My new book Profits of Doom is now out. Here’s a great review from one of Australia’s leading independent bookstores, Readings: Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein has travelled to Papua New Guinea, Afghanistan, Haiti and around Australia to report on a growing trend of ”˜vulture capitalism’ where the political and economic culture encourages ”˜corporate vultures to…
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Profits of Doom introductory chapter
My new book Profits of Doom is released officially today. There will be an avalanche of media and events in the coming weeks and months but in the meantime my publisher, Melbourne University Publishing, has published the introduction to the work. You can buy the book via Amazon and my publisher. Please read and share:…
Making money from natural disasters
Naomi Klein writes in The Nation about disaster capitalists salivating over Hurricane Sandy: Less than three days after Sandy made landfall on the East Coast of the United States, Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute blamed New Yorkers’ resistance to big-box stores for the misery they were about to endure.… Writing on Forbes.com… [1]… he explained that…
Writer Alice Walker refuses to be published by Israeli publisher
The following letter was sent by Pulitzer Prize winning author Alice Walker to Israel’s Yediot Books: … June 9, 2012 Dear Publishers at Yediot Books, Thank you so much for wishing to publish my novel THE COLOR PURPLE.… It isn’t possible for me to permit this at this time for the following reason:… As you may…
On literary boycotts, Palestine, Sri Lanka and the politics of dissent
My following essay appears in the latest edition of literary journal Overland (a shorter version is published on ABC online): ”˜For thirty years the country [Sri Lanka] went through a kind of hell and endured untold economic and cultural deprivation. Now, with things looking up, we need all the friendly input we can get from…
Disaster capitalism never sleeps
Because who is stopping it? The Shock Doctrine is alive and well, ideologues pushing through privatisation policies with little or no resistance from the Left or mainstream media. Daily Kos knows it: The events in the midwest these past few months have caused me, along with, I’d hope, any thinking progressive who had not already,…
The slow curse of disaster capitalism covers the world
I recently wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald about the ever-increasing arrival of the Shock Doctrine in Australia and Asia-Pacific. Privatisation running riot. George Monbiot writes about the same problems facing Britain: We’ve been staring at the wrong list. In an effort to guess what will hit us tomorrow, we’ve been trying to understand the…
Disaster capitalism envelops us all
My following article appears in the Sydney Morning Herald today: Last year’s cessation of hostilities between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers, after up to 40,000 Tamil civilians were murdered in the last months of the conflict, has heralded a Beijing-led invasion of the island. The authoritarian Rajapaksa regime was assisted by Chinese…
Mental health cure isn’t available with a pill
My following book review appeared in yesterday’s Sydney Sun Herald: Crazy Like Us Ethan Watters Scribe, $35 About one in five adult Australians will experience mental illness at some point. In the US, about 27 per cent of people aged 18 and older suffer from a mental disorder each year. These are startling figures that…
Australia is increasingly owned by somebody else
My following article appears in Crikey today: The Crikey/ACIJ series on Australian companies profiting from the foreign aid budget is a welcome discussion of the rapid privatisation of services in Australia and overseas, an area largely ignored by the mainstream media. The market, lightly regulated or not, is simply accepted by most commentators as the…