With reports that athletes from Western countries are being explicitly told NOT to talk to the media of their concerns about being a national representative in a deeply oppressive country, I have no doubt that the 2008 Olympics is turning into a disgraceful sham of the Olympic ideal which the IOC should be ashamed of ever letting happen in the first place. There is little more to add to the excellent report below, except for add my thanks for the information, and saluting the work of the people behind www.unmadeinchina.org.

Why should we be happy and complacent about the 2008 Beijing Olympics? Now, just as in 1936 at the Berlin Olympics in Germany, nobody minds participating in such an important international event. The countries that took part in that event later regretted the mistake they had made – in the years which followed the Games, a war took place which caused over 50 million deaths: World War II.

Let’s take a look back.

The Berlin Wall fell in 1990. The Cold War was over. The Soviet Union “fell apart.” The Western democracies had virtually won the ideological challenge against the communist regimes, whose champion was the USSR.
What’s happening now?

In 2001 the Western democracies, headed by the United States, shit in their pants from fear and, following the tragic event of the World Trade Center, in December of the same year they gave an enormous, incredible gift to China. Something to put under the Christmas tree.

They let China (without asking for anything in exchange) become a member of the WTO, the World Trade Organization.

Nothing important, a mere pittance!

They could have waited for China to implode, like the Soviet Union did. They could have waited for it to fall like a mature fruit and open itself up to democracy and reform. But NO! Low level bureaucrats, a world-wide lobby of politicians and business people, have decided to allow China to become part of the WTO without asking for anything in return, except for a few vague promises. Does this seem at all reasonable?

The indolent democracies shored up a decrepit system which was in the throes of death. They reanimated it, furnishing it with the oxygen it needed in order to survive. In this way, they perpetrated a regime of oppression, producing disastrous consequences.

Great. Well done.

We are neither happy nor complacent. We are not happily rushing to the party in order to obtain our piece of the Olympic pie that governments, business people, sponsors, committees, associations, midgets, dancers etc. are all running after.  On the contrary, we are worried.

Worried about the democracies who no longer have any minimal level of mental clarity in recognizing their mistakes. Instead, they are creating alarming situations through their mind-sets, which are more concentrated on business than on politics: from the negation of human rights to the imprisonment and murder of political dissidents, from the repression of religious freedom to the absence of free press.

The Chinese really have everything…

A superpower that constantly threatens to swallow up Taiwan, that illegally occupies Tibet, that sends their guard dogs, the Burman generals, to massacre the Buddhist monks who peacefully demonstrate in their own country.

The truth is that China is now exporting oppression, in addition to the toxic and poisonous products it is producing with its billion or more slaves.

But it’s still not too late.

Soon, the Olympic Games will be held.

If the democratic countries are able to regain their mental clarity and recover from the “political Alzheimer’s” they have been suffering from, if they are pressured from below, by public opinion, if a movement that refuses this, that is disgusted by it, begins with the people, the institutions, associations, you who are reading this, then something can be done. It won’t be too late.

We have no desire to honor, praise or publicize the leaders of a bloodthirsty regime.

We grant them no merit or glory.

Let’s unite and boycott this disgrace that’s hanging over us like a natural disaster, like an earthquake, a volcano, a meteorite.

BOYCOTT THE BEIJING OLYMPICS 2008!

(from http://www.unmadeinchina.org/contStd.asp?lang=en&idPag=38)

Whoops, there goes another statistic, out of the window before someone notices it’s gone. The Canadian Province of Alberta have a government that are particularly adept at this move, as I found to my annoyance when searching for some figures while researching my book.

It seemed simple enough: go and find out whether the carbon emissions of Alberta have gone up as result of the mining of oil sands in the Athabasca region. You might remember an article I published about this on The Sietch Blog and a little expose I did on Shell, on this very site not long ago – it’s pretty obvious from these that the emissions are bound to be going up. So what a surprise when I go to look for them, to find that the figures are missing, airbrushed from history to be replaced by the magical economic plaything called “Carbon Intensity” (or in Alberta’s case, Greenhouse Gas Intensity, just to make sure everything is neatly covered).

