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Tokyo Olympics Scandal Fouls Hopes for a Sapporo Winter Games
In recent times, the already brief listing of attainable candidates to carry the Winter Olympics has grow to be even shorter. Headline-grabbing value overruns and humbling defeats in public referendums have made cities cautious of constructing venues for sports activities like ski leaping and bobsled with restricted attraction past the Video games, whereas local weather change has quickly shrunk the variety of potential hosts that may promise actual snow.
These challenges had made Sapporo, in Japan’s frigid north, particularly interesting as Olympic organizers search a house for the 2030 Video games. Town appeared to have all of it: an Olympic legacy because the 1972 host; many of the mandatory services; an keen public; and constant, powdery snow. Its solely severe rival, Salt Lake Metropolis, most well-liked to attend till 2034 to host the Video games.
What Sapporo wasn’t relying on was a still-unfolding corruption scandal linked to the 2020 Tokyo Summer time Olympics, which has turned public opinion sharply towards Sapporo’s bid and sophisticated Japan’s potential to stage massive occasions within the coming years. The turmoil has thrown the 2030 choice course of into uncertainty, with each Sapporo and the Worldwide Olympic Committee pausing their efforts as officers courtroom various bidders.
The gradual drip of allegations of bid-rigging within the run-up to the Tokyo Video games, which have been delayed till 2021 due to the pandemic, has ensnared a few of Japan’s high firms. Probably the most distinguished is Dentsu, one of many world’s strongest sports activities advertising corporations and a key pressure in arranging all the pieces from the preliminary Tokyo bidding course of to the occasion’s tiniest particulars.
Arrests started final summer season, toppling the heads of one in all Japan’s largest publishers and a significant clothes retailer. In February, prosecutors accused Dentsu, in addition to Japan’s second-largest advertising agency, Hakuhodo, of forming a cartel to skirt guidelines on bidding for public contracts associated to the Tokyo Video games.
In response to the scandal, Tokyo and Osaka, amongst different cities, have pledged that — a minimum of within the brief time period — they may exclude Dentsu and its alleged conspirators from bidding for public contracts. That has been an particularly bitter tablet for Osaka, which is internet hosting the 2025 World Expo and was relying on the promoting large’s help to drag off the occasion.
In early March, Sapporo introduced a number of shorter public bidding bans on smaller firms named within the indictments. It has not but introduced whether or not it is going to work with Dentsu and Hakuhodo, however the metropolis’s relationship with a neighborhood Dentsu subsidiary that helped lay the groundwork for the Olympic bid is on maintain, mentioned Sapporo’s mayor, Katsuhiro Akimoto.
Whereas town nonetheless hopes to host the 2030 Video games, Mr. Akimoto mentioned, he believes it will likely be tough to safe the required sponsorships with out the involvement of Dentsu, which hauled in a record-shattering $3.6 billion in home sponsorship cash for the Tokyo Video games. The agency controls almost 28 % of Japan’s promoting market.
Previously, the authorities had “simply let the locations with know-how deal with all the pieces,” he mentioned in a latest interview in his workplace as fats, powdery snowflakes fell exterior. That, he mentioned, had made the system a “black field.”
Now, “the assumptions underlying that framework have been fully destroyed. We’re in a spot the place we now have to rethink even probably the most basic items,” Mr. Akimoto mentioned.
The fallout from the Tokyo Olympics has created an surprising headache not only for Sapporo but in addition for the I.O.C., which has discovered it more and more tough to safe hosts for the Winter Video games as cities determine the prices and hassles aren’t price it.
For the 2022 Winter Olympics, the I.O.C. was pressured to decide on between two candidates from authoritarian nations, in any case eight democratic nations that had expressed curiosity pulled out. Beijing edged out Almaty, Kazakhstan, and the Video games got here below hearth each for China’s abysmal human rights file and its dependence on synthetic snow.
In an effort to draw extra candidates, the Olympic committee has labored to make bidding for and internet hosting the Video games cheaper and onerous. Even so, few nations have utilized. Solely Sweden and Italy, the winner, have been finalists for the 2026 Winter Video games.
Sapporo’s flailing effort doesn’t endanger the Video games’ future, analysts mentioned. However it has had a domino impact. In December, the I.O.C. introduced that it will push again the timeline for choosing a number, saying it wanted time to contemplate the impacts of local weather change on the Video games’ future. Sapporo paused its bid quickly after.
Salt Lake Metropolis; Vancouver, British Columbia; and Stockholm have since been urged as attainable locations. Salt Lake Metropolis has mentioned it prefers to host in 2034 so it received’t need to battle for sponsors with the 2028 Summer time Video games in Los Angeles.
