Antony Loewenstein

It’s a discussion that rarely occurs in Western countries where Serco (and other corporations) are increasingly intruding on our lives. As citizens we are meant to silently accept the influence of these unaccountable firms. Privatisation will set us free, apparently.

Resistance is most certainly not futile. Take this recent piece by Zoe Williams in the Guardian:

One Society has produced some data on pay differentials, called A Third of a Percent (this is the pay of a UK low-paid worker compared to their chief executives). They found that private firms whose main income came from the public sector paid CEOs far more than the highest paid public sector employee. So, for instance, “Serco, which receives over 90% of its business from the public sector, paid Christopher Hyman an estimated £3,149,950 in 2010. This is six times more than the highest paid UK public servant and 11 times more than the highest-paid UK local authority CEO.”

It’s hard to compare Hyman to the lowest paid Serco employee, since the bottom figure visible on the collective bargaining records is for a Docklands Light Railway passenger service agent, at £35,000. But that almost certainly doesn’t represent the bottom of the pay spine – for the period from 1 April 2009 electricians in Serco’s Integrated Services bargaining unit were subject to a pay deal with a minimum rate equivalent to £10,358 a year.

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Not wishing to pick on Serco, since the situations in A4e, Capita and G4S are similar, these companies do, when they have a profit glitch, behave like any other big four with a stranglehold on the money supply: they squeeze suppliers. Last year, worried about local authority cuts (which of course hadn’t happened at this point), Serco sent out a letter to suppliers demanding a 2.5% reduction in costs, on the basis that, “Like the government, we are looking to determine who our real partners are that we can rely upon. Your response will no doubt indicate your commitment to our partnership”. They rescinded this after widespread outrage, but the message will have been easily recognised by anyone who’s ever objected to the working strategy of a major supermarket: we’re your conduit to the public cash cow, and you’ll do as we say.

Meanwhile in Australia, Serco operates with government backing (though public opposition, such as this Facebook page Serco Watch, is growing):

A lucrative IT contract for the new Fiona Stanley Hospital has been awarded to a British company in what has been touted by the state opposition as a continued disregard of keeping local jobs in Western Australia.

The decision follows the opposition’s outcry about the need to protect locally resourced jobs after BlueScope Steel axed more than 1000 staff in Victoria and New South Wales because it could no longer compete in the export market.

Now controversial hospital operator Serco, which is primarily a British company, has awarded British Telecommunications the IT services contract as part of a “boys looking after boys” deal, according to opposition spokesperson for IT strategy Andrew Waddell.

In some countries, such as Britain, there is continued public pressure on Colombo to hold those accused of war crimes to account. And rightly so.

The Australian government has a rather different view:

Several of the Tamil asylum seekers caught trying to flee Sri Lanka for Australia this week are being held in detention camps without charge under draconian anti-terror laws.

Australia has praised Sri Lanka for intercepting a boat carrying 44 asylum seekers, including two children, with high commissioner Kathy Klugman applauding the Sri Lankan security forces’ work.

But refugee advocates have criticised Australia’s uncritical support for Sri Lanka and accused the government of ignoring war crimes allegations stemming from Colombo’s brutal civil war with the Tamil Tigers.

The Australian high commissioner in Colombo, Kathy Klugman, has displayed appalling judgment in praising the Sri Lankan navy and police after the interception of a boat carrying 44 people, apparently bound for Australia. What we know of this particular case is limited: the 44 Tamils, including two children, were picked up in rough seas off the east of the country on Sunday as they attempted to flee. The children are now in the care of their grandparents, 36 others hauled before a magistrate and remanded in custody. The remaining six have disappeared into a detention camp in the country’s south, accused of being former fighters with the Tamil Tigers.

We know much more about the broader context. Sri Lanka stands accused of vicious abuses in the civil war – abuses that were certainly committed by both sides, but a military victory does not absolve the government of its moral culpability. Prime Minister Julia Gillard has acknowledged the conflict was a major factor in the increased number of people seeking haven in Australia in recent years. The United Nations has recognised more than 140,000 refugees from Sri Lanka.

Yet Australia’s representative has blithely ignored the cloud hanging over Sri Lanka’s security forces in what appears an effort to preserve official ties and warn of the dangers of a 5500-kilometre sea passage to Australia. Of course the journey is treacherous. But it is a sour look that damages Australia’s reputation to applaud the ring fence around Sri Lanka and pre-judge the merits of people seeking to escape.

It’s so hard to see why the Western-led war in Afghanistan is failing miserably:

An Afghan-owned security company accused of operating an illicit protection racket received “a slap on the wrist” from the Defense Department despite ample evidence of wrongdoing, according to a senior House Democrat critical of the military’s efforts to combat corruption in Afghanistan.

