Antony Loewenstein

A country is in ruins. Months of war.

Not to worry, business opportunities abound. Let a thousand disaster capitalist flowers bloom.

Libya, you are about to be mauled:

The starting pistol for British firms to pursue contracts in Libya has been fired by the new defence secretary, Philip Hammond, who urged companies to “pack their suitcases” and head there to secure reconstruction contracts.

As Nato announced that it plans to wind up operations in Libya, Hammond said that great care had been taken during the campaign to avoid destroying critical infrastructure.

“Libya is a relatively wealthy country with oil reserves, and I expect there will be opportunities for British and other companies to get involved in the reconstruction of Libya,” he told the BBC in an interview.

“I would expect British companies, even British sales directors, [to be] packing their suitcases and looking to get out to Libya and take part in the reconstruction of that country as soon as they can,” said Hammond, who replaced Liam Fox as defence secretary a week ago.

He added that after a “hugely successful” British mission in Libya, Britain now needed “to support the Libyans to turn the liberation of their country into a successful stabilisation so that Libya can be a beacon of prosperity and democracy in north Africa going forward.”

The National Transitional Council has already said that it intends to reward countries who showed support for its fight against the Gaddafi regime, with Britain and France likely to lead the way.

The success of British contractors in the country – which could see billions of pounds spent on reconstruction over the next decade – will be seen as a huge victory for prime minister David Cameron, who visited Tripoli and NTC members last month, along with Nicolas Sarkozy.

British gains in Libya include business and reconstruction contracts, as well as oil. As Libya’s £100bn in frozen assets around the world are released, it is a sizeable pot.

Lord Green, a trade minister, has already met with British firms to discuss potential opportunities in Libya, and oil company BP is believed to have already held talks with the NTC.

…

France has already begun its own campaign to secure business in the country. French foreign minister Alain Juppé has said it was only “fair and logical” for its companies to benefit.

Daniel Kawczynski, a Conservative backbencher and chair of the cross-party parliamentary group on Libya, said Britain should come first when it comes to awarding contracts, which would also pay back some of the cost of some £300m spent on military action.

“The question that remains is, who should ultimately bear this cost?” he said. “Should the burden fall on those who could be counted on? Or should, in time, Libya repay those who fought with her, and for her?”

He added: “In these difficult economic times, it should not be too much to ask a country with Libya’s wealth and resources to pay their share of the gold.”

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.

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.

My following article is published today in Overland journal and was co-written with John Docker and Ned Curthoys:

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
– Mahatma Gandhi

Israel is creating a kind of moral schizophrenia in world Jewry. In the outside world, the welfare of Jewry depends on the maintenance of secular, non-racial, pluralistic societies. In Israel, Jewry finds itself defending a society in which mixed marriages cannot be legalized, in which non-Jews have a lesser status than Jews, and in which the ideal is racist and exclusivist.
– IF Stone

On 14 December 2010, the Marrickville Council in inner-west Sydney, led by its Greens mayor Fiona Byrne, expressed its support for, in her words, ‘the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, to exert peaceful pressure on the government of Israel to honour its human rights obligations to the Palestinians’ (Fiona Byrne, ‘Rates, roads – and justice in Gaza’, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 April 2011). As is well known, the council’s now failed proposal (Sydney Morning Herald, 20 April 2011) to support BDS was controversial and widely ridiculed, and not only in the feral newspaper The Australian. In conversation, friends and acquaintances who live in the Marrickville municipal area made it clear to us that while they are sympathetic to the Palestinians, they feel such an action is rather absurd and silly for a local council so far from the Middle East. They also thought the Council hadn’t provided its constituents with necessary information. They have a point in terms of the council’s failure to communicate the rationale of a BDS. But was the Marrickville Council support for BDS really so ridiculous? In this essay we try to provide information about BDS that can help stimulate discussion and debate. We contend that supporting BDS is not only necessary in order to help save the Palestinian people from an ongoing catastrophe, but vitally important for the self-respect of the international community.

As anti-Zionist Jews, we support the BDS, and agree with Sonja Karkar of Australians for Palestine (‘Report on BDS Vote in Marrickville’, 21 April 2011) that the Marrickville Council action spectacularly succeeded in bringing nation-wide attention to the existence of the international boycott-Israel movement.

