Olympics: London takes Gold

London Takes Gold from Marie Billegrav Bryant on Vimeo.
My personal experience of the Olympics has been interesting. Our community, my home, the Clays Lane Housing Cooperative, home to about 500 people, was demolished in 2007 to make way for the Olympic “Park”. Our homes were ground up into piles of little nuggets about 20mm in diameter.  The piles of nuggets diapered leaving no trace.  I moved onto a boat. The authorities then tried to socially cleanse our boat community from London’s waterways. In an exhausting struggle we fought back and won that particular battle.  The authorities now require us to move our homes / boats out of our home turf, almost out of London, for 3 months over the Olympic period. Apparently we are seen as a security threat. I am uncertain if we will be allowed back in to our home waterways after the 5 ringed circus has left town.  I have spent 8 days in prison after an incident on an Olympic construction site.  I have been charged with Common Assault.  I will be pleading not guilty to this.  My trial date is set for the last day of the Olympics.  Until then my bail conditions keep me away from some Olympic venue/s. In my view the authorities are using bail conditions as a political weapon to keep Olympic dissenters quiet (not just me).

At the bid phase, Sebastian Coe and his cohort were keen to use local kids to promote their plans. Some of those kids accompanied the bid delegation to Singapore. Coe’s strategy was to persuade voters on the International Olympic Committee that London’s bid would benefit local children from some of the the most deprived parts of London. Now 6 years later, and a month before the Opening Ceremony Olympic chiefs are “protecting” the surroundings of the Olympic enclosure with so called “dispersal zones”. Within these a police officer has the power to order a group of two or more young people to leave an area and to ban them from returning for up to 24 hours. These control orders are aimed at the same local children they claimed would benefit from London 2012. Non-”dispersal” can lead to a maximum penalty of three months' imprisonment and/or a fine of £5000.  During my stay in prison I met many young men in their early 20s from poor backgrounds.  They have not benefited from the Olympic project.

The Olympics has a dark history with a history of corruption and fascism, not only in relation to the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany, but also due to the politics of the International Olympic Committee’s ex president, Juan Antonio Samaranch y Torelló, an enthusiastic Spanish Fascist.   The 1968 Mexico City Olympics are remembered for 2 US athletes giving the black power salute. But about 2 weeks before those famous salutes there were student protests in Mexico City. Chanting at these demonstrations included “No queremos olimpiadas, queremos revolución”, in English, "We don't want Olympics, we want revolution”. Perhaps not the image the Mexican ruling class would like propagated to visiting VIPs during their Olympics. The Olympia Battalion was called on to sort things out. They were a secret Mexican government security outfit set up to ensure the safety and security of the 1968 Games. A massacre followed. Women, children, bystanders, and protesters, a hundred or more people were murdered. The numbers are disputed, but probably somewhere between 100 and 500.

An Olympic issue that is not receiving sufficient coverage in the mainstream media is the securitisation of society based on an Olympic model.  Peak surveillance will be reached in the UK during the Games.  The Olympic “Park” itself is surrounded by a 17.5 km, 5,000volt electric fence. The fence is topped with 900 daylight and night vision surveillance cameras linked with facial recognition software. But what is going on outside the ‘“park” is more important.  Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Chris Alison has publicly stated that the authorities will be monitoring social media and gathering intelligence on Olympic dissenters. The extent of the monitoring remains unknown.  New software is planned to integrate all of London's CCTV cameras, and will have the capability to follow you through the city. Behavioral recognition software is also expected to be used.  

We now learn that missiles are to be dotted around our Olympic city though it is unclear who or what they are supposed to protect us from. There will be pilotless drones with laser guided bombs, there will be battleships on the Thames also with missiles. I wonder what would happen if these weapons were actually used in a densely populated area like London. Surely the “collateral damage” would be significant? 

While pandering to the every need of VIPs, 2012 organisers have, stated they will put on a good show - “no matter what”! But the list of enemies, the list of those that might spoil the fun is extensive. Streakers, terrorists, ambush marketeers, brand hijackers, space hijackers, real hijackers, ticket touts, Olympic flame firefighters, Tibetans, and survivors of Olympic sponsor Dow Chemical, everyone except the VIPs are on the list of suspects. Even the athletes are seen as a potential brand hijack risk. Streaking at the Olympics carries a maximum £20,000 penalty.

Approximately 13,000 military, 13,000 police, 23,000 private security, plus VIP and sponsors’ security is to be deployed during the Games. Elite military units such as the SAS, Paras, and Marines are to be mobilised, and nations such as the US are to deploy at least 1,000 of their own security staff. Britain may never have seen so many firearms concentrated into such a small area. And according to the UK’s Independent newspaper - “the British Secret Service is carrying out its biggest operation since the Second World War with almost all of its 3,800 staff mobilised for the London Olympics which will take place amid rising concerns over the possibility of terrorist attacks.”

