My following piece appears in the Guardian today: Syrian president Bashar al-Assad wasn’t supposed to survive. Since the uprising began in 2011, it’s been long presumed in western political and media circles that he would be deposed or killed and that a new, more US-friendly autocrat would be installed. This hasn’t happened. We know Russia…
Showing all posts tagged human rights
How to fight mass privatisation one industry at a time
My following article appears in The Hoopla today: The rate of incarceration of Indigenous Australians is… higher per capita… than it was for … blacks living in apartheid South Africa. The Australian Institute of Criminology released figures this year that confirm the problem. One in four are behind bars and the over-representation of Indigenous people in West Australian…
Al Jazeera English gets “access” to Serco-run Christmas Island camp
When I visited Christmas Island in late 2011 (researching my book Profits of Doom), the Australian Immigration Department and Serco heavily restricted access (though I finally obtained entry on my last day). This was supposedly for asylum seeker “privacy” but in reality is a policy aimed to not humanise the faces and lives of refugees.…
Small but positive signs that US war on drugs at home viewed as failure
One of the most devastating effects of the war on drugs has been on people of colour in the US, especially African-Americans. I’ve long believed that a serious society would consider decriminalising if not legalising drugs, a point I argued in a recent Guardian column. Now, some positive news from the US (via the New…
Centre for Public Christianity discusses For God’s Sake
The new book… For God’s Sake… is a discussion between an Atheist, a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim about the big questions of life. CPX invited Jane Caro, Antony Loewenstein and Simon Smart to discuss their reasons for writing the book and to debate some of the questions that are raised in it.
Profits of Doom extract: politicised, privatised and silenced by bureaucracy
The following… appears in the wonderful publication Right Now, an online site dedicated to human rights: In his new book,… Profits of Doom,… independent Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein travels to Curtin Immigration Detention Centre and Christmas Island to investigate the reality of Australia’s, notoriously… secretive, privatised detention facilities for asylum seekers.… In this excerpt, Loewenstein is on Christmas Island (CI)…
The daily inhumanity of Guantanamo Bay
Devastating article by writer John Grisham in the New York Times: About two months ago I learned that some of my books had been banned at Guantánamo Bay. Apparently detainees were requesting them, and their lawyers were delivering them to the prison, but they were not being allowed in because of “impermissible content.” I became…
The Australian reviews Profits of Doom
The following review by Miriam Cosic appears in Rupert Murdoch’s Australian newspaper today: In his recent book What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, American philosopher Michael Sandel explores ethical realms subverted by economic models. It is a bravura critique but there are surprising gaps when it comes to the modern nation-state’s supposed…
What if our future isn’t filled with renewable energy?
Michael Klare, TomDispatch: When it comes to energy and economics in the climate-change era, nothing is what it seems.… Most of us believe (or want to believe) that the second carbon era, the Age of Oil, will soon be superseded by the Age of Renewables, just as oil had long since superseded the Age of…
ABC Adelaide on Profits of Doom and vulture capitalism
Discussing the realities of crony capitalism is rare in the mainstream media. My interview this week with ABC Adelaide… about my book Profits of Doom… gave me the opportunity to talk about private mercenaries in Afghanistan and the attempts by multinational Rio Tinto to re-open its polluting mine in Bougainville in Papua New Guinea: