08/09)The neoliberal Games: who are the real winners from London 2012?/The Toxic Cloud That Hangs Over the Olympics

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The neoliberal Games: who are the real winners from London 2012?

Far from embodying some timeless ‘Olympic spirit’, the 2012 Games reflect the injustice and inequality of the current economic system, writes David Renton

The world’s largest McDonald’s has been built at the heart of the ‘Olympic village’

Long before John Carlos stood beside Tommie Smith to give their famous clenched-fist salutes on the podium at the 1968 Olympics, he was a boy growing up in Harlem. ‘When I first learned about the existence of the Olympics,’ he recalls, ‘my reaction was different from anything I had ever felt when listening to baseball or basketball or football or any of the sports that I’d seen people play in the neighbourhood. The sheer variety of sports, the idea of the finest athletes from around the globe gathering and representing their countries: it was different, and the fact that it was every four years made it feel like an extra kind of special.’

The origins of the Olympic wonder lie in International Olympic Committee founder Pierre de Coubertin’s struggle with the French sporting authorities, and in the Olympic Charter, with its promises ‘to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity’.

The London Olympics have always had a much narrower set of ambitions. One of the five promises made in the original Olympic bid was: ‘To demonstrate that the UK is a creative, inclusive and welcoming place to live in, to visit and for business.’

Welcoming business has meant that the 4,700 medals being given out at the event have been struck from gold, silver and bronze donated by Rio Tinto, mined chiefly from its Bingham Canyon mine in Utah, USA. According to the London Mining Network, Rio Tinto’s mining operation has generated air pollution causing between 300 and 600 deaths in Utah each year.

London 2012’s main ‘sustainability partner’ will be BP, responsible for the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. This saw some 200 million gallons of crude oil released into the Gulf of Mexico, poisoning fishing stocks, endangering birds and other wildlife, and putting tens of thousands of fishermen out of work. BP is also one of the companies involved in extracting tar sands in Canada, a process that destroys forest, wastes untold volumes of fresh water, causes illness in mining areas, and is already responsible for around 10 per cent of all of that country’s carbon emissions, with production set to increase continuously over the next decade.

The companies sponsoring the Games include chocolate firm Cadbury’s. And right in the heart of the athletes’ village, the London organisers have authorised building the world’s largest McDonald’s. Another company hoping to be associated with the health and vigour of the athletes is Coca-Cola, the sponsors of the Olympic torch relay.

Cheering crowds

The day the London bid succeeded, there were cheering crowds in Stratford. Many local people, not unreasonably, expected that the Games would lead to significant regeneration of their borough, which is one of the poorest in London. Far from it: the closure of the Atherton leisure centre and its swimming pool, with the new Olympic pool not scheduled to open to the public before 2014, means that there are now fewer sporting facilities in Stratford than there were in 2005.

Stratford has seen no significant spending on housing, schools or other social infrastructure. A vast shopping centre has been built, the Westfield, and the tube station has been redesigned to drive residents into it. But the shopping centre is marketed at Olympic tourists with budgets to purchase luxury goods. Who really believes that Gucci, Jimmy Choo, Louis Vuitton, Versace, De Beers, Tateossian or Tiffany will still be in Stratford in 12 months time?

Across London, small but popular local green spaces are being shut to make way for the Games. This April, the Olympic Development Agency obtained an injunction to exclude local residents and protesters from Leyton Marsh to facilitate the building of a basketball practice area. The building was unnecessary, as there were several alternative disused sporting arenas within 30 minutes of the Marsh, which could simply have been refurbished. It has involved substantial construction works that have taken over a much-loved community space. The developers refused to engage with local councillors who began asking questions about the use of the site six months before the building work began.

The Olympics organisers have identified traffic ‘hotspots’ that are likely to be congested during the Games, including Canary Wharf, London Bridge, King’s Cross and Paddington. But the sports administrators themselves are going to be protected from the worst of the congestion. For three weeks from 25 July, large parts of the central London road network will be closed to all but Olympic dignitaries and their hangers-on. There will be ‘Games lanes’ for accredited vehicles, which will receive preferential traffic signals, and fines will be imposed on other vehicles driving into them. The dignitaries themselves will have access to specially-built, chauffeur‑driven BMW cars.