We have our own ideas about what is absurd, and what is allegedly ‘extreme’ on issues to do with Israel/Palestine. It’s clear that not much is known about BDS in Australia, which is not surprising, given the crippled state of the print media in this country and its near-blanket censorship – what other name is there for it? – of views critical of Israel, especially the views of Palestinian, Arab, and anti-Zionist Jewish intellectuals. On this issue the media in Australia make a mockery of democracy, media diversity, and intelligent and empirically informed journalism (Antony Loewenstein). Compared to the UK – think the Guardian and Independent – the print media in Australia is second-rate, and, given the near monopoly of the Murdoch press, getting worse. It’s stunning that so many Australian ‘journalists’ can accept money from the Israeli government, or from Zionist organizations in Australia dedicated to providing active support for the Israeli state, to visit Israel. It’s clear that upon their return they act as advocates and agents of influence for Israel, uncritically enunciating the policy concerns and worldview of an ethnocentric state with a racist immigration policy, a state that supports and subsidizes the ongoing colonisation of Palestine, illegal under international law; a state that is opposed to Australia’s own values as a secular, non-racial, pluralistic society. Aren’t journalists supposed to be independent of the state – any state? Isn’t this situation absurd?

There are, however, and thankfully, alternative sources of information. Here we focus on Omar Barghouti, whose 2011 book BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions – The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights draws attention to the epigraphs we’ve used above from Gandhi and I.F. Stone (pp.1, 78). Barghouti is in the great tradition of Palestinian intellectuals, historians and poets like Edward W. Said, Walid Khalidi, and Mahmoud Darwish, maintaining an ongoing dialogue with the Jewish diaspora and the Israeli people while advocating Palestinian rights in the most eloquent terms possible. With postgraduate degrees in electrical engineering from Columbia University and in philosophy from Tel Aviv University, he works in Palestine as a dance choreographer. Barghouti is a founding member of both PACBI, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, which made its first call for boycott in April 2004, and the general Palestinian Civil Society Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, which made its call a year later, in 2005.

Importantly, Barghouti points out in BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions that the ‘BDS movement as such does not adopt any specific political formula’, for example, it steers away from the ‘one-state-versus-two-states debate, focusing instead on universal rights and international law’ (pp.51-52). He does, however, offer his own personal vision. He tells us that on ‘a personal level, not as a representative of the BDS movement’, he has for over twenty-five years consistently supported the one-state solution, ‘a secular, democratic state: one person, one vote – regardless of ethnicity, religion, nationality, gender, and so on’. Such a state can ‘reconcile our inalienable rights as indigenous Palestinians with the acquired rights of Israeli Jews as colonial settlers, once they’ve shed their colonial character and privileges and accepted justice and international law’ (p.178).

He opposes violence: ‘Even when it is in reaction to colonial violence, an indiscriminate attack on the civilian community of the oppressors is morally unjustifiable, in my opinion’; international law ‘never condones deliberate or criminally negligent attacks against civilians. I fully endorse that’ (p.130). So do we. Barghouti sees BDS as part of the tradition of non-violence whose most famous representatives are Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela, though the majority of Palestinians have always engaged in ‘non-violent resistance even before the inspiration of Gandhi, King, and Mandela’ (p.174). Mandela and Archbishop Tutu, he reminds us, liken Israeli occupation practices to apartheid South Africa. The present BDS campaign itself is ‘largely inspired by the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa’, though he does not suggest that the two situations are identical. The analogy is worthwhile, however, since ‘Israel’s system of bestowing rights and privileges according to ethnic and religious identity’, including allowing Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories to vote in Israeli elections and creating infrastructure, including modern highway systems, designed for the near exclusive use of those settlers, fits both the UN definition of apartheid in its Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid of 1973 and the International Criminal Court’s Rome statute of 2002.

Barghouti describes Zionism and the Israeli state – and such a description should make all Australians think of our own history of colonization of Indigenous peoples and lands – as one of ‘settler colonialism’ (p.4). He regards Zionism as a form of racism, and refers to the Israeli state as ‘ethnocentric, racist, and exclusivist’. Drawing on Ilan Pappé’s 2006 book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, he recalls that Israel’s creation in 1948 involved ‘massive ethnic cleansing, massacres, rape, wanton destruction of hundreds of villages’ by Zionist militias and later the Israeli army. Such brutality was ‘premeditated’ and ‘meticulously planned’ by Zionist leaders, including David Ben-Gurion (Israel’s first prime minister). Over 750,000 Palestinians were dispossessed and uprooted and more than four hundred villages were ‘methodically destroyed to prevent the return of the refugees’. Now refugees and internally displaced persons, the majority of the population of Gaza (something ignored by the pro-Israeli media who are deliberately ahistorical about these issues), make up two-thirds of the Palestinian population.

