A.LOEWENSTEIN ONLINE NEWSLETTER

• Oz journalists dare to mention Serco (just a little)
• Scared Zionist sees Germany and imagines colonial Israel
• Israel loves colonies so keeps on building merrily away
• What good friends do for each other; sell death
• Resist disaster capitalism in Cameron and Clegg’s Britain
• The UK is entering a period of extremes and mad capitalism is to blame
• Guide for the 21st century

Oz journalists dare to mention Serco (just a little) 21 Oct 2010 All praise this rarity. A story in the Australian media (yesterday’s Australian) on Serco. Short but oh so sweet: A security company contracted by Serco is being investigated over claims it used unlicensed guards at police detention centres. Serco is responsible for running Australia’s rapidly expanding network of immigration detention centres. Northern Territory Licensing, Regulation and Alcohol Strategy executive director Micheil Brodie confirmed that investigators from the Department of Justice had visited the Darwin offices of MSS Security yesterday. The visit was in response to claims that the firm was using unlicensed security guards. “The visit was productive and the firm is co-operating fully,” Mr Brodie said. “It would be premature to form any conclusions at this stage.” In June 2000, Serco won a five-year contract worth $370 million to run Australia’s detention network. It has come under periodic fire over its management of the centres, following a number of escapes. A spokeswoman for Serco confirmed that MSS was one of its subcontractors, but declined to answer further questions. MSS Security also declined to discuss the claims. A spokesman for the Immigration Department said Canberra was aware of the ongoing investigation. The news of the investigation came as a Senate estimates committee heard that up to 44 countries may be included in the definition of the government’s proposed regional processing centre. During a late-night hearing on Tuesday, the head of the Immigration Department, Andrew Metcalfe, said although negotiations for a regional processing centre were ongoing, the region would largely be defined by the member countries of the Bali Process, which works to combat people-smuggling. “I think there are 44 . . . As I have said, we are largely talking about countries where displaced persons are travelling through, so, of course, we would include Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, other countries in Indochina, but the Bali Process incorporates a number of other countries as well,” Mr Metcalfe said. Deputy Leader of the Opposition Julie Bishop called on the government to “immediately define” what countries would be included in the region. “Ms Gillard has promised to stop the boats with a ‘regional’ processing centre, and yet cannot define what constitutes the ‘region’,” Ms Bishop said. “This will create an enormous magnet. “I think we’ve come across a real Achilles heel of this plan.”

Scared Zionist sees Germany and imagines colonial Israel 21 Oct 2010 This is officially pathetic. So here’s a Zionist Australian, Alan Gold, arguing that because multiculturalism has supposedly failed in Germany, proponents of the BDS movement and one-state solution are misguided. We should just really embrace partition and separation and apartheid. Because that’s working so well for Israel right now. No mention of the occupation, of course: If ever a lesson should be learned about the impossibility of a one-state solution imposed by the Arab nations and their collegial “useful idiots” in the West upon Israel, one need look no further than Germany today. In a speech given to the youth division of her Christian Democratic Union party at Potsdam last weekend, Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has conceded that her nation’s attempts to create a multicultural society in which people from different cultural backgrounds live together peacefully, has failed. Multikulti was a concept touted by German sociologists and academics as the best way for the post-Hitler nation to bond its different factions together. Multiculturalism gained speed with the vast influx of Turkish workers into the rapidly expanding German economy, at the same time as which Germany was dealing with massive problems caused by the integration of East and West Germans following the dismantling of the Iron Curtain. Indeed, Merkel’s colleague, Horst Seehofer, the leader of the CDU’s sister party in Bavaria, told the same meeting that Germany was committed to a dominant German culture and opposed to a multicultural one. At a recent meeting between Merkel and Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the two leaders pledged to do more to improve the poor integration record of Germany’s two and a half million strong Turkish community. Which makes one have to look very closely and question the reasoning behind the upsurge in support for the international Union movement’s support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, a transparent device to force a one-state solution on Israel by collapsing the Israeli economy. Even the most cursory investigation of the Palestinian problem shows that Israeli Arabs have more rights, a better standard of living and greater equity, than any other general Arab population (excluding, of course, the ruling potentates and oil plutocrats). Where Germany and France have so patently failed in their multiculturalism, against all odds, and despite the voices screaming ‘apartheid’, Israel’s integration of its diverse populations, seems to have succeeded. How? Because it was a process of consensus and cooperation, and not one imposed from outside. Multiculturalism, and the successful melding of disparate units into one, can only succeed given willingness and time. Which is why the BDS program is destined to backfire on itself. Because of the cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians on the West Bank, the Palestinian economy (though not obviously that of Gaza) is going ahead in leaps and bounds. Any BDS success will have the effect of strengthening Israeli resistance to a settlement, and of ruining the Palestinian economy. So will the Unions, and universities, running the BDS campaign, now turn their focus against Germany, where it has admitted that its multicultural program is not working? Presumably not, because despite the fact that there are so many immoral dictatorships, repressive regimes, one party governments and totalitarian rulers who seem to escape the notice of Union leaders and academics, they have shown themselves to be concerned only with Israel. Merkel’s statement, especially in light of vast sums of money spent over decades in attempting to make Germany into a multicultural nation, needs closer attention than just its admission of failure. For there is a growing mood in the West, including many Jews, that Zionism and Israel are a 19th century anachronism, and that the only proper solution to the hatreds, is a one-state solution; one in which Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Muslims and Christians, will live in some sort of utopian harmony. This nonsense might have appeal in some academic sociological paper, propounded by such usual suspects as Tony Judt, Noam Chomsky or Australia’s hairy-chested Antony Loewenstein, Peter Slezak and Peter Singer, but their eyes, shielded from reality, have probably not looked at the mess German society is in today. And should they look at other European nations, they might also examine France, whose recent Islamic demonstrations caused terrible ructions in the French disposition, or the UK which is a new breeding ground for violent Islamism. Israel’s proposal of a two-state solution, with an border that enables trade, security and humanitarian exchanges, very much like the border between the USA and Canada, or France and Germany, has always been the most logical way to end this interminable conflict. One can only hope it arrives with this series of negotiations. Because if it doesn’t, and Israel is forced to accept an imposed solution, there will be no Israel.

