Green Bay Packers Inc.

CNBC’s Darren Rovell has a good story on the business of the Green Bay Packers. Rovell only briefly touches on this, but the Packers are one of the more interesting businesses in America today. The team is organized as a non-profit, community-owned corporation.

There are about 4.7 million shares, but they don’t pay a dividend and they can’t be traded. Think about that. You just buy them and watch. If you want, you can sell the shares back to the team for a teeny amount of money.

The Packer fans are so loyal that they’ve bought shares, and financially rescued the team more than once over the past 80 years.

The team was organized as a community-owned company in 1923. To add some context, this was at the high tide as progressive movement, which found its epicenter in Wisconsin (i.e., the Wisconsin Idea).

In 1924, Senator Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, Sr. of Wisconsin ran for president as a third party candidate. He won 17% of the vote and carried his home state.

The senior La Follette died in 1925, but was succeeded by his son, Robert La Follette, Jr., who held the seat until 1946 when he was upset by Joseph McCarthy (with the help of the Communist Party).

Milwaukee was the country’s only large city to have a socialist mayor, or at least, an admitted socialist mayor. In fact, the city had three socialist mayors over 38 years between 1910 and 1960 (would they have nationalized Arnold’s?). The last one died a few weeks ago at the age of 93.

Posted by on September 13th, 2006 at 1:06 pm


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