The complaint from Rep. John Tierney, D-Mass., detailed in a Sept. 13 letter to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, sets the stage for a contentious congressional hearing scheduled for Thursday on how aggressively the Pentagon is holding contractors working in war zones accountable for fraud and bribery.

In the letter, Tierney summarizes the findings of “Warlord, Inc.,” an investigation he led last year which concluded that Ahmad and Rashid Popal, the owners of the Watan Group, and Haji Ruhullah, a former assistant manager for the company, bribed local Afghan officials and used heavy weapons prohibited by the $2.16 billion Army transportation contract they were working under. They all denied funneling money to the Taliban, Tierney said, but evidence gathered by his staff “raised doubts about those claims.”

Based on the findings of Warlord Inc., Army officials in December proposed barring Watan’s security arm, Watan Risk Management, and Ruhullah from doing business with the U.S. government. Armed with American attorneys, the Popals and Ruhullah separately challenged the actions. Ruhullah won. The Army cited his status as a subordinate at Watan and said his inability to speak English meant he could not understand the terms of the contract or the investigators from Tierney’s staff who interviewed him.

The Middle East is changing before our very eyes and this of course worries the Western powers that have become used to dictating terms to Arab dictatorships.

The New York Times has the official view. Can you feel the loss of power and prestige?

While the popular uprisings of the Arab Spring created new opportunities for American diplomacy, the tumult has also presented the United States with challenges — and worst-case scenarios — that would have once been almost unimaginable.

What if the Palestinians’ quest for recognition of a state at the United Nations, despite American pleas otherwise, lands Israel in the International Criminal Court, fuels deeper resentment of the United States, or touches off a new convulsion of violence in the West Bank and Gaza?

Or if Egypt, emerging from decades of autocratic rule under President Hosni Mubarak, responds to anti-Israeli sentiments on the street and abrogates the Camp David peace treaty, a bulwark of Arab-Israeli stability for three decades?

“We’re facing an Arab awakening that nobody could have imagined and few predicted just a few years ago,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a recent interview with reporters and editors of The New York Times. “And it’s sweeping aside a lot of the old preconceptions.”

It may also sweep aside, or at least diminish, American influence in the region. The bold vow on Friday by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, to seek full membership at the United Nations amounted to a public rebuff of weeks of feverish American diplomacy. His vow came on top of a rapid and worrisome deterioration of relations between Egypt and Israel and between Israel and Turkey, the three countries that have been the strongest American allies in the region.

Diplomacy has never been easy in the Middle East, but the recent events have so roiled the region that the United States fears being forced to take sides in diplomatic or, worse, military disputes among its friends. Hypothetical outcomes seem chillingly present. What would happen if Turkey, a NATO ally that the United States is bound by treaty to defend, sent warships to escort ships to Gaza in defiance of Israel’s blockade, as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to do?

Crises like the expulsion of Israel’s ambassador in Turkey, the storming of the Israeli Embassy in Cairo and protests outside the one in Amman, Jordan, have compounded a sense of urgency and forced the Obama administration to reassess some of this country’s fundamental assumptions, and to do so on the fly.

“The region has come unglued,” said Robert Malley, a senior analyst in Washington for the International Crisis Group. “And all the tools the United States has marshaled in the past are no longer as effective.”

…

“Things are so fluid,” said Robert Danin, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “They’re not driving the train. They’re reacting to the train, and no one knows where the train is going.”

Will Hutton in the London Observer:

Eighty years ago, faced with today’s economic events, nobody would have been in any doubt: we would obviously be living through a crisis in capitalism. Instead, there is a collective unwillingness to call a spade a spade. This is variously a crisis of the European Union, a crisis of the euro, a debt crisis or a crisis of political will. It is all those things, but they are subplots of a much bigger story: the way capitalism has been conceived and practised for the last 30 years has hit the buffers. Unless and until that is recognised, western economies will be locked in stagnation which could even transmute into a major economic disaster.

Simply put, the world has trillions upon trillions of excessive private debt financed by too many different currencies whose risk is allegedly mitigated by even more trillions of financial bets which in aggregate do not minimise the systemic risk one iota. This entire financial edifice, underwritten by tiny amounts of capital, has been created over three decades backed by the theory that markets do not make mistakes. Capitalism is best conceived and practised, runs the theory, by hunter-gatherer bankers and entrepreneurs owing no allegiance to the state or society.

This is nonsense. Business and the state co-generate wealth in a system of complex mutual dependence. Markets are beset by mood swings and uncertainty which, if not offset by government action, lead to violent oscillations. Capitalism without responsibility or proportionality degrades into racketeering and exploitation. The prospect of limitless pay is an open invitation to bad, or even criminal, behaviour. Good capitalism cannot happen without referees to blow the whistle or robust frameworks in which markets can function; neither is reliably created by capitalism itself, hence the role of democratic government. Yet the world is trying to solve the legacy of the last 30 years as if none of this were true and, instead, that the practice and theories that created the mess are still valid.

