LA sex workers keep each other safe through community, not charity Through peer-to-peer mutual aid, the Sex Worker Outreach Project fights for bodily autonomy and human rights as surveillance of sex workers mounts in LA.

Ahead of the 2028 Olympics, sex work has garnered more attention and surveillance.

For @lapublicpress.bsky.social I spoke to one of the few sex worker-led mutual aid orgs that fills an important service gap that neither charity nor government services can meet. lapublicpress.org/2026/04/la-s...

LA city budget:
cops: $84 trillion dollars
lawsuits for cops: $100 trillion dollars
housing: -$12

all electeds: why is homelessness a crisis in LA?

“This summer, eight World Cup games are set to be played near Los Angeles at SoFi Stadium, where eConnect is now installed. There, according to the eConnect website, “every face that enters is automatically enrolled, allowing for historical search, alert triggers, and association tracking.”

Stadiums and arenas are ground zero for implementing and normalizing new surveillance technologies. Angelenos should read this and know that this surveillance is here too.

Inside The Games • JPMorgan Chase becomes IOC TOP sponsor The new high-profile arrival, revealed this week by the Financial Times, is expected to join the International Olympic Committee's programme ahead of Los Angeles 2028, highlighting the continued appea...

🚨 Sportswash alert 🚨

JPMorgan Chase is in talks with the International Olympic Committee to sponsor the 2028 LA Olympics.

Like all sportswashers, the bank aims to use the Games to distract from its environmental and social harm.

Here's a reminder. 🧵 1/6

AND that same man (Casey Wasserman) is behind bringing the Olympics to LA, an event that is being used as an excuse to displace tenants near stadiums (so they can build hotels near venues), violate unhoused people, and increase ICE/DHS/police presence in Black/Latino neighborhoods in LA. He's awful!

I love that both the World Cup and the LA Olympics are shaping up to be disasters, and I encourage everyone worldwide to contribute to that effort.

USOPC says monitoring Wasserman scrutiny as LA28 preparations continue The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) said on Wednesday it was closely monitoring the impact of increased scrutiny surrounding Los Angeles 2028 chair Casey ​Wasserman, marking a more measu...

A bit late, but maybe significant? Chair Gene Sykes says the USPOC has "actively engaged and listened to our stakeholders" regarding Casey Wasserman's leadership and "also shared our concerns directly with ⁠the LA28 board, which is responsible for determining who serves as its chair"

CA hasn’t signed off on a promised deal to help bail out LA if the Olympic Games lose money L.A. is banking on California sharing the financial burden if the Olympics go into the red.

You’ll never believe this but it looks like LA28 has also not finalized its deal with the state

Big-city politicians are starting to worry about the World Cup A long-planned spectacle collides with the messy domestic politics and global instability of the present.

The World Cup is quietly in chaos, and the first game is less than two months away. Across U.S. host cities, officials are confronting problems ranging from funding gaps and labor strife to security concerns and spiraling costs. Our story (w/ @ryrivard.bsky.social): www.politico.com/news/2026/04...

Hamburgs Olympia-Referendum: Eine Entscheidung ohne ausreichende Grundlage - Zukunftsrat Hamburg

www.zukunftsrat.de/hamburgs-oly...

Danke.

@nolympiaberlin.bsky.social
@nolympiamuenchen.bsky.social
@nolympicsla.bsky.social

Trump's word means very little. Plus, a sneaky ICE workaround is already in place: 3 World Cup host cities—Miami, Dallas, & Houston—have 287(g) agreements with the Trump admin, empowering local police to conduct immigration enforcement (& to get reimbursed for the salaries+benefits of officers).

The message of an overturned charge for protesting isn't "the law was on your side the whole time," it's that the law can't save you from the cops even when it's clear you're in the right

Goes without saying: this is a feature, not a bug

By the time they throw out your case, you've been brutalized by cops. You spent hours or possibly days in jail. Your family had to scrape together bail money. You miss work to go to court. You spend months terrified of months or years in jail

New Jersey’s NJ Transit is currently planning to charge more than $100 for return rail tickets from New York’s Pennsylvania Station to MetLife Stadium for FIFA World Cup games.

The 18-mile rail journey ordinarily costs $12.90 for a return ticket.

📝 @adamcrafton.bsky.social

🔗 nyti.ms/3QaZJwX

I got a slot to buy tickets for the '28 Olympics.
My family is all there, so we thought it would be great to go down for them.

Oh. my. god. The prices of these tickets. Closing Ceremonies? $5k
Handball? $400
Track and Field? $1,400

I'm out.

