Imagine what you could do with £9 billion. Provide sports teachers, sports class, equipment and fields for every poor school in the country? Provide widespread recreational and sports facilities for a whole range of interests? Give programmes for children and adults to eat a healthy and nutritious diet? Set up programmes for young and old to spend more time outdoors for enjoyment, for exercise, for health.
Through taxation, UK citizens have paid a total of £9 billion to host the London Corporate Olympics starting on Friday, July 27, 2012.
The Olympic Committee keep telling us that the Olympic Games attracts more young people to take an interest in sport. What attracts young people to recreational activities is the opportunity for such activities. £9 billion would cover that and leave billions for other worthwhile projects.
Major corporations based in the US and UK have paid hundreds of millions of $$$ to sponsor these Olympic Games. The Olympic sponsors include businesses with a worldwide reputation for a disregard for ethics, nutritious diet, safe medicine, environmental protect, sugar laden soft drinks and exploitation of natural resources including land, water and air.
With little regard for values, the London Olympic Committee has ignored the track record of these companies in numerous countries in the world and instead taken their $$$ without so much as a protest about the way these companies exploit people and our habitats. Why? The obsessive desire to make the current Olympics more impressive than the last Olympics. It is Darwinian madness.
The major Olympic sponsors include:
- British Petroleum (BP),
- Coca-Cola,
- Dow Chemicals,
- Glaxo Smith Kline,
- McDonalds Restaurants
- Rio Tinto.
British Petroleum (BP) has a history of accidents, oil spills, lack of full implementation of safety measures as well as “process failure, a cultural failure and a management failure.”
Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola continues to be criticized for alleged adverse health effects on its customers over a period of time, aggressive marketing to children, exploitation of its workers and pesticides in its products. The drink contains caffeine contributing to physical dependence. A can of Coca-Cola contains approximately 10 spoons of sugar. Authorities in India have expressed deep concern that Coca-Cola threatens vulnerable groundwater supplies in parts of India. One can of Coca-Cola uses litres of groundwater in the process. Coca-Cola machines are located in 200 countries. Along with cigarette smoking, junk food, Coca-Cola product gets promoted in most Hollywood movies.
Dow Chemicals has outstanding liabilities relating to the 1984 Bhopal disaster in India that resulted in the deaths of up to 20,000 people. Today in Bhopal, at least 150,000 people, including children born to parents who survived the disaster, are suffering from exposure-related health effects such as cancer, neurological damage, chaotic menstrual cycles and mental illness. People drink water with unsafe levels of mercury, carbon tetrachloride and other persistent organic pollutants and heavy metals. , the Indian Olympic Association urged the International Olympic Committee to terminate Dow’s sponsorship. Vietnam gave support to India. Dow Chemicals and Monsanto produced Agent Orange for the American war on the people of Vietnam. US army used 80,000,000 litres of Agent Orange to destroy Vietnamese forests and villages with an estimated half a million children in subsequent years born with birth defects.
GlaxoSmithKline, the UKs largest drug maker, had to pay $3.9 billion for prescribing drugs to children that can make them suicidal. The courts in the US also found that GSK bribed doctors into prescribing these dangerous anti-depressant drugs to children. Paxil, once their bestselling drug, was never approved for use by children. Sales reps encouraged paediatricians to prescribe for children. Such criminal acts never to lead to prosecution of executives.
McDonalds Restaurants. McDonalds have a deserved reputation for providing junk food with high levels of sugar, salt and fat. Food experts say that frequent cheap fast food in McDonald’s restaurants contributes to obesity especially among the Western poor. A London judge ruled that McDonalds Restaurants ‘exploit children’ with their advertising, produce ‘misleading’ advertising, are ‘culpably responsible’ for cruelty to animals, are ‘antipathetic’ to unionisation and pay their workers low wages. London Olympic committee authorised the building of a McDonald’s restaurant for 1500 people outside the Olympic stadium.
Rio Tinto: The British-Australian mining company has a long history of extensive harm to communities, denying human rights, pollution and environmental destruction. Executives of the company were jailed in China for up to 14 years bribery, corruption and espionage.
It is bizarre that the world’s elite men and women in terms of health, fitness and vitality found themselves supporting some of the world’s worst corporations who have taken over the Olympic Games. Unwittingly, the world’s supreme athletes find themselves supporting these companies and their products that contribute to ill health in the short or long term, low quality food and drink and destruction of land, water and air. Many athletes receive substantial sums of money for promoting food and drink products that make various claims largely unproven through scientific research.
Welcome to the 2012 London Corporate Olympics.