London Olympic Excesses a Preview of Things to Come

Simon Jenkins writes in the London Guardian, ” Any fool can raise a tax. But it takes a gutless one to splurge it on this stuff. Austerity vanishes when it comes to the prestige projects saddled on Britain. Ministers fear the IOC more than the IMF.”  He writes at the witless and seemingly endless river of money being wasted on the London games…

London yesterday witnessed a surreal scene. The panjandrums of the International Olympic Committee came to town to congratulate Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling on spending so much money. The two of them were well up to the mark, on course to blow the £9bn required for the committee’s 2012 Stratford extravaganza. Members were said to be mightily pleased with their ­humble servants.

The IOC is still demanding that London “build in” obsolescence to its facilities, ensuring that buildings are so located and designed as to shriek “Olympics” and be useless for anything else. The Athens site is gathering weeds, and Beijing’s stupendous stadium has yet to find another purpose.

The biggest scam is the proclaimed need for an “Olympic village”, with detailed specifications that require costly conversion for re-use when the games are over. In Barcelona this cost was said to be more than that of building the village in the first place.

There is clearly a dark side to hosting the Olympics. Wo is telling that story? Will some organization with a staff, office and a telephone PLEASE do the research needed to give the citizens of Chicago the information we at No Games have come across?