• Listen to this segment

The money in this year’s Beijing Olympics Games is unprecedented. At a tally of $43 billion dollars, the games are fifty percent more expensive than the previous five Olympics’ bills added together, according to the Wall Street Journal. In fact, “never in the history of sports has so much money been spent in 15 days.” And that’s just the official expenditure. With half a million visitors expected to attend the games, the Chinese government has built over 30 new stadiums, a brand new airport and added several metro lines. The official motto of the games, “One World, One Dream,” belies the fact that practically everything that can be commercially sponsored and auctioned off to the highest bidder, has been. Now, a new report called The Commercial Games, issued just yesterday by Multinational Monitor magazine and Commercial Alert, details the depth of the hypercommercialization of the Olympics Games. Companies like Coca-Cola, GE, Johnson & Johnson, Lenovo, Panasonic and Visa have paid hundreds of millions of dollars to the International Olympic Committee. On the US front, according to the report, “well over [a] 100 corporations are sponsoring the U.S. Olympic Committee or U.S. national teams.”

GUEST: Robert Weissman, editor of Multinational Monitor. Download the report entitled The Commercial Games here: http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/2008olympics/TheCommercialGames.pdf