Barghouti believes that the BDS movement, appealing to people of conscience everywhere, is necessary ‘to avert genocide’, by which he means Israel’s ongoing assault on the Palestinians as a people, enacted through the annexation of Palestinian land, alienation of Palestinian farmers from their arable lands, restrictions on Palestinian housing and construction permits, attacks on Palestinian olive crops, attacks on Palestinian rights of assembly, cultural expression and schooling, the mass imprisonment of young Palestinian men and boys, removal of Palestinian populations from East Jerusalem and Area C of the West Bank, onerous military curfews, attacks on Palestinian freedom of movement, and a crippling undermining of the Palestinian economy.

In Gaza, Barghouti writes, the situation is desperate. He quotes the international law expert Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, who argued in 2007 that what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians in Gaza reveals a ‘deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its allies to subject an entire human community to life-endangering conditions of utmost cruelty’. Falk urges the governments of the world and international public opinion to ‘act urgently to prevent these genocidal tendencies from culminating in a collective tragedy’. Barghouti also quotes the Goldstone Report (more on the unfortunate Richard Goldstone in a moment) on the December 2008-January 2009 war on Gaza saying that the Israeli assault was a ‘deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population’. Both Falk and the Goldstone Report emphasise that the Israeli mistreatment of the people of Gaza, which has included the destruction of their schools, wells, electricity generators, crops, and factories, reveals deliberate intention and systematic policy (pp.36-37, 46).

We can only lament Goldstone’s recent ‘turn’ here. While the meticulous research and legal judgements of the Report still stand, Goldstone’s reputation is irreparably damaged (Richard Falk, ‘What Future for the Goldstone Report? Beyond the Name’, 20 April 2011). In our view, Goldstone’s stumbling retreat from the Report reveals the acute dilemma facing many progressive Jews with a residual sympathy for Israel: the choice between supporting international humanitarian law, or a repugnant Israeli state dedicated to stonewalling and undermining the principles of international humanitarian law. The latter is a trait of the Israeli state at least since the late 1940s when it refused to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homes as required by international law (UN General Assembly resolution 194, 1948). Goldstone chose to support the Israeli state, thereby betraying the Palestinian people, his colleagues in international law, and the traditions of Jewish humanism and universalism that inspired him to investigate the events in Gaza in the first place. Despite Goldstone’s reversal, those traditions are now re-asserting themselves across the world, exampled by the inspiring support given to the BDS movement by leading Jewish intellectuals and activists such as Judith Butler and Naomi Klein. Richard Falk himself, who is Jewish, deserves very honourable mention in this respect as well.

Barghouti argues that the Palestinian call for BDS demands Israel observe the fundamental human right to full equality, ending its ‘system of racial discrimination against its Palestinian citizens’. He sees recognition of the Palestinian right of return as ‘the litmus test of morality for anyone suggesting a just and enduring solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict’. Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands captured in the 1967 war, including the West Bank of which East Jerusalem is a part, is illegal in international law. All Israeli settlements established in the occupied territories are a violation of article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which Barghouti quotes: ‘The occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies’. An example in the academic sphere is the Hebrew University, which has moved Israeli staff and students into illegally confiscated land in East Jerusalem. On 9 July 2004, The International Court of Justice in The Hague declared that Israel’s construction of the infamous apartheid wall is illegal because it annexes Palestinian land and separates Palestinians from their lands, as it was surely designed to do.

BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions dismisses any accusation that the boycott campaign is anti-Semitic (pp.82-83). For one thing, as part of the struggle for ‘universal rights’, BDS is opposed to ‘all forms of racism and racist ideologies, including anti-Semitism’. For another, as we have suggested, there is growing support for the Palestinian-led BDS from Jews inside and outside Israel. In Israel, on 27 June 2010, following the Palestinian Queers for BDS initiative, ‘an Israeli LGBT’ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) call endorsed BDS. Israeli groups of Palestinians and Jews that have endorsed the BDS call include the Alternative Information Centre, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition, and Who Profits from the Occupation? which is a project of the Coalition of Women for Peace. Who Profits? keeps a database of Israeli and international corporations involved in the occupation. There is also the ‘courageous Israeli BDS group Boycott from Within’.

