Ian Blunt and Beth Lawrence outline some key events in the history of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and explain how it operates as a global brand and generates and uses its funds.

Bread and Circuses

Bread and circuses were mainstays of the domestic politics of ancient Rome: keep down the price of food and put on a good show and the masses would be happy and the emperor would have a decent chance of not being overthrown or assassinated.

The biggest of the modern global circuses do not function in exactly the same way as their Roman forebears. A deal to host a 'mega-event' like the Olympics or the football World Cup can bring a certain political kudos to the government concerned, but they are more concerned with profiting from, rather than placating, the masses.

There can be negative side-effects of course: a public and international spotlight on domestic social inequality, lack of democracy and so on. Commenting on the most recent World Cup, Patrick Bond, director of South Africa's Centre for Civil Society, which ran a World Cup Watch project, said: "The elite have pulled off bread and circuses for the masses. We live in one of the most unequal societies in the world, and we've just seen an amplification of that inequality. The costs will become increasingly clear." There has already been no shortage of criticism of the social and economic effects of the London Olympics, but the hope for the organisers is that the blaze of publicity once the event starts will offset such negative criticisms. Sports reporters are, after all, paid to focus on sporting records rather than human rights.

The US Air Force's massive 30,000lb bunker-buster bomb critical for striking heavily fortified Iranian nuclear facilities is "ready to go"

Michael Donley, the US Air Force Secretary, said that the bomb "if it need to go today", would be available.

"We continue to do testing on the bomb to refine its capabilities, and that is ongoing," he said "We also have the capability to go with existing configuration today."

The endorsement of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) - the world's largest conventional bomb - comes after concerns were raised that the weapon still needed refining if was to be effective against Iran's deepest installations.

Last February Congress agreed to an "urgent" Pentagon request to divert $81.6m (£52m) into improvements for the 14-ton MOP.

Saudi security forces opened fire on demonstrators as a large number of people staged a rally in the oil-rich Eastern region of Qatif to call for the freedom of political inmates held in the country's jails.

Thousands of demonstrators on Friday also demanded that the Al Saud regime set free prominent Shiite cleric Sheikh Nemr al-Nemr.

Sheikh Nemr was attacked, injured and arrested by Saudi security forces while driving from a farm to his house in Qatif on July 8.

Chanting slogans in support of social justice in the province, protestors asked the regime to stop killing civilians by the Saudi-backed forces in neighboring Bahrain, press tv reported.

Some of the demonstrators were also detained and some others were injured as a result of violent crackdown by the security forces, activists said.

Earlier in the week, similar demonstrations were held against the regime in the town of Awamiyah and the city of Buraydah.

Similar demonstrations have also been held in Riyadh and the holy city of Medina over the past few weeks.

The investigation into the alleged poisoning of the late Palestinian leader leaves many questions unanswered.

Bradford, United Kingdom - I was 23 years old when I first met Yasser Arafat and I was at the Percy military hospital when he died. I had been with him in the ruins of his various headquarters in Beirut, Tunis and Ramallah. I loved him as if he were my father, and have remained his loyal supporter all my life.

So the news, broken by Al Jazeera, that he may have been murdered using Polonium-210 - the weapon of choice used to kill Alexander Litvinenko after tea in a central London hotel with, we were told, a former colleague of his from the KGB, is of personal as well as political importance to me.

In the case of Litvinenko, we were assured by all news media that only a state actor with access to nuclear weapons could possibly have the means of carrying out this crime. The same media outlets are currently ignoring the inconvenient truth that one such state actor with both a long track record of murdering its opponents and access to the requisite nuclear material is Israel, which, shortly before the death of Arafat - from the mouths of both Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert - told the world that their earlier undertakings to the United States not to harm Arafat were null and void, with Shaton saying that the Palestinian leader had "no insurance policy" against Israeli action.

As the Global Financial Crisis rumbles along in its fifth year, we read the latest revelations of bankster fraud, the LIBOR scandal. This follows the muni bond fixing scam detailed a couple of weeks ago, as well as the J.P. Morgan trading fiasco and the Corzine-MF Global collapse and any number of other scandals in recent months. In every case it was traders run amuck, fixing "markets" to make an easy buck at someone's expense. In times like these, I always recall Robert Sherrill's 1990 statement about the S&L crisis that "thievery is what unregulated capitalism is all about."

After 1990 we removed what was left of financial regulations following the flurry of deregulation of the early 1980s that had freed the thrifts so that they could self-destruct. And we are shocked, SHOCKED!, that thieves took over the financial system.

Nay, they took over the whole economy and the political system lock, stock, and barrel. They didn't just blow up finance, they oversaw the swiftest transfer of wealth to the very top the world has ever seen. They screwed workers out of their jobs, they screwed homeowners out of their houses, they screwed retirees out of their pensions, and they screwed municipalities out of their revenues and assets.

