Antony Loewenstein

She’s right:

Argentina’s mass looting was called El Saqueo—the sacking. That was politically significant because it was the very same word used to describe what that country’s elites had done by selling off the country’s national assets in flagrantly corrupt privatization deals, hiding their money offshore, then passing on the bill to the people with a brutal austerity package. Argentines understood that the saqueo of the shopping centers would not have happened without the bigger saqueo of the country, and that the real gangsters were the ones in charge.

But England is not Latin America, and its riots are not political, or so we keep hearing. They are just about lawless kids taking advantage of a situation to take what isn’t theirs. And British society, Cameron tells us, abhors that kind of behavior.

This is said in all seriousness. As if the massive bank bailouts never happened, followed by the defiant record bonuses. Followed by the emergency G-8 and G-20 meetings, when the leaders decided, collectively, not to do anything to punish the bankers for any of this, nor to do anything serious to prevent a similar crisis from happening again. Instead they would all go home to their respective countries and force sacrifices on the most vulnerable. They would do this by firing public sector workers, scapegoating teachers, closing libraries, upping tuitions, rolling back union contracts, creating rush privatizations of public assets and decreasing pensions – mix the cocktail for where you live. And who is on television lecturing about the need to give up these “entitlements”? The bankers and hedge-fund managers, of course.

This is the global Saqueo, a time of great taking. Fueled by a pathological sense of entitlement, this looting has all been done with the lights left on, as if there was nothing at all to hide. There are some nagging fears, however. In early July, the Wall Street Journal, citing a new poll, reported that 94 percent of millionaires were afraid of “violence in the streets.” This, it turns out, was a reasonable fear.

Of course London’s riots weren’t a political protest. But the people committing nighttime robbery sure as hell know that their elites have been committing daytime robbery. Saqueos are contagious.

The Tories are right when they say the rioting is not about the cuts. But it has a great deal to do with what those cuts represent: being cut off. Locked away in a ballooning underclass with the few escape routes previously offered—a union job, a good affordable education—being rapidly sealed off. The cuts are a message. They are saying to whole sectors of society: you are stuck where you are, much like the migrants and refugees we turn away at our increasingly fortressed borders.

Are the good times really coming to an end, or will Western-led wars be increasingly privatised?

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are winding down, Osama bin Laden is dead, and the federal government is deeply in debt. This spells the end of what was a golden decade for the defense industry.

In the decade since the Sept. 11 attacks, the annual defense budget has more than doubled to $700 billion and annual defense industry profits have nearly quadrupled, approaching $25 billion last year.

Now defense spending is poised to retreat, and so are industry profits. “We’re about to go into the downhill side of the roller coaster here,” said David Berteau, a defense industry analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Congress agreed last month to cut military spending by $350 billion over the next 10 years. The defense budget will automatically be cut by another $500 billion over that period if lawmakers fail to reach a deficit-cutting deal by November.

Defense industry stocks have already begun to suffer; they are lagging the S&P 500 in recent months. During the last defense spending downturn, which lasted from 1985 to 1997, defense stocks underperformed the broader market by 33 percent, according to an analysis by RBC Capital Markets.

The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks forced the world’s biggest and best-funded military to quickly retool itself. It needed to develop technologies, weapons and strategies to find and fight an elusive network of terrorists that seemed more sophisticated and dangerous than ever imagined.

The U.S. spent $1.3 trillion in the 10 years following the attacks chasing al-Qaida and fighting two wars. That was on top of baseline military spending in excess of $4 trillion.

“After 9/11 the floodgates opened,” says Eric Hugel, a defense industry analyst at Stephens Inc.

The defense budget grew from $316 billion in 2001 to $708 billion in 2011. Federal spending on homeland security, which includes everything from airport security to border control, also rose dramatically. Last year dozens of federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, spent $70 billion on such programs, according to the Office of Management and Budget. That’s up from $37 billion in 2003, the first year after DHS was formed.

All that spending was reflected in the soaring performance of the defense industry, led by the top five defense contractors: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and Raytheon.

In 2001, revenues for U.S.-based defense contractors totaled $217 billion, according to data compiled by the analytics firm Capital IQ. By 2010 revenues had grown to $386 billion. Profits grew more than twice as fast over the same time period, from $6.7 billion to $24.8 billion. Contractors based abroad, such as BAE Systems, also flourished. BAE was the sixth biggest defense contractor in 2010, with $7.2 billion in U.S. military contracts.

Who is held accountable for these breaches? Who wrote the words of the contract allowing no public scrutiny? And most importantly, something rarely asked by our media, why are private companies making a profit from managing human misery?

The full extent of despair and unrest inside the immigration detention network has been revealed, with documents showing 1507 detainees hospitalised in the first six months of this year, including 72 psychiatric hospital admissions, and 213 treated for physical injuries resulting from self-harm.