The British Library will be opening 30 minutes late each day for the duration of the Olympics to cope with anticipated staff shortages caused by traffic disruption. Businesses are being told to anticipate journey times being extended by over an hour during the Games.

The total cost of the Olympics is £12 billion (of which the bill to general taxation is £11 billion). This figure rises to £23 billion when all construction costs are included. These are fantastic sums of money. By way of comparison, during the last London Olympics in 1948 the total budget was £600,000. Even taking inflation into consideration, the real cost of the Olympics is 1,000 times more than last time London hosted the Games.

Guarding the Games

Despite this extravagance, there has been no significant pick-up in terms of local or London employment. The one area in which the organisers are recruiting is for security guards. But although a large number of them will be recruited (around 10,000 people altogether), the work will be precarious in the extreme. Most contracts will last just two to four weeks. Salaries are low at £10 per hour – and the main contractor G4S has negotiated further bonuses if it succeeds in reducing the hourly rate.

The recruitment of large numbers of guards chimes with the general tendency, under neoliberal economies, for spending on policing to increase while spending on health and education falls. The Olympics’ contribution to London policing has already included the use of pre-emptive banning orders (Olympic asbos) against supporters of the Leyton Marsh campaign and the deployment of armed police officers to transport hubs. The organisers of London 2012 will be able to call on 13,500 ground troops, several typhoon jets, Puma and Lynx helicopters, and two assault warships, HMS Ocean, and HMS Bulwark, the first of which will be stationed in the Thames throughout the Games.

Meanwhile, the low wages paid to Olympic security guards contrasts with generous salaries paid to Olympic managers, 16 of whom are being paid in excess of £150,000 per year. Sebastian Coe, chair of the organising committee, receives a starting £350,000 per year, but his full benefit rises to more like £600,000 per year when bonuses, image rights, and his Olympic-associated work for various private companies is factored in.

Inevitably, the London Games have been subject to protest. Several Occupy veterans joined local residents in the Leyton Marsh campaign. Various coalitions have formed, including a new Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), backed by the RMT union, and a Counter Olympics Network (CON), which has called a day of action on 28 July.

Sports begin in the most basic of human responses – the pleasure of running, jumping, testing your own reflexes and those of the people around you. But the sports business is escaping from these moorings. All over the sporting world, we see the same phenomena: declining access to public land or to other free facilities to enable people to participate in sports directly, declining opportunities even to watch sports live (supporting sport is increasingly done via television, more and more on pay-per-view satellite television), rising ticket prices, increasing salaries for sports stars and sports administrators, and a tendency for sport not merely to mirror the worst excesses of private capital but to be used to give allure to some of the most controversial of businesses.

The London Olympics is merely the grandest expression‎ of neoliberalism’s unhealthy involvement in sport.

The protest starts 12noon, Saturday 28 July in Mile End Park, London. More info.

http://www.redpepper.org.uk/the-neoliberal-games/?utm_source=Pepperista&utm_campaign=955a1a4a9c-96035f6d2dc1a0ab8d89ff1b8516f23b&utm_medium=email

Olympics: The Games turned upside down

The famous clenched-fists image of Tommie Smith and John Carlos protesting against black oppression at the 1968 Olympics is worth revisiting as London 2012 presents us with a regime of licensed private dictatorship, writes Mike Marqusee

In a world where the words ‘iconic’ and ‘icon’ have been so cheapened by overuse, it’s salutary to recall their original meaning. In religious use, an icon is a representation that is more than a representation, an image that contains a power beyond itself. It’s not merely familiar or typical (or self‑referential). It’s not a triumph of image over reality; it’s a deeper connection between image and reality, in which the former draws power from the latter.

That’s what makes the image of Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the podium at the 1968 Mexico Olympics that rare thing, a genuine icon. But its iconic power can only be reactivated, and the image saved from the banality of contemporary ‘iconography’, if we delve into the moment and its meaning, its background and its aftermath.

