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Feb. 8, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

26:53

2611 The Truth About The Olympics

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio guest hosts the Peter Schiff radio show, and talks about executive orders, why the government does not care about you, Ron Paul vs. Rand Paul, not giving up and much more.

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
	Hope you're doing well.
	Here are some interesting truths and facts about the Olympics.
	Did you know that originally the Olympics were conducted entirely in the nude, usually by fairly well-oiled young men who I guess were parading in front of Socrates and Plato as perhaps tasty morsels for after the games?
	But I guess it wouldn't work so well now.
	High def and slow motion.
	I mean, nobody looks good doing any kind of exercise, no matter how cut you are.
	But what's going on at the moment is, of course, there's the Winter Games going on.
	And the economics of the Olympics are really quite fascinating.
	There was, up until the 90s, fairly strict bans on athletes making any money.
	You had to be an amateur and so on.
	And even now, the top athletes in track and field in America...
	Usually, half of them make less than fifteen thousand dollars a year, and the international and American Olympic committees pay the athletes zero dollars.
	They will actually cover some flight and hotel expenses, but even that money comes from a combination of private and public sponsors and donors.
	So they rake in staggering amounts of money while paying The athletes who everyone is there to watch, zero.
	Now, some athletes do make a lot of money, and in fact, you will get a bonus if you are, I think, in Malaysia and you win a gold, you get a gold bar worth over $600,000, but I don't think they've ever won a gold.
	In America, you get $25,000 for gold.
	And lesser amounts for silver and bronze.
	You have to pay taxes on that, of course, but you will get some extra scratch, but not a lot of money for the athletes.
	It's kind of important to remember as we start looking at the economics and fiscal reality of the Olympics.
	Megacorporations are kind of handpicked by politicians to make up some of the lost taxpayer revenue for the whole affair and generally the Olympics.
	Leave a giant smoking Nevada-sized crater in public finances.
	So megacorporations like Samsung, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Cadbury's and so on, all of the least healthy things are advertising at the Olympics.
	And they provide them sponsorship opportunities and, of course, they pay the government millions or tens of millions of dollars for this, none of which really goes back to the taxpayer but stays in the government.
	See, the government takes money from you to pay for the Olympics, takes money from the corporations to help fund them and doesn't return the money back to you.
	It's quite a giant exercise in crony capitalism or crapitalism.
	In fact, the government sometimes go to such lengths that they ban anybody who's got a small business who might show up in a background shot from advertising their business.
	In the London Olympics, they actually went after anyone who had the word Olympic in the title even of the restaurant.
	They went after a Greek restaurant named the Olympic Grill or something like that because apparently the copyright is just so strictly enforced it goes backwards in time and across different venues as well.
	So it's pretty tightly controlled.
	When McDonald's secures a right to an Olympic venue, they use government power to ban anyone else from selling french fries in the entire venue.
	So really it's quite, you know, remember how the government doesn't like monopolies?
	Well, they will create one for you if the price is right.
	Now, in 1960, the right to broadcast the Olympics sold for $50,000.
	Now they run into the billions and billions of dollars.
	It's important to remember how this actually works.
	So, the Olympics are generally constructed using the taxpayers' money.
	The athletes are often trained using the taxpayers' money.
	The images and videos are broadcast over publicly owned and publicly funded airways, publicly regulated airways.
	But then you have to pay a huge amount of money in terms of time, just watching commercials and sponsorship opportunities.
	So it is pretty wretched.
	It's the same thing that goes on with the NFL stadiums, where generally publicly funded stadiums are filmed and the events are broadcast across publicly funded and controlled airways, and then the taxpayer has to pay in terms of time, in terms of commercials.
	So the Soji Games, the Winter Games in...
	Russia, our estimated spend is $51 billion.
	An International Olympic Committee official has said that as much as one-third of the $51 billion has been siphoned off by corruption.
	And this is a...
	It's kind of a clue as to why governments really like megaprojects.
	There's a variety of reasons which we'll get to, but most fundamentally, particularly sports megaprojects, it tends to dissolve resistance to massive spending.
	Well, it's for the Olympics or it's for a stadium or whatever.
