Antony Loewenstein

My following book review appeared in the Melbourne Age/Sydney Morning Herald last weekend:

Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming 
MCKENZIE FUNK 
PENGUIN PRESS, $29.99

Who says global warming is bad for the world? The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report found widespread and consequential effects on food systems and ecosystems, with detrimental ramifications for billions of people around the globe.

But that is only the negative reading of the incontrovertible scientific consensus. Another, far smaller group of people see climate variations as a unique opportunity to make a fortune. Deutsche Bank’s former chief climate strategist, Mark Fulton, used to help his employer identify global warming as a ”megatrend” that could guarantee profits for years. ”It’s always helped me, climate change, in my career,” he jokes with US journalist McKenzie Funk in this timely and necessary book on the new normal for vulture capitalism.

Disasters, man-made and natural, can be wonderful for energising our largely unregulated free markets. They are less welcome for the individuals who cannot afford to insulate themselves from the effects of rising temperatures, extreme storms, melting ice caps and battles for energy security.

Funk’s book is a warning – a unique insight into a world that largely exists in the business pages of our media. A fund manager tells him some insurance companies are licking their lips over climate change, because increasing rates prove ”hurricane season is actually quite a positive thing”. Screw the environmental and practical devastation on lives and property.

As Funk travels to many nations to document the ways in which changing temperatures are ruining life as they know it, he acknowledges this vital fact. ”It’s about people, and mostly it’s about people like me: northerners from the developed world – historically the emitter countries, as we’re called – who occupy the high, dry ground, whether real or metaphorical.”

The US National Snow and Ice Data Centre released figures last month about the declining amount of ice in the Arctic Circle, the fifth lowest peak since 1978. That is 12 per cent shrinking of ice per decade since the late 1970s. This will have worrying effects on rising sea levels and low-lying nations.

Greenland is ground zero for these battles and Funk outlines what is at stake; up to 22 per cent of the world’s untapped oil and gas deposits are ”thought to be hiding in the high north, some of it in territory that does not yet belong to any nation”.

”The less ice there is, the more petroleum there is within reach, and the most pressure there is to stake a claim.”

BP, Shell and London Mining are racing to industrialise the pristine Arctic area and an Australian company, Greenland Minerals and Energy Ltd, is ready to exploit Greenland’s recent approval of uranium mining.

This book details the massive energy multinationals that years ago, internally at least, recognised the threat of climate change and their ability to make money from it. The former head of scenario planning for Royal Dutch Shell published a report for the Pentagon in 2004 that extreme weather was inevitable and re-engineering climate to suit our conditions was necessary. The Pentagon’s concerns, Peter Schwartz tells Funk, revolves around one word: Mogadishu. ”Massive drought led to famine, which led to the collapse of Somalia, which led to the UN intervention, which led to the US intervention, which led to military disaster. They see a string of Mogadishus rolling off into the future.”

It is hard not to view this US position as the white man’s burden, reluctantly saving whichever individuals or communities deemed important to serve imperial interests. Bangladesh is already facing the prospect of millions of citizens being displaced by rising oceans. In the brutal, upcoming Darwinian gamble, it is hard to see the Washington elite viewing them as essential.

Funk speaks to firefighters in Los Angeles who are offering their services to the highest insurance bidder, water privateers, Wall Street bankers buying up valuable land in South Sudan and African environmental refugees desperately looking for arable land.

This compelling investigation into the darker sides of modern nature, as some states will lose parts of their land and people in the 21st century, is sober and not inflammatory.

Funk is right when he concludes climate change is also an issue of human justice.

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist and author of Profits of Doom.

Yes, to all of this, by Amy Davidson in The New Yorker:

Awarding the Pulitzer for public service to the Guardian and the Washington Post should go down as about the easiest call the prize committee has ever had to make. It would have been a scandal, this year, if there had been no Pulitzer related to the documents that Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, leaked to several reporters. This was a defining case of the press doing what it is supposed to do. The President was held accountable; he had to answer questions that he would rather not have and, when his replies proved unsatisfying to the public—and, in some cases, just rang false—his Administration had to change its policies. Congress had to confront its own failures of oversight; private companies had to rethink their obligations to their customers and to law enforcement; and people had conversations at home and at school and pretty much everywhere about what they, themselves, would be willing to let the N.S.A. do to them. Justice Scalia recently said that he fully expected these issues to be before the Supreme Court soon, because we’ve had a chance to read the Snowden papers. And journalists have had to think about their own obligations—to the law, the Constitution, their readers, and even, in the practice of reporting in the age of technical tracking, to sources they might expose or make vulnerable. Any one of those aspects would be a major public service. How could that not be Pulitzer material?

One of the best investigative journalists around, Matt Taibbi, has a new book out, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap. He explains the how and why of successive US administrations turning a blind eye to Wall Street criminality. It’s vulture capitalism on a massive scale.

Here’s Taibbi’s interview with Democracy Now!:

The issue of privatised immigration detention in Australia and globally is one subject of my book Profits of Doom.

Sydney’s FBI Radio Backchat program produced a strong feature on the issue last weekend and interviewed me about it:

My weekly Guardian column:

As an atheist Jew, I find it distinctly uncomfortable to defend the free speech rights of Holocaust deniers. I utterly oppose the inaccuracy, hatred and intolerance that goes with refuting the reality of Nazi crimes against Jews, gay people, Gypsies and many others.

But a truly free society is one that tolerates and encourages strong exchanges of ideas. This includes the most abominable of them, such as those expressed by German born, Australian-citizen, Holocaust denying Frederick Tobin, a regular bogeyman wheeled out to justify laws against offensive thoughts.

I fundamentally share the view expressed by Noam Chomsky that “acceptable speech” should never be decided by the state, because we “don’t want them to have any right to make any decision about what anybody says.” As a result, “a lot of people are going to say things that you think are rotten, and you’re going to say things that a lot of other people think are rotten.”

Australian academic Clinton Fernandes furthers this argument:

“One of the most important points in any discussion about the right of free speech is this: the defence of a person’s right to express certain views is independent of the views actually expressed. Thus, one might defend Salman Rushdie’s freedom to write The Satanic Verses without agreeing with the content of that book – or even needing to read it.”

These issues have all been thrust back into the public spotlight with the Australian government’s desire to amend the Racial Discrimination Act (RDA) to, in their view, expand free and often inflammatory speech. Attorney general George Brandis said last week that, “it is not, in the government’s view, the role of the state to ban conduct merely because it might hurt the feelings of others.”

Tellingly, Brandis has also arguably given the green light for intolerance when he said that people “do have a right to be bigots“. Surely the role of any responsible government is to condemn and fight hatred, rather than encourage it.

The response from the vast bulk of the left to the RDA alterations has been horror and opposition. Minority groups are outraged. The Labor party doesn’t support the changes and leader Bill Shorten has urged the Jewish community to lobby hard against the amendments (a request he would probably not make to other, equally affected communities because of the power of Australian groups backing Israel in influencing both major sides of local politics).

The Zionist establishment, long-time backers of the RDA, have written thousands of words in opposition to the government’s proposed changes, but the irony shouldn’t be lost on us. This is coming from individuals and organisations that routinely petition politicians and media organisations to erect tightly controlled limits on so-called acceptable talk around Israel and Palestine, illegal West Bank colonies and the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. They rarely have any complaints when anti-Muslim or anti-Palestinian sentiment is floated in the press.

Unlike those groups, I welcome a robust discussion over the limits, intent and interest of the state in trying to restrict the most offensive speech imaginable – although I do have some misgivings.

I share some of the concerns of learned law experts, such as Andrew Lynch, a director at the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law at the University of NSW, who writes in the Melbourne Age that the government has a wilful blindness to the profound power disparity between those individuals or groups who may be offended or hurt by hate speech and those most likely to be using them (such as media personalities or politicians). It’s a position utterly lost on cocooned editorial writers and also on columnist Andrew Bolt, who this week praised his ability to receive an apology for hurt feelings, forgetting that his requests come with the power of the massive corporation behind him. Bolt is neither a fair arbiter of how the law should work in relation to hateful speech, nor in a position to understand the awful effect that verbal abuse can have on an Aboriginal, refugee, Jew, Muslim, or Greek.

In supporting some changes to the RDA – principally supporting the removal of laws against “offensive” speech – I acknowledge that I’m writing this as a privileged white man who has rarely experienced racial abuse or hatred because of my religion (except my public, journalistic frankness over Israel/Palestine and the “war on terror” has brought constant hate mail and even death threats).

And at this stage, I also have to underline the fact that the vast bulk of commentators pushing for changes to the RDA are also white and male. It’s impossible to ignore the lack of female, Indigenous and non-Anglo perspectives (there are some exceptions, such as Aboriginal advisorWesley Aird and Sue Gordon, who both back the government’s moves).

