Interview: Anne Orchier of NOlympics LA on Tokyo 2020 Olympic Opposition

In this episode Lindsay Gibbs interviews Anne Orchier of NOlympics LA about opposition to the Toyko 2020 Olympics from on-the-ground organizers in Japan, which is largely led by unhoused people and those who will be displaced by the games. The discuss the privatization of public spaces and the aggressive policing of poor communities that happens regardless of where the Olympics are held, and how COVID-19 is heightening these trends. They also talk about the latest updates on pushback to LA's 2028 Olympic Bid.

This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.

Transcript

Lindsay: Hi everyone, and welcome to Burn It All Down. This is Lindsay Gibbs here for your interview of the week, and I'm thrilled to be joined by Anne Orchier of NOlympics LA. Anne, thank you so much for being with us.

Anne: Thanks so much for having us.

Lindsay: So, you are a return guest, and it's been a while though now since we last talked, I think, you know, pre-COVID, pre-postponement, pre-everything. So I guess I want to start out with just…Can you give a little bit of an overview of what NOlympics LA is and kind of how you got involved? 

Anne: Yeah, for sure. So, NOlympics LA started in the spring of 2017. We formed through the Housing and Homelessness Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America, Los Angeles chapter, and yeah. There were essentially a few of us, including myself, who were already organizing with other groups in LA and were part of other organizations. I'm a member of the Los Angeles tenants union. Some other folks were part of LA CAN, who were based in skid row, a few of the kind of original coalition partners and members of NOlympics. And through the work that we were doing in our own communities and with some other organizations, we were just hearing a lot about how badly the Olympics were going to affect the work that we were doing, in particular hearing about the impact that the Olympics had on poor communities, particularly around policing and displacement.

I personally was not in LA for the 1984 Olympics, but a lot of folks we organize with were. Partners and comrades who live and organize on and around skid row really pointed to the connection between police militarization and kind of the, you know, the war on drugs, and under Daryl Gates who is like the notoriously monstrous, racist LAPD chief in the 80s. So, leading into the ’84 games for example, Daryl Gates, because of a lot of high profile well-publicized incidents around police brutality and some incredibly ugly racist comments that he had made at press conferences was a little bit on the chopping block in the lead up to the ’84 games. And then as that came up that shifted into like, okay, well now you have unlimited funds and authority to do whatever you want to clean the city up.

And so that meant additional patrols on skid row and aggressive sweeps. That meant doing a lot of the stuff we see around like gang injunctions and kind of like the indiscriminate policing of in particular like Black and brown men living in certain areas because of, you know, “suspected gang involvement” – that kind of all started in the lead up to the ’84 games. Folks who directly experienced the results of that have such a different memory of ’84 compared to kind of the Eric Garcettis and the Casey Wassermans, the kind of rich kids on the west side who were like, “This was really fun!” You know, Casey Wasserman got to run in the torch relay with OJ Simpson, whereas a lot of the Operation Hammer you know, war on drugs efforts by the LAPD to terrorize Black and brown communities in LA…There's one kind of famous story about, you know, a SWAT team went to a house in south central and used a tank with a battering ram to kind of knock down a house and found there was a young mom with her kids eating ice cream. And that tank and that battering ram was purchased as part of the expanded funding for the ’84 Olympics.

So, you know, that had been sort of percolating for a couple of years as Eric Garcetti was was angling for the Olympic bid. And then in spring 2017, a group of us met in DSA LA and started talking about what would it look like to create that organized opposition. We had some contact with folks in NO Boston and NO Chicago who gave us some sort of background and advice on their successful campaigns to kick the Olympic bids out. At that point we knew it was a little bit late in the game, but still thought it was worthwhile, and even just the process of kind of bringing together this coalition of groups would be important. I think the most important thing off the bat was that this wasn't no, this was not a make them better. And this was also specifically about the impact to poor communities.

So this was not about like the budget basically, because all of the conversations in LA up until that point had really been focused on the budget and profits. And we were saying, you know, this is really about what this is going to do to our city. Like, what is the vision of LA that we want to push for in 2028? Is it creating a playground for rich tourists and corporate sponsors? Or is it having a city that's equitable and comfortable for everyone to live in?

