Romney was happy to take $1.5 billion taxpayer dollars to "save" the 2002 Olympics

[sad sally]

and greatly benefit Salt Lake City, Utah. Who would be the beneficiary if he were to get his hands on the US Treasury as president? Not 98% of Americans.

from today's Democracy Now on Link TV:

AMY GOODMAN: We are joined by Don Barlett and Jim Steele. They are the authors of the new book, The Betrayal of the American Dream. I want to go to the issue of the Olympics since they’re happening in London right now. In 2001, you wrote a story called "Snow Job" about the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, headed by none other than the Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney. In your investigation, "Snow Job," about these Olympics, which you published in Sports Illustrated, you reported, quote, "The $1.5 billion in taxpayer [dollars] that Congress is pouring into Utah is 1.5 times the amount spent by lawmakers to support all seven Olympic Games held in the U.S. since 1904—combined." Jim Steele?

JAMES STEELE: Well, it’s an interesting position for somebody who’s against new taxes and wants to cut the deficit, that here you had somebody heading an Olympic committee where that entire operation raided the federal Treasury like no other Olympics in history. And they got everything: Salt Lake—infrastructure around Salt Lake, sewer lines, land exchanges that transformed the average snow resort, ski resorts into world-class resorts. All of these things happened one way or another under Romney’s watch. And that’s what astonished us about this comment he made where he was dissing the London Olympics, I mean, because—that they’re not operating right, they’re not doing this right. I mean, the whole—I think he’s so vulnerable on that issue, and everybody who had anything to do with the Salt Lake Olympics is very vulnerable on that. The thing that struck us so much—and here was Utah, a state famously with a great antipathy to paying any kind of taxes, but they had absolutely no qualms whatsoever about raiding the federal Treasury to take care of all of their needs for really the next generation. So, the fact that he would make this point in London just, frankly, astonished us.

DONALD BARLETT: Jim’s right. I mean, Utah got out of this anything they wanted. The states—other states would have had to have paid for on their own, Utah got from the federal government. And so, it’s—the other thing is this hypocrisy of people like Romney who want everyone in the middle and the bottom to pay their own way, but they themselves have no trouble grabbing as much money as they can get out of Washington. And they do it all the time. And it’s just—it’s just astonishing. But people generally don’t know it. The news media does not do what it should do on this area—never has. And so, there—part of the problem here is because most people today get their news from TV, and it’s not public TV, as you well know, it’s commercial TV. And commercial TV is not about to do this kind of work. It just isn’t.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s interesting, with NBC covering the Olympics around the clock, we’re not seeing any of the protests that are taking place and the increasing anger of the small businessmen in East London who are getting wiped out, the whole issue of not criticizing the corporate sponsors, the corporate sponsors—

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/7/30/pulitzer_winning_reporting_duo_don_barlett

[spanone]

1. wake up america...the scam is on....we need this shit to go viral

k&r...

[Motown_Johnny]

2. The substance is correct although the number in your title seems inflated.

It is my understanding that the majority of that was already apportioned before Rmoney took over but that he did lobby for, and receive, an additional $347 million in taxpayer money for a "bailout".





http://www.democrats.org/news/blog/mitt_romney_and_the_olympic_bailout


^snip^



One of the main things Mitt Romney and his campaign want you to know is that Romney "saved" the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. In fact, Romney's returning to Utah tomorrow to congratulate himself on the 10th anniversary of those winter games.

But the story of Romney's supposed Olympic triumph isn't as simple as he wants you to believe. Rather, his success as president of the 2002 winter games was due to the unprecedented amount of federal money he procured to organize the most expensive Olympics in American history. And coming from a candidate who's spent his campaign railing against federal spending and earmarks, it's another breathtaking example of Romney's hypocrisy.

The Salt Lake games got more taxpayer dollars than all of the previous U.S.-hosted Olympics combined: a whopping $1.3 billion. For comparison, the 1984 games in L.A. received $75 million and the 1996 games in Atlanta received $609 million. It's clear that the real hero of the 2002 games was the American taxpayer.

Romney's campaign is already pushing back by saying that the extra money was necessary for security. But our money went to much more than security, including $30 million for parking lots, $2 million for sewer systems, and $33,000 for an Olympic horse adoption program.

[sad sally]

3. Okay, thanks.

Some of the beneficiaries of his $1.3 billion save are also questionable.

Wayne Barrett - The Dailey Beast

snip

It would not be an exaggeration to say that Romney considers his salvaging of the scandal-plagued Games as the turnaround point in his career—Turnaround was the name of his 2004 memoir detailing those years. Having lost badly in his 1994 Senate race against Ted Kennedy, Romney’s acclaimed management of the Salt Lake Games—on the world stage, no less—lifted him back into public prominence and propelled his successful campaign for governor of Massachusetts, which began just weeks after the Olympics ended. “I led an Olympics out of the shadows of scandal” has been Romney’s frequent mantra on the campaign trail for the 2012 election.

But while Romney’s gold-medal acumen in managing the Salt Lake City Olympics has been widely covered, there has been virtually no examination, in this or the 2008 presidential campaign, of how he navigated the ethical swamp he landed in. As he comes closer to wrapping up the GOP nomination, even less has been written about the alliances he made with some of the key figures of the Salt Lake scandal--alliances that have been paying dividends ever since, and helping to finance his presidential ambitions.

Prominent among these is Sead Dizdarevic, a New Jersey travel-company executive who is near the top of Romney’s pyramid of super PAC and campaign benefactors. If all family, corporate, and business-associate donations are included, people connected to Dizdarevic have contributed more than a million dollars to Romney. Dizdarevic, his company, and his family together have given $221,800

snip

...the conflicted Romney also said that he hoped Welch and Johnson would be cleared. “I’m pulling for them on a personal basis,” he announced. Romney decided soon thereafter to pay Welch and Johnson’s fees, suing the SLOC’s insurer to ultimately cover nearly $12 million in fees. And that was the last anyone ever heard from Romney about the “red flag” Dizdarevic. According to The Real Romney, by Boston Globe reporters Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, Romney tried to cajole the two former directors to take a plea before they were indicted, but that was just a sign of how desperately he seemed to want the case to disappear. In the end, the assumption of the legal bills seemed to do the job, muting the cantankerous former executives—as did Bullock’s decision in 2002 to pay them $1.2 million in withheld compensation.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/12/romney-saved-salt-lake-olympics-from-scandal-but-at-what-price.html