Outside Israel, there is accelerating Jewish support for the BDS campaign, beginning with the famous letter from Steven Rose and Hilary Rose to the Guardian on 6 April 2002 calling for a moratorium on EU funding of research collaboration with Israel, funding which is meant to be predicated on respect for human rights. In September 2010, more than 150 US and British theatre, film, and TV artists issued a statement initiated by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), supporting the boycott movement. In October 2010 Israeli-British architect, Abe Hayreem, founder of Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine, described how Israeli architecture and planning are instruments of the occupation. Jewish intellectuals mentioned by Barghouti who have been prominent worldwide in supporting BDS include Judith Butler, Mike Leigh, Richard Falk, Naomi Klein, Ilan Pappé, and Ronnie Kasrils. In the United States, issues like the BDS movement and Israel’s increasing distance from an American self-image of an inclusive liberal democracy based on human rights, are beginning to seriously fracture the Jewish community.

And what of local authorities in various countries? The implication of the ridicule of the Marrickville Council proposal appears to be that this small local government was the only one in the world silly enough to think globally and support the BDS. On the contrary. In June 2010 the South African Municipal Workers Union, we read in BDS: Boycott, Disinvestment, Sanctions, initiated a campaign ‘to rid all municipalities in South Africa of Israeli products’ in order to make them apartheid-Israel free zones, a campaign that has ‘started firing the imagination of BDS activists elsewhere’. There has been local council support for the Palestinian and international campaign against the Jerusalem Light Rail, the Israeli project whereby two giant French firms, Veolia and Alstom, build a tram route serving Israel’s illegal colonies in and surrounding occupied East Jerusalem, in contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

In the West Midlands, UK, the Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council decided not to consider further Veolia’s bid for the Waste Improvement Plan contract; Barghouti says that while the decision was presented as commercial, he is confident it was the result of BDS pressure. Furthermore, several local campaigns, from Hampshire County to Liverpool to Camden to South Yorkshire, have ‘sprouted to derail Veolia’ from large public works contracts. Barghouti welcomes BDS actions wherever they occur, however small or directed to one object: ‘As I’ve jokingly said in my talks’, even if a group ‘decides to launch a campaign targeting Israeli tomatoes only’, the Palestinians would be glad. He admires CodePink who have ‘chosen to focus their creative energies on boycotting AHAVA, the Israeli cosmetics company’ that manufactures in occupied Palestinian territory. Many campaigns in Europe, he adds, ‘have a narrow focus in their BDS targets, and that’s perfectly fine’.

We believe that support for BDS is crucial for the future of the international community if it is serious about upholding the principles of international law, which include non-aggression towards civilians, the illegality of occupying and annexing foreign territories, and the refusal to legitimise racist and apartheid systems of governance. The Western powers, including Australia, attempt to lead the world by relentlessly suggesting they alone act on behalf of universal principles of justice, human rights, and international law. Yet their cynicism in ignoring universal rights whenever it is convenient to do so in their own interests (think of Western intervention in Libya, yet no support for democracy in Bahrain) is glaringly revealed in the history of Israel/Palestine since 1948. Those powers blatantly protect the state of Israel, ignoring universal rights and international law, despite the fact that Israel’s self-conception, as I.F. Stone observed, is ‘racist and exclusivist’ (‘Holy War’, New York Review of Books, 3 August 1967); Israel is, according to its own preferred self-definition, a state that serves the prerogatives and interests of Jewish nationals rather than the entirety of its citizens. Consequently, while the Palestinians face a very bleak future that includes diminution of land and water rights and continuing exposure to military violence, the West generates anger and contempt for its egregious hypocrisy. We submit that BDS is indeed a litmus test for humanity, because it asks the world’s citizens to act to uphold universal human rights. If BDS fails, we are all diminished.

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, to take a second look at Naomi Klein’s influential best-seller The Shock Doctrine. The way Kasich, Walker, Snyder and others elsewhere have used the large state debts that resulted from the financial collapse of 2008 as a pretext to ram through myriad policies with little to no actual relation to ameliorating debt–but quite a lot of connection to making plutocrats swoon–has been quite revealing.

Naomi Klein on how her thesis is morphing into something even deadlier (via Democracy Now!):

AMY GOODMAN: We only have 30 seconds. You published Shock Doctrine in 2007. So much of what you’ve predicted has come to pass. Final words?