As a result, much of the discussion about the RDA is expressed by a political and media class that indulges racism on a daily basis, from theNorthern Territory intervention against Indigenous citizens to our treatment of asylum seekers, racial profiling, or our backing of wars in the Middle East. These groups and individuals don’t really care about tackling everyday racism, preferring to distract the public from their own shocking records instead.

None of this means, though, that those of us who have spent years fighting discrimination against minorities can’t feel uncomfortable with current laws that seek to restrict free speech. The RDA has not reduced tangible racism in Australia (if anything we’re becoming less friendly to migrants, according to a new study) and we shouldn’t look to a state that entrenches racism to legislate against it.

After thinking about this issue for many years, and growing up in the Jewish community I was constantly warned about rampant anti-Semitism, I support this comment by the 20th century American journalist H L Mencken:

“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”

It may make our hearts sink, but we owe it to our democracy to defend the rights of the most offensive people in our community.

I was invited last October by the Australian Society of Authors to speak at their national congress on the role of writing, journalism and being an author. The video has just been posted (!):

Much modern publishing is based on a commercial model, and has relied on authors to deliver sales and profits. Yet authors are also seen as important contributors to culture and education. A further identity – that of speaking truth to power – sees authors consciously take on activist tasks through their work.

Science journalist and NSW Writers Centre Executive Director Jane McCredie led author Susan Johnson and journalist Antony Loewenstein in discussion.

This discussion took place as part of the ASA National Writers’ Congress on Friday 18 October 2013 in Sydney.

The following was broadcast today on ABCTV1:

Can vulture capitalism be stopped?

That’s the question put up by Antony Loewenstein in his last book ‘Profits of Doom: How vulture capitalism is swallowing the world’.

He’s a writer, photographer, blogger, doco-maker and always a provocateur. He’s in conversation here with Chip Rolley, editor of the ABC’s The Drum.

The focus of this exchange is the implications of privatising prisons, detention centres, aid and security in this country and on a global scale.

To put this conversation in context, it took place at the Perth Writers Festival right after the riot on Manus Island and the death of refugee inmate Reza Barati.

I appeared on ABCTV News’s24′s The Drum last Thursday talking about changes in the Murdoch empire, the ethics and politics of changing the racial discrimination laws and why unions are in such dire trouble in Australia:

The job of US State Department favourites (journalists, commentators and politicians who routinely rehash US government talking points over war, peace and the Middle East) must be exhausting. Defending the indefensible while still being on the information drip-feed.

Welcome to the US embassy, the free champagne, caviar and PR tips are in the boardroom.

I was recently attacked, with about as much credibility as Israel when talking about Palestinian rights, by Lowy Institute flak Michael Fullilove over my recent Guardian comments on Russia and Ukraine.

Australian academic Scott Burchill is one of the country’s most astute observers of this pernicious trend. This latest piece by him is spot-on:

Reflexive support for state power and violence by America’s cheerleaders in Australia takes many forms. There are ad hominem attacks on those who disclose Washington’s nefarious secrets, such as its slaughter of journalists in Iraq or its illegal surveillance apparatus directed by the NSA. There is a conspicuous silence when US drones murder civilians in Yemen, Pakistan and  Afghanistan.

Currently there is confected outrage when a rival state cedes territory it considers to be a legitimate strategic asset, but convenient amnesia when questions about invasions and occupations by friends and allies are raised.

Compare the reaction to President Putin’s annexation of Crimea, which has so far resulted in one fatality, with Saudi Arabia’s incursion into Bahrain in 2011 which killed many innocent Shi’ites but which Washington refused to even call an “invasion”. Coincidently, just as Crimea houses the Russian Navy’s Black Sea fleet, Bahrain plays host to the US Fifth Fleet.

Consider Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank, which has killed thousands of Palestinians since 1948, and dispossessed many more, but would not have been possible without Washington’s connivance.

Perhaps there is a closer parallel. We are approaching the 40th anniversary of Turkey’s illegal invasion and occupation of northern Cyprus. Mass expulsions of Greek Cypriots, property theft and egregious human violations including killings and unexplained disappearances, followed the initial attack in July 1974. But Ankara remains a valued NATO ally and there are no suggestions in Washington or Canberra that economic sanctions be imposed on Prime Minister Erdoğan, his business cronies or predecessors. Some invasions and land grabs, such as Indonesia’s 24 year occupation of East Timor which Canberra and Washington enabled, are just fine with us.