	So when something is emotionally resonant with the taxpayers, it tends to lower resistance And if you can also tie in government spending to national pride, which is kind of hard to do outside of wartime and sports, if you can tie government spending into something intangible like national pride, then of course people's resistance to massive spending goes down.
	Kind of strange, Sochi.
	It's a subtropical black sea resort where the temperature hovers at the moment around 10 degrees.
	There's no snow.
	It has to be shipped in.
	If you're going to run some winter games in Russia, I'm not sure that it's wickedly hard to find a place in Russia with lots of snow in, say...
	February.
	But how did it become a winter venue?
	Well, according to spokesperson Vladimir Putin, the head of Russia, he likes Sochi.
	He likes skiing there.
	He's building his own palace down there.
	It's his personal choice, and he is completely behind it.
	So a woman recently made a documentary on corruption in these Winter Olympics in Russia, was visited by a number of representatives who actually paid her three times the documentary cost, offered her three times the documentary cost to not release it, which she declined and stopped answering her door.
	In this documentary, there's a building contractor who was threatened he would be drowned in blood.
	No longer a...
	He would be drowned in blood if he refused to pay kickbacks of up to 50% of building costs in Sochi.
	And the documentary also highlights the costs of the Olympics to local people who have lost their homes and livelihoods to construction.
	It's just this big giant claw borg that goes through neighborhoods, scooping up people's homes and businesses and so on, and just building buildings.
	Olympic junk over them which generally falls into disuse and becomes a place for homeless graffiti artists and drug addicts afterwards.
	The environmental damage of the Winter Games, particularly in Sochi, is very hard to measure but has been considered to be fairly catastrophic.
	In Beijing, for the recent Olympics, 1.5 million people were displaced.
	In other words, were shoveled out of their homes in order to make way for the couple of weeks of athletic excellence.
	So, to build a road to the Sochi Winter Olympics in Krasnia-Polyana, it's a mountain resort.
	It only hosts the ski and snowboard events.
	The Russian state spent three times more to build that road than NASA did for the delivery and operation of a new generation of Mars rovers.
	An article in the magazine Russian Esquire estimated that for the sum the government spent on the road, it could have been paved entirely with a centimeter-thick coating of beluga caviar.
	But because seagulls don't vote, it wasn't.
	Now, interesting coincidence.
	So, of the 50-plus billion dollars being spent on the Winter Games...
	About 7.4 billion of them have gone to a boyhood friend and former judo partner of Vladimir Putin, whose name is Arkady Rotenberg.
	And that's really quite a staggering coincidence when you think about it.
	I mean, what really are the odds of that happening?
	Well, in Russia, actually close to 100%.
	So here's some text around the corruption.
	So Mr.
	Morozov, who is a...
	Fairly successful construction business owner.
	Says, we started building a project in Primasco, which is a beachside area of Sochi.
	It was a wing of the Sochi Presidential Resort Home.
	The contract came to about £47 million.
	There was an official, he said, who wanted to be bribed.
	You pay him a commission or else.
	I call it a corruption tax.
	I should have paid him 12% and an additional 5%, but managed to get it down to 3%.
	He goes on to describe how the money is paid directly into the Kremlin's coffers.
	It works like this.
	The money is brought to the Presidential Administration Department.
	I go to the fifth floor, pass through security without being screened.
	Yeah, you don't want to screen people who are bribing you, and leave the money.
	So he described how bribes went through the roof when the city and region was declared an Olympic venue.
	Dozens of major building contracts were issued through Olympstroy, the Russian government-owned body responsible for organizing and building the Winter Olympics.
	And one Chinovnik, the Russian slang for a senior official, was told that the going rate for bribes was 5%, then asked, What if it were 50%?
	Mr.
	Moserov added, I realized he was being serious.
	The money thrown around by the Kremlin to ensure that Russia would get the Games is also revealed.
	Karl Schrantz, the former Austrian Olympic skiing champion and personal advisor to Mr.
	Putin on bringing the Olympics to Sochi, talks about the big money lobbying that went into the Games.
	Cash that Leonhard Chechkev, the former head of Russia's Olympic Committee, said was practically unlimited.
