Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Want to cleanse your city of its poor? Host the Olympics

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Monday, May 7, 2012

Want to cleanse your city of its poor? Host the Olympics

Click here to access article by Ashok Kumar from Ceasefire (UK).

This is an excellent, fact-based report on how the premier athletics event is transformed into measures to serve the interests of the One Percent: clearing out the poor from inner cities and inflating real estate prices in order to replace long established organic communities with new communities based solely on income and high consumption.

The Games are not simply hosted to ‘clean up’ the city, but to fundamentally reconfigure it, to ‘cleanse’ it of its poor and undesirable; to not only make way for a city by and for the rich, but to expand the terrain of profitable activity.

The political operatives of the One Percent shrewdly use social values supporting public demonstrations of athletic prowess and affirming national loyalties in order to reclaim cities for higher income people. Apparently, the latter want to return to gentrified inner cities from the suburbs where they previously went to flee the inner cities. And private enterprise is all too willing to accommodate them and reap fabulous profits in the process while sticking governments with more debts--owned by the One Percent.