Sapporo’s probabilities of internet hosting the Video games largely rely on its potential to revive public curiosity, mentioned the Olympic historian David Wallechinsky. From the I.O.C.’s perspective, “the corruption concern isn’t as vital as the dearth of public help,” he mentioned.
In a January ballot by The Hokkaido Shimbun, a regional each day newspaper, almost 70 % of these surveyed mentioned they opposed internet hosting the Video games. The turnabout is obvious even in as soon as enthusiastic residents like Masako Ishibashi, who attended the opening ceremony of the 1972 Sapporo Olympics as a toddler and whose daughter has ambitions of turning into a professional alpine skier.
Within the wake of the scandal, “the sensation that we must always positively, positively do it’s gone,” she mentioned as she walked her canine close to the outside skating rink the place the Olympic kickoff was held 5 a long time in the past.
When Sapporo turned the primary Asian metropolis to host the Winter Olympics, it was little identified overseas. Right now, town of two million is a world gateway for vacationers headed to well-known ski locations like Niseko, a high-toned village catering principally to foreigners.
With tourism on the rise, a second Winter Olympics appeared like a very good wager for town’s model, and in 2014 native officers introduced their ambition to host the occasion in 2026. An earthquake 4 years later derailed the plans, and the Video games went to Italy.
When Sapporo revived its bid in 2020, native enthusiasm was sturdy. A choice to maneuver the Tokyo Olympics’ marathon to Sapporo due to the capital’s suffocating summertime warmth added to the Olympic momentum.
The next 12 months, Sapporo officers persevered as public opinion turned towards the Tokyo Olympics, with many fearful that the Video games may grow to be a superspreader occasion. Spectators have been principally barred, and an ambivalent nation watched the competitors on tv.
Delicate to the excessive prices of the Tokyo Video games, Sapporo put collectively a bid proposal that largely relied on current services, together with an ice rink from the 1972 Video games. Sledding occasions can be held at outdated Olympic services in faraway Nagano, and the occasion would, “in precept,” be totally paid for by the I.O.C. and personal funds. Posters went up across the metropolis selling the bid. Officers have been modestly assured it was a performed deal.
Now, with opposition widespread, it’s something however. Sapporo has up to now refused to carry a referendum on the difficulty, however it could have the subsequent neatest thing on April 9, when the mayor, Mr. Akimoto, comes up for re-election.
Kaoru Takano, a former metropolis official who opposes Sapporo’s bid, is operating for the put up, hoping to make his candidacy a proxy vote on the Video games, which he believes will value town money and time higher spent elsewhere.
Whereas supporters of Sapporo’s bid have performed down issues a few ballooning invoice, Mr. Takano factors to the huge price range overruns which are almost synonymous with Olympic occasions: Tokyo’s Video games got here in at almost double the preliminary estimates.
Mr. Takano acknowledges that he has little prospect of profitable, however hopes to draw sufficient votes to point out that town is definitively towards the Video games, he mentioned in an interview.
Even when Sapporo’s 2030 bid collapses, it is going to stay a tempting Olympic candidate because the I.O.C. emphasizes making the Video games extra environmentally and economically sustainable. A 2022 research projecting the impression of local weather change on the Winter Olympics’ future mentioned that, by midcentury, Sapporo could also be one of many final former hosts in Asia able to reliably holding the Video games with out resorting to synthetic snow.
However for that to occur, Sapporo goes to need to restore the injury performed by the Tokyo scandal, mentioned Ryuichi Kasuga, a sports activities marketing consultant who labored on the 1998 Nagano Olympics.
“They should exhibit that they’ll make a bid and maintain an Olympics correctly,” he mentioned. “In any other case, Japan’s Olympics motion is over.”
The Justice Department accuses Visa of unfairly stifling competition in debit cards, claiming the company has maintained a monopoly by imposing or threatening to impose higher fees on merchants that also use other payment networks.
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President Biden’s top antitrust enforcers have promised to sue monopolies and block big mergers — a cornerstone of the administration’s economic agenda to restore competition to the economy.
Below are 15 major cases brought by the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission since late 2020 (including cases against Google and Meta initially filed during the Trump administration just before Mr. Biden took office).
The government has won several but not all the cases. And with only a few months remaining for the current administration, the number of suits is climbing, as regulators go after dominant companies in tech, pharmaceuticals, finance and even groceries.
In a lawsuit, the D.O.J. said that more than 60 percent of debit transactions in the United States run on Visa’s network, allowing it to charge over $7 billion in fees each year for processing those transactions. Government lawyers argued that Visa penalizes its customers when they try to use competing services and that it has built a monopoly around payment processing.