Lindsay: I know you all have connected a lot, as you mentioned, with organizers locally and with organizers internationally, and that there was a trip to Tokyo to meet with NOlympics Japan organizers.

Anne: It was two years ago, which feels like a very long time ago, and also not long ago at all. But I think first of all, you know, we were there really in solidarity with Hangorin no Kai, who were the lead organizers in Tokyo against the 2020 Olympics. And they are a group of folks predominantly led by unhoused folks in Tokyo. They are really really amazing organizers, and the kind of mantra was “we can still stop them.” It was end of July, so the Tokyo 2020 Olympics were originally supposed to open, I think, July 23rd, 2020. So we were there around a few days before July 23rd, 2019 and then a few days after that. I think since every opposition group has started this campaign, there's always this idea of like, this is a done deal and it's too late and you can't stop them. But I think what last year showed pretty definitively: this is all made up. Nothing is actually set in stone. It's just like…Is there a force strong enough to stop the IOC’s plans?

But the Olympics are not natural. They're not inevitable. Which is kind of the same framework we use to talk about gentrification, for example. That's kind of one of the biggest barriers, is just making it clear, like, yeah, these things are stoppable. It's not like the rain or something. This didn't exist at one point, it doesn't have to exist. It doesn't have to look exactly the way it looks now, like, these are all decisions that have been made at some point and they can be unmade. So that was one thing, and then another thing that's sort of wild to think about is when we were on the way over, I remember being at the airport on a plane and reading something…It mainly got picked up by like Wired and publications like that, where it's like the Tokyo organizers pulled some stunt where they imported…I forget how many strains of deadly viruses into Tokyo to like prepare for biological warfare attacks and for possible epidemic and pandemic situations, to do special drills. I'm like, this feels like the plot of a Michael Crichton book or something, like, this feels stupid and like something that could easily be harmful.

But then also it's wild to think like a year later, seeing how they're handling the situation now, like the number of athletes who are just coming into Tokyo with active COVID infections and they're just kind of like, meh! Or like, okay, well you have to go quarantine, but your teammates who you've been in close contact with for the last, you know, who you were on a plane with, who you've been traveling with, they can all come in. And it's like, okay, what was the point of all of these biological warfare drills if at the end of the day you’re just…Yeah. Basically, it just like the stupidest, most immediate concession to like, the show must go on. We need to make money. It doesn't matter if people are dying or if we're gonna cause the superspreader event.

And then the trip itself, you know, primarily led and organized by folks in Tokyo, as well as other parts of Japan, there was a group of amazing organizers from Osaka who were also part of that. We got to meet folks from Nagano, which also had previously hosted the Olympics in Japan. That was really interesting. There were folks from Paris, there were folks from London, there were folks from Jakarta who are kind of staring down a potential Olympic bid; folks who are in Rio. There was a contingent who also went to Fukushima to see up close what that devastation looked like, and this sort of really stark chasm between what the media and the government and the Olympic boosters were saying in terms of like, these are the recovery Olympics, and these are the Olympics that will kind of celebrate the end of this crisis in Fukushima.

And then being there and seeing like, oh, this is not even remotely recovered. People are still really, really suffering here. And this is all kind of like a bit of a Potemkin village setup for the Olympics to make it look like, okay, this is great, and now we don't have to give anyone government benefits who is suffering from thyroid cancer as a result of radiation, and we don't have to help people who have been displaced find new homes or fix their homes or give them medical care, because everything is “recovered.” And I think, you know, a lot of us too are experiencing that firsthand in our own cities with COVID, like, this period that we're in now in a lot of ways where it's like, it's over and everything is recovered, but in a lot of ways it's like, well, is it recovered though?

Lindsay: Yeah. [laughs] So, you know, I think there's been a lot of talk about people understand the push to cancel the Olympics in the wake of a global pandemic or a lot of people do, you know? And so a lot of the talk around the “should this be happening right now?” is focused solely on the pandemic. And I do want to get to that, and how Tokyo has handled that. But what was the main thing? I mean, you just mentioned a lot of things, but what was the main thing the organizers were concerned about, about these Olympics, before the pandemic? Because I think it's important for everyone to know that this organizing didn't pop up right when COVID did. This predates COVID.

