Disney blues

The Dorchester Eagles, a Boston-based Pop Warner football team for kids 8 to 15, won a chance to compete in the national finals. Great…

Wait a minute…they have to raise the money to go, and they can’t save on cheap accommodations or camp. The sponsor Disney says they MUST stay in Disney hotels and buy passes to their parks and others in the region.

“Like more than a million amateur athletes before them, the Pop Warner kids -- ages 8 to 15 -- were bound for Disney's Wide World of Sports Complex, which takes in tens of millions of dollars a year from participants who solicit charitable donations from friends, strangers, businesses, and nonprofits to compete in events at the park,” according to The Boston Globe.

Another team, the “St. Philip Saints, faced a $22,000 debt after its $50,000 trip last month to the sports complex,” The Globe reported.

I have not been a Disney fan for years. It seemed stupid to pay $93 million to an exec that didn’t work out. I didn’t like that they sued a small Florida nursery school for drawing their own Disney like characters and putting them in the window without paying Disney for a license. There corporate behaviour in opening Eurodisney had the warmth of Attila the Hun, driving companies out of business by their slow payment among other things. At an IABC conference the Disney spokesman told how they get publicity by co-op Olympic winners. The US is badly in need of real news, not Nancy Kerrigan in a Disney parade. We won’t even discuss the mega ego of long-time Disney head Eisner, who will be history shortly. You can create a fantasy world, which in itself is wonderful, without destruction of others.

Meanwhile the kids from Dorchester are frantically trying to raise more money for the trip than most of their parents earn in a year to help Disney’s profit stay at or beat last year’s $3.4 billion profit.

I often complain that American culture has become corporate culture not human culture, that Americans aren't citizens but consumers. This story only adds to this belief.