The London Olympics is not a sporting event.  It is a security event with a bit of sport on the side, and while the list of suspects, those that might cause trouble during the games, is endless, the shopping list of equipment designed to neutralize them is without limit.  One could be forgiven for thinking London 2012 is a giant security exhibition - “a once in a lifetime opportunity” for manufactures of security equipment to showcase their wares.

To me the London Olympics a muscle flexing exercise, but not that of the Olympic athlete, whose power and physical prowess is to be overshadowed by the state’s display of weaponry, a hijack of the state’s security apparatus as a projection of power - a display of machismo.  

We should ask who the Olympics are for?  As I pointed out earlier promises of benefits to local kids have proved hollow.  In fact just about every promise and statement made about the Olympics is a lie, the most impressive lies being embedded in ludicrous phrases such as the “Greenest Olympics Ever”, and the “Most Inclusive Olympics Ever”. But there is one place where the spotlight of truth shines on the Olympic project, unequivocally demonstrating who London 2012 is for.  That place is the VIPs lanes.  While ordinary people endure traffic chaos, and will receive automatic £130 fines for entering these lanes, VIPs will be seamlessly transported between their 5 star west London Hotels and the VIP enclosure in the Olympic Park, their BMW cars fitted with gadgets which will turn traffic lights green.   To ensure the VIPs feel at ease a clause in the Host City Contract states that the their chauffeurs will be required to wear hats - the green light red carpet treatment.

London Takes Gold is a reaction to my Olympic experience.  I hope you enjoy it.  It is my second film.  It is the first film I have both filmed and edited.  It is shot on a smart phone.  

Dow: London's 2012 Perfect Olympic Sponsor

Campaigners against Dow

A recent sponsorship deal has seen the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games accept money from Dow Chemical. Dow will provide a fabric "wrap" which will be placed around London's Olympic stadium. By Mike Wells.

According to Britain's Guardian newspaper the wrap's purpose is to reduce wind inside the stadium.  But, as the metaphor says ... it is an ill wind that blows no one any good.

Or in this case trying to keep wind out of London’s Olympic stadium is creating a foul smelling ill wind of its own. 

The foul smelling story begins in 1984, in Bhopal, a previously little known Indian city where Union Carbide, an American pesticide manufacturer, chasing cheap labour, set up a shoddily constructed and poorly maintained chemical plant. On the night of 3rd December it exploded.  A deadly cloud of toxic dioxin gas killed thousands. According to witness accounts in the chaos that followed, the dead and dying were thrown one on top of the other in heaps.  Since that time thousands more have died, are ill, and have been born with physical and mental disabilities.

Since the accident Union Carbide (UC) paid compensation to survivors in the order of a mere few hundred dollars each.  Later, in what looks like an effort at rebranding, hiding liabilities, and obstructing legal action, Union Carbide was taken over by Dow.  Dow have also formed other holding companies behind which they have sought protection from legal action.

According to The Bhopal Medical Appeal, Dow claims the Indian Courts have no jurisdiction over them, because they are an American company.  Dow also claim US courts have no jurisdiction, because the incident occurred in India.

Decades later UC/Dow has failed to clean up contamination at their old chemical plant in India, and because of this ground water continues to be contaminated, and locals who drink the water are still blighted with health problems. Thousands are still suffering.

But Dow's reach of doom is not limited to India. They were also busy facilitating death, and the maiming of many thousands of people during the Vietnam War, by way of the manufacture of and supply of Napalm and Agent Orange.

American generals were concerned that their communist enemy were able to hide from their aircraft beneath the forest canopy, and also that they could sustain themselves from food crops grown by Vietnamese peasants.  Solution: remove the canopy, kill the food crops.  Enter Dow Chemical, defense suppliers, and manufacturers of Agent Orange - a liquid which could be sprayed from aircraft and would kill crops and forest.

Apart from the famine caused to non combatants, the other problem is Agent Orange is highly toxic to human beings.

Wikipedia entries estimate the Agent Orange death toll to be 400,000 and the number of birth defects 500,000.  As in Bhopal, birth defects are still occurring in Vietnam.

In Britain petitions have been launched against the 2012/Dow deal, while MPs and The Bhopal Medical Appeal are demanding London sever ties with Dow.

In India outrage at London's acceptance of Dow's sponsorship has led to protests which, according to a report from Ted Jeory in The Sunday Express, have been put down by the battening of peacefully protesting women.

Dow are the perfect sponsor for the London Olympics.  Reason? Synergy. The connection is contamination.

The land the London Olympic Park is built on was, for more than a century, home to all sorts of filthy industries.