	So, Of course, there's physical excellence and amazing athleticism on display, but the fundamental driver, I would argue politically, is it creates a massive, massive fog bank for bribery and corruption, which is dissolved in people's generally positive views of the Olympics, and it can be covered up or exacerbated under the cover of nationalism.
	Wherever you have big construction projects, you have, and government, big construction projects plus government, and they're always involved.
	Even if they're not paying for it directly, they're still issuing all of the licenses and permits and all that kind of stuff.
	You just get massive corruption.
	Transparency International has long cited the construction industry as the world's most corrupt, pointing to the prevalence of bribery, bid rigging, and bill padding.
	By 2025, estimates are that the cost of fraud in the construction industry worldwide will have reached $1.5 trillion.
	So not only are governments generally the biggest spenders on infrastructure, but all of the private projects, you know, worksite inspections, approvals, permits, and so on, all of which are ripe for kickbacks.
	Now, big one-time projects are super juicy for corruption, because if you're just building another road, you have all of these cost estimates and completed projects beforehand that you can compare the cost to and look for deviations.
	When you're building something new, what happens is it's never been built before, and so nobody knows what to compare it to, and so you can hide a huge amount of corruption in those things.
	And for contractors, bribery is always attractive.
	I mean, the cost of a bribe is dwarfed by the value of the contract.
	This is known as the Tulak paradox among economics.
	A study by Neil Stansbury, when a project is really big, he says, it is easier to hide large bribes.
	Most projects involve building something unique, or at least something that's never been built in that place before, makes it harder to estimate whether costs are reasonable or not.
	And Turkey's construction spree also plays a major role in...
	In economic, quote, boom, China has spent, it really is impossible to estimate how much, building these ghost cities.
	And of course, governments then say, well, look at our GDP, look at our construction industry, look at our unemployment.
	Because, you know, if you pay a million people to dig holes and fill them in again, it looks like your economy is doing really well.
	So for investors who don't know much about free market economics and debt and so on, the numbers will look better when you engage in these megaprojects.
	But because they're not fundamentally customer-driven, consumer-driven, they are enormous waste of capital.
	And human capital, too.
	People get trained to work on particular projects that are unlikely to be replicated in the same way ever again, which means all their skills generally get lost.
	Another thing that happens is that politicians like big flashy new things.
	They like cutting ribbons on new things rather than all the boring work, say, of maintaining sewage infrastructure, which is not particularly exciting in which no politician is going to get a photo op on it.
	Also, you can get bribes on massive new projects.
	You can get bribes and corruption going on those big new projects a lot more than you can on, say, road maintenance and so on, again, of which the costs are generally well known and which is not flashy.
	So, I guess it's a step up that Russian politicians are now focusing on sports rather than, say, invading and dominating Eastern Europe, but nonetheless, it still comes from the same kind of place.
	So in the 2012 Olympics, which was in London, there was a security company, G4S, and they were going to provide security personnel for $444 million, which was 10 times the actual original estimate.
	I guess you just lean on that key and you can make a lot of money.
	But they said, well, gosh, you know, even though it's a massive recession, times of massive unemployment, we're just unable to get the right number of security guards.
	And so the army and the police had to then go out and fill the gap.
	And despite this failure, this security company got to keep $89 million as a management fee.
	Nice work if you can get it.
	2004 Greek Olympics has been somewhat credited with, I mean, although the Greek government is a fairly profligate spender even in the worst of times, or the best of times, or any times in between for that matter.
	But they did To join the euro currency zone, they did actually adopt some austerity measures.
	Austerity for the Greeks is like telling a guy on a 10,000 calorie a day diet that you're going to cut him to 9,800 calories and then he claims that he's starving to death in some low calorie hunger games nonsense.
	But they did reduce deficits from just over 9% of GDP in 1994 to 3.1% of GDP in 1999, right before they joined the euro.
	Some of that, of course, was Fraud and lies, but some of it was real.
	But then the Olympics broke the bank, and government deficits rose every year after 1999, peaking at 7.5% of GDP in 2004, the year of the Olympics, because they spent 9 billion euros on the Olympics.
	Now, Greece, of course, is a pretty small country.
	The cost of housing the Olympic Games was about 5% of the annual GDP of the country.
	Now, was there the resulting economic boom?
	Well, of course there wasn't.
	I mean, building giant stadiums for which there's no long-term economic value, you might as well set fire to the money.
	I mean, the Olympic torch should be cash and the blood of unborn taxpayers fueling its fire, because that's all it's burning.
	In 2005, Greece suffered an Olympic-sized hangover, with GDP growth falling to its lowest level in a decade.
	However...
	The GDP of individual construction companies, as well as the mob, organized crime, and politicians rose extraordinarily high.
	Brazil is hosting the 2016 Olympics, as well as the 2014 World Cup.
	To construct its five-star accommodations to entertain and house the wealthy, it is actually emptying out entire neighborhoods.
	And as I mentioned, 1.5 million folks were displaced for the Beijing Olympics.
	You would not want to be a stray dog in Sochi at the moment.
	They're rounding them up and disposing of them, for which I think not much detail is being provided.
	Now, a lot of the money that goes into the Olympics, of course, comes from taxes, as mentioned.
	There are huge amounts of money that are given in grants and subsidies and so on from governments, and there are over 80 Olympic Committee members who make over $100,000, but, as mentioned, they pay the athletes Zero dollars.
	And now a few of the athletes do make a lot of money and end up in cereal boxers, not so much the steeplechasers, but there is a lot of money for politics, there's a lot of money for construction companies, there's a lot of money in corruption, and there's a lot of money for people who like to roll around in chauffeurs and the international Olympic committees.
	There's almost no money for the athletes.
	I mean, I consider that to be pretty egregious.
	I mean, it is pure exploitation.
	It takes 20 years, 15 to 20 years of intense, you know, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 hours a day training to get to the Olympics.
	People are only there to look at the Olympics.
	They're not there to look at the construction companies or the judges or the committee members or the politicians.
	They're there to look.
	At the athletes, and the athletes are the only people who make little to no money from it.
	This is exploitive in the extreme, and also, of course, since some of the athletic events, not so much at the Winter Games, but certainly the Summer Games or the regular Olympics, a lot of the gymnasts and so on start their training as children.
	And because they start their training as children, this is really child labor.
	It's unpaid child labor that is being used to enrich governments and contractors to the tune of billions of dollars.
	I mean, it makes a Dickensian factory look like Chuck E. Cheese as far as the exploitation goes.
	And this is true even for the children who are in a more voluntary situation.
	If we take a look at some of the pictures, I'll move over a little bit here.
	We'll take a look at some of the pictures of what goes on in the Chinese training camps.
	It's pretty, pretty brutal.
	While we're looking at those, we will continue to talk a little bit about what happens even in the American situations.
	So Joan Ryan wrote a book in 1995 called Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, and she wrote the following about the system for producing gold medal gymnasts.
	Quote, What I found was a story about legal, even celebrated, child abuse.
	In the dark troughs along the road to the Olympics lay the bodies of girls who stumbled on the way, broken by the work, pressure and humiliation.
	I found a girl whose father left the family when she quit gymnastics at the age of 13, who scraped her arms and legs with razors to dull her emotional pain.
	And who needed a two-hour pass from a psychiatric hospital to attend her high school graduation.
	Girls who broke their necks and backs.
	One who so desperately sought the perfect weightless gymnastic body that she starved herself to death.
	So, little girls as young as four or five are recruited and spend their childhoods in gyms, raised by coaches, some of whom behave like Svengali's.
	These kids are brainwashed into attempting dangerous tricks, accepting injuries and pain.
	These gyms always have a psychologist on staff to goad or guilt these kids.
	Parents often don't know what goes on because they are sometimes banned from the gyms.
	This is true in the US as it is in China.
	The reason female gymnastics is a race against puberty is because once maturity happens, the female body adds 5% body weight, which adversely limits their strength and endurance.
	By contrast, male gymnasts can only be developed after puberty because that is when they acquire sufficient strength to do their tricks.
	This also means that their careers are not only post-puberty but last longer into adulthood.
	There has been an ongoing sexual abuse scandal in American swimming.
	ESPN's TJ Quinn and Greg Amante wrote in 2010, quote, Youth swimming coaches, many certified by USA Swimming, the sport's national governing body, have been able to molest young swimmers and then move from town to town, escaping criminal charges and continuing to victimize other underage swimmers.
	ESPN found the abuse of coaches, some of whom molested young swimmers for more than 30 years, Avoided detection because of a number of factors.
	USA Swimming and other organizations had inadequate oversight.
	Many local coaches, parents and swimming officials failed to report inappropriate contact they witnessed and some parents, driven to see their children succeed, ignored or did not recognize what should have been red flags.
	There is a study with an Australian sample on sexual abuse in sports.
	Out of 370 elite national and club regional athletes surveyed, 31% of female athletes and 21% of male athletes reported having experienced sexual abuse before the age of 18.
	Environment-specific sexual abuse rates were particularly high.
	41% of the sexually abused female athletes and 29% of the sexually abused male athletes indicated that the abuse was perpetrated by sport personnel.
	The sport-related abuse was largely perpetrated by those in positions of authority or trust in relation to the athletes, primarily coaches, and less frequently support staff and other athletes.
	The vast majority, more than 96% of the perpetrators, were men.
	So as I mentioned, one study by the USA Track and Field Foundation demonstrated, quote, approximately 50% of our athletes who rank in the top 10 in the USA in their event make less than $15,000 annually from the sport.
	So, sports is an improvement over war, and sports, in fact, was considered by the ruling classes to be an excellent preparation for war.
	What does sports fundamentally do?
	It substitutes geography for value, right?
	Why is your team better than some other team?
	Because they're closer to you, in the same way that your army is better than the other guy's army because they're closer to you.
	It gets you addicted to loving a uniform, Rather than the character of the person in the uniform, the moral content or the virtue or integrity of the person in the uniform.
	People can shuffle in and out of those uniforms, but you must remain loyal to the team.
	So it's an empty geographical shell that is around you that demands and evokes your allegiance.
	This goes way back to our tribal days, of course.
	I mean, all who did not develop an irrational allegiance to those geographically proximate to themselves in the form of the tribe would usually be expelled from the tribe, and if all the tribal members didn't care whether it was their own tribe or the other tribe that won, that tribe would be wiped out.
	So we've been genetically selected for...
	Bonding or an irrational adherence to costumes that are geographically close and that is prepared for by sports.
	Hate the other team or dislike the other team or want to beat the other team.
	This is a fundamental lack of empathy.
	And don't get me wrong.
	I love sports.
	I think sports are a lot of fun to play.
	They really are.
	But we all know, come on, Sports Team A, which you then follow.
	Watch Hoop Dreams or, you know, any of the sports films.
	You're just watching that sport team, those ragtag bunch of misfits who somehow find a way to get together with a boozy manager to beat the other team and achieve victory and change their lives and so on.
	That's Team A. You could take the exact same movie.
	And go over to the other side to team B. And you would follow them and you'd feel exactly the same thing.
	Whoever you get emotionally invested in is the person you want to win, which is why you get all of these little intros to these athletes.
	You know, they grew up in poverty and, you know, both children were struck by, both parents were struck by lightning, but the electricity passed to the next generation allows them to vault tall buildings with a single bound and so on.
	So, sports has always been a preparation for war, and I'm very glad that the world is having sports events rather than war events, although that has a lot more to do with the development of nuclear weapons than it does with any particular maturation of the human condition.
	But it is really important to understand that it's a completely irrational adherence.
	When I was a kid growing up, my local team in England was Crystal Palace, which was populated by a lot of people from Trinidad and Tobago who could barely speak We're good to go.
	Now, I don't mind people indulging in their silliness, but not at my expense, right?
	I mean, if you want to go worship some local sports team or whatever and think that they're the best thing since sliced bread, be my guest.
	You know, just keep your goddamn hands out of my pocket through the state when you do so.
	And don't sell off my daughter's future to indulge in your silly, local, anti-rational, dangerous tribalism.
	And understand, at least with the Olympics, that these are people who were exploited as child laborers, not paid, for the profit of enormously rich, well-connected, largely corrupt conglomerates, multinationals and corporations.
	At least see the Olympics for what it is.
	And then if you can continue to enjoy it, you might want to look in the mirror.

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