Tag: Mike Brown

The Police Extortion of the Cincinnati Bengals: Communist labor unions always expect “the rich” to pay for their mismanagment

For me, and this has always been the case, there is a limit to how much of the thin blue line I’m willing to pay for. We need police in our society; we can’t function without them. We should not defund the police as Democrats have suggested. But when you are dealing with public sector unions that always want to expand government, “defund” is not an open checkbook that is beyond the reach of management. Throwing infinite amounts of money at police or any government employee is a bad idea. Society should pay for the police and to pay for them well. But not infinitely.

Traditionally, when police or fire employees insist that they always receive more money, they say, but we run into fires, we run into gunfire, so you don’t have to. I will volunteer to run into a burning building to save a dog any day of the week. I will gladly engage with a dangerous group of shooters any day of the week, any hour of the day. And I’d do it without pay because I would look at something like that as fun. So I’m not a big fan of that argument. Yes, police work is dangerous. But those who get into it understand that. It’s a privilege to wear the badge. The community should support the police enthusiastically. We should all live by the laws of our society, constitutionally supported. But the arguments of pay, such as what Dan Hils did on 55 KRC with Brian Thomas, is an exploitation of the standard union point of view, which is always communist in nature, to attempt to argue more pay in all the ways that the police unions expect it. There is a limit to what police are worth. When an FOP president makes the case from an obvious liberal point of view to a radio talk show host who is typically a small government kind of guy, it makes for an interesting debate that often hides in the cracks of our society.

Everyone knows I’m not a big fan of the Cincinnati Bengals. My favorite team is the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and it has been since Mike Brown fired Sam Wyche as the head coach. My support of Wyche went with him to Tampa from Cincinnati, and I have never forgiven the Brown family for that firing. They are losers as NFL owners. They run a bad organization that does not represent the city well. Sure they went to the Super Bowl last year because they have really good players. But over the years, they don’t know how to close the deal, and if they win, it’s usually because they get lucky and the other teams overlook them. But I don’t like this Billionaire Bengals talk from the FOP president, Dan Hils. I also have to remind people that every labor union in America started as a communist idea. Every entertainment union, government sector union, and union that runs some manufacturing aspect are all Karl Marx’s products. With Trump he’s a former Democrat who has opened up the tent of the Republican Party to include labor unions. In politics, there are many viewpoints, and people often don’t get everything they want. So it’s worth discussing unions’ problems with the same people who now consider themselves MAGA Republicans. With that in mind, all this talk about the Bengals paying double time and triple time for traffic staff before and after games is a perfect example of how the same people who will talk about saving money with taxes on one topic find themselves nodding in agreement with Dan Hils on the extortion racket being played out with the Cincinnati Bengals and talked about on the air as if the Bengals should pay whatever it costs for safety because they have the money and can afford to. Just because someone like Dan Hils, from the perspective of a communist police union, thinks that the Bengals are rich, does that mean they should be obligated to pay some artificial value for more traffic cops at Bengal games? 

I go to Bengal games a few times a year, and I prefer the great seats when I go. When I arrive, it’s usually where the player entrance is, so I get to see all the security they have at these games from that point of view, and there is a lot of police there—a lot of security. I tend to think that the Bengals should hire their own security for their own events. But as Dan Hils points out on Brian Thomas’ broadcast, the Bengals can’t pay for their security on a city street leading to and from the stadium. Those are city streets, and the police union has it rigged so that only they can provide traffic services. It’s the same kind of mess that you deal with at any union where tasks are placed in silos, and restrictions to productivity are also associated with the labor assigned to that task. For instance, you might have a box of pencils sitting on a dock meant for the office area. But the unionized dock workers are on a break, or have called off work for the day. Or maybe they are on strike. So there sits the box of pencils. The office people need them. They can look through the window into the dock and see the pencils sitting there. But they are not allowed to go in and pick them up so they can get their pencils. They have to wait for the union to perform the task. That is the kind of political game the Cincinnati FOP has going on regarding city streets leading to and from the stadium. Because the unionized police want a monopoly on the work, they complain that the work just can’t get done because they don’t have the staffing or the money. But the Bengals aren’t allowed to provide a solution. Or perhaps the people attending the games might volunteer to help direct traffic. They are prevented from helping because they are not lawfully permitted to perform that task. 