Anne: So, yeah, I mean, starting with the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi earthquake and nuclear disaster, which was a massive earthquake that led to a tsunami that caused a nuclear reactor to melt down in Fukushima which just completely devastated that entire area. Tens of thousands of people were displaced, still are displaced. The people who are still living there are regularly exposed to just insane levels of radioactivity because of how the nuclear reactor melted down all of the soil in that area is contaminated with nuclear waste. You know, the Olympic boosters also just dumped a lot of the remaining nuclear waste into the Pacific ocean – and the greenwashing too, because at the same time that that was going on, you know, the Olympic organizers were continually promising these are the most “green” Olympics ever, using endangered rainforest wood to build new stadiums.

So, keeping in mind too, with Fukushima, that displacement is a big part of that too, right? Because again, the people who were displaced, who were kind of in this limbo of not knowing where they were going to go, if they could come back, when they would be able to come back, and then people who didn't leave, who were staying, but who don't have the homes that they had, but don't really have anywhere else to go. So, Fukushima was one big thing. And then Tokyo organizers – who, again, are led by folks who are unhoused – and so part of what they were seeing was the really accelerated policing and brutalization and evictions of where they were staying. Like, police started clearing out those parks. And it all starts with the privatization of public space, you know? Spaces where poor people are typically allowed to exist and enjoy their lives and eat and in some cases sleep become privatized become spaces that are more exclusive and then therefore lead to policing.

So, as the Olympics were approaching, as these sites were becoming designated for tourist zones, police started coming in and really cracking down on poor folks who were staying there. There were a lot of media headlines about some individuals whose homes were demolished and who were displaced for both the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the 2020 Olympics. But pretty much every single one of those articles missed that we didn't really get to dig into until we were in Tokyo was that it's specifically because those people live in public housing. And that's something we see in every Olympics too, including in LA. It’s always the people who are displaced and the types of housing that are targeted for demolition in order to make way for Olympic developments are the housing that the most poor people live in. It's public housing in Tokyo, it's skid row in Los Angeles. It's in south central LA in Los Angeles. It's the favelas in Rio.

So, those were the issues that folks in Tokyo are grappling with. Also something that was interesting to see, there was a big sort of uproar last year when they were talking about allowing the use of Japan's Imperial flag in the Olympics. So, kind of the role that like nationalism and imperialism play in these games and heightening those sentiments, a lot of people were really concerned about. And that's obviously something to be concerned about here as well. We've seen such a really sharp rise in right wing nationalism and how these types of events can really heighten that. And those continue to be concerns in Tokyo, along with the pandemic, like how is the pandemic accelerating and heightening those in the same way? In the US it's like, you know, there's the pandemic, which is a new thing, but a lot of the specific harms of the pandemic in the United States and in the city that I live in, Los Angeles for example, it's just accelerating and heightening the inequality that existed.

Lindsay: Pandemics don't happen in a vacuum. 

Anne: Right, right.

Lindsay: So, I mean, obviously COVID does heighten all of this, right? Like, the vaccination rates are very, very low in Tokyo. There are polls that say the public does not want the Olympics to be there. Doctors are concerned that they won't have enough resources, and there's questions about whether this will end up being a superspreader event. No international spectators are allowed. But local spectators will be allowed in – there’s a very strange rulebook going along around about, you know, not being able to cheer and not being able to do all these things, which…You know, we'll have to see how enforceable that really is.

The more I read about it the more I get a headache and feel frustrated because it seems like they've had so long to plan this now, right? They've had an extra year, access to the best infectious disease experts in the world, proof of what sports leagues are doing around the globe, right or wrong. And yet it doesn't seem like there's been many steps taken. What is the biggest concern on the ground from organizers there, as far as the coronavirus…Is it as dire as we think it is?

