A.LOEWENSTEIN ONLINE NEWSLETTER

• Obama and Bush share the same view on abusing “terrorists”
• Getting out of colony building is making business sense
• Interview with Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas
• Who do we want to control us?
• Britain is experiencing the shock doctrine in action
• Britain desperate to insulate Zionists from examination
• Serco says it’s doing a wonderful job

Obama and Bush share the same view on abusing “terrorists” 04 Nov 2010 Salon’s Glenn Greenwald spoke last night at the University of Wisconsin on “Civil Liberties and Terrorism in the Age of Obama”. Suffice to say, to any on the Left who think Barack Obama is radically different to George W. Bush, they need to get their head read.  Glenn Greenwald on civil liberties and terrorism after Obama from The Badger Herald on Vimeo.

Getting out of colony building is making business sense 03 Nov 2010 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 years numerous organizations, firms, governments and celebrities have exerted pressure and severed their relationships with Leviev and his companies over their involvement in settlement construction and other human rights abuses, in response to a boycott campaign initiated by Adalah-NY. Israel’s Coalition of Women for Peace disclosed on Monday that in an official letter to the Coalition, Africa Israel stated, “Neither the company nor any of its subsidiaries and/or other companies controlled by the company are presently involved in or has any plans for future involvement in development, construction or building of real estate in settlements in the West Bank.” In follow-up articles in the Israeli media on Monday, Africa Israel said that the statement was “a description of the business today” and that “Africa Israel builds for all the public in Israel, and does not deal in politics or any other policy.” Ethan Heitner from Adalah-NY explained, “Following years of settlement construction, and pro-settlement statements and activities by Lev Leviev, the public announcement by Africa Israel that it has no plans to build Israeli settlements is clearly a result of pressure from the growing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. This provides concrete evidence of the way in which the BDS movement can change companies’ behavior. But Africa Israel can’t speak out of both sides of its mouth and expect a clean bill of health. Africa Israel must unambiguously renounce settlement activity, and all other involvement in violations of Palestinian rights. And Lev Leviev needs to end his involvement in settlement construction through other companies like Leader Management and Development, as well as his support for human rights abuses in the diamond industry in countries like Angola and Namibia.”

Interview with Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas 03 Nov 2010 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 do we want to control us? 03 Nov 2010 This year’s Sydney Peace Prize winner, Indian Vandana Shiva – I saw her speak last night 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 to control the earth’s resources and transform the planet into a supermarket in which everything is for sale. They want to sell our water, genes, cells, organs, knowledge, cultures and future.

Britain is experiencing the shock doctrine in action 03 Nov 2010 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 a government spread sheet. Born of the “never again” spirit of 1945, social democracy in Britain has surrendered to an extreme political cult of money worship. This reached its apogee when £1 trillion of public money was handed unconditionally to corrupt banks by a Labour government whose leader, Gordon Brown, had previously described “financiers” as the nation’s “great example” and his personal “inspiration”. This is not to say Parliamentary politics is meaningless. They have one meaning now: the replacement of democracy by a business plan for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope, every child born. The old myths of British rectitude, imperial in origin, provided false comfort while the Blair gang, assisted by venal MPs, finished Thatcher’s work and built the foundation of the present “coalition”. This is led by a former PR man for an asset stripper and by a bagman who will inherit his knighthood and the tax-avoided fortune of his father, the 17th Baronet of Ballentaylor. David Cameron and George Osborne are essentially fossilised spivs who, in colonial times, would have been sent by their daddies to claim foreign terrain and plunder. Today, they are claiming 21st century Britain and imposing their vicious, antique ideology, albeit served as economic snake oil. Their designs have nothing to do with a “deficit crisis”. A deficit of 10 per cent is not remotely a crisis. When Britain was officially bankrupt at the end of the second world war, the government built its greatest public institutions, such as the National Health Service and the great arts edifices of London’s South Bank. There is no economic rationale for the assault described cravenly by the BBC as a “public spending review”. The debt is exclusively the responsibility of those who incurred it, the super-rich and the gamblers. However, that’s beside the point. What is happening in Britain is the seizure of an opportunity to destroy the tenuous humanity of the modern state. It is a coup, a “shock doctrine” as applied to Pinochet’s Chile and Yeltsin’s Russia. In Britain, there is no need for tanks in the streets. In its managerial indifference to the freedoms it is said to hold dear, bourgeois Britain has allowed parliament to create a surveillance state with 3,000 new criminal offences and laws: more than for the whole of the previous century. Powers of arrest and detention have never been greater. The police have the impunity to kill; asylum seekers can be “restrained” to death on commercial flights and should fellow passengers object, anti-terrorism laws will deal with them. Abroad, British militarism colludes with torturers and death squads.

Britain desperate to insulate Zionists from examination 03 Nov 2010 How far will Western states go to protect the Zionist state from legal prosecution? Israel has postponed all strategic dialogue with Britain in protest at a law which allows UK courts to prosecute visiting Israeli officials for alleged war crimes. Strategic dialogue between the two countries takes place annually and focuses on defence and security issues. “The strategic dialogue has indeed been postponed,” Yigal Palmor, a foreign ministry spokesman, said on Wednesday. The development came as William Hague, the British foreign minister, arrived in Israel for a two-day visit on Wednesday. “The visit by foreign minister Hague is an important phase in the ongoing exchange between the countries and the question of Israeli officials being unable to travel to Britain will be on the top of the agenda as far as we are concerned,” he said. The law in question gives British courts “universal jurisdiction” to issue warrants against individuals accused of war crimes, including visiting foreign politicians. Sherine Tadros, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Jerusalem, said that this issue was top on the agenda for Hague’s visit. “This is something that is vital for Israel and they are not happy how, time and time again, its’ officials have to cancel trips to the UK because of fear of being arrested for war crimes,” she said. “The UK has said that this law needs to be changed but the question for Israel is when will the change happen.” Earlier this week, Dan Meridor, Israel’s intelligence minister, cancelled a trip to London over general concerns he risked being arrested, with local media speculating it was in connection with Israel’s deadly raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla in May. Britain’s embassy in Tel Aviv confirmed that the government was taking the issue very seriously and said that a draft amendment to the law would be put before parliament “in the coming weeks”. “The British government understands that we have a real problem and we are dealing with it,” spokeswoman Karen Kaufman told AFP, saying it would take “several months” before any amendment was passed. “We will present a draft (amendment) in the coming weeks with the goal of passing it in this current sitting of parliament,” Kaufman was quoted as saying. This year’s strategic dialogue meeting, which had been expected to take place in Britain last month, did not happen, a diplomatic source said. But a spokesman for the prime minister’s office refused to comment on the issue, saying: “We don’t talk about strategic dialogue. It’s a sensitive issue.” Israel has been pushing for Britain to amend the legislation for five years after a number of high-profile political and military officials were forced to cancel visits over arrest fears.

Serco says it’s doing a wonderful job 03 Nov 2010 Seriously, Serco has nominated itself for Australia’s Employee of the Year and the Australian government may back it, I hear on the grapevine.