This was enjoyable. On Sunday an extended interview with John Safran and Father Bob, hosts of Triple J’s Sunday Night Safran, was aired and we discussed detention centres, Serco, Palestine, Haiti, Afghanistan, private war, BDS, democracy and human rights:
Showing all posts tagged Afghanistan
US soldiers weep in Afghanistan at loss of KFC
With the war thoroughly lost years ago, American troops had to entertain themselves in the time-honoured, imperial tradition of completely ignoring local customs. Good story by McClatchy: There is nothing quite like coming off a patrol, your body-armor-shaped sweat stains still drying and ears ringing from grenades, only to have the hostess at T.G.I. Friday’s…
What price for real security? Melbourne Writer's Festival on Profits of Doom
Today, on 11 September, ABC1 and ABC Big Ideas… screens the following… (and I discuss my recent book Profits of Doom): Personal, economic, geopolitical security – this is the panel discussion from the… Melbourne Writers Festival. Who gets to make the decisions in these arenas? And why are we so damned anxious and insecure in this continuing period…
Sydney launch event for Profits of Doom
My new book Profits of Doom was launched by independent journalist Wendy Bacon in Sydney in August at Gleebooks. The audio of this packed event is presented by the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism, where I’m a Research Associate:
Triple R interview on Profits of Doom
It’s rare to get a chance in today’s media climate to have a long conversation about serious issues. This interview, about my new book Profits of Doom, was broadcast on Melbourne’s Triple R Spoke program, and we spoke in depth about the reality of privatised detention centres, privatised war in Afghanistan and challenging the seeming…
How vulture capitalism evolves in Afghanistan
A key theme in my new book Profits of Doom… are the ways in which corporations enrich themselves in times of war. Here’s the latest example, via the New York Times: Dollar for dollar, Mahmood Karzai may well hold the title for getting the least value out of his pricey American lawyers. Mr. Karzai, a brother…
Challenging US-led Dirty Wars
My book review appears in today’s Sydney Morning Herald: Days after the Boston marathon bombings in April, the surviving suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, reportedly told authorities that he and his brother, Tamerlan, watched online the sermons of Anwar al-Awlaki, the US-born cleric who was killed by an American drone in Yemen in 2011. It was just…
Right Now radio interview on Profits of Doom
The human rights group Right Now has strongly covered my new book Profits of Doom. I was interviewed on their radio station on Melbourne 3RRR on vulture capitalism and the dangers of outsourcing asylum seekers to private corporations:
Questioning an ever-increasing and corporatised aid budget
My following article appears in the Guardian today: I couldn’t believe my ears. I was in Papua New Guinea’s capital, Port Moresby,… in 2012 and a local Oxfam employee told me that he wished Australia would again take control of his country. He argued that in the nearly four decades since independence, the state had not…
Right Now positively reviews Profits of Doom
The great publication Right Now (they recently published an extract from my new book, Profits of Doom, on Christmas Island) today publishes a strong book review by… Maya Chanthaphavong: The drive by governments to privatise what are usually key governmental functions, such as refugee processing and detention, reform and prison, and health care is one that…