Anne: Yeah. I mean, I think it's very dire, and this has been a concern since the beginning. You were mentioning they've had this time to plan and what's going on, and one of the biggest Olympic myths is when things go badly there's often this instinct, which makes sense to frame like, oh, this is a mistake, or like, why couldn't they sort of get it together? That happens a lot, with Rio in particular, in the budget and the sort of…And I should say, also the Tokyo Olympics are massively, massively, massively over budget, like trillions of yen over budget.

Lindsay: [laughs] So much over budget!

Anne: Which again, that is something that happened before the pandemic, but in light of the pandemic and just the massive amount of aid that's needed in order for real recovery, that becomes an even bigger issue because now it's like there is a crisis that needs to be addressed and there is all of this funding that's been spent and can't be undone. And there's not political will to undo it, which is the real issue, because the only plan that Olympic boosters and organizers have is to make money. So, it's not that they can't get it together or can't figure it out. It is explicitly that they don't want to, that that is not their priority.

And I think what's just sort of different about this moment than in past moments is Thomas Bach, who’s the head of the IOC, said something about like, oh, “sacrifices have to be made,” which basically a lot of people took to imply, you know, some people are just going to have to die so that we can hold these Olympics. We can't cancel these. So, you know, certain people are just going to have to get sick and die and that's how it goes. And that's pretty much always what their attitude is when it comes to things around accelerated and increased displacement, police violence, environmental destruction. The attitude is just sort of, well, this is what it takes to put these games on so there are going to have to be sacrifices.

Normally there's less public outrage around that because what they are able to plan successfully, where they do put their energy, is making sure that the people who are sacrificed are the most poor and the most vulnerable, and oftentimes the most stigmatized, because these are the people that a lot of folks in certain countries and cities have already decided their lives are less important. What's changing now is that the IOC has just sort of broadened that out to say, you know, now it's everybody's life. It might be your…Unless you're super wealthy, unless you are one of the people who is in charge of this, unless you were the CEO of NBC, unless you're the president of the IOC, now you're at risk.

Lindsay: It's wild because I think usually when you say sacrifices will have to be made it means like, oh, you might have a little bit longer commute because streets will be shut down.[lauhgs] Like, there'll be some street closings downtown due to the event so things might be a little bit more crowded, you know? That’s what we're referring to. But this is a deadly pandemic.

Anne: Jules Boykoff I think has done a really good job of putting this into perspective, and it actually reminds me, I was talking to a friend yesterday about like, yes, the mall was open, but it's only 25% capacity. And I have a friend who who works at one of these malls and she said something about like, yeah, they keep saying 25% capacity, but that’s several thousand people. And that means that at any given point there's several thousand people moving around in an enclosed space. Maybe it's less than it would be normally, but that's still a lot of people. And the same thing too with these Olympics, where they're talking about like, oh, it's closed to foreign spectators and and blah, blah, blah, and we've put a cap on this. I forgot what the…It’s something like 90,000 people are going to be coming into the country, and from all over the world, and that's still a lot of people. As we've been seeing, even within just the first wave of earlier arrivals for training, a lot of them are infected. And that's something we've heard from our comrades in Tokyo is a huge demand, just like, don't come. They're asking people not to come to Tokyo.

Lindsay: Yeah. I mean, like you said, I just read from Jules Boykoff that there have been multiple people arriving from Olympic delegations that have already tested positive and the public has not been informed in a timely manner of these positive tests. And you know, I've obviously watched a lot of sports around the globe over the last year, as have our listeners. I think to the Australian Open, they have a tennis tournament in January when every single…It was a huge undertaking, but that was just with a few hundred tennis players. They were all quarantined in Australia for two weeks beforehand, not allowed to leave their houses. And then there was one positive on a plane that made the quarantine even tighter.

Then during the Australian Open there was like a few more cases popped up in Melbourne, and so they shut down, like no spectators were allowed. You can say, well, should the tournament have been happening at all, period? But it was clear that they were taking it seriously and really having control over, you know, as much control as you can in this situation of keeping a bubble. And then you just think about something like the Olympics, which is 30 times that amount of people, you know? 93,000 people coming in. And there's just no way to have that level of control. There's just no way.