Financiers are forcing schools, parks, pools, fire departments, senior citizen centers, and libraries to shut down. They are forcing national governments to auction off their cultural heritage to the highest bidder. Everything must go in firesales at prices rigged by twenty-something traders at the biggest and most corrupt institutions the world has ever known.

And since they've bought the politicians, the policy-makers, and the courts, no one will stop it. Few will even discuss it, since most university administrations have similarly been bought off - in many cases, the universities are even headed by corporate "leaders" - and their professors are on Wall Street's payrolls.

We're screwed.

One wonders what Syrians are thinking, as "rebels" vowing to "free Syria" take the country down the same road to destruction as "rebels" in Libya. Libya, under Gaddafi a well-run country whose oil revenues were shared with the Libyan people instead of monopolized by a princely class as in Saudi Arabia, now has no government and is in disarray with contending factions vying for power.

Just as no one knew who the Libyan "rebels" were, with elements of al Qaeda reportedly among them, no one knows who the Syrian "rebels" are, or indeed if they are even rebels (Antiwar.com).

Some "rebels" appear to be bandit groups who seize the opportunity to loot and to rape and set themselves up as the governments of villages and towns. Others appear to be al Qaeda. (Antiwar.com)

The fact that the "rebels" are armed is an indication of interference from outside.

There have been reports that Washington has ordered its Saudi and Bahrain puppet governments to supply the "rebels" with military weaponry. Some suspect that the explosion that killed the Syrian Defense Minister and the head of the government's crisis operations was not the work of a suicide bomber but the work of a US drone or missile reminiscent of Washington's failed attempts to murder Saddam Hussein. Regardless, Washington regarded the terror attack as a success, declaring that it showed the rebels were gaining "real momentum" and called on the Syrian government to respond to the attack by resigning. (reuters.com)

As HSBC executives apologize to the US Senate for laundering drugs money, the fact is that nothing changes.

"Steal a little," wrote Bob Dylan, "they throw you in jail; steal a lot and they make you a king." These days, he might recraft the line to read: deal a little dope, they throw you in jail; launder the narco billions, they'll make you apologise to the US Senate.

Two months ago in Washington DC, a poor black man called Edward Dorsey Sr was convicted of peddling 5.5 grams of crack cocaine. Because he was charged before a recent relative amelioration in sentencing, he was given a mandatory 10 years in jail.

Last week, managers from Britain's biggest bank, HSBC, lined up before the Senate's permanent sub-committee on investigations - just across the Potomac river from the scene of Dorsey's crime - to be asked questions such as: "It took three or four years to close a suspicious account. Is there any way that should be allowed to happen?"

President Bashar al-Assad's artillery pounded rebel-held areas in and around Aleppo on Friday in preparation for an onslaught on Syria's biggest city where the United States has said it fears a "massacre" may be imminent.

Opposition sources said the shelling, which follows intensive ground and air bombardment, was an attempt to drive fighters inside Aleppo from their strongholds and to stop their comrades outside the city from resupplying them.

"They are shelling at random to instill a state of terror," said Anwar Abu Ahed, a rebel commander outside the city.

The battle for Aleppo, a major power centre that is home to 2.5 million people, is being seen as a potential turning point in the 16-month uprising against Assad that could give one side an edge in a conflict where both the rebels and the government have struggled to gain the upper hand.

A rebel commander said insurgents had attacked a convoy of Syrian army tanks heading towards the city, as the government continued to redeploy forces from other parts of the country to bolster its forces there.

"Society's tendency is to maintain what has been. Rebellion is only an occasional reaction to suffering in human history: we have infinitely more instances of forbearance to exploitation, and submission to authority, than we have examples of revolt." (Zinn, 1968)

Have you ever wondered why society hardly ever changes? I think most of us have.

One answer is that humans have a mental bias towards maintaining the status quo. People think like this all the time. They tend to go with what they know rather than a new, unknown option.

People feel safer with the established order in the face of potential change. That's partly why people buy the same things they bought before, return to the same restaurants and keep espousing the same opinions.

This has been called the 'system justification bias' and it has some paradoxical effects (research is described in Jost et al., 2004):

Did you know that roughly one person in a hundred is clinically a psychopath? These individuals are either born with an emotional deficiency that keeps them from feeling bad about hurting others, or they are traumatized early in life in a manner that causes them to become this way. With more than 7 billion people on the planet that means there are as many as 70,000,000 psychopaths alive today. These people are more likely to be risk takers, opportunists motivated by self-interest and greed, and inclined to dominate or subjugate those around them through manipulative means.


Last year, the Occupy Movement drew a distinction between the top 1% and the remaining 99% - as distinguished by measures of wealth and income. Of course, this breakdown is misleading, since there are many top income earners who sympathize with the plights of others and are not part of the problem. But the real defining metric reveals itself: 1% of the global population is comprised of people who exhibit psychopathic tendencies.