Some 5,000 people were employed in the chemical industry in the area.  The land is heavily contaminated by paint factories, explosive manufacture, oil refiners, arsenic manufacture,  pesticide manufacture, and many more polluting activities.

In a bizarre coincidence one of the companies evicted from within what is now the Olympic Zone was Banner Chemicals.  Their business?  The import and wholesaling of chemicals.

But the site's pollution problems aren't limited to chemicals - they also include radioactive contamination, another inconvenience to which Dow is no stranger. They operated the notorious Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in the USA, and were fined $750m in 2008 in a plutonium contamination class action by nearby landowners, but as expert legal escapologists they subsequently wriggled out on appeal.

Dow is a perfect sponsor because both Dow and London have shown themselves to be willfully negligent when it comes to dealing with issues of radioactive and chemical contamination and its actual and potential health implications. Also they are both expert at hiding behind walls of misinformation and spin.

Around a third of the site for London Olympics had been used historically as landfill, taking industrial and domestic waste.  While it is clear the remaining two thirds of the site is also contaminated from previous industrial activity.

Various government documents warn that precautions against radioactive contamination should be taken during excavation work on such landfills.  Yet initially on the 2012 site no such precautions were taken, no surveys were done, and no radioactive remediation planned for: an inexcusable failure.

After radioactive material started being detected across the 2012 site, a shambolic and inadequate strategy for its 'management' led to regulations being bypassed and thousands of tonnes of radioactive waste ended up dumped back under a bridge in the middle of the Olympic Park. The Main Stadium squats in the remains of a radium-contaminated waste tip, preventing any uncontrolled disturbance of the land under and around it.

Like UC and Dow, the Olympic Delivery Authority's (ODA) principle concern over this contamination, rather than the well being of workers and public, appears to have been avoiding bad publicity.  Which is why when widespread radioactive contamination was eventually found to exist on the site, a press release playing down the situation was immediately hatched.

The fact that excavation works had been carried out for months before any precautions were taken is worrying.  When people from the surrounding communities complained about dust coming from the contaminated site, the ODA's response was to threaten them with legal action.  This demonstrates the priorities of Olympic bosses: to get the job done and to deliver an Olympic venue on time, regardless of the risk to human health.

On first appearances it may seem surprising that London 2012 would accept money from what many of Dow’s victims would consider to be a global doomsday machine.

But like Dow London 2012 is expert in churning out misleading statements and untruths. In the case of London, Olympic chiefs have needed to persuade British taxpayers that a 17 day sporting event is really worth £10 billion. Olympic bosses have become so accustomed to misrepresenting the truth, and have such an effective means of doing so in their communications department, that they have lost their ability to judge where the limits of public tolerance lie.

Terminological inexactitudes started poring out London's Olympic machine at the bid phase, when we were told the budget for the Olympics would be £2.35 billion. The current estimate is over £9 billion.  The initial estimate was not credible as it was known that the Athens Games had cost the Greeks £9 billion. Other untruths include promises about housing, jobs, training, and the clean-up of the site etc.  

The statement promulgated by Olympic Chiefs that the "Olympic Park will be the largest new park in Europe for 150 years” is also untrue. The phrase “Olympic Park” is also misleading. Less open space is to be returned after the Games than existed in the area previously. 

Olympic officials are also exaggerating the size of the television audience for the Opening ceremony, which they claim will be 4 billion.  The true figure is more like 250 million.

"The Greenest Olympics Ever" is another statement behind which London has tried to hide a reality that is very far from Green. Crimes against our planet include:

1) at least 500,000 tones of highly contaminated waste from "soil washing machines" trucked to landfill sites around the country (not checked for radioactive contamination),

2) failure to fit all machines on site with catalytic converters,

3) failure to use clean fuels,

4)failure to use waterways to carry freight in and out of Olympic zone,

5)gassing to death hundreds, or thousands, of small mammals,

6)burial of thousands of tones of radioactive material in Olympic zone,

7)failure to adequately monitor the site for radioactive contamination,

8) providing misleading or false information to elected officials regarding environmental matters,

9)failure to comply with the Radio Active Substances Act,

10)failure to provide (and illegally changing) documents under the Environmental Information Regulations,

11) attempting to intimidate those who have criticized works in relation to dust and contamination issues.

Quite apart from the broken promises on environmental issues, building a 2.5 square kilometer sporting venue, involving the excavation of millions of tonnes of contaminated soil, just for a 17 day sporting event is inherently damaging to the environment. The "Greenest Olympics Ever" slogan is therefore just Green-wash.

