When Snow Melts: Vancouver’s Olympic Crackdown

Dave Zirin, The Nation

News Flash: Winter Olympic officials in tropical Vancouver have been forced to import snow – on the public dime – to make sure that the 2010 games proceed as planned. This use of tax-dollars is just the icing on the cake for increasingly angry Vancouver residents. And unlike the snow, the anger shows no signs of abating. As Olympic Resistance Network organizer Harsha Walia wrote in the Vancouver Sun, “With massive cost over-runs and Olympic project bailouts, it is not surprising that a November 2009 Angus Reid poll found that more than 30 per cent of [British Columbia] residents feel the Olympics will have a negative impact and almost 40 per cent support protesters. A January 2010 EKOS poll found that almost 70 per cent believe that too much is being spent on the Games.”

Officials are feeling the anger, and the independent media, frighteningly, is paying the price. Just as Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman was held in November for trying to cross the border for reasons that had nothing to do with the Olympic Games, Martin Macias Jr., an independent media reporter from Chicago, was detained and held for seven hours by Canada Border Services agents before being put on a plane and sent to Seattle. Macias, who is 20 years old, is a media reform activist with community radio station Radio Arte where he serves as the host/producer of First Voice, a radio news zine.

I spoke to Martin Macias today and he described a chilling scene of detention and expulsion. “I was asked the same questions for three and a half hours in a small room. They told me I had no right to a lawyer. I went from frustrated and angry to scared. I didn’t know what the laws were or how the laws had been changed for the Olympics. I kept telling them I wasn’t going to Vancouver to protest but to cover the protests but for them that was one and the same. This is bigger than me. We need to ask who is exactly ordering this kind of repression. Is it the government? The IOC? Why the crackdown?”

Then insult on top of injury when they deported Macias and insisted he pay his own way out of the country. “They wanted me to buy a $1,300 plane ticket back to Chicago. I said ‘no way’ and now I’m in Seattle.”

Martin’s story is not unique. Two delegates aiming to attend an indigenous assembly taking place alongside the games were also detained and turned away.

For people with just a passing knowledge of our neighbors to the north, it must all seem quite shocking. When we think of human rights abuses and suppression of dissent, Canada is hardly the first place that comes to mind. But there actually is a long history in Canada of this kind of abuse of power. The latest chapter in that history has been written during the pre-Olympic crackdown of 2010. Now as protestors and independent, unembedded journalists gather for the February 10-15 anti-Olympic convergence, as tax dollars go toward importing snow, the need to silence dissent becomes an International Olympic Committee imperative.

As Chicago’s Bob Quellos, who entered Vancouver successfully after accompanying Macias, said to me,

“Walking the streets, residents here are very clear about who is responsible for the billions of dollars of Olympic debt they will be paying off for generations. They are outraged that the over $1 billion that is being spent on security has placed a cop on almost every corner of Downtown Vancouver. And they are outraged by the government’s priorities. For example, while Vancouver’s Downtown East Side struggles with poverty similar to third-world countries and social programs continue to be gutted, VANOC is spending an untold amount of money helicoptering in snow to the Olympic venue of Cypress Mountain that would otherwise be a mud hill due to the warm weather.”

It’s not hard to deduce why the snow is melting: it’s the heat on the street.

[Dave Zirin is the author of the forthcoming "Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love" (Scribner) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.]
View the full article in its original form at: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/528319/when_snow_melts_vancouver_s_olympic_crackdown

Stop civil obedience: Fight the Games

By Harsha Walia, Special to the Vancouver Sun

http://www.vancouversun.com/story_print.html?id=2536175&sponsor=

They’ve been dubbed everything from the Surveillance Games to the Bailout Games to Olympics Inc., and British historian George Monbiot has aptly characterized the Olympics as “a legacy of a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich … Everywhere they go, they become an excuse for eviction and displacement; they have become a license for land grabs.”

It is trite to comment on how taxpayers are the real sponsors of the $6 billion-$7 billion Winter Games. According to Kevin Walmsley of the University of Western Ontario’s International Centre for Olympic Studies, most host cities incur a high debt. Corporate sponsors, on the other hand, use sports as a commodity for their merchandising and are provided with exclusive deals under the ruling ideology of market fundamentalism. For companies like Petro-Canada and the Royal Bank of Canada, complicit in the world’s largest industrial project and environmental disaster that is the Alberta oilsands, sponsoring the Olympics provides the much-needed platform for corporate greenwashing.

With massive cost over-runs and Olympic project bailouts, it is not surprising that a November 2009 Angus Reid poll found that more than 30 per cent of B.C. residents feel the Olympics will have a negative impact and almost 40 per cent support protesters. A January 2010 EKOS poll found that almost 70 per cent believe that too much is being spent on the Games.

Despite corporate sanitized billboards full of smiling people adorned in red, international media have picked up on this rapidly creeping sense of dread. A commentator for the Manchester Guardian declared that “Vancouver looks more like postwar Berlin than an Olympic wonderland,” while Sports Illustrated writer Dave Zirin quips: “When I arrived in Vancouver, the first thing I noticed was the frowns.”

Much like the failed financial commitments, the IOC and Vanoc have failed on their token social promises, which included protecting rental housing and ensuring that people are not made homeless. The reality is that Vancouver has experienced a 300-percent increase in homelessness since the Olympic bid, while approximately 1,600 new market housing and condominium units are being built around the Downtown Eastside.

According to Downtown Eastside resident Joan Morelli, “There is a condo tsunami overrunning our neighbourhood, where will we go?” A damning June 2007 report by the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions found that two million people have been displaced in host cities over 20 years.