The issue of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) continues to dominate the media agenda (with the Israeli occupation largely ignored). Today’s Melbourne Sunday Age has a feature on the issue and once again shows the Zionist establishment echoing anti-Semitic illusions:

John Searle, president of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, takes issue with the language of the protesters [against Israeli company Max Brenner].

He says slogans used at Max Brenner’s were ”outrageous and disgusting” – particularly chants about blood in chocolate, and genocide.

”Here in Melbourne, in 2011, we have to hear the blood libel repeated all over again,” Mr Searle says, referring to the anti-Semitic slur that Jews consume human blood.

While AJDS and other Zionist groups struggle with facts on the ground in Palestine, the reality of West Bank apartheid are registering in various ways (and real commentators are happy to assess the real BDS agenda). Take this progressive American Rabbi who now supports BDS against settlement products.

And American and Israeli values are increasingly different, something the Zionist establishment globally is keen to avoid discussing. Here’s Haaretz last week:

It has become conventional wisdom since U.S. President Barack Obama assumed his position two-and-a-half years ago that tensions between Washington and Jerusalem were largely due to personality differences between the U.S. president and Prime Minister Netanyahu. However, a new report, published by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, claims the challenge is much bigger than the lack of the personal chemistry between the two, and can’t be dismissed as merely temporary turbulence.

CSIS Deputy Director of the Middle East Program Haim Malka warned in a new report titled “Crossroads: The Future of the U.S.-Israel Strategic Partnership”, that “social and political trends in the United States and Israel are reshaping the politics of both societies”.

The report expressed alarm over “ the erosion of the intangible elements of support, most importantly the ideal of shared values that had been the glue of the partnership long before the strategic alliance took shape”.

Malka claimed that it is impossible that U.S. and Israeli interests be totally aligned, however he believes that “Israel has become a complicated domestic political issue” in the U.S. alienating younger liberal Jews that disapprove of Israel’s handling of the conflict and lack of religious pluralism.

He also attributed these growing differences to changes within Israeli society, saying “today Israel’s Jewish population is more nationalistic, religiously conservative, and hawkish on foreign policy and security affairs than that of even a generation ago, and it would be unrecognizable to Israel’s founders.”

This, according to Malka, has reshaped Israeli politics and policies, increasingly estranging Israel’s Arab populace.

As these trends in both countries continue to take their course, diplomatic challenges “will likely intensify and spark additional U.S.-Israeli friction”, the report said, necessitating a reevaluation of the relationship, instead of resting upon the ages-old mantra of shared values and interests.

Sadly, Murdoch’s Australian is happy to continue printing the lie that BDS is akin to Nazism. Columnist Angela Shanahan yesterday (with a photo of “Max Brenner”, a man who doesn’t actually exist but why focus on mere details?)

One can only imagine what other factors would have had to be considered before the ACCC did anything: a brick through a window, perhaps, or daubing the place with swastikas? When you think about it, the new Green Left really don’t sound different from the old grey Left of my youth: always up for an anti-Israel boycott and protest. Nor do they sound much different from another brand of extremism: that of the old Right, in another place and time.

Of course Shanahan probably doesn’t read her own paper which featured a pretty strong piece by John Lyons yesterday on the crushing occupation that oppresses Palestinians day after day. No doubt the Zionist lobby has already complained about the article’s clear anti-Semitic intent:

In the lead-up to the [UN] vote, the Israeli Defence Forces is giving additional guns, tear gas and training to the estimated 350,000 Jewish settlers. Settlers are already heavily armed; the IDF has a policy under which if a settler believes they may be threatened, the IDF will give them weapons and training. The potential for catastrophe is obvious.

Israel’s “settlement enterprise” began after it captured the West Bank in the 1967 war. Some Israelis believe the country now pays too high a price in terms of damage to its international reputation and resources.

Under international law, Israel’s settlements are held to be illegal. The Fourth Geneva Convention states: “The occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

The Western world is now infested with privatisation as the supposed ideal of society. In reality, the opposite is true.

Take the recent report by the US-based Project on Government Oversight:

• Federal government employees were less expensive than contractors in 33 of the 35 occupational classifications POGO reviewed.
• In one instance, contractor billing rates were nearly 5 times more than the full compensation paid to federal employees performing comparable services.
• Private sector compensation was lower than contractor billing rates in all 35 occupational classifications we reviewed.
• The federal government has failed to determine how much money it saves or wastes by outsourcing, insourcing, or retaining services, and has no system for doing so.

