Oh Yeah, That Kawhi Thing... (Part Two)
On "No-Show" Jobs
OK, so the Kawhi thing… I last wrote about it back in September, when it first broke.
By now it’s is no longer even the most salient NBA scandal broken by Pablo Torre this year. But this one is still ongoing: The NBA has opened its own investigation into the matter, and the Los Angeles Clippers have responded.
Still, I never addressed the substance of the allegations, which remain largely the same since it first broke: Kawhi Leonard had an “endorsement deal” with an environmental company called Aspiration, which paid him $28 million over four years. Leonard’s deal was, in fact, the biggest sponsorship the company had, and when Aspiration went bankrupt, he was listed as one of the company’s biggest creditors. Yet this “endorsement” was never publicized, and Leonard does not appear to have made any mention of the company at any time.
On top of that, when Aspiration started to go belly-up, the Clippers’ owners stepped in to keep the company afloat, seemingly just so it could continue to make payments to Leonard. People within the company have said that paying Leonard was a top priority, even as they were having trouble covering its basic expenses, despite the fact Leonard didn’t seem to actually DO anything for Aspiration.
All of this suggests that the “endorsement deal” was really just a way for the Clippers to circumvent the NBA’s salary cap, to use a front company, which was dependent on the Clippers for investment and legitimacy, to pay Leonard more than his official salary without having to count it against the NBA’s luxury tax. The phrase tossed around a lot is “No-Show Job,” because everyone likes to talk as if they’re on The Sopranos now.
I’m a little ambivalent about this phrase, having its roots as it does in allegations of union corruption, where jobs were added to the books as nothing more than graft. But I admire the intuitive spirit of it: a job is supposed to be connected to work. Indeed, the smoking gun in the Kawhi Leonard case is simply the fact that he was paid so much to “endorse” a company that he never even actually endorsed. There would seem to be something inherently fraudulent about income earned without any labor.
The only problem is: That’s not how capitalism works at all. Capitalism is predicated on private ownership of the means of production, and therefore money flows to people based on what they own, not whether they work. This can sometimes feel like the same thing — especially since most people don’t really own much besides their labor and skills. But in reality, capitalism guarantees the existence of a rentier class who make money without working.
There are all sorts of tricks to convince you that this isn’t true. We even sometimes use the word “earnings” synonymously with income, to suggest that all money made is money earned through labor. But this is not close to true: The vast, vast majority of the wealth generated by capitalism flows to private owners, who are entitled to that wealth regardless of what work they actually do.1
None of this makes the Kawhi deal any less scandalous. It certainly does seem like the Clippers were trying to circumvent the rules with this arrangement. But what makes this deal distinct is the existence of the NBA’s luxury tax, not the existence of a “no-show” job for Leonard. Indeed, such deals are pretty normal in the upper echelons of wealth, celebrity, and status. There are many businesses that will pay someone a lot of money just to manufacture an association with that person, whether it’s a law firm hiring Kamala Harris’ husband, or Netflix throwing money at the Obamas to slap their names on a few documentaries, or Andrew Cuomo earning $5 million as a “consultant” in 2024.
Some might object to characterizing these deals as “no-show” jobs since there is always some veneer of plausible deniability involved. Doug Emhoff certainly has an office at his law firm, for example, and if you asked his bosses they would certainly cite all kinds of “expertise” he has to justify the job.2 (And I’m sure the Obamas gave detailed production notes on Leave the World Behind.) But the essence of these jobs is the same as Leonard’s deal with Aspiration: These people are not really being paid for the labor they’re doing, but because some executive has calculated that they’re a good person to be associated with.
If anything, Leonard’s deal is more straightforward: He WAS being compensated for his labor — just not the labor he was performing for Aspiration. What’s confusing is why Aspiration didn’t just make Leonard do a short photo op, or post on Instagram, or just SOMETHING to make the arrangement seem more legit. Obviously it would have still been a shady deal — no Instagram story would be worth $28 million to Aspiration — but it’s only the absence of ANYTHING that really raises so many red flags here. Indeed, it is remarkable how thin the veneer of legitimacy has to be for people to play along with the idea that income like this is actually “earned.”
You might remember that, a few years ago, I tried to determine whether LeBron James was really a “billionaire.”
One thing that stands out when you look at reports of James’ net worth is how much of it involves “reported” valuations and private deals. That is, someone makes an undisclosed investment in a company LeBron owns that “reportedly” values that company at $700 million or $500 million and then… voila: LeBron’s stake in that company is suddenly worth hundreds of millions of dollars! It’s not much different than giving my friend $1 for .0001% of his sandwich and then saying that sandwich is worth $1 million. But if you do that enough times with enough sandwiches, then suddenly you can say you’re “worth” a billion dollars and nobody is going to question you too much.
In other words, there’s a whole capitalist infrastructure built to funnel money to people in “no-show” jobs, either by inflating net worths or offering sinecures to powerful figures. It sort of seems like that was the whole essence of Aspiration’s business model! They ostensibly sold carbon credits, but really seem like a business set up by a well-connected insider to allow his powerful friends to greenwash their reputations and launder money.
So it’s frustrating to see a scandal like this framed as a matter of a worker like Kawhi Leonard getting paid more than he should have, as opposed to a glimpse at the whole house of cards that this economy is based on. Obviously the NBA still has to do an investigation, but I’m not sure that pro sports owners are in a position to judge someone for getting paid to do nothing.
Even though capitalist propagandists try to hide this fact, you can see it pretty clearly when you look at any of those lists of the World’s Richest People, which are overwhelmingly made up of heirs to fortunes, or people like Bill Gates, who hasn’t actually worked at Microsoft in over a decade.
Just like Hunter Biden’s expertise in natural gas!