Spoken like a true communist union president, Dan Hils places all the blame on the Billionaire Bengals because they are rich and can afford to pay whatever the members of the Thin Blue Line require. But the Bengals’ options are to use Dan Hils unionized employees at rates of double time or triple time to pay for the mismanagement of the police force in general at whatever cost they decide. Rather than hiring their own people at $15 per hour or less to perform a task that is only worth minimum wage for a few hours on a Sunday to keep people from running into each other. And because we are politically on a path to support the police no matter the cost, someone like Brian Thomas, who is a small government guy, gets pulled into a discussion about defending a government union’s ridiculous extortion racket. And from the perspective of Dan Hils, his argument is that the Reds pay for the security, as to other sports events in the downtown area. So why don’t the Bengals pay too? Well, because the police union is forcing a customer to pay for goods and services that they control exclusively, and they expect to pass their mismanagement off as an undisputed bill, which is ridiculous. The police are great to have, but I don’t like their labor unions. I’d volunteer to help the police if there weren’t so many dumb rules that keep people from helping them. In many ways, they create their own problems by forcing restrictions on themselves and then expect a community to pay for their mismanagement of financial resources. And at a certain point, when they ask for too much, the community should just get rid of them and form their own law enforcement that doesn’t have a union attached to it. And my argument would be that it would work far better and be a whole lot cheaper. Just because rich people can afford to pay, that’s not up to Dan Hils to decide. It’s up to market values to determine, and the FOP of Cincinnati clearly isn’t interested in that kind of discussion. They are just like everyone else; they want the most money possible for the least work produced. It’s up to management in all cases to determine the value of that ratio.

Rich Hoffman

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Mike Brown is Terrible for the Cincinnati Bengals: Embracing a losing mentality is bad for creating value for his customer base

Long ago I wrote an article about why the Cincinnati Bengals would never be a championship team, even if they could load their team with all first-round draft picks. It was never about talent; the Bengals have always had great talent that was worth watching. I usually go to a few games a year even though I am not particularly keen on the Bengals because of their losing reputation, and I really enjoy watching Carlos Dunlap play, along with Andy Dalton and A.J. Green. There are others as well. There is a lot to like about having the Bengals in Cincinnati and the NFL experience in general, but I typically don’t get very excited about them because of their front office approach to the customer base. Mike Brown as an owner never really understood what his role was as an owner and people do resent him for it. Sure they buy the product the way people in Russia bought bread during the height of communism, because there wasn’t any other option. Mike Brown was happy to just barely get by and keep his team in the black financially, but he has shown that he doesn’t care about the customer in the stands buying his product.

Since I do love the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, I did go to the home Bengal game when they played in Cincinnati at the end of October. Tampa Bay has been good some years and not so good other years, like this year. But what I see out of their organization every year is an attempt to win. They may get the combinations wrong, but at least they try, so I remain a loyal fan. As many who have read here for years know, I became a Tampa Bay fan because Mike Brown fired Sam Wyche when he was the head coach of the Bengals back in 1992 for one bad season. I never thought it was fair and I followed Sam Wyche to Tampa and remained a fan even after all the many coaching changes there because I simply think the Glazers are good owners and I cheer for their teams because I like them as people. Good people, good product, good public. Tampa Bay is a great place to watch a game win or lose, because you always feel they are trying.

However, after the Buc, Bengal game on a very beautiful day in Cincinnati where the home team held on to win in a close game that was very exciting I was in the Club section using the restroom after and by the way the fans were talking you’d think that the Bengals had lost. The talk after the game was that it was a miracle that Marvin Lewis didn’t find a way to lose the game, not that the home town Bengals had won, and I actually felt sorry for the team. Honestly, the Bengals played a good game. The Bucs at the time were playoff contenders so there was a lot for Bengal fans to be happy about. But the reputation of the team has left a fog over the entire organization that was costing them millions and millions of dollars and it was quite embarrassing.

