Best-selling journalist Antony Loewenstein trav­els across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Papua New Guinea, the United States, Britain, Greece, and Australia to witness the reality of disaster capitalism. He discovers how companies such as G4S, Serco, and Halliburton cash in on or­ganized misery in a hidden world of privatized detention centers, militarized private security, aid profiteering, and destructive mining.

Disaster has become big business. Talking to immigrants stuck in limbo in Britain or visiting immigration centers in America, Loewenstein maps the secret networks formed to help cor­porations bleed what profits they can from economic crisis. He debates with Western contractors in Afghanistan, meets the locals in post-earthquake Haiti, and in Greece finds a country at the mercy of vulture profiteers. In Papua New Guinea, he sees a local commu­nity forced to rebel against predatory resource companies and NGOs.

What emerges through Loewenstein’s re­porting is a dark history of multinational corpo­rations that, with the aid of media and political elites, have grown more powerful than national governments. In the twenty-first century, the vulnerable have become the world’s most valu­able commodity. Disaster Capitalism is published by Verso in 2015 and in paperback in January 2017.

Profits_of_doom_cover_350Vulture capitalism has seen the corporation become more powerful than the state, and yet its work is often done by stealth, supported by political and media elites. The result is privatised wars and outsourced detention centres, mining companies pillaging precious land in developing countries and struggling nations invaded by NGOs and the corporate dollar. Best-selling journalist Antony Loewenstein travels to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Papua New Guinea and across Australia to witness the reality of this largely hidden world of privatised detention centres, outsourced aid, destructive resource wars and militarized private security. Who is involved and why? Can it be stopped? What are the alternatives in a globalised world? Profits of Doom, published in 2013 and released in an updated edition in 2014, challenges the fundamentals of our unsustainable way of life and the money-making imperatives driving it. It is released in an updated edition in 2014.
forgodssakecover Four Australian thinkers come together to ask and answer the big questions, such as: What is the nature of the universe? Doesn't religion cause most of the conflict in the world? And Where do we find hope?   We are introduced to different belief systems – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – and to the argument that atheism, like organised religion, has its own compelling logic. And we gain insight into the life events that led each author to their current position.   Jane Caro flirted briefly with spiritual belief, inspired by 19th century literary heroines such as Elizabeth Gaskell and the Bronte sisters. Antony Loewenstein is proudly culturally, yet unconventionally, Jewish. Simon Smart is firmly and resolutely a Christian, but one who has had some of his most profound spiritual moments while surfing. Rachel Woodlock grew up in the alternative embrace of Baha'i belief but became entranced by its older parent religion, Islam.   Provocative, informative and passionately argued, For God's Sakepublished in 2013, encourages us to accept religious differences, but to also challenge more vigorously the beliefs that create discord.  
After Zionism, published in 2012 and 2013 with co-editor Ahmed Moor, brings together some of the world s leading thinkers on the Middle East question to dissect the century-long conflict between Zionism and the Palestinians, and to explore possible forms of a one-state solution. Time has run out for the two-state solution because of the unending and permanent Jewish colonization of Palestinian land. Although deep mistrust exists on both sides of the conflict, growing numbers of Palestinians and Israelis, Jews and Arabs are working together to forge a different, unified future. Progressive and realist ideas are at last gaining a foothold in the discourse, while those influenced by the colonial era have been discredited or abandoned. Whatever the political solution may be, Palestinian and Israeli lives are intertwined, enmeshed, irrevocably. This daring and timely collection includes essays by Omar Barghouti, Jonathan Cook, Joseph Dana, Jeremiah Haber, Jeff Halper, Ghada Karmi, Antony Loewenstein, Saree Makdisi, John Mearsheimer, Ahmed Moor, Ilan Pappe, Sara Roy and Phil Weiss.
The 2008 financial crisis opened the door for a bold, progressive social movement. But despite widespread revulsion at economic inequity and political opportunism, after the crash very little has changed. Has the Left failed? What agenda should progressives pursue? And what alternatives do they dare to imagine? Left Turn, published by Melbourne University Press in 2012 and co-edited with Jeff Sparrow, is aimed at the many Australians disillusioned with the political process. It includes passionate and challenging contributions by a diverse range of writers, thinkers and politicians, from Larissa Berendht and Christos Tsiolkas to Guy Rundle and Lee Rhiannon. These essays offer perspectives largely excluded from the mainstream. They offer possibilities for resistance and for a renewed struggle for change.
The Blogging Revolution, released by Melbourne University Press in 2008, is a colourful and revelatory account of bloggers around the globe why live and write under repressive regimes - many of them risking their lives in doing so. Antony Loewenstein's travels take him to private parties in Iran and Egypt, internet cafes in Saudi Arabia and Damascus, to the homes of Cuban dissidents and into newspaper offices in Beijing, where he discovers the ways in which the internet is threatening the ruld of governments. Through first-hand investigations, he reveals the complicity of Western multinationals in assisting the restriction of information in these countries and how bloggers are leading the charge for change. The blogging revolution is a superb examination about the nature of repression in the twenty-first century and the power of brave individuals to overcome it. It was released in an updated edition in 2011, post the Arab revolutions, and an updated Indian print version in 2011.
The best-selling book on the Israel/Palestine conflict, My Israel Question - on Jewish identity, the Zionist lobby, reporting from Palestine and future Middle East directions - was released by Melbourne University Press in 2006. A new, updated edition was released in 2007 (and reprinted again in 2008). The book was short-listed for the 2007 NSW Premier's Literary Award. Another fully updated, third edition was published in 2009. It was released in all e-book formats in 2011. An updated and translated edition was published in Arabic in 2012.

