Investigating privatisation, the scourge of our times, receives an appropriate reward: The Paul Foot Award for Campaigning Journalism 2010, worth …£5,000, has been won by Clare Sambrook for her investigating, reporting and campaigning against the government policy of locking up asylum-seeking families in conditions known to harm their mental health, and scrutinising the commercial contractors…
The Left don’t want or like Obama and that’s more than fine
I’m still in shock to see two progressive Americans talking on American cable TV about Barack Obama and the Left. Enjoy the view, it happens so rarely:
The power of music in the horror of the Holocaust
Very moving trailer about the oldest Holocaust survivor in the world, Alice Herz-Sommer:
Counterfire interview on Israel/Palestine
I was recently interviewed by Elias Stoakes for the British website Counterfire on the Israel/Palestine conflict and the one-state solution:
Liberals should love Israel (if Palestinians are absent)
A Zionist claims Israel is a left-wing paradise. Gay sex! Pot! Freedom! Of course, Arabs don’t exist in this utopia.
Bush and Obama see “terrorists” in the same way
Salon’s Glenn Greenwald spoke this week at the University of Wisconsin on “Civil Liberties and Terrorism in the Age of Obama”. Suffice to say anybody on the Left who thinks Barack Obama is radically different to George W. Bush needs to get their head read: Glenn Greenwald on civil liberties and terrorism after Obama from…
The colony building business is making less business sense
Another victory in the growing BDS movement: Africa Israel, the flagship company of Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev, announced this week that it is no longer involved in Israeli settlement projects and that it has no plans for future settlement activities. Africa Israel subsequently denied that this was a political decision. However, in the last few…
Interview in Indonesia with Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas
During my recent visit to the Ubud Writers Festival in Bali, Indonesia, I interviewed successful Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas. It was a robust conversation and we covered vulgarity, politics, gender relations and offending readers.
Who controls us today and tomorrow?
This year’s Sydney Peace Prize winner, Indian Vandana Shiva – I saw her speak this week at the Sydney Opera House and she was powerful and courageous, a woman dedicated to fighting the privatisation of our entire society – doesn’t mince words and nor should she: A handful of corporations and of powerful countries seeks…
Britain sees the shock doctrine in action
John Pilger on Britain’s disaster capitalism: These days, the stirring lines of Percy Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy may seem unattainable. I don’t think so. Shelley was both a Romantic and political truth-teller. His words resonate now because only one political course is left to those who are disenfranchised and whose ruin is announced on…