Anne: Yeah. We come up right against this a lot, understandably, where people have ideas about like, well, what if the Olympics look like this? What if they look like that? I read some op-ed in the New York Times that was talking to some scientists that it's like, if they had this, if they did this…And it's like, that's all kind of an interesting thought exercise, and the classic one is what if the Olympics only happened in one city, or rotated? But the reality is you have to step back at a certain point and look at the power dynamics and the profit motives at play. None of these things can co-exist with the IOC. Like, they do not care. They're not interested in having a more thoughtful, safer Olympics. They're interested in consolidating power and generating profit.

Lindsay: Yeah. And I think you see this is why it's only governments who have kind of full control are able to host the Olympics these days, right? Because the Australian public was just not going to have it, you know? One thing that almost just bowled me over, and I think when we talk about how much of the Olympics is symbolism and is imagery and is PR…Whew. Thomas Bach, the IOC president, is going to visit Hiroshima to do a photo op and to “promote peace.” What have you heard about this proposed visit and what residents are feeling?

Anne: Oh, yeah. It's gnarly. I mean, I believe that’s a visit he has been scheduled to take at least once before, maybe twice if I'm not mistaken. But his visit keeps getting canceled because of the case rates in Japan. So that's like, again, another reminder that the people who are actually in charge of making these decisions, that folks like Thomas Bach and the other members of the IOC, the decisions that they're making affect people in a very negative way and they are completely insulated from any of those impacts. Like, Thomas Bach is going to be protected because he can make the decision about like, oh, is it safe to go to Japan or not? And he's asking other people to make sacrifices, but definitely would not put himself in danger. And yeah, of course people are upset. Yeah. It's just so completely so completely tone deaf, so completely horrifying.

And yeah, the Olympics, like you said, they're about spectacle. You know, one thing that we've sort of continually brought up is there's this provision in the host city contract around…It’s called like the clean city provision, which is nominally about essentially protecting the advertising rights of corporate sponsors, but also will often extend to be interpreted and to create other local laws around making sure that the city is a proper backdrop for corporate sponsors and advertising, for the image that the Olympics project. And so that means removing visible poverty, that means cracking down on political dissent, anything that would sort of not help, you know, Coca-Cola sell beverages when NBC broadcasts. It’s like everything has to look a certain way.

And with COVID right now we're seeing this in really stark relief too, because that's also one of the reasons that…And I think hopefully people are sort of starting to understand this, that the money is all coming from the broadcast and the sponsorship rights. It's all about the image. If you want to talk about who's really running the show, it's NBC. And you know, the Rio Olympics devastated Rio; NBC made a record profit. Those are pretty much the dynamics. And so, you know, to a certain extent too, it's like what Thomas Bach is doing is horrifying, people in Japan are horrified, but at the end of the day it's like if people are going to watch on TV, if it's going to create a good spectacle, they don't really care.

People in Japan have made it very clearly they don't want the Olympics happening. But if there isn't sort of sustained pushback and organized opposition earlier on, the longer things go on it does become harder. You know, things do become more entrenched, and I think that's something we're definitely taking to heart and keeping in mind with our own campaign and kind of what things look like in the next couple of years.

Lindsay: So, let's bring things back to LA. What is the latest on the movement to get the LA Olympics canceled? What's the latest with Eric Garcetti, the mayor there who has been behind them? And how can people help? 

Anne: Yeah. So I think there's been a lot of really interesting movement in LA in the last few months. Starting from an electoral standpoint, Eric Garcetti is out the door, on his way. I don't know what the right term is, like, he slid his way into a position as the ambassador to India in the Biden administration. You know, it was clear that he was after his own failed attempt at a position in the Biden administration, which he didn't get. That creates some interesting shifts and dynamics, because one thing that we knew when we were building our campaign out was that our city council is very powerful compared to sort of like…Not to get too deep into civics 101, but I do think understanding some of these things are…I think it's interesting. 