The Justice Department accuses Visa of unfairly stifling competition in debit cards, claiming the company has maintained a monopoly by imposing or threatening to impose higher fees on merchants that also use other payment networks.
Read more › The F.T.C. accused three big prescription drug middlemen, known as pharmacy benefits managers, of artificially raising prices for insulin drugs and making it harder for individuals to obtain cheaper options. The legal action targeted CVS Health’s Caremark, Cigna’s Express Scripts and UnitedHealth’s Optum Rx and subsidiaries they’ve created to handle drug negotiations. The three companies collectively control 80 percent of prescriptions in the United States.
The F.T.C. files an administrative complaint, which is not yet public, that seeks to prohibit pharmacy benefit managers from steering patients to drugs that make them more money.
Read more › The F.T.C. sued to block Kroger’s $24.6 billion acquisiton of Albertsons, which, if allowed to proceed, would be the biggest supermarket merger in U.S. history. The companies said the merger would bolster their leverage with suppliers; the government contended that it would drive up prices for shoppers and suppress worker wages.
The hearing, a mini-trial, lasts just over three weeks. The judge in the case has yet to issue a decision.
The trial begins in Oregon, where both grocery companies have a significant presence. The case enters the spotlight as high food prices become a critical focus in the presidential race.
Read more ›
The F.T.C. and eight states, plus the District of Columbia, sue to block Kroger from acquiring rival supermarket chain Albertsons. They say the deal would most likely result in higher prices for groceries and weakened bargaining power for unionized workers.
Read more › The D.O.J. alleged Google harmed competition over the technology used to place advertising on web sites. The department and eight states said Google acquired rivals through anticompetitive mergers and bullied publishers and advertisers into using the company’s ad technology.
The trial is expected to take about a month. The government has asked for a breakup of the company, requiring Google to sell off some assets.
Read more › The Justice Department and a group of eight states accuse Google of abusing a monopoly over the technology that powers online advertising.
Read more › The D.O.J. and a group of states sued Google, saying its role in about 90 percent of all internet searches made it a monopoly. The lawsuit, which was filed in the final days of the Trump administration, alleged Google uses exclusive contracts with phone makers like Apple and other companies to feature Google search on their devices, making it harder for consumers to use rival search engines like Bing or DuckDuckGo.
In a 277-page ruling, a federal judge calls Google a monopolist and says it has acted illegally to maintain that monopoly. A trial to determine remedies is set to begin in 2025.
Read more › The chief executive of Google’s parent company, Sundar Pichai, counters the government’s narrative in testimony that describes Google’s deals with other tech companies as having been in the best interest of consumers.
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As a trial begins, Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, becomes the government’s highest-profile witness in the case when he testifies that even his company has found it difficult to compete with Google’s search products.
Read more › The Justice Department accuses Google of maintaining its monopoly over search and search advertising, crowding out competition through exclusive business contracts.
Read more › An F.T.C. lawsuit sought to block Tapestry’s $8.5 billion acquisition of Capri, a blockbuster fashion tie-up to bring together Coach, Kate Spade, Michael Kors and Versace. The suit was a rare move by the agency to block a fashion deal, given that the industry does not suffer from a lack of competition.
A hearing, which effectively serves as a mini-trial, begins over whether the government should put a halt to the deal while the F.T.C. can mount a case against the merger.
The F.T.C. sues to block a merger of two fashion companies, Tapestry and Capri Holdings, that would bring together brands like Coach, Michael Kors and Kate Spade. The agency says the deal could force millions of consumers to pay more for “accessible luxury” accessories — less expensive goods sold by high-end firms — because the combined company would no longer have the incentive to compete on price.
Read more › An antitrust lawsuit filed by the D.O.J. and several states against RealPage, a real estate software company, said its technology enabled landlords to collude to raise rents across the country. It was the first major civil antitrust lawsuit to centrally feature the role of an algorithm in pricing manipulation, D.O.J. officials said.
In its complaint, the Justice Department accuses RealPage of enabling a price-fixing conspiracy that artificially raised rents for millions of people.
Read more › The D.O.J. accused Apple of using a monopoly in the smartphone market to stifle competition and inflate prices for consumers. In its suit, the department said Apple blocked companies from offering apps that competed with Apple versions, including Messages and Wallet.
Apple files a motion to dismiss the case, saying its business decisions didn’t violate antitrust laws. It has argued that those decisions make the iPhone a better experience.
The Justice Department and 16 states, plus the District of Columbia, file a challenge to the reach and influence of Apple, arguing that the company has used anticompetitive tactics to keep customers reliant on their iPhones.