Under the guise of this exceptional two-week party, we are left with irreversible policies of corporate welfare, gentrification, land grabs, surveillance and massive debt.

It seems, then, the real question is not why are people protesting. Rather it is: why would you not protest? I would rather be remembered as a community that stood up to defy this five-ring circus, rather than yet another passive host city that has been duped by the IOC and its government and corporate cronies.

As recently deceased U. S historian Howard Zinn reminded us: “Our problem is not civil disobedience, our problem is civil obedience … Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country.”

Harsha Walia is an activist.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

No Games Organizer Deported From Canada – Rights Shreded

Martin Macias, Jr., a credentialed journalist who works for Vocalo.org, the online and new media outlet for Chicago Public Radio, was turned back from the Canadian border late Saturday night.

Martin was a lead organizer for No Games Chicago, the all-volunteer citizens group that opposed the Chicago bid for the 2016 Olympics. Martin was part of the No Games delegations that went to the International Olympic Committee’s international headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland and then to Copenhagen, Denmark to deliver materials documenting the reasons why Chicago should not have been awarded the games. Martin was an invited guest a conference critical of the 2010 Vancouver games and the Olympic industry.

“I was in the passport line in Vancouver,” said Martin, “and I told them I was a radio journalist and a student a Malcolm X College. The agent put a big circle and x on my ticket. I was pulled out the line and questioned aggressively for two hours. They wanted to know what I was going to do in Vancouver, who i was meeting with, who organized the conference and what they looked like. They took all my contact information and business cards of journalists and other people I was to connect with while in Vancouver.”

Martin also said that he asked for a lawyer and was denied access to one. He demanded to know what his rights were. “You don’t have any, they told me.”

Read the full story at the Huffington Post.

You Told Us To Fight On

OK. it’s been a few months since Chicago lost its bid to host the 2016 Olympics. We asked you what should we do now, if anything. 567 of you took the time to take the online survey. Right after the October 2 decision most of the key organizers inside No Games were exhausted and returned to their lives and civic commitments – including studying full time, trying to make a living, teaching, campaigning to stop the deportation of long-time Chicago residents and many other ongoing issues. We looked at the results of this survey as well as the hundreds of e-mails that we received. There were differing opinions as what to do next. There was no firm decision to move forward on any one idea. We told you we’d report back to you…

Here’s how the survey broke down:

We asked people to share ideas for economic development and political reform and YOU DID. Download the 28 page document here with your ideas for what Chicago should do next.

If you want to know more – download the “Thank You, No Games!” email messages (17 pages, names and email addresses of senders removed).

One of our organizers, Tom Tresser, wrote a column for Huffington Post, “Lessons Learned From Olympic Fiasco.” Tom is now the Green party candidate for Cook County Board President.

That’s about it, Chicago. There hasn’t been a real discussion of what happened around the bid and the opposition to it. The media did not tell the story running up to the bid and they haven’t told the story since we lost the bid. We have not seen any academic institution or public policy body convene a discussion and no in-depth article or story has been published telling the story of what we did and why. We think Chicago’s progressive community ought to come together some how to frankly review what happened and why, but it will be up someone else to organize that forum.

To all the people who wrote, organized, marched, protested, donated, emailed, sent us articles, sent us advice, helped out and secretly wished us well when they could not do so publicly – THANK YOU.

No Games Chicago

Here’s What We Missed…

Check out this video from activists in Vancouver. It gives you a taste of what Chicago was in for had we got the 2016 Olympics…

Chicago NOT Awarded The 2016 Olympics – What Now?

Listen to President Rogge announce the vote.

Chicago has not been awarded the 2016 Olympics. No Games Chicago thinks is a very good decision for the people of Chicago. But what happens now? The mayor has been quoted as saying he has “nothing up his sleeve” with regards to economic development for the future of the city. Representatives of the 2016 Committee said on many occasions at public meetings that this was THE plan for jobs and prosperity for our future. There appears to be no Plan B.

What now?

No Games Chicago helped turn back a bad plan for our future. Should we stay around to help build a better plan?

Please answer the questions on our brief survey to tell us what role, if any, a group like our might play in helping to create a city where all prosper in health and security.

What ideas do YOU have for our city’s future economic development?

Lastly, we ask you to share your contact information with us so we might work together to make that vision become a reality.

PLEASE FOLLOW THIS LINK TO ANSWER OUR BRIEF THREE-QUESTION SURVEY.

Copenhagen Update #3

Copenhagen Update #2

Reader Columnist: “Dear IOC…”

By Ben Joravsky, from today’s Chicago Reader, “One last argument for why Chicago doesn’t need, want, or deserve the games.”

It’s been almost six months since I last wrote to encourage you not to award Chicago the 2016 games. Back then, as you recall, I was welcoming some of you to town for your official visit. Now, of course, you’re in Copenhagen, preparing to announce on October 2 which city they’ll be held in—Chicago, Madrid, Tokyo, or Rio.

I don’t want Chicago to “win” for the reasons I mentioned last time: we can’t afford the games, and they’ll tear up our parks. But let’s talk about your needs. I urge you, for your own sake: spare yourself the cost overruns, backroom deals, political wrangling, embarrassing scandals, and ugly headlines a Chicago Olympics would almost certainly bring you.

Let me explain.

Let him explain…

Copenhagen Update #1

We spare no expense to update Chicago on what we’re doing! Seriously, Copenhagen has been flooded with olice, security and Secret Service agents. Everyone here is excited about Oprah, Michelle Obama or Pele. We still like to think that our presence is making a difference…