How to fight the toxic culture wars and win

My book review appears in the Weekend Australian newspaper with the great headline: “What did you do in the culture wars, daddy-o?:

As soon as Donald Trump unexpectedly won the White House in 2016, commentators and instant experts claimed it was because of economic anxiety. White, working-class Americans voted for the Republican candidate in greater numbers than Hillary Clinton, and the narrative was set: ignorant and insecure voters reportedly had backed the reality TV star because they feared losing their jobs and being discarded by globalisation and free trade. This thesis was only partly true.

In April, Stanford University political scientist Diana Mutz published a study that debunked the myth. “In this election,” she concluded, “education represented group status threat rather than being left behind economically. Those who felt that the hierarchy was being upended — with whites discriminated against more than blacks, Christians discriminated against more than Muslims, and men discriminated against more than women — were most likely to support Trump.”

Australian writer Jeff Sparrow succinctly explains in Trigger Warnings how Trump cleverly skewered his political enemies by appealing to their anger at the elite political and media classes (despite being a member of the elite himself). By damning political correctness without ever describing what it meant, Sparrow explains, Trump convinced his opponents “into calling for decorum, at a time when his supporters wanted to scream their rage”. Trump and his advisers read the mood of the country well and rode it to victory.

Trigger Warnings is a rare book that takes a necessary scalpel to the leftist political persuasion of its author as much as, if not more than, the right-wing agenda he opposes. Near the beginning, Sparrow outlines the bald facts of 21st-century life. With the “world’s eight richest billionaires controlling as much as the poorest half of the planet’s population … a historian of the future might assume that the Left was ascendant: that the injustice under which the planet groaned would be fuelling radical ideas and egalitarian alternatives to the status quo. Such a historian would be wrong.”

What follows is a potted history of how phrases such as “political correctness” and “culture wars” originated and how they have been weaponised today by the Right in ways that largely have trapped the Left, unsure how to respond. Sparrow writes that although right-wingers “portray PC as an Orwellian scheme to end freedom of speech, a deliberate strategy to impose a progressive orthodoxy”, the Left used the term from the 1960s as a gag to mock colleagues who believed in censorship. By the 90s, however, its usage had morphed and the Right claimed that being anti-PC meant “a minority using bureaucratic measures to enforce progressive ideas”.

In a post-Cold War world, where the designated enemy was no longer clear, right-wing politicians and their media cheerleaders correctly believed that by launching multiple culture wars over sexuality, gender, patriotism and morality, the Left would be consumed with these debates instead of challenging neoliberal “reforms” that enriched big business at the expense of ordinary people. It worked in many nations, including Australia, Britain and the US, but there are signs its effectiveness is breaking down.

For example, the electoral appeal of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in Britain is linked to the fact that years of Conservative Party-pushed austerity has led to one-fifth of the population living in poverty. Recent attempts by Theresa May’s government and many in the corporate media to falsely accuse Corbyn and his team of rampant anti-Semitism, a classic “culture war” tactic, has done little to affect his public standing. Whether his popularity leads to assuming power as prime minister remains to be seen.

The strongest sections of Sparrow’s book are his demolition of “smug politics” that have been employed by the Left in the past decades.

For comedians Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah of The Daily Show, any number of performers who populate Netflix and HBO and “new atheists” such as Richard Dawkins, the stupidity of vast swathes of the populace was a given. After all, how else could so many vote for George W. Bush or Trump and watch Fox News?

The political ramifications for showing contempt of the electorate are obvious.

“If progressives couldn’t influence society,” Sparrow argues, “that was the fault of society — or more exactly, the people who were too stupid and too venal to appreciate the objective correctness of progressive ideas.” Left ideas will never thrive in such an environment.

The solution to this malaise is (too briefly) outlined by Sparrow but he argues only radical solutions to present-day problems will work. How else to address the climate change crisis without imagining a zero-emissions future solely with renewable energy sources?

Symbolic gestures pushed by celebrities to switch off the lights just won’t cut it; the Left needs to build mass movements for change, an all-too-uncommon occurrence today.

