Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/07/26/black-lives-matter-in-rio-too.html
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We didn’t have much in the way of death squads, but even Sydney made a point of vanishing our homeless in 2000.
Olympus Delenda Est.
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Yes, Rio is just an especially blatant example of how the Olympics just about always end up screwing the disenfranchised.
Dave Zirin has been doing great work on Rio:
But for this year’s Rio Olympics, the corruption is also a function of how Brazil’s elites have always done business, and the crisis has little to do with general problems in the “developing world.” Instead, it is closely connected to the fact that Brazil is an incredibly unequal society, with oligarchical elites who disdain the poor, mourn for a lost military dictatorship, and don’t particularly care for democracy (all attractive traits to the IOC when looking for an Olympic host city). For these elites, the Olympics are a neoliberal Trojan horse allowing powerful construction and real-estate industries to build wasteful projects and displace the poor from coveted land. But now, as the controversies mushroom, they are also fighting a PR battle, arguing that hosting the Olympics is for the common good. Just as with the mass fumigation of Zika-carrying mosquitoes, Brazil’s Olympic planners are hard at work attempting to extinguish any counternarrative about an impending Olympic disaster before it goes viral.
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