The Olympics are coming back to Los Angeles. But the games are notoriously bad news for poor people in host cities.
Jackie Robinson, writing in 1972: I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag. I know that I am a black man in a white world. Jim Brown, the Cleveland Browns Hall of Fame running backin 2016 said he stands '100 percent' behind Colin Kaepernick. Further, Kaepernick 'made all the sense in the world' in explaining his position. This is part of a long tradition of athletes, especially African American athletes combining sport and protest. (* ESPN)
As the Olympic Games go, the reviewer says, it's time to ask the big question: which were the worst Olympics ever? David Goldblatt's The Games is a history of the tarnished Olympics, from Avery Brundage to, yes, London 2012. The evidence shows indisputably that it was Hitler's Berlin games of 1936, which set the stage for spectacle and nationalist-racialist sentiment.
The reality of anthropogenic climate change is hardly an issue among climate scientists any more, but the spinmeisters on the payroll of the oil industry keep it alive in the "national conversation." One of their standard gambits is to point to record cold weather, as occurred this winter in much of the United States, and chortle, "What warming?"
Athletes are going into the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics knowing that protesting homophobia may entail a sacrifice. It’s a stunning comment on our times that so many seem not only willing but eager to make it.
Reader comments: Prisons; Labor Unions; Banning Russia from the Olympics - a Very Bad Idea; Remembering Viola Liuzzo; Bayard Rustin & '63 March on Washington; American Jews & Israeli Racism; Student Debt;
Announcements: FREEDOM '63 REMIXED - Legacies of the March on Washington - Aug 16 -New York; The Forgotten History of the March on Washington, Aug 22 -Washington, DC - two events; Walmart Workers are Standing Up!; CCDS 7th Convention; Useful graphic on Climate Change
The time to organize resistance begins now, with no illusions in the IOC, their corporate sponsors, or the good will of our own government.
Whether or not there is a boycott, connecting Putin's systematic attacks on LGBT people to the Sochi Olympics is a stroke of political genius
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