A. Loewenstein Online Newsletter

My following book review appeared in last weekend’s Melbourne’s Sunday Age and Sydney’s Sun Herald:

The news late last year that Australia’s richest man, Andrew ”Twiggy” Forrest, had not paid any corporate tax for seven years was unsurprising.

Fortescue Metals’s tax manager, Marcus Hughes, conceded to a parliamentary committee in December: ”We have not cut a corporate tax cheque to date.”

Author Matthew Benns would have a few words to say about that. He begins this striking, investigative book, Dirty Money: The True Cost of Australia’s Mineral Boom, with a sordid tale about copper company Anvil Mining’s alleged complicity in a massacre in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2004. Examples of Australian company criminality are shown from the Philippines to Papua New Guinea.

Tragically, these are not atypical stories. Many Australian firms scour the globe looking for cheap resources and exploitation. It is often not illegal but it is largely a reality hidden from the population. We want cheap petrol and minerals; we rarely want to know from where they come.

Benns documents a litany of dirty deals, grubby environmental catastrophes and health scares. The only conclusion from this essential book is that Australia has a bipartisan belief in giving the resource industry whatever it wants and screwing the long-term expense. Our political leaders preach about a budget surplus but give little thought to building our Future Fund from the revenue.

It is a point equally well made by fellow writer Paul Cleary in his recent book Too Much Luck. At the Sydney book launch, Cleary told the audience that Australia preaches to a country such as Papua New Guinea – a land truly cursed by a resource boom that benefits few locals – that they should establish a sovereign fund for future generations and yet we neglect our own Future Fund.

Benns would share this argument. ”We are dancing on the deck of the Titanic,” Benns writes. ”The rest of the economy is being run down in favour of minerals. But mining companies only employ 3 per cent of the Australian population.”

Such points are rarely heard within the mainstream political and media elites, too keen to promote ”growth” and ”development”. The three-year election cycle has turned us into lemmings approaching the cliff.

Dirty Money 
Matthew Benns 
William Heinemann, $34.95

Via the New York Times:

Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show.

The practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, with a handful of carriers marketing a catalog of “surveillance fees” to police departments to determine a suspect’s location, trace phone calls and texts or provide other services. Some departments log dozens of traces a month for both emergencies and routine investigations.

With cellphones ubiquitous, the police call phone tracing a valuable weapon in emergencies like child abductions and suicide calls and investigations in drug cases and murders. One police training manual describes cellphones as “the virtual biographer of our daily activities,” providing a hunting ground for learning contacts and travels.

But civil liberties advocates say the wider use of cell tracking raises legal and constitutional questions, particularly when the police act without judicial orders. While many departments require warrants to use phone tracking in nonemergencies, others claim broad discretion to get the records on their own, according to 5,500 pages of internal records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union from 205 police departments nationwide.

The internal documents, which were provided to The New York Times, open a window into a cloak-and-dagger practice that police officials are wary about discussing publicly. While cell tracking by local police departments has received some limited public attention in the last few years, the A.C.L.U. documents show that the practice is in much wider use — with far looser safeguards — than officials have previously acknowledged.