This is what makes The John Carlos Story (Haymarket Books) such a wonderful gift. Carlos’s intelligence, humour, ruefulness and righteous wrath make him a commanding observer and narrator. He’s sensitively aided by the cutting-edge socialist sports writer Dave Zirin, whose columns and books fearlessly explore race and class, money-power and media‑hypocrisy. Together, they’ve turned a sports autobiography into a powerful social testament.

From boycott to podium

Carlos explains how, in early 1968, he joined a handful of other elite African‑American athletes in the newly formed Olympic Project for Human Rights. The idea was to mount an African-American boycott of the upcoming Olympics in order to dramatise the continuing oppression of black Americans. Four demands were agreed: the hiring of black coaches (a crucial issue for the athletes, whose daily lives were managed by older white men imbued with racist assumptions); the restoration to Muhammad Ali of the heavyweight title stripped from him because of his refusal to take part in the war in Vietnam; the exclusion of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia from the Olympic movement; and the removal of the head of the IOC, Avery Brundage – a long time white supremacist, going back to the days when he helped Hitler secure the 1936 Olympics.

Despite valiant efforts, the OPHR activists were unable to persuade many of their fellow competitors to sign up for a boycott; for most of them the Games represented a once in a lifetime opportunity. In the end, the OPHR activists decided they too would take part, and as a result of that decision Carlos, Smith and their allies found themselves in a position to turn the Games upside down.

In the 200 metres final, Smith won the gold in world record time, with the Australian Peter Norman in second, fractionally ahead of Carlos. With Norman’s support (he’s wearing the OPHR badge on the medal podium), Smith and Carlos staged their protest before a global audience. As the US national anthem played and the US flag fluttered overhead, the two African‑American champions raised clenched fists and bowed their heads.

As Carlos explains, the accompanying symbolism was hastily improvised: black gloves for black unity and strength, bead necklaces to remember the lynch mobs, black socks and no shoes for black poverty. But the message was unmistakeable – and profoundly provocative.

These were African-Americans who would not allow their success to be used to bolster America’s image, to imply that black people in America enjoyed freedom and equality. They repudiated this image as a sham, a cover-up, a false unity, and at the same time they posed against it a different solidarity, a higher unity. In so doing they dramatically subverted the core symbolism of the Olympic podium, where individual excellence is harnessed to national identity. It was a globe-spanning message in a globe‑spanning language.

The context of ’68

As Carlos makes clear, the context was everything. It was 1968, and the wave of protest and repression had rolled through America and Europe and into Mexico City on the eve of the Olympics, when the military fired on protesting students, killing hundreds. In making their stand, Smith and Carlos brought the spirit of ’68 to the centre of the Olympic arena, breaching the citadel of sport, so often hailed as a haven from politics. They were able to do that because of their own relationship to the swelling currents of global activism. They knew that when they stood, they would not stand alone.

In narratives of the 1960s it is common to find the latter part of the decade, with its sometimes extreme and violent rhetoric, contrasted unfavourably with the earlier, more innocent and high-minded years. Many historians lament in particular the passing of the integrationist, nonviolent phase of the civil rights movement and its displacement by the militant black power phase.

They forget that this shift occurred because of the frustrations and failures of the earlier phase, out of which arose the need for a deeper, more systematic analysis as well as more effective forms of action. They also neglect the achievement of black power in releasing the self-reliant cultural energies of black performers – among them Smith and Carlos. Their protest was a flower of that movement and moment: a black nationalism with an internationalist vision, in which African-Americans were seen as members of a global community of the oppressed.

Unfinished business

Smith and Carlos were expelled from the Olympic village and returned home to find themselves vilified. They were denounced as ‘black storm troopers’ who had disrespected their country and, most heinous of all, had shown a shocking ingratitude for all America had done for them. For years Smith and Carlos were treated as pariahs by the athletics establishment. There were no sponsorships, no coaching or media jobs for these world record beaters. To feed his family Carlos took jobs as a gardener, in a grocery store and an aluminium factory, and a stint in American football.

