ROBERT LIPSYTE
“Jock Culture” correspondent for Tomdispatch.com, Lipsyte is author of several books on sports, most recently Yellow Flag, a novel about stock car racing. He said today: “The focus has unfairly been upon China rather than the true Evil Empire, the Olympic Nation-State, which from the beginning (the all-male, naked Greek games) has been political and commercial, and since the 1896 Revival has traded in on the worst kind of nationalism, from fascism to Communism to Global corporatism, to keep its monopoly alive. But because it is a great festival of youth and beauty, I am going to watch every minute as a soft-porn show of great bodies at peak performance.”
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JENNIFER WEDEKIND
Wedekind is associate editor of Multinational Monitor and co-author of the just-released report “The Commercial Games.” She said today: “The Olympic rush to sell sponsorships to the highest bidders has led to partnerships with companies whose products or methods of doing business betray Olympic ideals: junk food hawkers, beer and liquor peddlers, and equipment makers reliant on sweatshop contractors, among others.”

DAVE ZIRIN
Sportswriter Zirin’s latest book is Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics and Promise of Sports. He just wrote the piece “China’s Olympic Trials,” which states: “This is the Olympics the West wanted: games where the grandest prize is not a gold medal but a glittering entree to China’s seemingly endless army of potential consumers. This is the reason that George W. Bush will attend the opening ceremonies, the first U.S. President to do so on foreign soil, and that in March, mere days before the crackdown in Tibet, Condoleezza Rice, laughably, took China off the State Department’s list of nations that abuse human rights.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167