How about the Oakland Overstock.com Coliseum? No thanks

Oakland Coliseum Complex

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Loca 444, retired

I was driving along the freeway not so long ago, leaving Oakland California heading South. As I drove through the eastern part of town, the part of town that has the baseball and football stadium in it, I couldn't but notice the exit to this complex.

But before I get to this, it should be known that this part of Oakland is the "poor" part. When I first came to Oakland 38 years ago it was almost exclusively the "black" part. Now it is the Black and Asian and Latino and Tongan and Samoan and poor white folks part although my guess is that a lot of the black folks have left it seems as I ride my bike through town. The fact that the subway had a stop here called "Coliseum" that served working class people was an accident. There would be no reason for there to be a subway stop here; no money in it,  but the Coliseum was nearby and that's where everyone got off to go to the ball games. Here in Oakland we have the Raiders and the A's and used to have the Golden Seals who were an Ice Hockey team and we still have the basketball team, the Warriors.

So folks have to have a place to stop at when they go to the games, right. The better paid people and those that came from the surrounding suburbs needed a place to get off at when they wanted to go to sports events. After all, most of the he kids that lived around the Coliseum station couldn't afford the tickets for the warriors. And they certainly can't afford the $60 or $70 for tickets to see the Raiders play.

But as I drove past that night I noticed the exit and it was called the McAfee stadium exit. "What is this?" I said to myself. I thought it was called the "Network" Coliseum a few weeks ago.

This was bad enough. The "Network" Coliseum. Some internet company paid a million dollars or so and they changed the name from the Oakland Coliseum to the "Network" Coliseum. I couldn't understand why folks don''t get mad over this. For me, it was a further encroachment of the private sector in to public life. Just like the Concord Pavilion which is through the hills further east but is now called the Chronicle Pavilion because the local Northern California paper, the San Francisco Chronicle paid some money and the name changes.

So bye bye Network and hello McAfee Coliseum another sort of internet company doing better and with more money than the old Network group. The A's still play there as do the Raiders, and the Warriors. The Seals have long gone and become the San Jose Sharks I think, victims of the vagaries of the market. Perhaps the owners are now selling condoms or coats to Mongolians or maybe its the same folks; they have no allegiance to any community or country.

But now I read that there is a deal underway to name it the Overstock.com Coliseum.  The agreement with the Internet book retailer will run for six years at a cost of $7.2 million says reports I've read. This pisses me off again.  I get frustrated at folks that have just accepted these things as the natural way of doing things.  I am reminded of what Marx wrote so many years ago about capitalism:

"All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his, real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."

How right he was. All the kids that grew up in Oakland and dreamed of the day they might play in the Oakland Coliseum. All the memories that this Oakland Coliseum held for the folks that grew up in the neighborhoods around it. All the folks that remember seeing the Doors or Stevie Wonder or  Herman's Hermits at the Concord pavilion. All these childhood memories, these dreams, these permanent fixtures of everyday life have "ossified" have become "antiquated" have "melted in to air". And in what seems to me to be a few years, the Coliseum, the Oakland Coliseum, became the Network Coliseum the McAfee Coliseum and now it looks like it will be called, the Overstock.com Coliseum.  The city that is the birthplace of Jack London, the Black Panthers, the Oakland General strike, is the home of the Overstock.com Coliseum; what's tragic is that most youngsters and people throughout the country will end up being more familiar with the Overstock.com Coliseum than Oakland's General Strike of 1946, Jack London's The Iron Heel, or the Black Panthers standoff with the cops on the steps of the courthouse of the old Grove Street.*

I am right to be angry at this. It is a reflection of the domination of capital over labor, of the bourgeois over workers, the private sector over the public-----of the dictatorship of capital over freedom.

But it, like the many victims of capitalism, it is temporary. We'll make sure of that. It'll always be the Oakland Coliseum to me.

*Bobby Seale's "Seize The Time" is a great book about the Panthers and Oakland