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Talk about golden parachute—while Donald Sterling was fired as LA Clippers owner, estimates report that his $12M investment will payoff in the neighborhood of $1B+.  

As far as I understand, he is being forced to liquidate his position in the Clippers with enough money to start another league if he wants. For an 81-year old billionaire, a $2.5M fine is negligible. The way this society is structured, Donald Sterling can purchase a private island with enough resources to forget he even owned the Clippers and enjoy the spoils of extreme wealth.  Since money rules this world’s social order, and Sterling has enough of it to buy his subject’s silence for decades, don’t cry too hard for Mr. Sterling. 

Truly, the only way to defeat modern-day Plantation-owners is to create an ecosystem of revolutionary thinkers, professionals, businessmen and women that genuinely work to transform and evolve society and allocate resources in underserved areas and communities.  Capital has been king since the foundation of America, thus to truly serve justice in this money-driven Kingdom, is to force no retreat for racist, ignorant, intolerable people. Clearly, at Sterling’s level of wealth and privilege, his sentiments are shared by many—I expect the vast majority of old, aristocratic barons.  Moreover, most super-wealthy old conservative families probably express what Sterling got caught saying 1000X times a day in the privacy of their castles or high-end brownstones.

In a society that values money > everything, racisms/hatred prevails when the allocation of capital is skewed toward traditional groups and barriers to gaining such are high and social mobility is restricted. Truly, a radical transformation of social/political values is the only answer to root out racism/elitism etc. In fact, a massive transfer of wealth and resource is indeed needed—that is the only way to re-engineer this economically imbalanced society, antiquated façade of capitalism, and the dominance of the American Aristocracy.

I think the NBA ruling is a step in the right direction, but to really have a lasting impact we need to recalibrate social, economic, spiritual, values and place access, a more fairly distributed pipeline of opportunity, & humanity as key social drivers and not simply financial status.  The solution is to invest in people and systems changing the world and ridding humanity of destructive ideals.  Invest in areas that the Donald Sterlings refuse to serve en masse.  The solution lies with that type of substantive change, and is much bigger than short-term of isolated punishments. Invest in macro-scale evolution, distribution of resources, and dispersion of financial, spiritual, and physical capital to all groups regardless of race/color/creed—that’s how we change the world. #tothemoon