when one of you took the time to “qoute”.
* “It ‘should’ be reserved…”
Let me know if you need any further help.
My guess would be that it’s (1) the fact that most of us here don’t need illumination on this issue and (2) your soul is likely a black hole that absorbs all light and can’t be illuminated.
Just guessing, of course.
Ok, we get it Doug, you’re on tilt. Give the stellar comebacks “I’m rubber, you’re glue…” a rest, the adults are talking here.
money is power, not speech. Speech is powerful but speech is not power. Speech is independence, personal strength. Money is just an amplifier and to that extent, wealthy people want to influence elections to influence policy to immortalise themselves as monuments to some fantasy they have about the world not being according to them.
This oligarchal “we own you or your operating environment” crap has to stop. Equality of power is the only thing that works “good” for “human beings”. We are not wallstreet’s help. We are not wallstreet’s expendables. Wealth influences on public policy need to be made illegal.
Do i need to say that again? If humble and modest isnt the best thing around, then you are living in hell and may not know it.
Tom Ricketts, the family member most involved in running the Cubs, hates Donald Trump because Trump isn’t conservative enough for him. THAT’s what the Republican establishment thinks of Trump and why they hate him, not all the BS going around in corporate and even leftist media.
As to the Cubs, the problem is that these teams are owned by private individuals (aka, rich pigs) instead of the cities in which they’re located. The Green Bay Packers are the only exception to this that I know of. Get rid of private owners and these conflicts between rooting for a team and the right wing politics of their rich owners disappear.
What a weird headline. I thought the story was going to be about gun-ownership or hunting.
As far as the death penalty, I’m against it except in the case of certain politicians. (I kid! I kid!)
The reasons not to vote for Clinton :
http://www.mostdamagingwikileaks.com/
The Cubs owned by a right-wing billionaire connected to the Death Penalty and a cheesy on-line Wall Street brokerage. A perfect trifecta of misery.
Absolutely shameless shitty timing, Zaid & editors.
This is unworthy of TI.
I think it was on purpose. Your innocent sports fix is no longer.
Agreed. This was stupid. It has nothing to do with the Cubs, and is merely a pretty crass attempt to trade on their historic win. You want to do an article on the death penalty referendum in Nebraska? Fine; go for it. But leave the Cubs out of it.
The Cubs win was amaaazing, and it will always be so, nothing will take away from that. But, a possible death penalty comeback is of grave import and far reaching. When else might there be a moment like this? If I were a ticket holder I would want to know what I was enabling with my purchase.
If you were a ticket holder or a Cubs fan of any description, you might very well want to know — but I solemnly assure you that no Cubs fans would welcome this story today.
The story is fine. The timing is cheap and tawdry.
The timing is also stupid, if the honest intent were to focus attention on the issue. The election is in five (5) days and those days are the least likely in over a century to be ones during which anyone with an interest in the Chicago Cubs will care about anything other than the World Series.
Obviously.
Oh, BTW, Nebraska is a long way from Chicago, geographically and, especially, culturally.
MLB treats the whole state as part of the Kansas City Royals market, with an overlay in the western panhandle for the Colorado Rockies. To the extent that Nebraska has baseball fans (college football is the big deal there), they tend to follow those two teams.
A swing and a miss.
c’mon, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
The Cubs, like any MLB team, are just a bunch of revolving drafts & trades etc. Management gets turned over too, sometimes even ownership.
In other words there is no ‘Cubs’. (Sometimes it’s just a matter of how much you spend on players and coaching etc. that influences outcomes).
In any case sports wins change nothing and mean squat, things go on the same whether you drew winners names out of a hat.
This year the circumstances favored this particular grouping of talent. The name means nothing more than what’s sewn onto the costumes.
All these fans just like the ‘opera’ of the whole thing, they don’t even play the game on weekends. That’s how much they like baseball. It’s just a show.
While that may be true for you, to what end and for what purpose?
I wouldn’t expect any, not one single fan, to boycott the Cubs in some attempt to push back on the sleaze of the owners or to express their disagreement about the death penalty by holding out on purchasing tickets to Cub’s baseball games. Not only because that would be futile, but because anytime a boycott is suggested it should be well thought out so that the desired result would have a chance of coming to fruition. Proposing boycotts in futility weakens the whole idea of boycotts in general. So that leaves ticket purchasing fans of the Cubs with no less and no more voice and leverage against the pro death penalty owners than all of the rest of us have to offer.
If you were a ticket holder you’d know that the Cubs tickets don’t “enable” anything other than more Cubs games. You don’t really think that any professional sports team provides a huge financial windfall to the owners, do you? It’s a vanity purchase, not an investment.
Really? Try living in Chicago and not be a Cubs fan, and you’ll learn quickly how awful hype and bullshit can get. And this didn’t start with the Ricketts’ deep pockets. Fuck ’em.
What are you talking about? What does your post mean? To whom is it addressed?
Doug – you’re off the rails. having lived in Chicago since the 1950s and having endured “maybe next year” every single year i could not disagree with you more. i watched and savored every minute of the series BUT i absolutely want to know the kind of people who own our cherished Chicago institutions. my grandfather was smiling down that the Cubs FINALLY got the goat off our backs but it’s absolutely the right time to leverage the limelight and shine it brightly on the ricketts, and frankly all the other team owners. we are also at a time when betting is legal which my grandfather would never have believed. when they kept showing how much seats cost last night, up to $75,000/seat, all i could think of what was the total “take,” including all the other sources of revenue: merchandising, media $$, hell, the second the game ended commercials were advertising t-shirts. the second it ended.
we are at a time when billionaires and oligarchs own Chicago and our country, ask rhambo, more so than anytime in our history. we need to leverage whatever every ray of sunlight to educate citizens why we have the greatest political, social, and financial inequality in history. the ricketts cover all of those bases.
TI is one of the only sources of journalistic integrity left standing.
Go Cubs! Go TI!
Yep, totally agree that this is a really, really, really shitty way to report this information. It’s such a turn off that, if anything, it will be more likely to cause the previously uninformed or casually informed to be set back in their desire to learn more about the information and to act or react accordingly. This is classic ugly opportunistic exploitation.
Misleading. No mention of Tom Ricketts.
A
And what the fuck has this got to do with state surveillane and the documents that snowden took from the NSA, documents that were supposed to be made public, same documents that the intercept is keeping secret?
After you’ve comprehensively completed reading each and every document listed at the link, please come back to the comment board and give readers your summary of what you’ve comprehended. I mean, besides how The Intercept is keeping Snowden Documents a secret from you.
Snowden Archive — Reported at The Intercept
Sheesh,talk about killjoys.
The death penalty – Helping religious people feel good about themselves.