But the ODA and Dow are masters of Green-wash. They also share an ability to manipulate situations and information to their advantage while others bear the cost. One example of this occurred on June 23rd 2011 when the ODA’s Director of Infrastructure and Utilities, Simon Wright, stood before the Greater London Assembly’s Environment Committee. In answering questions from GLA member Andrew Boff concerning issues of contamination, Mr Wright told many untruths to elected members of the GLA. 

During this session Wright misled the committee on the following matters.

1)Wright claimed that works on contaminated land were carried out before official permission was granted only once, and only in one location. In fact this was the norm rather than an exception as he claimed.

2) He denied that there was any “ risk to any party” caused by the uncontrolled excavation of radioactively contaminated material. Independent expert opinion differs on this matter.

3) He inferred that the contamination was limited to “a number of aircraft dials”. This is not true.

4) He claimed that all radioactive material buried on the site was “exempt from regulation”. This is not true.

5) He claimed that the location in which the radioactive waste is buried would not be disturbed. This is not true, plans now show a block of flats will be built on top of it.

6) He claimed radioactive gas is 'highly unlikely' to be produced by the burial of this radioactive material. This is untrue, the ODA's own technical reports identify this as a certainty.

The truth is that when the ODA finally put radiation protection advisors onto the site after many months of uncontrolled excavation work, the first day onsite they began finding radioactive contamination. The contamination was widespread. Eventually 7,300 tones of it was buried in a hole in the ground near the centre of the Olympic Park, while more remains embedded in the matrix of the soils on the site. 

Radioactive contamination of the venue created serious practical and public relations problems. A trick of averaging down the radioactivity of the waste (dilution) was carried out - with the express intention of making it all appear exempt from control. The full chemical and radiological details of the buried waste remain unknown. The ODA, and its contractor Atkins, took every effort to ensure that this “material” remained outside regulation and therefore out of external oversight.

Due to the less than honest “management” of contamination, grandiose promises made for the “clean-up” of the site are void, which raise questions over plans for the legacy phase, and land values for the site. Liabilities over contamination also remain unclear.

Unlike UC in relation to Bhopal, who morphed into Dow Chemical as a means of avoiding liability, London’s ODA goes one step further: after 2012 it ceases to exist, raising questions over the liability of its directors. Ex-Chief David Higgins has already left, after denying the evidence of the ODA's own documents regarding mismanagement of radioactive contamination and refusing to authorise an independent investigation.

The ODA’s response to Freedom of Information Requests on the issue of radioactive contamination have been obstructive leading to complaints to the Information Commissioners Office, and a likely tribunal hearing on the matter.

The fact that so many untruths have been told with little or no comeback must have emboldened our friends at the Olympic Communications Department, and made them imagine they could handle any situation. It would also explain why they imagined they could get away with accepting money from Dow. But in choosing to flaunt Dow's sponsorship in such an iconic location they may have gone one step beyond what the public in India, in Vietnam, and in Britain are able to stomach.

In many ways Dow and 2012 may be ideologically aligned but, not withstanding this, London may have made a serious public relations blunder in milking the cash cow that is Dow. It now looks as though not only are the London Olympics set to financially bankrupt the UK, they are also morally bankrupting and shaming themselves and the nation.

Lord Sebastian Coe, like the London Olympic project in general is a fraud.  Coe promotes an Olympic ideal that is in reality just empty noise. This is clearly demonstrated by the acceptance of money from Dow, the way radioactive contamination has been managed on the London Olympic site, and by a multitude of broken promises on a wide range of other issues.

By way of demonstrating the deluded psychotic mentality of the Olympic industry Denis Oswald, of the International Olympic Committee, recently commented on the placement of advertising in and around Olympic venues ...

“There must be no advertising at all, inside or out. We cannot be bought”.

What does Mr Oswald think accepting money from Dow and other dubious Olympic sponsors is, if it is not being bought?

UPDATE:
It has just been announced that "Dow have agreed to remove their logo on the outside of the wrap". However this is aanother misleading statement. The original plan was that Dow was only ever going to be allowed to have a discrete logo on the wrap for a short period of time before the Games began. This therefore looks like an attempt by London and Dow to limit public relations damage and is not a victory for campaigners in Bhopal, Vietnam, Rocky Flats (USA), or in London.

Link to Simon Wrights appearance before the Environment Committee 23rd June 2011 at the GLA, page 24 to 27.
http://www.london.gov.uk/moderngov/mgChooseMDocPack.aspx?ID=4298&SID=4876

Link to Amnesty International comments on Dow/2012 sponsorship

http://blog.amnestyusa.org/business/olympics-denigrate-suffering-of-bhopal-survivors/

Link to Greenpeace on Dow
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/greenhouse/post/2010/11/greenpeace-dow-spying-lawsuit/1

Link to Bhopal medical appeal
http://www.bhopal.org/