Hypocrisy, double standards and selective outrage dominates foreign affairs commentary. Amongst the current avalanche of hysterical Putin bashing in the Western media one fact is always omitted. The US is the most promiscuous interventionary state in the world, with mass slaughters in Afghanistan and Iraq being only the most recent examples of its addiction to military violence. In both these cases Australia was an enthusiastic accomplice.

To those infatuated by power, however, these actions – for which apologies are never issued nor reparations paid – are not crimes, merely “wrong-headed and foolhardy” because Washington’s impact on the world is “benign” (Michael Fullilove) and it remains an “overwhelming force for good in the world” (Greg Sheridan, Kevin Rudd). Just ask the Vietnamese.

Perhaps the strangest claim by American boosters in Australia is that Washington is unfairly singled out for criticism by “the left” and thugs like Putin get off lightly. According to a former Liberal Party staffer, “It’s interesting how little the green-left in Australia has said about Russia’s conquest of Crimea which, under international law, is part of Ukraine. Had the United States done it, I think the green-left would have gone berserk.” (Gerard Henderson ).

Actually, the alleged silence of “the left” is neither interesting nor surprising. Despite its own significant responsibility for what has happened in Ukraine, there is no obsession with Washington’s crimes in the Australian media or across the broader political class. But there should be one.

There is no alliance between Australia and Russia. We don’t have intelligence sharing agreements with Moscow. There are no technology transfers and no Russian troops rotating through Darwin. We don’t play host to “joint facilities” with Russia, have routine ministerial meetings with officials in Moscow or regular bilateral summits between our heads of government. We have no influence on Moscow’s political elite.

We do, however, have limited leverage in Washington. The alliance gives us access to their decision makers, regardless of whether our opinions are welcome. With that opportunity comes a responsibility to exert influence where we can, especially to curb America’s propensity to meet its global political challenges with extreme violence. This does not constitute a disproportionate preoccupation with US foreign policy, as the local Washington lobby would have us believe. As our major ally that is precisely where our focus should be.

It is also our ethical duty. In democratic societies, responsibility for the consequences of our actions extends to the decisions taken by governments on our behalf because we can participate in the process of formulating policy. The US alliance is a policy choice for Australia and there is no evading the moral consequences of that relationship, including the international behaviour of “our great and powerful friend”.

Our leaders closely align themselves with their counterparts in Washington, and claim to share both common values and a similar view of the world. In Iraq and Afghanistan, as in several wars before, we have been willingly complicit in acts of aggression and breaches of international law. Drawing attention to these crimes, as opposed to those committed by others we have no influence upon, does not constitute anti-Americanism. It is our moral and political responsibility. Like charity, analysis and criticism should begin at home.

Essential recent event in New York with Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, Laura Poitras, filmmaker and Barton Gellman of The Washington Post, talking about Edward Snowden, surveillance, censorship and brave reporting:

I was interviewed by Melbourne’s Triple R radio this week:

On, Michelle Bennett talks to author, journalist and activist Antony Loewenstein about Western hypocricy and “peaceful citizen’s arrests”. In a column he wrote recently [for the Guardian], Loewenstein put forth a discussion-provoking argument for greater accountability of Western leaders, including pushing for a serious enquiry into Australia’s involvement in the Iraq War. 

My weekly Guardian column is below:

How many e-book consumers realise that some publishers, writers and distributors know an awful lot about their reading style? They have knowledge about how far into the book you’ve reached, when you get bored, which characters you like and those you don’t. Amazon, Apple and Google, along with countless large publishers, embrace the idea of providing products that readers are apparently craving.

It’s yet another way that our digital footprint is commercialised, marketed and analysed. Nothing is private anymore. Curling up on the couch with an e-book is not a solitary act but instead a way for corporations to learn about your habits and then sell you items you’ll think you need.

Novelist Scott Turow told the Wall Street Journal in 2012 that writers still didn’t know who bought their books or why. “If you can find out that a book is too long and you’ve got to be more rigorous in cutting”, Turow said. “Personally I’d love to get the information.” The president of publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux pithily responded: “We’re not going to shorten War and Peace because somebody didn’t finish it.”