Lindsay: I love it. I love it. [laughs] 

Anne: Okay. LA city council is very weird in that we only have 15 city council members for a city of 8 million people. They are individually, relatively powerful. They completely control decisions around land use. So, when we're talking about things like enclosure of public space, private development, they completely control that. The mayor is not part of the city council, like, he's not their boss. But they definitely have a sort of symbiotic relationship, and there's a lot of deal-making that goes on. And you know, the city council in LA had to vote to authorize Eric Garcetti to sign the host city contract, which is sort of the document that is now getting a lot of play because as people are asking why can't the Japanese government make the decision to cancel the Olympics, it's because of the host city contract. And our host city contract has the same terms, that it basically puts all the power into the hands of the IOC.

But yeah, so our city council authorized that and it felt very clear and in some cases was confirmed to us directly by people working in city hall that, you know, the decision and the calculus for them to just hand over this blank check to Eric Garcetti to in turn hand over a blank check to the IOC wasn't because any of them are excited about the Olympics. It was a political decision based on…Like, Eric Garcetti said he really wants the Olympics, and we'll do this favor for you and we're never going to be on the chopping block for it because no one is paying attention to this. Because the vibe in LA has consistently been, since our campaign started and continues to be…We did we did like our own polling a couple of years ago and we just did another round a few months ago. Most people just have no idea that it's happening and don't care. And the city council and the boosters, including LA28, they did a pitiful brand launch in the middle of the uprising the summer. It seems like their strategy is just to bury it and to make sure people just aren't thinking about it.

So, from the city council's perspective, it was like, yeah, what is the risk? It's like, we'll vote on this thing, and if people hate it they'll blame Eric Garcetti, because he is the face of it. Part of our work has been to sort of change that calculus and make their involvement more public and their decisions more public. Well, I should also say, first of all, we have some new council members and new progressive council members who got elected in the last cycle. So, it's a different cast of characters. Two of the council members who kind of rubber stamped the Olympic bid back in 2017 are now…One of them is in prison, the other one I don't think has been sentenced yet, but on federal charges of like corruption and bribery, you know? So that was a little bit of an upheaval in city hall. It didn't completely change things. And one of them actually left his seat as city council member to go work for a stadium developer.

So, the cast of characters has changed a little bit. The dynamics have changed a little bit. We’re starting to see them shift in terms of…The biggest thing that's happened recently is they had to vote to create the authorization of COPPSC, which is the official…One of the flags we've been raising since the beginning was around the national special security event designation of the Olympics, which is a federal designation that mandates the creation of a unified command between federal, local and state law enforcement overseen by…It’s coordinated by the department of homeland security, which is terrifying, especially in a region like LA which is home to the most mixed status families and folks without papers of any other American city.

And so city council had to vote. They were voting on whether or not the LA city council should like join that process. They voted yes, which we knew they would, but two of them voted no. It wasn't a unanimous vote, which every other Olympic vote that's come up before city council has been unanimous. They've just been in lockstep about like, this is happening. So we're starting to see some cracks. And then in the discussion when they were debating it among themselves internally, a lot of them were acknowledging the connection between the Olympics and policing. So when we first started, the sort of mainstream dialogue in city hall was, you know, you're all fringe lunatics, there’s no connections between the Olympics and policing. And now we've sort of entered into more of this territory of like, well, yes, obviously there is a connection between the Olympics and policing, but you know, we're going to try to fix it.

Lindsay: That's awesome. I love that there's some optimistic news amidst all this terror.

Anne: Yeah. Oh, and before I forget, I want to make one plug for our…We have a campaign called Locks On My Block, which is if folks want to check out NOlympicsLA.com/locks that's around tracking Airbnb and short-term rental driven displacement, which we know is happening in cities around the world. So even if you don't live in LA but are experiencing that in your city and want to check it out and share stories we would love to connect with people anywhere and everywhere about kind of what they're seeing around, how…You know, like in LA, entire buildings are being converted into illegal short-term rentals and basically illegal hotels using Airbnb, and that's displacing people. And Airbnb and the Olympics announced a corporate partnership. Our hope is to be able to kind of coordinate and share what we're doing with other cities and learn what folks in other cities are doing as well.

Lindsay: Well, listen, thank you so much for joining us. It was just a pleasure to have you here on Burn It All Down, and we'll stay in touch certainly, you know, throughout these Olympics, and as we get closer to whatever's happening in LA.