Dave Zirin's
article on corporate 'sin washing' at the London Olympics exposes the corporate criminality of the major corporate sponsors of the Olympics including Dow Chemicals, BP, McDonald's, and Coca Cola.
Global corporations like Dow Chemical, Adidas, and McDonald's are paying upwards of $100 million USD
to sponsor the 2012 London games and associate themselves with the
Olympic brand -- but with their brands already well-established, what do
corporations get in exchange for these expensive sponsorship deals?
According to Dave Zirin, sportswriter and columnist for The Nation, the payoff comes through "corporate sin-washing."
"More than any other enterprise, if a company associates themselves
with an Olympics, it really creates a positive feeling in the mind of
the consumer," he says.
But, "if you look at the main sponsors that the International Olympic
Committee has brought on board, you see companies like Dow Chemicals,
British Petroleum, McDonald's, Adidas."
These companies, Zirin tells the
Center for Media and Democracy, are some of "the worst corporate
criminals" most in the need of an Olympic absolution.
Zirin uses the example of Australian Aboriginal boxer Daniel Hooper to highlight the hypocrisy of the London organizers stance on corporate sponsorship
Zirin's favorite example of odd, corporate-friendly Olympic rules involves Australian boxer Daniel Hooper,
who wore a T-shirt with an Australian Aboriginal flag in a recent
boxing match to showcase his Aboriginal roots. Hooper could face
disciplinary action for making a "political statement" by wearing the
shirt, which contains a flag not recognized by the International Olympic
Committee (IOC). The flag is, however, recognized by the Australian
government as an official flag of Australia.
"What's particularly perverse about this is that if Damien Hooper had
chosen a shirt that said 'I love British Petroleum' or 'Dow Chemicals
is A-OK with me', he would have been allowed to compete." Zirin observes
"it's amazing to me that wearing a shirt that says 'Dow Chemicals' is
not seen as a political statement, while wearing a recognized flag of
your own country is a political statement, because the IOC chooses not
to recognize that flag."
Phil England makes similar points in
this piece in Ceasfire where he highlights that the Olympics organisers breached their own guidelines on ethical contracting and ignored concerns and complaints from civil society groups about the corporate sponsors.
The apparent unwillingness to apply any of the Olympics’ supposed
ethical principles to the selection of corporate sponsors, brushing
aside numerous civil society complaints and campaigns, is certainly one
thing that the games can claim to be consistent about.
Why is the London Olympic organising committee (LOCOG) breaching its own Sustainable Sourcing Code? and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) breaching its own Code of Ethics?
The former promises to “place a high priority on environmental, social
and ethical issues when procuring products and services for the games”,
while the latter states that the support of sponsors “must be in a form
consistent with the rules of sport and the principles defined in the
Olympic Charter” which defines Olympism as “seeking to create a way of
life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example,
social responsibility and respect for universal fundamental ethical
principles”.
These are serious questions for the respective committees as well as
for the Commission for a Sustainable London 2012 (CSL) and its standards
and ethics expert David Jackman. Because, as with other forms of
cultural sponsorship, these company donations aren’t magnanimous acts of
philanthropy, but calculated acts of public relations. At their recent
AGM, the BP board outlined how they had made a business case internally
for their sponsorship of the Olympics, the costed returns for which
included building and protecting their brand. Inside the industry this
is understood as maintaining the “social license to operate”.
In a very real sense then, the Olympics are colluding in the public
relations campaigns of corporations who are engaged in large-scale
environmental and human rights abuses, many of which are the subject of
legal actions. The IOC and LOCOG are therefore complicit in normalising
and cleansing the image of some of our most heinous corporate criminals
and CSL is failing to properly address this.