Like I said, I go to a few games a year. I love the Club section because it’s usually a business class of people and I like the indoor amenities. There’s room to get up and walk around that you don’t get throughout the rest of the stadium. But I noticed that during the entire game almost no seats around us filled up with people. While the season ticket holders and hard-core blue-collar fans who have invested many of thousands of personal dollars into the Bengals and are willing to overlook the Bengal faults due to their own large investments into the NFL experience, the business class people see clearly what is going on with the Bengal organization and they aren’t supporting them even when they get free tickets through business associations. They simply have better things to do with their lives than watch losers play. Because business people know that even when losers sometimes win by accident, they are still losers, and that is the state of the current Bengal ownership under Mike Brown and they reject the product wholesale. When you can’t even give away free tickets, there is a problem with the product.

In business we are all trained, especially these days to give value to the customer, the people who pay for your product. If they aren’t getting value, what incentive do they have to continue using the product. The days of old top down relationships with the customer that large companies and monopolies had could afford to ignore the customer experience somewhat. For instance, the reason GM is failing isn’t because of large tariffs, but because they have a lackluster labor force that builds bad cars people don’t want. People bought them back when only America was building cars. But when there are better options, people will go where their value is massaged. In the case of GM put a Chevy Cruz next to a Toyota Corolla and the differences are obvious. I personally still support the GM brand, my family likes the cross-overs, but for sedans, there isn’t any question as to quality between the two. It’s the same with the NFL, Mike Brown thinks that just having a professional football team is all it takes, and up until a few years ago he was partially right. People were happy to have an NFL team in their city whether they were winners or losers, just the experience was worth the cost of the product. But times have changed, where the Bengals haven’t.

With the advent of Fantasy Football and the video game culture of Madden, the new generation of football fans are less inclined to love the home town team as they are players that they can invest in. The loyalty to the team as a whole has been broken up in these days of more individualized experiences such as we see with the smart phone revolution. That means that if a football team doesn’t occasionally win a big championship fans will drift away onto other interests, and the product will be permanently impacted. It’s a simple value stream kind of thing that any business would track trying to ensure that the customer experience is something they could build a business on. The Mike Brown assumption that people will buy his product regardless of what decisions he makes is really quite an insult especially to the business class people who spend their entire work week trying to figure out how to make their customers happy only to spend their leisure time getting spit in the face by Mike Brown. The final straw for Cincinnati fans was a few years ago when the Bengals were winning a playoff game against Pittsburg and they blew the ending with stupid penalties. Marvin Lewis stuck by those players not trying to recruit better personalities in the offseason and for smart people, they saw a lazy coach who was just riding the cart Mike Brown was pushing. And that was why fans were in the bathroom on a really wonderful day with a Bengal win against a good team complaining about Marvin Lewis when they should have been celebrating.

Whether the product is government, entertainment, or general business, the first obligation is to the people who give you money for that service. A few years ago when there was only the Post Office, there wasn’t anywhere to complain about the lazy postal worker who carelessly threw mail on our front porches. But with the rise of FedEx and UPS, that changed. The same with phone companies, it used to be that if you made a call outside of your home zip code, you would be charged for long distance communication. Now there are many communication options and those costs are long gone. And when it comes to sports, there are lots and lots of options and these days it’s actually more fun to watch them on the big magnificent televisions in the comfort of our homes. I still like to hear the roar of a crowd and see things in person, but if the customer experience sucks, I’ll just stay home. And that is what is happening to the Bengals. I wish I hadn’t been right all those years ago, but as usual, unfortunately I was. The Bengals under Mike Brown ownership will never win a championship. He has disrespected the customer base to a point that it will never recover and that’s a shame. Especially when Cincinnati has given him so much by way of tax relief and other benefits. Mike Brown didn’t respect Cincinnati enough to at least try to win. He is happy with mediocrity and his insult to all of us is that he insists that we like it.

I’d love to love the Bengals and take my grandkids down to the field to get autographs by really good people and players like Carlos Dunlap. But because of Mike Brown’s terrible leadership, I just can’t.

Rich Hoffman

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