The Five Ring Olympic Circus: The Big Lie, Elite Priorities, and Lost Opportunities Chris Shaw |
2010 Watch and Work Less Party As There is nothing surprising about this:
All Olympics come with massive price tags with the burden falling on ordinary
people rather than the private sector that reaps the real rewards. Since when it comes to the Olympics money is no object for governments, it might be worthwhile to examine what else Vancouver’s Olympic dollars might have provided instead, in other words what are some of the lost opportunities? Olympic boosters dismiss this sort of speculation as unknowable and even naïve, as if somehow the very notion that money spent on the Games could be better employed elsewhere is an absurd utopian ideal. Intangible it may be to some extent, but the concept of lost opportunities is no more intangible than the second pillar of the Olympic frame, patriotism. In fact, the question of what things society might need more than a 17-day party is one of those ‘red pill’ questions that arose during the bid period in 2002/03 that directly links the Olympics to the subject of social priorities and how our money gets spent and for whose benefit. Over twenty years of government cuts to services and the under-funding of health care and education are typically blamed on debt loads that all levels of government typically carry. “What can we do? We have to live within our means”, becomes the official mantra. The Olympic machine exposes this as a lie since for projects the government wants to fund on behalf of their friends in the private sector, even at enormous expense, it can. The glaring reality is that money exists, just not for purposes of ordinary people. An illuminating example of this – one could say an epiphany – is unfolding as these words are written: North American and other Western markets are falling into panic due to the sub-prime lending schemes of the last dozen years. Western governments and their national banks moved within days to inject almost a trillion dollars into the market to ensure ‘liquidity’, the same governments and banks that have for years made the argument that any timely and equivalent funding to combat climate change is impossible[i]. Clearly, the problem isn’t money, it’s priorities, with theirs completely trumping ours. From the cost accounting cited above for
what In my own field of neurological disease
research, $6 billion is the equivalent of over ten years worth of funding for
the national health research establishment (Canadian Institutes for Health
Research). Focused funding of this amount could supply the basic and applied
research that in the same period would make most cancers, diabetes and the
neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Lou Gehrig’s only distant memories. The overall
societal cost of these neurodegenerative diseases in The money spent on the Olympic scam
forces us to realize that these alternatives simply aren’t priorities for our
politicians. Why? The simple reason is that our politicians would prefer to
put our tax dollars into the private sector as corporate welfare. Even if we
were to accept the Olympic frame that hosting the Olympics brings billions of
dollars in economic returns – and it never does – the magnitude of the
difference between imaginary Olympic outcomes and very realizable
social/medical ones is simply staggering. The failure of our politicians to
see across this gulf speaks to a truism that has become starkly obvious to
tens of millions in The impact of the Olympics goes beyond
lost ‘intangible’ opportunities such as those cited above, to extremely
tangible ones. Hosting the Games is promoted as a boon to businesses big and
small, but this rarely materializes. Certainly some companies get lucrative
contracts and just as surely parts of the tourism sector and businesses close
to Olympic venues can do very well during the actual Games period. However,
transportation headaches created by construction during the pre-Games period,
or traffic jams or security perimeters during the Games themselves, often
make the access of tourists and locals alike to parts of the city nearly
impossible. The construction of the RAV line has negatively impacted local
businesses along Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda chief, once said that, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” The IOC has learned the lesson well as it promotes the Olympic frame that the Games serve humanity by promoting elite sport in the cause of peace. (This is not likely an accident given the fascist nature and sympathies of the IOC and some of its past presidents, Avery Brundage and Juan Antonio Samaranch, for example). The lost opportunities, the displacement of the poor and homeless, the destruction of the environment vanish before the new big lies of the IOC and VANOC. And, of course, the government is rapidly preparing its security response for 2010 with thousands of police and soldiers headed for our streets. Our job as the anti-Olympic resistance
movement, therefore, becomes the essential task of dismantling the Olympic
frame and showing British Columbians, as well as people around the world,
what the Olympics are truly about and what the true costs –direct and in lost
opportunities- actually are. And, while we may not save |