So interesting this exploded after she fired Casey Wasserman, scion to a Mafia entertainment family blazing his own path as a Ghislaine Maxwell confederate and Olympics booster. It's like Chinatown but stupid.

Hotels Say World Cup Economic Boon ‘Isn’t Materializing’ With just over two months until the World Cup begins, the hotel industry doesn’t see the promised economic boon on the horizon.

With just over two months until the World Cup begins, the hotel industry doesn’t see the promised economic boon on the horizon.

Reminder: If FIFA weren't an organized crime ring, they would have removed the US's status as World Cup host already.

The “human rights strategy” for LA28 is like 20 pages of total content with like a page and a half on the risks for unhoused communities caused by LA28 and their main recommendation for people facing discriminatory displacement is to call Trump’s HUD directly. Unbelievable.

Remember! The Olympics 🕺🏻 are not 💃🏻 for you! 🤗

Commentary: LA28's first Olympics ticket drop flops, leaving locals locked out of events in their own backyards LA28 organizers promised that those living near venues would have access to tickets for the Olympics for as little as $28 apiece. Folks who tried to buy quickly learned otherwise.

Commentary: LA28's first Olympics ticket drop flops, leaving locals locked out of events in their own backyards

Screenshot of LA Times article with headline “ excitement over affordable LA Olympics turns to angry sticker shock over high price tickets“. Beneath it is a photograph of a large stadium in Los Angeles.

Screenshot of an article from The Guardian with the title “FIFA raises top ticket price for World Cup final to $10,990, up from $1600 in 2022.” There’s a photograph of Lionel Messi holding the World Cup trophy above the headline.

Sports Mega-Event Grifters Gonna Grift

FIFA creates new World Cup ticket category, deepening suspicions of deception Yet another twist in the 2026 FIFA World Cup ticketing saga has soured fans who feel duped about the process

New (seriously):

FIFA has now created an extra ticket category to sell "front" row World Cup seats for double the price of Category 1 tickets — which supposedly could’ve yielded “front” row seats when bought months ago.

Fans feel deceived.

More @theathletic.com: www.nytimes.com/athletic/718...

‘Hard to not feel scammed’: World Cup fans say FIFA misled them with ticket allocations, seat maps (Gift Article) Fans not getting what they thought they were purchasing is the latest in the ticketing saga surrounding the 2026 World Cup

New: World Cup ticket buyers accuse FIFA of “misleading” them.

Altered categories, seat maps that failed to disclose hospitality sections — "it's hard not to feel scammed," one fan told me.

Full story free to read @theathletic.com:

White House wants FIFA to change transgender policy, with Women’s World Cup guarantees on the line (Gift Article) President Trump has praised the rule change around transgender athletes at the Olympics and wants 'the entire sports world' to follow suit

Free to read:

Trump’s White House must sign govt guarantees for FIFA to proceed with U.S. bid for Women’s World Cup in 2031

But White House wants to use its leverage for soccer to change a policy: its regulations on transgender players

www.nytimes.com/athletic/717...

Hyping the "Barcelona Model" In 1986, the IOC voted to stagger the Summer and Winter Olympics at two-year intervals, beginning with the 1994 Winter Games. This would maximize revenues from advertisers, corporate sponsors, and television rights. Samaranch also finagled the 1992 Summer Games for Barcelona, closing the nearly forty-year circle from his days as a Barcelona city councilman and member of the Spanish Olympic Committee under Franco to bringing the Games home to a post-Franco Spain. He arranged victory for Barcelona by cleverly scheduling the 1992 Winter Games vote before the 1992 Summer Games vote. Engineering the '92 Winter Games for Albertville, France made Paris, Barcelona's main rival for the Summer Games, less appealing. 95 Many consider the Barcelona Games the pinnacle of Olympism. Not even the "ugly American" theme, which coursed through media coverage of the Games, could dampen the mood. The American "Dream Team" basketballer Charles Barkley elbowed an Angolan player in a game the US won, 116 to 48, and asked, "How did I know he didn't have a spear?" Later, all twelve Dream Teamers unzipped their Reebok-sponsored Team USA jackets during the medal ceremonies to conceal the corporate logo in order to protect the interests of six players under contract with Nike. Barkley and Michael Jordan two of the Nike athleteseven pinned American flags over their shoulders to cover the archrival's insignia. Jordan said, "I'm a person who feels that whatever you believe in, you stand up for it." 96 Apparently,

