I love soccer and played the game in my youth. My two children are both avid soccer players.
But, the more I have learned about the way the World Cup is run, the more I just cannot enjoy watching.
-170,000 Brazilians forcibly removed form their homes without compensation to make way for construction
-special police task force (UCC) created to 'clean up the cities', UCC to be disbanded after World Cup
-numerous reports of murders of inncocent people including many children, such as in the favelas
-police have stated they are paid a bonus to kill street kids
-cost overruns on stadiums that Brazil probably cant afford to maintain (witness the unused Olympic Stadiums falling apart in Greece, the only thing left after their Olympics is a mountain of debt)
-the total revenue, est. $30bn, from ticket sales, sponsorships, broadcast rights, advertising, sales of FIFA branded goods, flows almost exclusively to FIFA's HQ, and doesnt benefit the average Brazilian
-so while Brazil didnt have any money to increase its illiteracy rate (20%) or work oin removing poverty or staff its strained hospital system with more doctors and nurses, it somehow found $5bn to build expensive stadiums, many some willl only be used for a few games (Manana stadium is for 4 games) and then fall into disrepair
I also notice how the highly paid players, eager to get their ration of a few million in blood-stained notes for playing, dont apeak out against these atrocities. They are no different than the Jews in the Nazi concentration camps who managed the gassing of their fellow countrymen in exchange for a bit of protection from the Nazis.
It will be a similar catastrophe in Japan, when (if?) the Olympics are held. Never mind that Japan has the highest debt to GDP of any developed nation,
214% Debt:GDP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_debtnever mind that the Japanese bond market is collapsing, never mind that the government cant clean up the Fukushima nuclear disaster, lets bring the best and strongest DNA in the world to Tokyo so we can irradiate it with nuclear fallout and permanently damage that DNA. So, even though there is evidence of actual nuclear fuel scattered in the streets of Tokyo (from when the plants blew up, aerosolizing the fuel), they ignore the warnings and want to have a nuclear Olympics. They have even put a training facility right on the edge of the exclusion zone, where radiation levels are still high.
Both the World Cup and Olympics have morphed into some warped definition of a sports event that is really only corporate cronyism forcing humanity to do business while looking at the end of the barrel of a gun.
As an MCC and PM collector and investor, this is one of the main reasons I collect MCC, to hedge against the insanity of government. I am not numb to the suffering that the Brazilian people went through to 'host' these games.