Read more › Live Nation Entertainment, the concert giant that owns Ticketmaster, stands accused of illegally maintaining a monopoly in the live entertainment industry. The D.O.J. said Ticketmaster provided exclusive ticketing contracts with concert venues, which helped Live Nation shore up its dominance, depriving consumers of better prices and options.
The Justice Department, joined by 29 states and the District of Columbia, accuses Live Nation of leveraging its sprawling empire to dominate the live music industry by locking venues into exclusive ticketing contracts, pressuring artists to use its services and threatening its rivals with financial retribution.
Read more › A merger between JetBlue and Spirit, which would have created the fifth-largest airline in the United States, was blocked by a federal judge after a D.O.J. challenge. Government lawyers argued that smaller, low-cost airlines like Spirit helped reduce fares and that allowing the company to be acquired by JetBlue, which tends to charge higher prices than Spirit, would have hurt consumers.
JetBlue and Spirit announce that they will not seek to overturn a court ruling that blocked their planned $3.8 billion merger.
Read more › In a 109-page ruling siding with the government, the judge in the case says the merger would “likely incentivize JetBlue further to abandon its roots as a maverick, low-cost carrier.”
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The Justice Department files a lawsuit seeking to stop JetBlue Airways from buying Spirit Airlines, arguing that the $3.8 billion deal would reduce competition.
Read more › A lawsuit filed by the F.T.C. and 17 states against Amazon accused the retail behemoth of squeezing merchants and favoring its own competing brands and services over third-party sellers. A trial date is set for 2026.
Amazon asks the court to dismiss the suit, arguing that the F.T.C. failed to identify the harm consumers were experiencing. It says the agency confused “common retail practices” with monopolistic behavior.
The F.T.C. and 17 states sue Amazon, contending its online store and merchant services illegally stifle competition. The lawsuit that raises the possibility of altering the company’s structure.
Read more › The F.T.C. sued to block Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which, if allowed to proceed, would be the largest consumer tech acquisition since AOL bought Time Warner more than two decades ago. The case follows scrutiny of the deal by regulators in Europe. Microsoft makes the consoles and platforms on which Activision’s games are played, and the merger of two companies that don’t directly compete is known as a vertical merger. Cases against vertical mergers have traditionally been difficult to win.
Microsoft says it has closed its deal with Activision Blizzard, signaling that the tech industry’s giants are still free to use their cash hoards to get even bigger.
Read more › In a 53-page decision, a judge says the F.T.C. has failed to show the merger would result in a substantial reduction in competition that would harm consumers.
Read more › The F.T.C. seeks a preliminary injunction to bar Microsoft from completing the deal before the F.T.C. has the chance to argue the case in its internal court. Microsoft argues a delay would essentially be killing the deal anyway.
Read more › In its suit, the F.T.C. says Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard would harm consumers because Microsoft could use Activision’s blockbuster games like Call of Duty to lure gamers from rivals.
Read more › The Justice Department sought to block a proposed merger between the largest publisher in the United States and a key rival.
In an order, a judge says that the government has demonstrated that the merger might “substantially” harm competition in the market for U.S. publishing rights to anticipated top-selling books.
Read more › The D.O.J. sued to block UnitedHealth Group’s $13 billion acquisition of health technology company Change Healthcare, arguing that a deal would give UnitedHealth sensitive data that it could wield against its competitors in the insurance business.
After a trial over the summer, a judge says in a 58-page memo that UnitedHealth’s incentives to protect customer data as it grows its businesses outweigh motivations to misuse the information.
In a lawsuit, the Justice Department argues UnitedHealth Group’s deal to acquire Change Healthcare, a health technology company, would give the giant insurer access to sensitive data that it could wield against its competitors.
Read more ›
new video loaded: The U.S. Is Mining for Uranium
September 23, 2024
Miners at Pinyon Plain uranium mine, Arizona.
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new video loaded: Federal Reserve Cuts Interest Rates for the First Time in Four Years
transcript
transcript
Federal Reserve Cuts Interest Rates for the First Time in Four Years
Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said that the central bank would take future interest rate cuts “meeting by meeting” after lowering rates by a half percentage point, an unusually large move.
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Today, the Federal Open Market Committee decided to reduce the degree of policy restraint by lowering our policy interest rate by a half percentage point. Our patient approach over the past year has paid dividends. Inflation is now much closer to our objective, and we have gained greater confidence that inflation is moving sustainably toward 2 percent. We’re going to take it meeting by meeting. As I mentioned, there’s no sense that the committee feels it’s in a rush to do this. We made a good, strong start to this, and that’s really, frankly, a sign of our confidence — confidence that inflation is coming down.
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