Well, this thread has taken an interesting twist. First, yes the IOC sucks. That's what the scandal of the past few years was about. Just because open bribery has been sort of 'cleaned up' we should not assume that they are beyond improper influence. I don't doubt that all the nations involved in this year's competition were using various "behind the scenes" influences. China just happened to have the most effective methods this year.
The political discussion that has grown out of this initial point is quite fascinating. It is of course a joke that the industrialized nations of Europe/North America are called the 'free world'. Nothing is 'free' in the capitalized world, especially political opinion. They just suppress dissent by cleverer means than the ham-handed 'communists' and similar dictators. It's a bit hard to get your political opinion into the mass media if it doesn't have the support of either the Democratic or Republican parties in the US, for example. We had FIVE qualified national candidates in the Last Presidential election. How many were in the "Presidential Debates"? Two. The two representing the parties with hundreds of millions of dollars to spend. Keep on rockin' in the 'free world'!
The United States is a Republic by formal definition but in practice it's some sort of Plutocracy or Oligarchy. You cannot get into political life without huge amounts of wealth. If you're not born into it -- which both of the 'recognized' candidates in the Last Presidential election were, btw -- you have to get 'sponsors' among the money-classes. Thus the profession of "politician" is actually 'fund-raiser' most of the time.
Yet, in the most bizarre twist of all, most of the 'white middle-class' population think they live in a democracy!
The European nations are somewhat better because they tend to have 'proportional' representation and public funding of political parties. But they are still largely ruled by their corporate classes, just less severely.
Marty Ward:
How much of the Southern United States have you seen? If you travel very far outside of a city in Alabama, Mississippi, or Louisiana you'll see some very 'third world' countryside. It's the classic 'vicious circle' that you see in Africa or South America. The people are poor and uneducated, so no one will locate any serious industry nearby to give them jobs. So they have no money and cannot get education/training to get decent jobs. The programmer's Deadly Embrace in social conditions. It's quite real but most of the victims are the Wrong Color to attract interest from the 'liberal' mass media, so it goes unreported. Then there are the "Indian Reservations" where those inconvenient ORIGINAL inhabitants of this continent are housed. They "weren't using the land" say the propoganda manuals^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htext books in the public schools. Text books carefully supervised by the government and the huge corporations who own all mass publishing channels. Not using it? What is 'not using it'? Not chopping down all the trees and damming all the rivers and raping the land for minerals? Well, this is a nifty principle. If someone is "not using" their property in a way that
I think they should, I have the right to take it??? So, the descendants of the rightful owners of this entire continent a now forced to live in abject poverty in deserts that aren't useful to the media-industrial complex. But they don't count either. Then there's Appalachia, where there are actually
white people living in poverty. But that's too scary to be dealt with, so they have to be dismissed with a good label like 'white trash'. Obviously if you're white and not comfortably middle-class there's something wrong with
you and you're 'white trash'... Yep, if you don't count people who aren't already middle-class there's no poverty in the US!
Besides, it would not look good to have real poverty in the US while we are haranguing all those 'third world' nations to join our trade treaties so they can become 'prosperous' like we are ...and lock their economic subordination into a legal structure. They might realize that "capitalism" does not automatically make everyone wealthy. They must not be allowed to realize that until it's too late or they might not sign the treaties. Thus the silence.
[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 15 July 2001).]
Re: OFF TOPIC - The IOC sucks.
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