As the political movement that had inspired his action disintegrated, Carlos and his family were isolated. His marriage broke down. In 1977, after years of financial distress and mounting depression, his wife, the childhood sweetheart who stood by him every step of the way in 1968, took her own life.

After much struggle, Carlos found a rewarding life as a school guidance counsellor, though it’s only in the last decade that he and Smith have received the recognition they’re due. Carlos makes clear that the demons still haunt him, that there’s still unfinished business. Not least political business.

In his story, the narrative arc of trial and redemption so familiar from sports autobiographies and Hollywood biopics is invested with depth and realism – because it’s linked to a wider social struggle. The bravery was real and so was the suffering that followed. It is this history, feeding into and flowing out from the famous image, that makes the Smith/Carlos moment so deeply resonant and so enduringly relevant.

Colonised by capital

Since Carlos’s day, the Olympics, like so many other parts of the commons, have been colonised by global capital. At London 2012, the podium will serve as a symbol of the holy triad: individual competitive excellence, national identity and corporate overlordship.

As Carlos notes, the removal of the indigent from public view by the host city has become as much part of the Olympic ritual as the torch relay. Along with that has come the establishment of Olympic zones as licensed private dictatorships, in which rights to free expression‎ and assembly are suppressed for the duration. An aggressive assertion of intellectual property rights, ruthlessly enforcing the corporate sponsors’ exclusive claims to the Olympic entity, will be matched by an unprecedented security clampdown, ensuring neither local residents nor protesters against corporate sponsors are able to disrupt the flow.

Like global capital, the Olympics have been cast as a juggernaut, an irresistible force with laws of its own to which we must all submit. In deference to that higher command, we’re told to swallow the exorbitant expense, the dubious ‘legacy’, the loss of rights, the trickle-up economics. We’re told to ignore the aching contrast between public austerity and Olympic extravagance. Despite the attempted lock down, the contradictions in the whole enterprise loom large, and one way or another, they’re bound to surface.

Mike Marqusee writes a regular column for Red Pepper, 'Contending for the Living', and is the author of a number of books on culture and politics

http://www.redpepper.org.uk/olympics-the-games-turned-upside-down/

August 02, 2012

Dow, Monsanto and the Truth About the "Green Games"

The Toxic Cloud That Hangs Over the Olympics

by TOM FAWTHROP

It is the world‘s biggest sporting event. TV programming in at least 150 countries provides saturation coverage. Men and women from all races and religions are competing for Olympic glory and gold.

Added to the usual extolling of lofty Olympic ideals this year the organisers are bragging about the ‘Green Games’. Public relations hype is regurgitating extraordinary claims that it will be the most environmentally friendly Olympics since the halcyon days of Ancient Greece.

So much for the hype. Just glance at the Who’s Who among the mega-corporations sponsoring this sporting extravaganza, and a far from eco-friendly line-up emerges.

The sponsors include BP the oil giant that has inflicted massive oil spoils on the world’s oceans, and Rio Tinto Zinc another resource extraction behemoth. Rights groups say they both have woeful environmental, safety and human-rights track records.

But worse of all is Dow Chemical Company USA. Dow Chemical has become the main focus of protests. It has been linked to the worst industrial accident of all time – the Bhopal disaster in India.*

Around  20,000 people were killed as a result of the disaster,  when Union Carbide still owned the Bhopal plant and before Dow took it over.

In 2001 Dow bought the plant and thereby acquired not only the assets, but also the toxic liabilities including ongoing compensation claims from the victims.

Twenty-eight years later Dow Chemicals the owner of the Bhopal site, has still failed to  clean-up the toxic mess.

The Indian government has demanded that Dow be removed from all forms of sponsorship. A chorus of outrage over Bhopal, from victims, campaigners for justice and fair compensation, and their lawyers have demanded the IOC should immediately sever the links to Dow.

