Visitors from Vancouver will join local people to carry the Poverty Olympics Torch in Glasgow's East End today, protesting at scandalous profiteering and evictions, as the city council implements its corporate vision for the Commonwealth Games in 2014.
The Poverty Olympics were launched in Canada's seventh largest city when the Winter Olympics of 2010, staged with the usual promises of regeneration and positive legacy, went down the same path. There is particular local anger that promises to build housing for the homeless never materialised.
As London braces itself for the Olympic onslaught, the same scenario is playing out there. The benefits will be entirely for the corporations while the £24bn cost will be paid by the public and in particular Londoners. As to the much-vaunted “legacy” cliaims, a report from global real estate firm CBRE states: "The ... greatest legacy will be the land that was assembled to host the Games thereby changing the landscape of East London.”
The report cites 4 million square feet of commercial space at Stratford, in addition to the massive Westfield Centre, private housing for sale by Inter IKEA on a site next the Olympic Park and the sale of the Olympic Athletes Village to a Qatari developer.
Meanwhile, tenants in London are being priced out of their homes. Landlords are using six-month shorthold tenancies to get tenants out in time for the Olympics, or even telling them they can stay, but vacate for the Olympic period. Monthly rent on a two-bedroom flat in Tower Hamlets or Hackney would normally be about £1,400; now they are being advertised as high as £7,500 a week to attract wealthy tourists coming to London for the Olympics.
In Glasgow, families, small businesses and the Accord Centre for people with learning disabilities, have been displaced to make way for the Commonwealth Games. The treatment of the poor and the rich by the council could not be more different.
Wealthy Mayfair property developer Charles Price bought a parcel of land in Dalmarnock that was already earmarked for the Games for £8 million sometime between 2002 and 2005. The council could have put a compulsory purchase order on it. Instead they paid £17 million; with £3m VAT that's £20 million pounds of public money.
Readers of this blog will know about Margaret Jaconelli and her family, who held out for months refusing to leave her flat because the council offered her a paltry £30,000, not enough to buy a flat anywhere in the city. In the end she was carried out by force, and she has still not received any compensation.
Plans for the area after the Games include a 160-bedroom hotel, a supermarket, various food outlets (you can guess which ones) and executive apartments priced will be well beyond the pockets of hard-pressed East Enders.
Modern Olympics and Games are in reality state-financed and public-subsidised land grabs, and regeneration is a myth. Any developments that are of benefit to the public –schools, hospitals - remain locked into the public/private partnership model, where the profit is privatised and the risk socialised.
The local authority - whether in Vancouver, London or Glasgow, buys land at inflated prices from developers, and uses compulsory purchase powers to evict householders, allotment holders or small business people who can't afford lawyers.
The money is all up front from the people's purse, but the benefits are nebulous and mainly unrealised. They pay to recapitalise derelict land and build new infrastructure, then the corporations move in.
The Olympic and Commonwealth Games have moved far away from sporting territory. It's time to boycott them entirely and focus instead on taking back control of our communities, and our sports facilities, making sure the majority benefit and not the wealthy few.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
For revolutionary solutions to create a sustainable, not-for-profit economy in place of global capital alongside a real democracy based on People’s Assemblies. Visit our web site at www.aworldtowin.net
Showing posts with label Commonwealth Games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Commonwealth Games. Show all posts
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Delhi becoming an 'apartheid city'
If the hit film Slumdog Millionaire showed the extreme contrast between the dispossed of Mumbai and the city’s rich, the saga of the 2010 Commonwealth Games is doing the same for Delhi and the country’s political system.
The Congress Party – which claims a lineage back to Mahatma Gandhi – presides over a state that has embraced market-driven globalisation with a vengeance. Where Congress once favoured the poor, small farmers and the trade unions, it now rules as the party of big business.
A major report into the plans for the Games by the Housing and Land Rights Network (HLRN) catalogues evictions and demolitions of informal settlements and slums in the run-up to the CWG. “Most evictions are generally carried out to construct roads, bridges, stadiums, and parking lots, or under the guise of city ‘beautification’, ostensibly to create a ‘world class’ city.”
In the five years from 2003 to 2008 close to 350 slum clusters housing nearly 300,000 people were demolished and only about one third of these families have been resettled. Authorities have cleared street vendors, rickshaw pullers, and other informal sector workers off the roads, and destroying livelihoods of the urban poor. “Beggars” and homeless citizens are being rounded up, arrested and arbitrarily detained, the report says.