International Health and Medical Services, the network’s health provider, treated 723 detainees for ”voluntary starvation” during that period. Police, meanwhile, were notified 264 times of possible criminal behaviour.

A parliamentary inquiry into the immigration detention network, instigated by the opposition and Greens, has begun to lift the veil on the secretive private contractor, SERCO, that runs Australia’s detention centres.

The Immigration Department has supplied the inquiry with hundreds of pages of data, including the time and nature of every recorded incident inside the 19 detention centres. But SERCO is refusing to state how many staff it employs at each centre, claiming this is sensitive.

The Immigration Department told a hearing last night that SERCO wasn’t required to meet any staff-to-detainee ratios under its contract. The department secretary, Andrew Metcalfe, said SERCO was refusing to disclose its staffing ratios to the inquiry because it was concerned detainees would find out.

SERCO had been fined by the department every month in 2010-11 for failing to meet contract goals, the hearing was told.

Mr Metcalfe told the hearing that rising unrest, self harm and suicide were unfortunate and sad, but ”defy simple solutions”.

Serco has reported 871 incidents of inappropriate behaviour towards its staff, and 700 incidents of inappropriate behaviour between detainees. There have been 5 substantiated complaints against SERCO staff – but no staff dismissed as a result.

The Adelaide News Blog helps us all:

Indicating that a special Defence Cabinet would now govern South Australia, Premier Mike Rann will announce this morning that he and all of State Cabinet would be presenting their resignations to the Governor later today.

“You’ll hardly notice any difference.” Mr Rann told onlookers at the Norwood Pie Cart last night. “The Yanks know what they want, and we’ve been rubberstamping their stuff for years. The bloke running the shipyard used to be a Halliburton boss, if there’s anything that needs sorting out, he’ll manage.”

Defence Minster Kevin Foley’s is tipped to be the only survival of the regime change, as Government Services Facilitator. In the cubicles of a South Parklands toilet last night, a voice resembling the former Treasurer’s was heard to say “Who’s laughing now?”

Former Halliburton/KBR GlobalVice President for Infrastructure, and now Defence-SA boss Andrew Fletcher was unavailable for comment, referring queries to the Regime Change department of KBR’s headquarters in Houston.

Yet another reason that major banks, this time in Britain, regard corporate social responsibility as something that needs to be done, rather than actually believed. Making money, no matter how, is the key reason to get up in the morning. And helping to manufacture death? Bring. It. On:

British high-street banks, including two institutions that were bailed out by taxpayers, are investing hundreds of millions of pounds in companies that manufacture cluster bombs – despite a growing global ban outlawing the production and trade of the weapons.

The Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB, Barclays and HSBC have all provided funding to the makers of cluster bombs, even as international opinion turns against a weapons system that is inherently indiscriminate and routinely maims or kills civilians.

One year ago this month, Britain became an active participant in the Convention on Cluster Munitions, a global treaty that bans the use, production, stockpiling and transfer of cluster bombs. To date, 108 countries have signed the treaty, which also forbids parties from assisting in the production of cluster weapons.

Yet there has been no attempt by the Coalition Government to rein in banks and investment funds that continue to finance companies known to manufacture the weapons.

And one of them is possibly the next US President. Will the Jewish mainstream condemn such figures? I’m not holding my breath. Being “pro-Israel” seemingly trumps everything, especially human rights:

A company that should be named, shamed and shunned (via the Sydney Morning Herald):

Cisco, one of the world’s largest technology companies, is being sued by Chinese political prisoners for allegedly providing the technology and expertise used by the Chinese Communist Party to monitor, censor and suppress the Chinese people.

Dan Ward, of US law firm Ward & Ward, has brought the case on behalf of Du Daobin, Zhou Yuanzhi, Liu Xianbin and ten unnamed others. He compared Cisco’s actions to “IBM’s behaviour in Nazi Germany”.

Cisco has rejected the allegations as baseless but has failed to respond to serious questions stemming from an internal company presentation.

“Cisco has, for years now, knowingly aided and abetted the Chinese Communist Party’s ongoing efforts to stifle the free speech and discourse of its citizenry,” Mr Ward told Fairfax Media.

“Dating back to the early 2000s, Cisco competed for contracts with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to help design, develop and implement the ‘Golden Shield Project’ – a rather Orwellian euphemism for the Chinese Communist Party’s ongoing effort to monitor, track and censor all internet traffic into and out of China.”

According to court documents, Mr Du spent three years in jail, Mr Zhou is currently a prisoner in his own home and Mr Liu has served two months of a 10 year sentence. All three claim to have been tortured and abused over articles they published online.

The world’s only super-power may be soon run by this (via The Daily Beast):

With Tim Pawlenty out of the presidential race, it is now fairly clear that the GOP candidate will either be Mitt Romney or someone who makes George W. Bush look like Tom Paine. Of the three most plausible candidates for the Republican nomination, two are deeply associated with a theocratic strain of Christian fundamentalism known as Dominionism. If you want to understand Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, understanding Dominionism isn’t optional.