In May the Vietnamese government joined India with a strong protest letter of their own ,delivered to the IOC (International Olympic Committee) about their own bitter experience with Dow.

The Vietnamese government Minister of Culture and Sport Hoang Tuan Anh wrote: “The Dow Chemical Company is one of the major producers of the Agent Orange, which has been used by the US Army. 80 million litres was  sprayed  over villages in the South of Vietnam over 10 years, from 1961 to 1971, destroying the environment, claiming the lives of millions of Vietnamese people and leaving terrible effects on millions of others, now suffering from incurable diseases and some hundreds of thousands of children of the fourth generation, were born with severe congenital deformities.

Dow Chemical expressed their indifference and refused compensation for victims of the Agent Orange produced by the company. They have expressed indifference as well to their responsibility to clean up contaminated areas. Spending zero effort to recover their mistakes in the past, Dow continues to destroy the current living environment. In 2010, US Environmental Protection Agency listed Dow as the second worst polluter in the world.”

The Vietnam Minister Hoang Tuan Anh’s letter continued,“Since the ultimate goals of the Olympic Movement are to promote good health, equality and progress of the mankind, we think that the acceptance of IOC for Dow sponsorship was a hasty decision”.

Signed by Hoang Tuan Anh, Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism letter to the IOC 02/05/12.

Scott Wheeler, a Dow spokesman, dismissed the Vietnamese letter as both “misguided” and “wrongly focused”.

The IOC responded “The [IOC] does not enter into agreements with any organisation that it believes does not work in accordance with the values of the Olympic Movement as set forth in the Olympic Charter,” the IOC said in a statement to Vietweek magazine in Ho Chi Minh city..

The Olympic body also noted that the partnership agreement with Dow was signed in 2010, and before that, the IOC had “studied carefully” the history of the company.

Well how much they studied Dow’s recent record is open to question, as a five minute search on Google would have revealed that the US Environmental Protection Agency in 2010, listed Dow as the second worst polluter in the world.

The IOC declared their confidence in Dow as, a “global leader in its field of business” and said the company was “committed to good corporate citizenship.”

Meredith Alexander, a member of the Commission for a Sustainable London 2012 set up to monitor the London Olympics, resigned over the IOC’s lame acceptance of Dow’s public relations line, denying any legal or moral responsibility for the victims of Bhopal.

“I had been providing information about Bhopal to commission members and I was stunned that it publicly repeated Dow’s line that it bears no responsibility for Bhopal,” Ms Alexander wrote in the Guardian newspaper (UK -26.1.12).” 

She elaborated ‘  I was shocked to see that the result of our investigation was a public statement from the commission that essentially portrays Dow as a responsible company.”

NEVER MIND THE SPORT – THE OLYMPICS IS BIG BUSINESS 

After her resignation Meredith Alexander observed   “But the Olympics is also big business. There is an expensive machine behind the Games, that is funded by corporate sponsors. Sadly when these sponsors are selected, money talks much more loudly than values.”

Dow Chemicals,  committed to provide the IOC with $10 million over four years, expects to reap a financial bonanza from its sponsorship.

The BBC Detailed the full extent of  Dow products being used in the London Olympics.

From its urethane foam in the track, polymer fibres in the super-fast hockey pitches, materials in walls, floors and roofs of stadia and insulation technology in the broadcasting, and electricity wiring cables to technology in the signage in the Games Lanes, the company’s hands are all over London 2012. (BBC online How does Dow Chemical gain from the Olympics?  January 2012).

Dow Chemical inked a 10-year deal with the IOC in 2010. The agreement calls for the US-based outfit to fork out $100 million every four years as a chief sponsor of the Summer, Winter and the Paralympics Games.

During the 10 years of Dow’s Olympic sponsorship, he estimates there will be £97bn ($150bn) spent on Olympic Games – building stadiums, venues, athletes’ villages, roads and bridges, making a big marketing opportunity for a company ubiquitous in the field.

Dow envisioned a global sales bump of about $1 billion by promoting, ironically enough, a raft of environmentally-friendly products.