One of the dirtiest forms of this ideology is in the military sphere and mercenaries.

This fascinating story on the magazine Soldiers of Fortune highlights the dark side of the industry (er, not that there’s really a positive side):

Since the mid-to-late 1970s era of promoting mercenary work in African bush wars, Soldier of Fortune has distributed what CBS’ “60 Minutes” called a “political warfare journal,” published classified ads that resulted in no fewer than five murders-for-hire on American soil, and helped to equip paramilitary border vigilantes who terrorized Latino immigrants. 

Conservative media sites lauded Brown last year on the 35th anniversary of Soldier of Fortune. “Certainly the magazine has drawn its share of controversy,” Newsmax gushed:

“It has consistently outraged the left by publishing Rhodesian Army recruiting posters, to offering $25,000 in gold to a defector from Cuban intelligence, to a $1,000,000 reward for the defection of a Nicaraguan MI-24 helicopter. All the while training the Contras and Salvadorian army.”

This week (probably) sees the Palestinian Authority (PA) go to the UN and ask for something resembling statehood. It’s all so vague and so deeply troubling that too many in the Western world have blindly supported it (such as today’s UK Observer). Others, such as Gideon Levy in Haaretz, can’t understand why Barack Obama isn’t backing it (it’s called domestic concerns, the Zionist lobby and gutlessness, a hallmark of his Presidency).

The PA has nothing left to offer. Indeed, they’ve spent the last decades foolishly negotiating with a Zionist state that has no desire to end the occupation. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman despairs for his beloved Israel but can only repeat the same two-state solution talking points that have stunningly failed. More forward-thinking people, such as Palestinian Ali Abunimah, oppose the UN bid because it aims to legitimise the PA and codify separation.

In Australia, we have the predictably unedifying sight of Jewish politicians longing to be the best lover Israel has ever had:

Two prominent Jewish MPs have engaged in a public spat over which of the major political parties is a bigger friend of Israel.

Labor’s Michael Danby has lambasted the Coalition’s Josh Frydenberg as an ”inexperienced Liberal Party operative” looking to score cheap political points after Mr Frydenberg challenged the Gillard government to vote against Palestinian statehood at the United Nations this week.

Ambassadors in New York agree with Israel’s position that the Palestinian bid is a wrong move that may bring unwanted results. Yet they say Israel is to blame as it has failed to present any political initiatives, leading to a lengthy political deadlock.

Two requirements for an effective post-September program seem evident: our Palestinian civil society partners should articulate a clear vision of where they see the struggle headed, if not a detailed program; and all of us working for Palestinian self-determination – Palestinian, Israeli and international activists alike – should hold urgent and critical discussions regarding our next steps. Our activism and our campaigns need to be accompanied by Palestinian-led strategizing, together with far more coordination and communication. We in ICAHD believe that the vote at the UN – or even a non-vote in the UN – is going be a game-changer. At least it is likely to clear the table of all the obstacles to pursuing a truly just peace: fruitless negotiations, the two-state “solution” and, very possibly, the PA itself, which has too long enabled Israel to prolong its occupation. We must be prepared for that shifting of the political ground. We must be pro-active, united and effective.

While Washington and much of the West turns away, citizens must continue raising their voices. Anthony Shadid writes in the New York Times:

Activists trade stories of colleagues forced to eat feces in prison and high-ranking Shiite bureaucrats compelled to crawl in their offices like infants. Human rights groups say 43 Shiite mosques and religious structures were destroyed or damaged by a government that contended that it faced an Iranian-inspired plot, without offering any evidence that Tehran played a role. Backed by the armed intervention of Saudi Arabia, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa declared martial law in March, and though it was repealed June 1, the reverberations of the repression still echo across the island.

“They told me, ‘There are two ways we can deal with you — as a human or as an animal,’ ” Matar Matar, 45, recalled being told after he was arrested by men in civilian clothes in May and jailed for three months.

I’ve spent the last days at Australia’s first investigative journalism conference organised by the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism, where I’m an Honorary Associate. It was called Back to the Source and I spoke on the effect of Wikileaks on modern journalism (short version; it’s major, it’s profound and the mainstream press are nervous about losing its power).

Video of my event will be forthcoming but in the meantime I was very impressed with the various talks by Robert Rosenthal, Executive Director of America’s Centre for Investigative Reporting. It’s an organisation, funded largely by philanthropic means, designed to produce quality journalism. Its latest major project was about the details of post 9/11 anti-terror laws on daily lives.

As one way to explain very complex information, the group produced this animation, alongside print, online, radio and video, and it shows how new forms of journalism can be utilised to reach an even wider number of people. Good media on multiple platforms was a theme repeated over and over again during the conference: