Antony Loewenstein

The development and exploitation of natural resources by corporates is on the march globally. Take the proposed gas hub in the Kimberely in Western Australia. Governments are usually far too keen to please corporations, with locals and environmental concerns largely ignored.

Chevron recently announced a massive LNG project off the Western Australian coast.

Such moves are reflective of predatory capitalism with little or no thought into the records of the companies being granted access.

Tonight’s Sunday Night TV program featured a story about Chevron polluting in Ecuador. A responsible government would not ignore evidence of a company willfully shunning its responsibilities to properly manage the environment:

Renouncing terrorism as part of a national liberation struggle is a complex business, either done for pragmatic reasons or genuine remorse. Whatever the reason, Tamils in Sri Lanka remain deeply oppressed:

Five years after they were caught buying arms for Sri Lankan rebels, three Canadians have signed an open letter from prison acknowledging they were wrong and renouncing political violence.

“We incorrectly believed that violence could achieve the goals that we sought,” they wrote. “We now realize that what we did was not helpful in leading to a positive resolution of the issues that existed in Sri Lanka.”

The rejection of armed militancy is a complete reversal for the Toronto men, who were part of the international weapons procurement network that supplied the Tamil Tigers, or LTTE, during Sri Lanka’s long civil war.

But since being caught in New York shopping for $1-million worth of surface-to-air missiles and AK-47 assault rifles — a crime that earned them sentences of at least 25 years — the men have apparently had a change of heart.

“Each of us has come to the conclusion that the criminal activity for which we have been sentenced has caused much harm to all citizens of Sri Lanka,” wrote Sathajhan Sarachandran, Thiruthanikan Thanigasalam and Sahilal Sabaratnam.

“We incorrectly believed that supporting LTTE ideology on armed violence would bring peace to Tamil people. We refrain from those believes [sic] now,” reads the joint letter signed by each of them at their prison in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Aug. 21. The letter, obtained exclusively by the National Post, was to be released publicly in the coming days.

The repudiation of political violence is the first of its kind to emerge from Canadians actively involved in supporting the Tamil Tigers, a federally banned armed separatist group that has long been active in Toronto.

When we understand that wars come about as a result of lies, peddled to the British public and the American public and public all over Europe and other countries, then who are the war criminals? It is not just leaders, it is not just soldiers, it is journalists, journalists are war criminals.

And Assange, interviewed at the same London rally, talks about the role of intervention in Libya and beyond.

There are few lengths to which so-called Western democracies won’t go to protect Zionist leaders accused of war crimes:

Britain blocked an attempt on Thursday to arrest visiting Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni for alleged war crimes, officials said.

Livni, foreign minister during Israel’s three-week assault on the Palestinian-ruled Gaza Strip launched in December 2008, is the first senior Israeli figure to visit Britain since the government changed a war crimes law that had kept her and some other Israeli officials away for fear of arrest.

Her centrist Kadima party said she was in Britain at the invitation of Foreign Secretary William Hague.

A Palestinian civilian, who maintains Livni is responsible for war crimes allegedly committed by Israel during the Gaza offensive, asked Britain’s top prosecutor to allow an application be made for an arrest warrant for Livni, according to lawyers representing the unnamed Palestinian.

The Crown Prosecution Service said prosecutors had not taken a decision on the request when the government intervened, informing them that Livni was on a “special mission” to Britain, effectively granting her immunity from prosecution.

As a result, Britain’s top prosecutor, Keir Starmer, refused to allow an application to court for an arrest warrant against Livni.

Britain last month introduced a new law limiting citizens’ rights to seek the arrest of foreign politicians for alleged war crimes committed anywhere in the world.

But there remains some confusion as to what the British government is doing, as Ben White reports for the New Statesman:

Last month, on the day that changes in universal jurisdiction law went into effect, Israel’s former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said she “received a phone call” from UK Ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould telling her “there is no longer a warrant for my arrest”.

Yet when Livni arrived in Britain on Thursday, something went wrong. In what was billed as a “test case” for a law designed to remove the threat of arrest for visiting Israeli officials, Livni only avoided a warrant due to a legal assessment by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) that she was on a “Special Mission”.

In a statement released Thursday lunchtime, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) revealed that it was the Special Mission status of Livni’s visit that led the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) to refuse to “give his consent to the private prosecutor to make an application to the court for an arrest warrant”.

Some incorrectly interpreted this as the DPP blocking an attempt to arrest Livni; in fact, as a spokesperson for the CPS had confirmed to me, what prevented an arrest warrant being issued was the Special Mission status – there was no decision regarding the prospect of conviction.

According to the CPS’s statement, the DPP took into account a case earlier this year when the High Court considered, among other things, the “legal effect” of the Special Mission certificate. But by citing this ruling, more questions are raised about what happened Thursday.

Evidence submitted to the High Court included a letter written by the FCO itself in January 2011, which described a Special Mission as “a means to conduct ad hoc diplomacy in relation to specific international business”, whose “fundamental aspect” is “the mutuality of consent of both the sending and the receiving States to the Special Mission”. In his ruling, Lord Justice Moses said that “the Special Mission represents the sending State in the same way as a permanent Diplomatic Mission represents the State who sends it”, and called it “vital” that “the consent which must be previously obtained is consent to a Special Mission” (my emphasis). Moses added: “Not every official visit is a Special Mission”.

Yet Livni, a foreign opposition politician who was not part of a wider government delegation, was afforded Special Mission status. How were FCO legal advisers able to make this analysis, if, as appears to be the case, there was no prior agreement between the British and Israeli governments that Livni’s visit would be a Special Mission?

@OccupyTheHood, Occupy Wall Street from adele pham on Vimeo.

Mining and exploitation remain live issues in and around Papua New Guinea; it is disaster capitalism on a grand scale.

These two clips, made in the 1990s for ABC TV and Channel 9 TV, show that the issues of today have been around for decades, as long as a poor nation has a resource curse:

A beautiful articulation of this moment:

I love you.

And I didn’t just say that so that hundreds of you would shout “I love you” back, though that is obviously a bonus feature of the human microphone. Say unto others what you would have them say unto you, only way louder.

Yesterday, one of the speakers at the labor rally said: “We found each other.” That sentiment captures the beauty of what is being created here. A wide-open space (as well as an idea so big it can’t be contained by any space) for all the people who want a better world to find each other. We are so grateful.

If there is one thing I know, it is that the 1 percent loves a crisis. When people are panicked and desperate and no one seems to know what to do, that is the ideal time to push through their wish list of pro-corporate policies: privatizing education and social security, slashing public services, getting rid of the last constraints on corporate power. Amidst the economic crisis, this is happening the world over.

And there is only one thing that can block this tactic, and fortunately, it’s a very big thing: the 99 percent. And that 99 percent is taking to the streets from Madison to Madrid to say “No. We will not pay for your crisis.”

That slogan began in Italy in 2008. It ricocheted to Greece and France and Ireland and finally it has made its way to the square mile where the crisis began.

“Why are they protesting?” ask the baffled pundits on TV. Meanwhile, the rest of the world asks: “What took you so long?” “We’ve been wondering when you were going to show up.” And most of all: “Welcome.”

Many people have drawn parallels between Occupy Wall Street and the so-called anti-globalization protests that came to world attention in Seattle in 1999. That was the last time a global, youth-led, decentralized movement took direct aim at corporate power. And I am proud to have been part of what we called “the movement of movements.”

…

But the biggest difference a decade makes is that in 1999, we were taking on capitalism at the peak of a frenzied economic boom. Unemployment was low, stock portfolios were bulging. The media was drunk on easy money. Back then it was all about start-ups, not shut downs.

We pointed out that the deregulation behind the frenzy came at a price. It was damaging to labor standards. It was damaging to environmental standards. Corporations were becoming more powerful than governments and that was damaging to our democracies. But to be honest with you, while the good times rolled, taking on an economic system based on greed was a tough sell, at least in rich countries.

Ten years later, it seems as if there aren’t any more rich countries. Just a whole lot of rich people. People who got rich looting the public wealth and exhausting natural resources around the world.

Disturbing news from Baghdad, via McClatchy:

An Anglican priest here says he’s working with the U.S. Embassy to persuade the handful of Jews who still live in Baghdad to leave because their names have appeared in cables published last month by WikiLeaks.

The Rev. Canon Andrew White said he first approached members of the Jewish community about what he felt was the danger they faced after a news story was published last month that made reference to the cables.

“The U.S. Embassy is desperately trying to get them out,” White said. So far, however, only one, a regular confidante of the U.S. Embassy, according to the cables, had expressed interest in emigrating to the United States.

“Most want to stay,” White said. “The older ones are refusing to leave. They say: ‘We’re Iraqis. Why should we go? If they kill us, we will die here.’”

The U.S. Embassy said it would take steps to protect the individuals whose names appear in the cables and suggested in a statement that should any wish to leave, the U.S. would help relocate them.

“Protecting individuals whose safety is at risk because of the release of the purported cables remains a priority. We are working actively to ensure that they remain safe,” the embassy said.

It slammed WikiLeaks for releasing the cables. “Releasing the names of individuals cited in conversations that took place in confidence potentially puts their lives or careers at risk,” the statement said.

A furious White also hit the website for publishing the cables. “How could they do something as stupid as that?” he said. “Do they not realize this is a life and death issue?”

WikiLeaks did not respond to a request for comment. Previously, WikiLeaks has said that it had no choice but to make its copies of the cables public after the publication in a book of a password that opened an encrypted version of the cables already available on the Internet.

“We had to warn them of the danger and tell them that we want them all to leave,” White said. “I never wanted the Jews to leave Iraq. They belong here.”

If White persuades Baghdad’s remaining Jews to leave it will mark the end of a 2,700-year presence that dates to the Assyrian conquest of the Judean Kingdom.

If more evidence was needed of the moral collapse of the mainstream Israeli “peace movement”, this is it. The fact that the Israeli government would honour the group Peace Now is bad enough but the quotes from its leader are highly revealing, and depressing:

The Peace Now movement has recently received a certificate of merit from Defense Minister Ehud Barakfor its support of reserve soldiers.

The certificate was personally signed by Barak and Chief Reserve Officer Brigadier General Shuki Ben-Anat. “For your activity and care for employees serving in reserve duty. Your activity is commendable and greatly contributes to the IDF’s fortitude and the State of Israel’s security.”

The certificate was issued as part of a competition which honors organizations, businesses and companies whose workers serve as reservists and are supported in this by their workplace.

Peace Now Secretary-General said in response: “Each year I get to visit the territories as a combat reserve soldier despite the difficulty in following disputable orders such as guarding settlements or outposts, working in checkpoints and conducting tours in the West Bank.

“I believe than in a democratic country, the government makes the decision and as I am willing to guard settlements with my body I expect soldiers by my side to help in future evacuations.

He added: “The Right is trying to incite against the Left and take ownership of patriotism and loyalty to the State. A loyal citizen is a person who is willing to fight for the state’s future and work towards changing reality. I am glad about receiving the certificate but as far as Peace Now is concerned reserve duty is obvious and not anything out of the ordinary.”