HLRN adds: “There is rampant exploitation of workers at CWG construction sites. This includes low pay, unsafe working conditions, lack of housing, use of child labour, non-registration of workers, and denial of social security benefits. More than a hundred deaths have been reported from the CWG sites.”
Environmental impact assessment norms have been violated. Hundreds of trees have been felled. Rain water drains have been covered. The Games Village has been built on the flood plains of the River Yamuna causing a drop in the ground water table in Delhi. The river bed is a seismically active area. There has been a significant increase in cases of asthma and allergies directly as a result of the dust from the construction work.
Funds for social sector and development projects in Delhi have been diverted to the CWG, which are the most expensive in history to build at $7.5 billion. Judging by the poor quality of the infrastructure, huge amounts have been skimmed by contractors while others have simply not been up to the job. “In a hurry to complete work, the government picked (just about any) contractor to execute the projects. While they met the financial capabilities parameter, many have little experience in using sophisticated technologies and equipment imported from developed countries,” said engineering expert Pradeep Chaturved.
The HLRN report concludes that the entire process related to the CWG has been essentially underscored by “secrecy, unavailability of information, and unconstitutional activities”, with evidence of long-term economic, social and environmental costs for the nation, and specifically for the city of Delhi.
The network's executive director, Miloon Kothari, said that "even if miraculously the Games are a succes, it is already evident from the situation on the ground that serious human rights violations affecting thousands of people across the city are leaving behind a debilitating social legacy for Delhi and permanent disfiguring of Delhi's urban fabric. The Games are a clear step in the direction of Delhi becoming an apartheid city."
Another Delhi-based NGO, Hazards Centre, draws on an analysis of debts incurred by cities hosting previous sports mega events, and it concludes that cities in the developed world have taken 20-25 years to pay off debts accrued from big sports events. It is clear that the burden on India will be even higher.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
The Congress Party – which claims a lineage back to Mahatma Gandhi – presides over a state that has embraced market-driven globalisation with a vengeance. Where Congress once favoured the poor, small farmers and the trade unions, it now rules as the party of big business.
A major report into the plans for the Games by the Housing and Land Rights Network (HLRN) catalogues evictions and demolitions of informal settlements and slums in the run-up to the CWG. “Most evictions are generally carried out to construct roads, bridges, stadiums, and parking lots, or under the guise of city ‘beautification’, ostensibly to create a ‘world class’ city.”
In the five years from 2003 to 2008 close to 350 slum clusters housing nearly 300,000 people were demolished and only about one third of these families have been resettled. Authorities have cleared street vendors, rickshaw pullers, and other informal sector workers off the roads, and destroying livelihoods of the urban poor. “Beggars” and homeless citizens are being rounded up, arrested and arbitrarily detained, the report says.
HLRN adds: “There is rampant exploitation of workers at CWG construction sites. This includes low pay, unsafe working conditions, lack of housing, use of child labour, non-registration of workers, and denial of social security benefits. More than a hundred deaths have been reported from the CWG sites.”
Environmental impact assessment norms have been violated. Hundreds of trees have been felled. Rain water drains have been covered. The Games Village has been built on the flood plains of the River Yamuna causing a drop in the ground water table in Delhi. The river bed is a seismically active area. There has been a significant increase in cases of asthma and allergies directly as a result of the dust from the construction work.
Funds for social sector and development projects in Delhi have been diverted to the CWG, which are the most expensive in history to build at $7.5 billion. Judging by the poor quality of the infrastructure, huge amounts have been skimmed by contractors while others have simply not been up to the job. “In a hurry to complete work, the government picked (just about any) contractor to execute the projects. While they met the financial capabilities parameter, many have little experience in using sophisticated technologies and equipment imported from developed countries,” said engineering expert Pradeep Chaturved.
The HLRN report concludes that the entire process related to the CWG has been essentially underscored by “secrecy, unavailability of information, and unconstitutional activities”, with evidence of long-term economic, social and environmental costs for the nation, and specifically for the city of Delhi.
The network's executive director, Miloon Kothari, said that "even if miraculously the Games are a succes, it is already evident from the situation on the ground that serious human rights violations affecting thousands of people across the city are leaving behind a debilitating social legacy for Delhi and permanent disfiguring of Delhi's urban fabric. The Games are a clear step in the direction of Delhi becoming an apartheid city."
Another Delhi-based NGO, Hazards Centre, draws on an analysis of debts incurred by cities hosting previous sports mega events, and it concludes that cities in the developed world have taken 20-25 years to pay off debts accrued from big sports events. It is clear that the burden on India will be even higher.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
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