Never mind the usual puffery about what this month’s Winter Olympics are all about. Sure, there’s the beauty of sports, the spirit of friendly competition, the dedication of great athletes and all that. But the Winter Games are about a few other things as well: elitism, exclusion and the triumph of the world’s sporting haves over its have nots.
What the Winter Games are not is a truly international sporting competition that brings the best of the world together to compete, as the promotional blather would have you believe. Unlike the widely attended Summer Olympics, the winter version is almost exclusively the preserve of a narrow, generally wealthy, predominantly Caucasian collection of athletes and nations. In fact, I’d suggest that the name of the Winter Games, which start Friday, be changed. They could be more accurately branded “The European and North American Expensive Sports Festival.”
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Obviously, the climate and terrain in, say, Indonesia or Aruba aren’t highly conducive to molding superstar aerial skiers and biathlon champions. But it’s not just the presence or absence of snow and ice that determines Winter Olympics success, or even participation. If it were, some of America’s best ice skaters and speedskaters wouldn’t live and train in Southern California or Florida. If it were, athletes from countries like Peru, Chile, Nepal, Morocco, Afghanistan and Ethiopia — all blessed with soaring, snow-covered mountains — would be marching en masse in the Opening Ceremonies and fighting for the medal stand.
Instead, the more telling factors are economic. Would-be Winter Olympians need years of training, coaching and competition if they’re going to make it to the Games. All of these things require massive sums of money. A bobsled (or bobsleigh, in official IOC-speak) costs about $35,000, to say nothing of what it costs to build an Olympic-caliber bobsled run. A pair of speedskates might be relatively cheap, but how many countries have speedskating rinks? Most nations, even those with plenty of snow and cold, simply can’t afford such extravagances.
Remember the Jamaican bobsled team? Those lovable underdogs endeared themselves to many with their participation in the 1988 games in Calgary (the four-man team was the subject of the 1993 Disney movie “Cool Runnings” and finished a surprisingly high 14th in 1994). Less well-known is what happened — or didn’t happen — to the Jamaicans in the 2002 games in Salt Lake City: They didn’t show up. The team ran out of funding and had to stay home.
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http://www.groups.yahoo.com/group/news_junkie_gp/
The End of the Internet?
The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.
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To make this pay-to-play vision a reality, phone and cable lobbyists are now engaged in a political campaign to further weaken the nation’s communications policy laws. They want the federal government to permit them to operate Internet and other digital communications services as private networks, free of policy safeguards or governmental oversight. Indeed, both the Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are considering proposals that will have far-reaching impact on the Internet’s future. Ten years after passage of the ill-advised Telecommunications Act of 1996, telephone and cable companies are using the same political snake oil to convince compromised or clueless lawmakers to subvert the Internet into a turbo-charged digital retail machine.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060213/chester
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Green_All_Views/
Super Bowl City on the Brink
“A celebration of concentrated wealth.” That’s what Washington Post sportswriter Tony Kornheiser called the National Football League’s two-week long pre-Super Bowl party binge. Every Super Bowl Sunday, corporate executives and politicians exchange besotted, sodden backslaps, amidst an atmosphere that would shame Jack Abramoff. Only this year the bacchanalia — complete with ice sculptures peeing Grey Goose vodka and two tons of frozen lobster flown directly to the stadium — is happening in the United States’ most impoverished, ravaged city: Detroit.
Detroit’s power elites in government and the auto industry are rolling out the red carpet while many of its people shiver in fraying rags. This contrast between the party atmosphere and abject urban suffering has been so stark, so shocking and so utterly revealing that news coverage on the city’s plight has appeared in the sports pages of the New York Times and Detroit Free Press, among others.
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Ryan Anderson of Detroit, wrote me a chilling email saying, “The mood is one of Orwellian-flavored siege: dire warnings of a 30-day police speeding ticket bonanza, designed to raise $1 million for the construction of a damn bridge welcoming out-of-towners to the Motor City; the mayor, the governor, and every other notable on the radio urging us all to ’show ‘em what we got’ [read: Don’t further sully our already bad reputation]; and the homeless being taken to a three-day ‘Superbowl Party,’ where they’ll get the actual food and shelter they need until the big game’s over, after which they’ll be kicked back out on the streets. Welcome to the Poorest City in America, sponsored and enabled by lily-white Oakland County.”
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Mitch Albom of the Detroit Free Press described the shelter, called the Detroit Rescue Mission, throwing the “three day party” to cleanse homeless people from the city’s landscape. As Albom wrote, “Lines formed before sunset, dozens of men in dirty sweatshirts, old coats, worn-out shoes. They had to line up in an alley, because, [the shelter’s director says], the city doesn’t want lines of homeless folks visible from the street. Even at a shelter, they have to go in the back door.”
FYI: You need to scroll all of the way down the page in order to read the story
http://www.alternet.org/story/31635/
NAFTA Corridors: Dividing the Nation to Multiply Profits
This essay discusses the socio-economic and envirnomental impact of two limited-access highways that are being built.
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/vogel040206.html
BLACK HAWK: THE BATTLE FOR THE HEART OF AMERICA
In early April 1832, Black Hawk’s band of Sauks—some two thousand men, women, and children, including several hundred well-armed warriors—crossed the Mississippi near the mouth of the Iowa River and began making their way north toward Saukenuk, their traditional summer village, at the junction of the Mississippi and Rock rivers (now within the city limits of Rock Island, Illinois). A startled American settler encountered them along the river road. They had come in peace to reclaim their village, the Sauks told him, “but if the Whites want War they shall have it.”
That was precisely what many Americans wanted. Historian Kerry A. Trask makes this clear in Black Hawk: The Battle for the Heart of America, both a biography of the Sauk leader (Makataimeshekiakiak—”Black Sparrow Hawk”—in the Sauk language) and a history of the war that took his name, a war that was nothing short of an instance of American genocide. Trask quotes General Henry Atkinson, commander of a small force of US Army troops sent to patrol the northern Illinois frontier: “I will treat them like dogs,” he sneered. “If Black Hawk’s band strikes one white man[,] in a short time they will cease to exist!” Atkinson was blustering—he was unwilling to take on such a large force—but his rhetoric was commonplace. Indian hating, Trask understands, was part of the very character of American settler society. Atkinson wrote Illinois governor John Reynolds for assistance, warning that “the frontier is in great danger.” Reynolds responded quickly. Facing reelection and sensing the political advantage of a quick and violent strike against a despised enemy, he called out the militia.
http://www.bookforum.com/faragher.html