Along with the music and newspaper industries, the publishing world is undergoing a profound transformation that will affect every book that you buy or write. A 2009 New Yorker article on whether the Amazon Kindle could “improve on the book”, is today a redundant question. The device, despite its technological limitations and mundane aesthetics, has sold in the millions (not that Amazon ever releases actual sales figures).

The days of extravagant publishing parties, sales reps enjoying spa treatments and wine tastings are almost gone. The result is that author advances have plummeted, Amazon now controls vast swathes of the industry, bookstores are closing across the Western world and yet at no time in history have more people been reading. Publishers in Australia and globally are trying to adapt, recognising that readers want more choice in how they purchase books. The Australian industry, while perhaps healthier than in years past, remains risk-averse though online opportunities for genre fiction has never been stronger.

The reasons for the publishing malaise is both complex and predictable (yes, the internet kills and nourishes all art forms). In a seminal 2009 essay on the subject, by Elizabeth Sifton, senior vice president of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a litany of figures are blamed, including the industry itself. She worried about the commodification of books, the “internet types” who see books as items to be shifted as opposed to critical cultural artefacts in a healthy democracy and “lucrative junk”. Sifton laments “booklike objects created by the teams working on, say, famous generals in televised wars, cooks, telly dons, ballplayers, realty-show contestants, famous pats. These flashy items dominate shelf space, ad budgets and public attention; they leave nowhere near enough air, space or money for true literature.”

I would counter and say a healthy market should sustain all types of books, from the literary masterpiece to the quickie title based on an instantly forgettable TV show.

Despite it all, the book will survive and perhaps thrive, though our understanding of what a book can do and how it relates to the reader must change. Amazon remains a behemoth and yet a recent New Yorker feature on the company painted a picture of multinational disinterest in building a quality collection of books and literary culture (perhaps because they’re too busy selling garden tools, dildos and toys on their website).

Books, like newspapers, aren’t just products to be bought, discarded and forgotten; they contribute to the necessary exchange of ideas, policies and dreams in any stable nation. Simon and Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy urged her colleagues this year to strongly promote the “marketplace of ideas” that they create. Books can inspire fear and hope, love and pain. They allow any individual to shut out their own lives and imagine a different reality. Whether this is fiction or non-fiction and in print or online, we should celebrate, nourish and support the realisation of creative works. This takes time, money, patience and a diversity of views. Never forget that only six corporations control 90% of media in the US. Smaller, independent presses have therefore never been so important (along with challenging the idea that a company like Google can digitise every book ever written, handing one firm unimaginable and dangerous cultural and financial power).

So what will the reading future look like? It may be dominated by new ideas around wearable technology such as Google Glass. Wired magazine claimed in January that these devices “will be as big as the smartphone”. It’s entirely conceivable that people will want innovative ways to read content as they live, work and sleep. Publishers will need to be ready or the public will simply bypass them and design their own methods of reading. As an author myself, I’d love a book that can be accessed on multiple devices, each giving the reader a different experience about my journalistic work, some static and others interactive.

Perhaps the most interesting interventions in this debate over narrative are coming from gamers and digital storytellers. Sydney based Guy Gadney, group executive director of The Project Factory, blogged this month – under the headline, Why Ancient Stories Bring Transmedia Inspiration (Or Why Books are Shit) – that consumers should no longer accept the rules set by publishers. “Books are now centralised and controlled by monolithic publishing houses which make the decisions over what we should read and what stories will never see the light of day”, Gadney argued. “But behind this corralling of story form and structure, a new wave of storytelling has recently been emerging that will challenge the orthodoxy.”

He advocated a “dialogue not monologue” around engaging audiences and used one example of a project that will assist Australian Indigenous cultures in sharing their stories to a wider audience via an app, Ringbalin: River Stories. A normal book simply cannot fulfil this mission.

I don’t see this project as replacing traditional books but a direct challenge to the failure of the written word to publish or even acknowledge so many Indigenous stories. With the public increasingly consuming information on countless devices and screens with limited time to read and reflect, non-linear forms of storytelling must be considered by any serious producer of content.

Books will exist in 100 or 500 years, and not just in museums. How we as a society manage the online disruption to traditional forms of publishing will determine how we want to tell our own stories and how they should be remembered. Are we no more or less than what is recorded on a retrievable device? Memories fade. History has been traditionally written by the elite so I welcome the ability for anybody today to document their lives, every intimate detail, on equipment of their choosing. Books need to adapt to this changed reality or face being principally embraced as nostalgia.