2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver: Green Games are really a Greenwash

This traveling police state has killed one person so far, a luge athlete from the country of Georgia (eastern Europe), as the luge run is an unsafe, too fast course. For those of us attempting to see any events on TV, we are faced with a deluge of advertising that makes it almost impossible to see anything. I managed to watch the processional of athletes and was struck, as always, by the gross inequality as to who is an Olympic athlete: The US, for example, was lily white and most of the countries competing were very white, especially those with large teams. Considering that 65% of the US population that is white, non-Hispanic European descent has a median age of 41, there are very few white youth in the 18-25 age group, the likely Olympic competitors, and of couse, even fewer who are top-notch athletes. The Winter Olympics especially, and to only a somewhat lesser extent, the Summer Olympics too, is a chance for the rich people of the rich countries of the world to show off their ill-gotten wealth as no worker can afford the training.

It is long overdue that the Winter Olympics be permanently in Norway and the Summer Olympics permanently in Athens, Greece. That would end the whole real estate development racket. I suppose that will occur when we eliminate the private profit system, which can only occur when we have an organized labor movement capable of carrying out a general strike.

Until then, the Olympics are better known as ABA: Anyone But the Americans should win medals, and that is already very true at the Winter Olympics. The reason of course is that it is US imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, that is destroying the world, including the United States, with its deadly military machine. Americans can usually hope for 1 Olympic medal: Women's figure skating. This year perhaps American men will bring home 1 medal instead of the women in figure skating. The rest of the medals are rarely, if ever, won by Americans at the Winter Olympics.

A country that puts guns before butter because the greatest profits are in munitions making ends up with very poor per capita medal showings at the Olympics. The US has 300 million people, yet much smaller countries like Germany, Austria, Finland, Norway and Russia do better than the US on a per capita, and sometimes overall, basis. This inequality is described more thoroughly at:
"American, the Land of Inequality," by Tom Eley, 2/13/10, World Socialist Website, at
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/feb2010/pers-f13.shtml