NAOMI KLEIN: Look, my fear is that climate change is the crisis, the biggest crisis of all, and that if we aren’t careful, if we don’t come up with a positive vision of how climate change can make our economies and our world more just, more livable, cleaner, fairer, then this crisis will be exploited to militarize our societies, to create fortress continents. And we’re really facing a choice. And, you know, I think what we really need now is for the people fighting for economic justice and environmental justice to come together.

I’m currently working on a book about disaster capitalism and rampant privatisation, diseases that seemingly sweep all before it. The idea that selling everything into private hands will solve our economic problems is ludicrous and yet both major sides of politics in many Western states back the idea.

Resistance is key, so here’s Paul Krugman in the New York Times writing about the current waves of delusion in his nation:

Here’s a thought: maybe Madison, Wis., isn’t Cairo after all. Maybe it’s Baghdad — specifically, Baghdad in 2003, when the Bush administration put Iraq under the rule of officials chosen for loyalty and political reliability rather than experience and competence.

As many readers may recall, the results were spectacular — in a bad way. Instead of focusing on the urgent problems of a shattered economy and society, which would soon descend into a murderous civil war, those Bush appointees were obsessed with imposing a conservative ideological vision. Indeed, with looters still prowling the streets of Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer, the American viceroy, told a Washington Post reporter that one of his top priorities was to “corporatize and privatize state-owned enterprises” — Mr. Bremer’s words, not the reporter’s — and to “wean people from the idea the state supports everything.”

The story of the privatization-obsessed Coalition Provisional Authority was the centerpiece of Naomi Klein’s best-selling book “The Shock Doctrine,” which argued that it was part of a broader pattern. From Chile in the 1970s onward, she suggested, right-wing ideologues have exploited crises to push through an agenda that has nothing to do with resolving those crises, and everything to do with imposing their vision of a harsher, more unequal, less democratic society.

Which brings us to Wisconsin 2011, where the shock doctrine is on full display.

In recent weeks, Madison has been the scene of large demonstrations against the governor’s budget bill, which would deny collective-bargaining rights to public-sector workers. Gov. Scott Walker claims that he needs to pass his bill to deal with the state’s fiscal problems. But his attack on unions has nothing to do with the budget. In fact, those unions have already indicated their willingness to make substantial financial concessions — an offer the governor has rejected.

What’s happening in Wisconsin is, instead, a power grab — an attempt to exploit the fiscal crisis to destroy the last major counterweight to the political power of corporations and the wealthy. And the power grab goes beyond union-busting. The bill in question is 144 pages long, and there are some extraordinary things hidden deep inside.

For example, the bill includes language that would allow officials appointed by the governor to make sweeping cuts in health coverage for low-income families without having to go through the normal legislative process.

…
If this sounds to you like a perfect setup for cronyism and profiteering — remember those missing billions in Iraq? — you’re not alone. Indeed, there are enough suspicious minds out there that Koch Industries, owned by the billionaire brothers who are playing such a large role in Mr. Walker’s anti-union push, felt compelled to issue a denial that it’s interested in purchasing any of those power plants. Are you reassured?

The good news from Wisconsin is that the upsurge of public outrage — aided by the maneuvering of Democrats in the State Senate, who absented themselves to deny Republicans a quorum — has slowed the bum’s rush. If Mr. Walker’s plan was to push his bill through before anyone had a chance to realize his true goals, that plan has been foiled. And events in Wisconsin may have given pause to other Republican governors, who seem to be backing off similar moves.

But don’t expect either Mr. Walker or the rest of his party to change those goals. Union-busting and privatization remain G.O.P. priorities, and the party will continue its efforts to smuggle those priorities through in the name of balanced budgets.

Wonderful and accurate quote from 2007:

By think tanks I mean the people who are paid to think by the makers of tanks.

Naomi Klein:

We have to build that independent left. It has to be so strong and so radical and so militant and so powerful that it becomes irresistible.

Naomi Klein on an event that received virtually no Western media coverage (except Democracy Now!):

Cochabamba, Bolivia

It was 11 am and Evo Morales had turned a football stadium into a giant classroom, marshaling an array of props: paper plates, plastic cups, disposable raincoats, handcrafted gourds, wooden plates and multicolored ponchos. All came into play to make his main point: to fight climate change, “we need to recover the values of the indigenous people.”