Apparently the quantity of greenhouse gases went down by 20% between 1994 and 2004, but only when compared to the huge amount of money Alberta is making from oil production; when you consider that Alberta’s Gross Domestic Product  went up by 3.6% per year in the same period  then you realise that, in fact, Alberta’s greenhouse gas emissions have actually gone up by 20%.

They don’t want you to know that, of course, and the Canadian Government are more than happy to let them get on with this, because Alberta is the big cheese, the top dog, the grand wizard of economic output:

“The federal government will receive 41 per cent of $123 billion of total government revenues from the oil sands”
(from CAPP, Industry Facts and Information)

Odd then that even the Government of Alberta say, on the very same page they banished the Carbon Emissions from:

“As greenhouse gases are added to the atmosphere, they contribute to the enhanced greenhouse effect, causing the increase in global temperature to take place at a faster rate than has ever been recorded. It is predicted that as temperatures continue to increase in the coming years, we will see more heat waves, floods, droughts and rising sea levels.”

When it comes to money versus life, then money always wins where politicians are concerned.

Nice guy Robert Zoellick. Hand-picked by George Bush in 2007 to ensure the interests of the USA remain paramount in the policies of one of the world’s largest money lenders, his replacement of the shamed Paul Wolfowitz was really a like-for-like swap, so it’s no surprise that the World Bank is in the news again as arch hypocrites.

Founded in 1944 to fund the reconstruction of post-war Europe, the World Bank, or International Bank for Reconstruction and Development shifted its focus in the 1950s to funding “development” projects in poor countries. The underlying aim is now, in fact, to ensure that any financial, infrastructure or political systems operating in these countries become market-led, thus allowing corporations and Western government interests (essentially the same thing) to control the resources and public purses of poorer countries. The lending agreements are corrupting, to say the least.

Here is an excerpt from the a conditions of lending agreement with Armenia:

“The Borrower has: (i) adopted a privatization strategy for power sector enterprises satisfactory to the Association; and (ii) issued a letter of invitation for international financial advisors to assist in implementing said privatization strategy.”

That was from 1997. Just in case you think things have changed, this is from a 2005 lending agreement with Serbia:

“In order to increase collections from industrial consumers, political will is required, particularly where enforcement of payments discipline requires disconnection. Evidence from elsewhere in the region suggests that payments problems of this nature are best tackled through restructuring and privatization of large industry.”

So it is no surprise that they are in the news again, this time having been found to be a major lender to projects that are causing massive deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest. The Independent newspaper reported at length on this appalling hypocrisy, running counter to many of its now public aims:

“In a single project last year, the IFC – part of the World Bank group – handed $9m to Brazil’s leading beef processor to upgrade its slaughterhouse operations in the Amazon, despite an environmental study, carried out for the IFC, which showed that expansion of a single slaughterhouse in Maraba would lead to the loss of up to 300,000 hectares of forest to make way for more cattle.”

They lie, they manipulate, they are the World Bank.

Yesterday was “Super Tuesday”. It was a big day in American politics and, true to form, the Earth suddenly found itself without a representative in the USA. 

When politics really gets media-savvy then this is what happens:

1) Facts go out of the window; nice words takes over.
2) Public appeal comes to the forefront; politicians have to be seen to be popular,
3) Home issues comprise 90% of the stated policies, especially the “economy” (A.K.A. consumer spending).
4) The planet disappears in a cloud of rhetoric.

I didn’t have to watch the speeches to know this, it’s been going on ever since real power was taken out of the hands of the voting public and placed into the pockets of the super-rich and the corporate lobbyists. What I didn’t expect, though, was how obvious the hole is, once you realise that environmental degradation is – without a shadow of doubt – the most critical issue all humans face.

But I’ll let you decide for yourself how much these candidates (and their families) care about our future…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gB16r8K4NHI (Hillary Clinton speech)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUmtQul2ROo (John McCain speech)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOTlQEA8s5o (Barack Obama speech)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Qti3G1LMt0 (Mitt Romney’s family speaking)

And don’t let them forget that you know what they forgot.