the puppeteer - manipulating you and me

I came across this story over at coco's blog. It explains that "Developers are the Games’ real winners" (speaking of the 2010 Olympics). Yeah, no shite Shirley. I never had any doubt about that, and it has always pissed me off. Sure, a lot of speculators have been winners too, but they are more of a participating audience than players.

A former developer himself, Premier Gordon Campbell holds the purse strings to an Olympic-size sweepstakes payout.


The 2010 Olympics were still a gleam in Jack Poole's eye when he addressed a roomful of real-estate developers in the spring of 2002. Vancouver had been shortlisted for the Games, but it would be more than a year until the winning city was chosen.

The outcome of the race to win the Games didn't seem to matter to Poole, who headed the 2010 Vancouver Bid Corporation. Western Investor editor Frank O'Brien sat in on the talk and later editorialized that, according to Poole, "the real purpose of the 2010 Olympic bid is to seduce the provincial and federal governments and long-suffering taxpayers into footing a billion-dollar bill to pave the path for future real estate sales."

Indeed this was Poole's opinion. "If the Olympic bid wasn't happening," he told the developers, "we would have to invent something." Long-time developer Poole had it right. The Olympics are about real estate.

(emboldening mine)



It verges on criminality,in my mind, but "we" asked for it - if not begged for it. Now, the average citizen of Vancouver cannot afford to buy the lowliest crack-shack, while these rich bastidges get richer - at our expense.

B.C. premier Gordon Campbell knows well how taxpayers subsidize developers. Campbell was all smiles when he announced that Marathon would be glad to sell the land to the province at a good price. It was still worth three times as much as its value before the city rezoning.

Campbell...boasted that he got the property at a rock-bottom price before others became aware of what the stadium would do to land values. He built a hotel that was completed at about the same time as the stadium.

Twenty years later, Campbell holds the Olympic purse strings, and as Poole pointed out, it's payday for developers.

The whole article is worth reading. It demonstrates what g-damned fools the populace of this fair city are - sucked in to voting for the Olympics without a clue as to who would really pay for them, and who would benefit.


As you may have gathered, sometimes my postings are more about doing the photoshops, than any serious commentary, though this one is about both.

Do a Google image search for "Bob Rennie", and two of my photoshops come in in the top 9. One of them is the first. That makes me laugh. Let's see if this one shows up on a Google search for "Jack Poole, Bob Rennie, Gordon Campbell".