Israel loves colonies so keeps on building merrily away 21 Oct 2010 This is how Israel shows its love for apartheid; entrenching it: Israeli settlers have begun building new homes at a quick pace since the government lifted its moratorium on West Bank housing starts – almost 550 in three weeks, more than four times faster than the last two years.

What good friends do for each other; sell death 21 Oct 2010 I‘ve written before about the massive US arms deal to Saudi Arabia (US$60 billion). Now it’s been officially approved by the powers that be in Washington, so see how the State Department defends the weapons to one of the most brutal regimes in the world.

Resist disaster capitalism in Cameron and Clegg’s Britain 21 Oct 2010 No Shock Doctrine in the UK.

The UK is entering a period of extremes and mad capitalism is to blame 20 Oct 2010 Britain has embraced rampant capitalism and the effects, writes The Independent’s Johann Hari, will be severe: Margaret Thatcher is lying sick in a private hospital bed in Belgravia but her political children have just pushed her agenda further and harder and deeper than she ever dreamed of. When was the last time Britain’s public spending was slashed by more than 20 per cent? Not in my mother’s lifetime. Not even in my grandmother’s lifetime. No, it was in 1918, when a Conservative-Liberal coalition said the best response to a global economic crisis was to rapidly pay off this country’s debts. The result? Unemployment soared from 6 per cent to 19 per cent, and the country’s economy collapsed so severely that they lost all ability to pay their bills and the debt actually rose from 114 per cent to 180 per cent. “History doesn’t repeat itself,” Mark Twain said, “but it does rhyme.” George Osborne has just gambled your future on an extreme economic theory that has failed whenever and wherever it has been tried. In the Great Depression, we learned some basic principles. When an economy falters, ordinary people – perfectly sensibly – cut back their spending and try to pay down their debts. This causes a further fall in demand, and makes the economy worse. If the government cuts back at the same time, then there is no demand at all, and the economy goes into freefall. That’s why virtually every country in the world reacted to the Great Crash of 2008 – caused entirely by deregulated bankers – by increasing spending, funded by temporary debt. Better a deficit we repay in the good times than an endless depression. The countries that stimulated hardest, like South Korea, came out of recession first. David Cameron and George Osborne have ignored all this. They have ignored the warnings of the Financial Times, the newspaper most critical of their strategy. They have dismissed the warnings of Nobel economics laureates like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, who have consistently been proved right in this crisis. They have refused to learn from the fact that the country they held up as a model for how to deal with a recession – “Look and learn from across the Irish Sea,” Osborne said – has suffered the worst collapse in the developed world. They have instead blindly obeyed the ideological precepts they learned as baby Thatcherites: slash the state, and make the poor pay most.

Guide for the 21st century 20 Oct 2010