Friday, August 3, 2012

The American Taxpayer Saved the 2002 Olympics


A new commercial paid for by Restore Our Future snubs the fact that roughly 1,342,000,000 (that’s right 1 billion) of the taxpayer’s dollars funded the Olympic Games and Salt Lake City area infrastructure improvements needed for the Games to be a success.  The ad contains former Olympians snubbing the taxpayer's contribution and heralding Mitt Romney for allowing athletes to "realize" their "dreams" and for bringing a "huge sense of hope".  The following are quotes from athletes Kristi Yamaguchi and Derek Parra:

”Mitt allowed athletes like myself to realize our dreams” –Derek Parra
 “Mitt Romney brought a huge sense of hope”-Kristi Yamaguchi

``The Games won't ever be judged on a dollar basis,'' Romney said in April of 2002. ``The Games will be judged by the feelings and memories that came from Salt Lake City.''  Romney was apparently wrong because the Olympic ad spends about 1/5 of the allotted time discussing dollars. The ad boasts that Romney created a $100,000,000 surplus even though most articles have the surplus pegged at $65,000,000.  That sure is some creative rounding up;)
The Mitt Romney business experience at the Olympics consists of “How to Get the Government to Bail You Out”. The American taxpayers should be thanked not just Mitt Romney. While he rails against “Big Government” “Handouts” “bailouts for General Motors” he himself did not refuse the 342 million dollars it took to save the Olympic Games under his direction nor did he speak out against the $1 billion in infrastructure improvements in the Salt Lake City Area needed for the games.  Apparently Mitt Romney wanted Detroit to go bankrupt but not Utah.
 Mitt Romney promised “complete transparency” when he took charge of the scandal-plagued Salt Lake City Olympics, a pledge that included access to his own correspondence and plans for an extensive public archive of documents related to the Games.
“All of the documents inside our organization are available to the public,” Romney said in a speech to the National Press Club in 2000. “Simply submit a form saying which documents you want. For instance: ‘I want to see all the letters written by Mr. Romney to [then-IOC President Juan Antonio] Samaranch.’ You’ll get ’em all.”
But some who worked with Romney describe a close-to-the-vest chief executive unwilling to share so much as a budget with a state board responsible for spending oversight.

“Transparency? There was none with [the Salt Lake Organizing Committee] when he was there,” said Kenneth Bullock, a committee member who represented the Utah League of Cities and Towns. “Their transparency became a black hole. It was nonexistent.”

The committee charged news outlets $25 per hour to research records requests, even if the requests were eventually denied.

Even within the organizing committee, access to information was sometimes restricted, according to Bullock, the committee member.
“Everything should have been accessible to the board, but it wasn’t because that’s not what Mitt wanted,” he said.

Letters between journalists and the organizing committee obtained by the Globe show reporters were sometimes denied access to records they believed were covered by the committee’s open documents policy. Only a week after Romney spoke to the National Press Club, the Utah chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists wrote a complaint to the committee.
Technically Romney and the Salt Lake Organizing Committee had no legal obligation to preserve their records or make them public, even though the state paid $59 million, and the federal government spent $342 million on the Games and contributed roughly $1 billion more in indirect aid for transportation projects and other capital improvements in the Salt Lake region.

 “I led an Olympics out of the shadows of scandal” Mitt Romney states in a Washington speech but he does not acknowledge the fact that the government bailed him out.
The Government Accountability Office issued a report regarding Romney’s handling of the money as wasteful spending.
The 2002 Winter Olympics went down as the most expensive games in US history and Senator John McCain cited the games as “an incredible pork-barrel project for Salt Lake City and its environs”. It was not the custom of the US government to invest so heavily in a US hosted Olympic game, the money is supposed to come from sponsors, local cities and the US Olympic Committee.

Sources:


Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)