Put simply, Dominionism means that Christians have a God-given right to rule all earthly institutions. Originating among some of America’s most radical theocrats, it’s long had an influence on religious-right education and political organizing. But because it seems so outré, getting ordinary people to take it seriously can be difficult. Most writers, myself included, who explore it have been called paranoid. In a contemptuous 2006 First Things review of several books, including Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy, and my own Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, conservative columnist Ross Douthat wrote, “the fear of theocracy has become a defining panic of the Bush era.”

…

We have not seen this sort of thing at the highest levels of the Republican Party before. Those of us who wrote about the Christian fundamentalist influence on the Bush administration were alarmed that one of his advisers, Marvin Olasky, was associated with Christian Reconstructionism. It seemed unthinkable, at the time, that an American president was taking advice from even a single person whose ideas were so inimical to democracy. Few of us imagined that someone who actually championed such ideas would have a shot at the White House. It turns out we weren’t paranoid enough. If Bush eroded the separation of church and state, the GOP is now poised to nominate someone who will mount an all-out assault on it. We need to take their beliefs seriously, because they certainly do.

Surely companies that assist repressive regimes in their censorship should pay a legal and ethical price in their home country? This is an argument in my book The Blogging Revolution (just re-released in an updated edition). This story is from Guelph Mercury:

A Guelph tech firm with a reputation for making tools to control information abroad is now tightening communications at home.

After giving several media interviews during its rapid rise in the burgeoning internet security sector, Netsweeper is now refusing to speak to reporters.

“There’s no good conversation for us to have,” company spokesperson Scott O’Neill told the Toronto Star in June. Requests for comment by the Guelph Mercury and The Canadian Press have also been turned down.

Netsweeper also recently rejected a meeting request by Guelph MP Frank Valeriote.

“I wanted to meet with them. I wanted to learn more about everything they did, more than I was able to glean from their website and news articles,” he said. “I’m disappointed they didn’t want to meet with me.”

The silence follows allegations the company provides censorship software to Middle Eastern clients who actively suppress free speech and access to information.

According to researchers from Citizen Lab, a web censorship watchdog at the Munk School of Global Affairs, at the University of Toronto, Netsweeper currently provides filtering tools to state-owned telecommunications companies in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

All three clients use the software to block political, religious and same-sex content, Citizen Lab has reported. In its promotional material, Netsweeper boasts it can block websites “based on social, religious or political ideals.”

What does any of this mean for Guelph? Some say not much.

“It is not the City’s practice to comment on the business and contractual relationships of private companies,” Peter Cartwright, general manager of economic development and tourism, said. “If the company has broken any provincial or federal laws, these matters would be have to be addressed by those levels of government.”

Others disagree.

“I think as citizens of the local community, the country and the world, we have multiple obligations,” Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab, said.

“It’s imperative that citizens of Guelph think of themselves as custodians of what takes place in Guelph and is projected internationally.”

Melbourne Herald Sun writer Alan Howe just doesn’t like Arabs too much. All those free trips to Israel thanks to the Zionist lobby have worked a treat. The Jewish community must be so proud that one of the strongest advocates for Israel in the Australian media also really hates Palestinians. Well done!

His latest piece, in today’s paper, attacks Federal Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon for, well, being alive but especially her backing of BDS, that evil plan to ethically cleanse all Jews from Palestine. Oh wait.

Here’s Howe:

Rhiannon also supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) group that targets Jewish companies doing business with Israel. The idea is to economically cripple the only democracy in the Middle East and the one country in which the region’s Arabs are guaranteed safety.

Rhiannon has boasted that South African cleric Desmond Tutu had written to support the boycotts.

Crikey, Tutu must have some time on his hands. You’d reckon the famed campaigner for freedom and democracy, and opponent of homophobia, would have been busy sorting out Zimbabwe, right next door.

Robert Mugabe has destroyed that country, kills his opponents and persecutes gays, who are described by their president as repugnant and repulsive – “I don’t believe they have any rights at all”. They are “lower than pigs and dogs”, he adds, fearful deputies nodding in agreement.

Tutu has criticised Mugabe in the past, but it’s more bark than bite.

Those Jewish dogs are different, though. Tutu and Rhiannon will sort them out.

Last month, as part of the campaign against Israel in those violent protests outside the Max Brenner chocolate shop in Melbourne, 19 demonstrators and three police were injured.

Some prominent Australians met to drink hot chocolate outside the Brenner shop some days later in a counter protest against the violence.

Smarter than Rhiannon, they know about the 1930s and where violent protests against Jewish traders may end. It was a colourful time of brownshirts, blackshirts, and yellow Stars of David. The streets ran red. The Green Senator should read up on it.