Nevertheless, as the Olympics wrapped up, the Guardian hailed Barcelona as "the very best Games in memory, possibly ever, certainly since they became global fandangos.") The New York Times gushed, "The athletes never had a chance. No matter how well they jumped and ran and rowed, they could never dominate these Summer Games. The city won the Games. " Scholars have largely agreed that "the city won the Games" because Barcelona city officials converted the Olympics into a chance to revamp and redevelop significant swaths of the city center and seafront. The Poblenou industrial area in downtown Barcelona was rebuilt as an Olympic Village to be converted later into housing, the airport was revamped, extensive ring roads around town were built, and the polluted river system that sliced through Barcelona to the Mediterranean Sea was remediated. The Barcelona Olympics were part of a long-term urban redevelopment first formulated in 1976, a full decade before the IOC selected the city as host. By that time, twenty-seven of the thirty-seven sports facilities eventually put to Olympic use had already been constructed, while another five were in the process of being built. As the economist Andrew Zimbalist notes, "the games were put at the service of a preexisting plan, rather than the typical pattern of the city development plan being put at the service of the games. This became known as the "Barcelona Model," the paragon of Olympic urbanism and a template for future hosts. The Games cost $11.5 billion, the bulk going toward infrastructure and Olympic facilities. 1/3 of these costs were covered by the private sector while 2/3 came through public financing. Only 2% of Games costs came from the city of Barcelona. ° Unemployment decreased, the construction industry boomed, and to the delight of developers the housing market enjoyed an upward turn. ''' After the Games, Barcelona leapfrogged up the list of most-visited tourist destinations in Europe.

Zimbalist notes that four particular conditions helped move Barcelona toward fiscal success: (1) the unusually large chunk of the Olympic pie paid for by the private sector; (2) an opportune macroeconomic situation in a country ripe for stimulus spending; (3) Spain's entrance into the European Economic Community (now the European Union), which jump-started trade, tourism, and investment; and (4) Barcelona was a relatively hidden gem of a city that had untapped room for growth. However, the "Barcelona model" has some notable downsides. The Barcelona bid egregiously lowballed the costs, initially attaching a $667 million price tag to the Games; after winning the bid, costs ballooned above S11 billion. ° Funds spent on the four principal Olympic sites spiked twenty-nine times higher than the original estimate. 'This is an extreme example of a tactic used by bidding cities: underestimating costs in order to rally public support. The Games also intensified gentrification, with the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) finding, "The Olympic Games served to reinforce and exacerbate the consequences of the privatisation of a basic need such as housing." The availability of public housing nosedived while rents spiked by 145 % and housing prices jumped 139 %. Gentrification contributed to a 250 % cost-of-living increase in Barcelona in the six years leading up to the Olympics. Cultural and class diversity suffered. When it came to Games-related housing policy, the benefits skewed in favor of Barcelona's affluent. The construction of the Olympic Village crystallized these dynamics. The village was a S1.9 billion public-private partnership that was a boon for speculators. It accelerated gentrification in a working-class area of the city. Much of the employment created by construction projects consisted of temporary jobs ("contratos eventuales").'''

the better, but construction companies and property owners were the prime beneficiaries of the Olympics-driven fix-up."2 In the eyes of Olympic planners, the city's poor and marginalized amounted to little more than collateral damage. Also, as is common with Olympic planning, transparency was lacking. COHRE noted, "Despite the wide scope of this urban regeneration no participative processes were anticipated in the Olympic candidature, and no specific protocols or commissions were set up in relation to forced evictions or the possible impact of the Olympic Games on access to housing "113 Again, the IOC stayed silent on these matters, claiming them beyond their purview. So the "Barcelona Model" was much more of a mixed bag than it is often portrayed by full-throated boosters of the Olympics.

Finished @julesboykoff.bsky.social’s book, Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics. Most Olympics have out-of-control costs (all now), & don’t bring benefits promised. Barcelona is oft touted as a positive outlier, and it is in many ways, tho not 100%.

library.olympics.com/CNOSPA/doc/S...

"We are 10 weeks out from the biggest World Cup in history & we don’t know if every country will be there, if supporters from every country will be allowed in, how they will be treated when they get there...It would be weirder if we weren’t fearful," writes @danielstorey85.bsky.social

LA used to have a handful of JCDecaux self-cleaning toilets, with a plan to install up to 150 public bathrooms, until our overconfident leaders decided we could handle this shit by ourselves. Unfortunately, we can't.

Since 2022, LA has built 14 free-standing toilets. They are all currently closed