Yet wealthy countries have little interest in learning these lessons and are instead pushing through a plan that at its best would raise average global temperatures 2 degrees Celsius. “That would mean the melting of the Andean and Himalayan glaciers,” Morales told the thousands gathered in the stadium, part of the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. What he didn’t have to say is that the Bolivian people, no matter how sustainably they choose to live, have no power to save their glaciers.

Bolivia’s climate summit has had moments of joy, levity and absurdity. Yet underneath it all, you can feel the emotion that provoked this gathering: rage against helplessness.

It’s little wonder. Bolivia is in the midst of a dramatic political transformation, one that has nationalized key industries and elevated the voices of indigenous peoples as never before. But when it comes to Bolivia’s most pressing, existential crisis–the fact that its glaciers are melting at an alarming rate, threatening the water supply in two major cities–Bolivians are powerless to do anything to change their fate on their own.

That’s because the actions causing the melting are taking place not in Bolivia but on the highways and in the industrial zones of heavily industrialized countries. In Copenhagen, leaders of endangered nations like Bolivia and Tuvalu argued passionately for the kind of deep emissions cuts that could avert catastrophe. They were politely told that the political will in the North just wasn’t there. More than that, the United States made clear that it didn’t need small countries like Bolivia to be part of a climate solution. It would negotiate a deal with other heavy emitters behind closed doors, and the rest of the world would be informed of the results and invited to sign on, which is precisely what happened with the Copenhagen Accord. When Bolivia and Ecuador refused to rubber-stamp the accord, the US government cut their climate aid by $3 million and $2.5 million, respectively. “It’s not a free-rider process,” explained US climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing. (Anyone wondering why activists from the global South reject the idea of “climate aid” and are instead demanding repayment of “climate debts” has their answer here.) Pershing’s message was chilling: if you are poor, you don’t have the right to prioritize your own survival.

An intriguing and rather pathetic attempt to slam Naomi Klein, by the Zionist think-tank Reut Institute, claiming she is really working (implicitly, of course) with Hamas and Hizbollah to destroy Israel. Yes, it’s that sophisticated and utterly ignores any human rights abuses in Palestine:

“Kleinists” seem to have concluded that one-sided criticism of Israel is the best way to promote peace, and that pressurizing the state with all available means, including BDS, is both legitimate and effective.

As a result, Israel’s branding as a violent, aggressive and discriminatory state is increasingly gaining traction. Consequently, the entire political model of Israel as a Jewish state is framed as inherently immoral. Israel is compared with South Africa’s apartheid regime with such persistence and intensity that many seem not to be concerned by the fundamental differences between the two cases, and call for a one-state solution based on the South African formula of “one man, one vote.”

This dynamic is well exploited by the “network of resistance” – primarily Iran and its clients Hezbollah and Hamas, which have adopted a strategy that targets Israel’s political and economic standing. In recent years, these groups seem to have inverted their position toward the Israeli occupation, coming to view it as a strategic asset, believing that continued Israeli control over the Palestinian population will create an “overstretch” between the Jewish identity of the state, its democratic values, its territory, and demographic trends, all of which will lead to Israel’s implosion. Therefore, these groups have consistently sabotaged the political process via terrorism and thwarted Israeli attempts to unilaterally separate from the Palestinians.

The latest from Naomi Klein in Copenhagen (her earlier dispatch is here):

On Saturday night, after a week of living off of conference center snack bars, a group of us were invited to a delicious home-cooked meal with a real live Danish family. After spending the evening gawking at their stylish furnishings, a few of us had a question: Why are Danes so good at design?

“We’re control freaks,” our hostess replied instantly. “It comes from being a small country with not much power. We have to control what we can.”

When it comes to producing absurdly appealing light fixtures and shockingly comfortable desk chairs, that Danish form of displacement is clearly a very good thing. When it comes to hosting a world-changing summit, the Danish need for control is proving to be a serious problem.

The Danes have invested a huge amount of money co-branding their capitol city (now “Hopenhagen”) with a summit that will supposedly save the world. That would be fine if this summit actually were on track to save the world. But since it isn’t, the Danes are frantically trying to redesign us.

Take the weekend’s protests. By the end, around 1,100 people had been arrested. That’s just nuts. Saturday’s march of roughly 100,000 people came at a crucial juncture in the climate negotiations, when all signs pointed either to break down or a dangerously weak deal. The march was festive and peaceful but also tough. “The Climate Doesn’t Negotiate” was the message, and western negotiators need to head it.