The 2012 London Olympics have already been tarnished long before the games have begun.  Given its record in delivering Agent Orange to defoliate tropical rainforest on a massive scale during the Vietnam War under contract to the Pentagon and the US army, no amount of hype can conceal their ugly history as manufacturers of eco-cidal products, that inflicted a carcinogenic nightmare on the jungles of Indochina.

Dow and Monsanto corporation have also been accused in a US lawsuit brought by the Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange that they had unleashed chemical warfare based on dioxin on the civilian population in rural areas of South Vietnam.

“The modern Olympics was founded here in the UK to promote peace and understanding between the peoples of the world. The Olympic values are all about celebrating our common humanity,” in the words of Meredith Alexander who resigned over the IOC’s abject infatuation with Dow and its dollars.

Perhaps nothing is more twisted than the concept that the corporation whose products – Agent Orange and Napalm – that maimed and crippled so many Vietnamese, will be sponsoring the Paralympics.

Vietnamese victims of Dow products commented  “ It’s ironic that Dow is allowed to sponsor sporting events including Paralympics athletes, when it is responsible for creating generations of severely disabled children and refuses to do anything to help them,”.

“Allowing such a company to sponsor the Olympics and Paralympics — a cultural event of global magnitude, is an affront to the conscience of humankind.” Statement by  VAVA  [The Vietnamese Association of Victims of Agent Orange based in Hanoi who organised a class action lawsuit in the US courts against Dow Chemicals and Monsanto Corporation.]

The Vietnamese Red Cross estimates that up to 3 million Vietnamese ] have been affected by Agent Orange, including at least 300,000 children born with birth defects.

The US government’s Veterans Administration officially recognises 13 medical conditions linked to Agent Orange and provides free medical treatment to US soldiers who can prove their exposure to the herbicide. But Washington has adamantly denied all responsibility and evaded any kind of accountability for the estimated four million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians who suffered far greater exposure to the dioxin than the US war veterans.

Remember the book ‘Girl in the picture” about the story of the Vietnamese girl Kim Phuc set ablaze by napalm? That napalm bomb was also manufactured by Dow.

ATHLETES AGAINST THE OLYMPICS   -

Another campaign also was activated by thousands of athletes and NGOs around the world to call for the organisers of Olympics 2012 to end its ties with Dow.

The website writes: “We, former and competing athletes, national team members and Olympians, do not feel that Dow Chemical embodies the spirit and humanity of the Olympic movement.”

A few testimonies:

Marilyn Chua, Olympian, Malaysian National Team Member – Swimming

As an Olympian for the Malaysian National Team and UCLA Swim Team member, I am disgusted that Dow Chemical has been chosen to be a sponsor of the 2012 London Olympics after the thousands of lives they have killed and destroyed all over the world! They do not deserve to be associated with all that the Olympics stand for!

Abdoul K Mbaye Niane, Senegal National Team Member – Swimming

As a former Senegal swimming team member, I oppose Dow Chemical sponsorship of the Olympic Games LONDON 2012.

Dr. Geraldine Schick, UCLA/Canadian – Swimming

As a medical doctor and former UCLA swim team member I am deeply concerned by the IOC’s decision to allow Dow Chemical to become a sponsor of the Olympics. Athletes, in the eyes of most, are the embodiment of health. When the second worst polluter of toxic substances in America for 2010 is entrusted by the IOC to be part of this supposedly healthy and ethical sports event, I begin to lose my faith in the Olympic movement. I hope the IOC decides to implement the same standards towards sponsors as it does for other participants of the Olympic Games.

Brian Fell, American Record Holder – Track and Field

Please remember all the hard work, dedication and years it takes for each Olympic Sport! Please value the pressure and ideals placed upon every athlete from the strict IOC rules and regulations and place this same magnifying lens on the sponsorships who you decide to partner with. Please do not tarnish these coming games by letting DOW Chemical anywhere near the Olympic family and brand. If money is the only interest with DOW, then the backlash will soon follow heading into 2012 games.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/02/the-toxic-cloud-that-hangs-over-the-olympics/