Naomi Klein on blindly ignoring the Shock Doctrine in Britain

Posted: 17 Aug 2011

She’s right:

Argentina’s mass looting was called El Saqueo—the sacking. That was politically significant because it was the very same word used to describe what that country’s elites had done by selling off the country’s national assets in flagrantly corrupt privatization deals, hiding their money offshore, then passing on the bill to the people with a brutal austerity package. Argentines understood that the saqueo of the shopping centers would not have happened without the bigger saqueo of the country, and that the real gangsters were the ones in charge.
But England is not Latin America, and its riots are not political, or so we keep hearing. They are just about lawless kids taking advantage of a situation to take what isn’t theirs. And British society, Cameron tells us, abhors that kind of behavior.
This is said in all seriousness. As if the massive bank bailouts never happened, followed by the defiant record bonuses. Followed by the emergency G-8 and G-20 meetings, when the leaders decided, collectively, not to do anything to punish the bankers for any of this, nor to do anything serious to prevent a similar crisis from happening again. Instead they would all go home to their respective countries and force sacrifices on the most vulnerable. They would do this by firing public sector workers, scapegoating teachers, closing libraries, upping tuitions, rolling back union contracts, creating rush privatizations of public assets and decreasing pensions – mix the cocktail for where you live. And who is on television lecturing about the need to give up these “entitlements”? The bankers and hedge-fund managers, of course.
This is the global Saqueo, a time of great taking. Fueled by a pathological sense of entitlement, this looting has all been done with the lights left on, as if there was nothing at all to hide. There are some nagging fears, however. In early July, the Wall Street Journal, citing a new poll, reported that 94 percent of millionaires were afraid of “violence in the streets.” This, it turns out, was a reasonable fear.
Of course London’s riots weren’t a political protest. But the people committing nighttime robbery sure as hell know that their elites have been committing daytime robbery. Saqueos are contagious.
The Tories are right when they say the rioting is not about the cuts. But it has a great deal to do with what those cuts represent: being cut off. Locked away in a ballooning underclass with the few escape routes previously offered—a union job, a good affordable education—being rapidly sealed off. The cuts are a message. They are saying to whole sectors of society: you are stuck where you are, much like the migrants and refugees we turn away at our increasingly fortressed borders.

Just how are merchants of death supposed to make a good living these days?

Posted: 17 Aug 2011

Are the good times really coming to an end, or will Western-led wars be increasingly privatised?

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are winding down, Osama bin Laden is dead, and the federal government is deeply in debt. This spells the end of what was a golden decade for the defense industry.
In the decade since the Sept. 11 attacks, the annual defense budget has more than doubled to $700 billion and annual defense industry profits have nearly quadrupled, approaching $25 billion last year.
Now defense spending is poised to retreat, and so are industry profits. “We’re about to go into the downhill side of the roller coaster here,” said David Berteau, a defense industry analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Congress agreed last month to cut military spending by $350 billion over the next 10 years. The defense budget will automatically be cut by another $500 billion over that period if lawmakers fail to reach a deficit-cutting deal by November.
Defense industry stocks have already begun to suffer; they are lagging the S&P 500 in recent months. During the last defense spending downturn, which lasted from 1985 to 1997, defense stocks underperformed the broader market by 33 percent, according to an analysis by RBC Capital Markets.
The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks forced the world’s biggest and best-funded military to quickly retool itself. It needed to develop technologies, weapons and strategies to find and fight an elusive network of terrorists that seemed more sophisticated and dangerous than ever imagined.
The U.S. spent $1.3 trillion in the 10 years following the attacks chasing al-Qaida and fighting two wars. That was on top of baseline military spending in excess of $4 trillion.
“After 9/11 the floodgates opened,” says Eric Hugel, a defense industry analyst at Stephens Inc.
The defense budget grew from $316 billion in 2001 to $708 billion in 2011. Federal spending on homeland security, which includes everything from airport security to border control, also rose dramatically. Last year dozens of federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, spent $70 billion on such programs, according to the Office of Management and Budget. That’s up from $37 billion in 2003, the first year after DHS was formed.
All that spending was reflected in the soaring performance of the defense industry, led by the top five defense contractors: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and Raytheon.
In 2001, revenues for U.S.-based defense contractors totaled $217 billion, according to data compiled by the analytics firm Capital IQ. By 2010 revenues had grown to $386 billion. Profits grew more than twice as fast over the same time period, from $6.7 billion to $24.8 billion. Contractors based abroad, such as BAE Systems, also flourished. BAE was the sixth biggest defense contractor in 2010, with $7.2 billion in U.S. military contracts.

Evidence emerging of dysfunctional relations between Serco and Aussie officials

Posted: 16 Aug 2011

Who is held accountable for these breaches? Who wrote the words of the contract allowing no public scrutiny? And most importantly, something rarely asked by our media, why are private companies making a profit from managing human misery?

The full extent of despair and unrest inside the immigration detention network has been revealed, with documents showing 1507 detainees hospitalised in the first six months of this year, including 72 psychiatric hospital admissions, and 213 treated for physical injuries resulting from self-harm.
International Health and Medical Services, the network’s health provider, treated 723 detainees for ”voluntary starvation” during that period. Police, meanwhile, were notified 264 times of possible criminal behaviour.
A parliamentary inquiry into the immigration detention network, instigated by the opposition and Greens, has begun to lift the veil on the secretive private contractor, SERCO, that runs Australia’s detention centres.
The Immigration Department has supplied the inquiry with hundreds of pages of data, including the time and nature of every recorded incident inside the 19 detention centres. But SERCO is refusing to state how many staff it employs at each centre, claiming this is sensitive.
The Immigration Department told a hearing last night that SERCO wasn’t required to meet any staff-to-detainee ratios under its contract. The department secretary, Andrew Metcalfe, said SERCO was refusing to disclose its staffing ratios to the inquiry because it was concerned detainees would find out.
SERCO had been fined by the department every month in 2010-11 for failing to meet contract goals, the hearing was told.
Mr Metcalfe told the hearing that rising unrest, self harm and suicide were unfortunate and sad, but ”defy simple solutions”.
Serco has reported 871 incidents of inappropriate behaviour towards its staff, and 700 incidents of inappropriate behaviour between detainees. There have been 5 substantiated complaints against SERCO staff – but no staff dismissed as a result.

Thanks for telling us who really runs South Australia (and isn’t the government)

Posted: 16 Aug 2011

The Adelaide News Blog helps us all:

Indicating that a special Defence Cabinet would now govern South Australia, Premier Mike Rann will announce this morning that he and all of State Cabinet would be presenting their resignations to the Governor later today.
“You’ll hardly notice any difference.” Mr Rann told onlookers at the Norwood Pie Cart last night. “The Yanks know what they want, and we’ve been rubberstamping their stuff for years. The bloke running the shipyard used to be a Halliburton boss, if there’s anything that needs sorting out, he’ll manage.”
Defence Minster Kevin Foley’s is tipped to be the only survival of the regime change, as Government Services Facilitator. In the cubicles of a South Parklands toilet last night, a voice resembling the former Treasurer’s was heard to say “Who’s laughing now?”
Former Halliburton/KBR GlobalVice President for Infrastructure, and now Defence-SA boss Andrew Fletcher was unavailable for comment, referring queries to the Regime Change department of KBR’s headquarters in Houston.

US MSM have a 30 second attention…span

Posted: 16 Aug 2011