“Hosting the Games is already accelerating policing, displacement, inequality, and exploitation in some of our city’s lowest-income communities — and, now, it’s being coordinated hand-in-glove with Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security,” says Chris Tyler, SAJE’s communications director. “At this point, these intersecting harms will not be reduced in any meaningful way unless we cancel.”

LA has limited options to get out of hosting — but LA does have options, says the report’s author Neil deMause, editor of Torched-recommended Field of Schemes. (Torched is cited several times, and I was interviewed for the report.) “The IOC has the hammer of the contract, but it also very much does not want to see the 2028 Olympics caught up in legal wrangling, so there’s at least the potential to try to make some demands in terms of limiting LA’s potential liability.” However, says deMause: “LA28 finances are so opaque that we may not know until 2028, if then, who’s really on the hook for what.”

Which is why the report outlines steps that LA can take, right now, which seem even more urgent in light of recent developments.

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