John Fisher Murders the Oakland A’s, Demonstrating How Billionaires Are Leeches on Society

By Jacob Weindling  |  September 27, 2024 | 11:45am
Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images
Sports Major League Baseball
John Fisher Murders the Oakland A’s, Demonstrating How Billionaires Are Leeches on Society

Yesterday, the Oakland A’s played their last game in a city they have called home since 1968. They will move to Sacramento as a pit stop on their way to potentially Las Vegas, although the certainty of that move is looking less likely, and the A’s are in limbo for at least a couple years as their billionaire owner John Fisher forces them to play in a minor league ballpark until he figures out a plan.

Ahead of the final homestand ever in Oakland, Fisher published an insult of a letter to the fans, lying about how he and his minority owners’ “dream was to win world championships and build a new ballpark in Oakland. Over the next 18 years, we did our very best to make that happen.”

Fisher bought the team in 2005, and dating back to 2011, the Oakland A’s have ranked (out of 30 MLB teams) in total payroll: last, last, 29th, 23rd, 25th, 25th, 28th, 29th, 27th, 26th, 21st, 28th, 29th and 21st.

John Fisher’s net worth is $3 billion.

It is objectively, a lie that he “did [his] very best” to win a championship and keep the team in Oakland. He is a leech, a barnacle dragging down the collective spirit of the city, and the only positive that A’s fans can take from this pain is that they are excising one of mankind’s worst humans from the Bay Area. The contrast between the humanity demonstrated by Oakland’s fans and Fisher over the course of his cheap and manipulative ownership is a stark example of the vast gulf between the value systems of the isolated billionaire class and the rest of society.

Fisher is a special kind of cynical evil on the scale of sports owners, as he is abandoning a city where this team won four World Series championships and gained mainstream acclaim for revolutionizing baseball in Moneyball for a minor league stadium and a pinky promise in Las Vegas sometime in the future. At least other owners who have hijacked a city’s beloved team in the name of their own net worth have had a firm agreement in their new city. Fisher doesn’t have that. This is spiteful greed, pure and simple. What Fisher did with the Oakland A’s is a microcosm of how billionaires treat our society: it is not something they participate in, but something to exploit for their own personal gain.

Fisher never saw a bunch of baseball fans in the Oakland Coliseum, but as an extractive enterprise whose humanity doubled as leverage he could use against the city of Oakland because he’s too cheap to buy his own stadium. He is a small man who has proven that greed is his only animating principle in his miserable life, and it is so clear that ESPN’s straight news reporters like Jeff Passan are stating the obvious.

Millionaires are not like billionaires. Millionaires match an equitable scale of America’s wealth creation machine. Millionaires are a logical result of supply and demand and technological innovation. Billionaires are inherently extractive. They hold on to more wealth than any one person can spend, depriving our economic engine of its fuel, and entire sets of laws like our antitrust regime acknowledge that if left to their own devices, those with the most economic power will use it to amass as much as they can, even at the expense of broader society.

Dan Riffle, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s former Chief of Staff, famously said that “every billionaire is a policy failure,” which was echoed by an Oxfam report from January 2023. This “research also shows that the richest are key contributors to climate breakdown: a billionaire emits a million times more carbon than the average person, and billionaires are twice as likely as the average investor to invest in polluting industries like fossil fuels.”

Billionaires are societal leeches. Pure and simple.

Your neighbor might have bought Apple stock in 1995 and be a millionaire for all you know. Every billionaire is its own gated community. Even those with a net worth of $400 million are closer to the net worth of the unhoused than a billionaire. A billion dollars is an astronomical amount of money that should only be the purview of corporations and governments. Any single human who amasses that much money did it by being a drag on society, using their wealth as a cudgel to stifle the wealth creation of others through an anti-competitive ethos an entire presidential campaign is running against.

We live in a world built by and for billionaires. America’s founders never intended for all of us to vote, or for all of our votes to count equally. Their vision of “democracy” was of one secluded to the white, male, land-owning class. Given the immense influence of billionaires in today’s society, there is no real fundamental difference between what kinds of forces controlled nascent slave-owning America and our modern Gilded Age where slavery still exists through a gigantic loophole in the 13th Amendment.

Capital is King in the land built in supposed defiance of one, and professional sports’ Congressional antitrust exemptions create thirty-plus fiefdoms in every major sport. John Fisher, with the help of Major League Baseball’s other owners, murdered the Oakland A’s, ripping a beloved tentpole out of the community in the name of greed. John Fisher has proven he does not see himself as a member of our broader society, but as one who gets to lord over us, and in that sense, he’s just like every other billionaire in America. No matter how well-intentioned they may believe themselves to be, their wealth and how they accrued it is proof that their fundamental relationship to the rest of us is the same as a leech.

 
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