The always eloquent Arundhati Roy on disaster capitalism in the world’s biggest quasi-democracy: I don’t know how far back in history to begin, so I’ll lay the milestone down in the recent past. I’ll start in the early 1990s, not long after capitalism won its war against Soviet Communism in the bleak mountains of Afghanistan.…
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New press freedom group launches to support vital work of Wikileaks
Via the New York Times: A group advocating a more transparent government has formed a nonprofit organization called the Freedom of the Press Foundation to serve as a conduit for donations to organizations like WikiLeaks. The goal is to insulate those groups’ fund-raising efforts from political and business pressures. In December 2010, Visa, MasterCard and…
War on Drugs a massive failure so who’s ready to stop it?
British Deputy Prime Minister and Liberal Democrats leader Nick Clegg speaks the truth about the “war on drugs”: If you were waging any other war where you have 2,000 fatalities a year, your enemies are making billions in profits, constantly throwing new weapons at you and targeting young people – you’d have to say you…
What unaccountable US torture looks like
Stunning post by Darryl Li at the Middle East Research and Information Project: Two of today’s headlines together provide a good example of the work of imperial forgetting. On the front page of theNew York Times, a… story… about the depiction of torture in the forthcoming national revenge flick… Zero Dark Thirty… shows how little debates have advanced over…
How Australia actively blocks legitimate refugees globally who need our protection
Australia’s largely secret role in actively blocking persecuted people from escaping life-threatening situations should be exposed more often. Canberra seems happy colluding with authoritarian figures in Sri Lanka, Pakistan and beyond to “stop the boats”. Here’s Aubrey Belford in The Global Mail: Australian authorities have increasingly turned to a strategy some find disturbing: they are…
Challenging spin over PNG LNG vital in age of resource curse
A key theme of my disaster capitalism book (out 2013) is the role of Western multinationals in exploiting resources and people in poor nations. A focus is Papua New Guinea. A report released today by NGO Jubilee Australia called Pipe Dreams… challenges the many myths about the supposed benefits of the soon to begin LNG operation.…
The global war on drugs has failed. Discuss
A new documentary features some key global figures saying that a fundamental re-thinking is required. It’s called Breaking the Taboo:
My book of the year
I was asked by Green Left Weekly for my book of 2012: Antony Loewenstein Journalist, author, documentarian The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupation, Resistance and Hope By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan The corporate media’s reach into our lives can sometimes feel suffocating, with the same voices telling us that globalisation is good for…
Kim Kardashian loves autocratic Bahrain
The “star” recently travelled to Bahrain on a nice junket to promote…milkshakes: Anybody with a brain or eyes knows that Bahrain is a brutal, US-backed dictatorship. Marc Lynch in Foreign Policy writes: Kim Kardashian’s December 1 trip to Bahrain to promote milkshakes brought all the Middle East tweeps to the yard. Her visit attracted both…
My Q&A with Federal Senators about Australia’s future in Afghanistan
On 4 December I went to Canberra to give testimony at the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee on Australia’s overseas development programs in Afghanistan (here’s my opening statement with links). The following transcript is the Hansard record of my statement and questions from the Senators… (they were Greens MP Lee Rhiannon, Liberal MP Helen…