Likewise with addressing the apartheid-level rates of indigenous Australian incarceration. “If we’re not talking about the need for structural change, we’re simply not acknow­ledging reality,” Sparrow concludes. How to achieve this is easier written than done.

Sparrow doesn’t underestimate the challenges and calls for “liberation”, a word that is almost invisible in the modern age. There are successful examples from which to take inspiration, from the struggles for same-sex equality to supporting the legalisation of marijuana across the US.

“Symbolic redress” won’t suffice to help ordinary people facing serious problems, Sparrow says, and the current path leads only to decades more of circular arguments that will embolden the status quo.

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist and author of Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe.

Trigger Warnings: Political Correctness and the Rise of the Right

By Jeff Sparrow

Scribe, 320pp, $29.99

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Censored Al-Jazeera film on Israel lobby reveals important truths

My following essay appears in the Israel/Palestine news outlet +972 magazine

There’s a moment near the end of the four-part, Al Jazeera documentary on the U.S. Israel lobby — censored by its own network due to pressure from the U.S. government and incensed U.S.-based, pro-Israel lobbyists — where the show’s undercover reporter, “Tony,” films a key Israel advocate in Washington. Eric Gallagher was a senior manager at The Israel Project and admits that the dominant pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC, faces an existential crisis.

“People at AIPAC know that something has changed,” Gallagher says. “They know something is wrong. They are not as effective as they used to be.” He worries that the day is coming soon when AIPAC wouldn’t be able to deeply influence the Israel lobby crafted in the U.S. Congress, as it does today, and that the pro-Israel lobby will have to operate without AIPAC’s power. “There’s this big bowling ball that’s being hurled towards them [AIPAC] and the response is to run faster,” Gallagher continues. “They need to get on the bowling ball and start dancing.”

Gallagher doesn’t explain why so many Americans are turning against Israel in public opinion polls. The latest figures from The Economist and YouGov, an online data analytics firm, find that U.S. liberals, millennials, and women have turned against the Jewish state in large numbers. The 50-plus year occupation of Palestinians and their lands, constant killings of civilians in Gaza, and the Trump administration’s obsessive embrace of Israel’s hard-right are all factors.

Republicans and conservatives still back Israel in large numbers, as do many in the evangelical Christian community (though younger members are more skeptical). For the foreseeable future, however, Israel will likely receive unprecedented financial, military, and diplomatic support from the United States.

Tony films Gallagher in a Washington D.C. café explaining that “the foundation that AIPAC sat on is rotting. There used to be widespread public support for Israel in the United States…I don’t think that AIPAC is the tip of the spear anymore, which is worrisome, because who is?”

It’s a telling admission in a documentary that’s full of them. Following Al Jazeera’s 2017 examination of Britain’s Israel lobby — a film that uncovered extensive Israeli government interference in the British political system, along with Labour Party operatives who aimed to silence critics of Israel with false charges of anti-Semitism — expectations were high for the U.S. version. They planted a convincing young, British, Jewish man, James Anthony Kleinfeld, within the American Zionist establishment, who filmed undercover for months to reveal pro-Israel lobbyists and Israeli government affiliates talking tactics and spewing racism against Muslims and Palestinians. Al Jazeera even admitted to planting an undercover reporter inside U.S. pro-Israel lobby groups in 2017, but the channel never broadcast the final product.

Director and founder of Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit, Clayton Swisher, has detailed the political reasons for this decision: a combination of Qatari government capitulation, pro-Israel lobbyists in Washington threatening to convince Congress to register the network as “foreign agents,” and false accusations of anti-Semitism against the producers of the documentary. A source told me that U.S. President Donald Trump’s first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, had even lobbied the Qataris not to screen the film. Whatever exactly Israeli, American, and pro-Zionist lobbyists did, it worked, though clips of the film started leaking in the last months. The full film can’t be far behind [it leaked a few days after this piece was published].

The leaks prove that the Israeli embassy, often working with pro-Israel groups, spies on pro-Palestinian students and attempts to disrupt the growth of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement across the U.S. Other Zionist lobbyists want students who support Palestinian rights to be criminally prosecuted. Fake Facebook accounts are created by Israel lobby groups that only occasionally mention Israel, because the Israel brand has become so toxic. The notorious Canary Mission website, used by the Israel government to target pro-Palestinian supporters on arrival in its country, is exposed as being funded by major pro-Israel donors in the U.S.

These are all important revelations, and an international audience deserves to see them. There’s nothing remotely anti-Semitic in the film. It’s a sober and detailed exposé of a lobby that functions despite the demographic gravity pushing against it. It’s not just young Americans losing support for Israel, but American Jews who increasingly can’t abide by a foreign country that advocateschauvinism, occupation, and racism. The horrific Pittsburgh synagogue massacre has only deepened this divide between Israel and its vast Jewish Diaspora.

Banning the film shows the weakness of the Zionist lobby, not its strength, because it acknowledges that any criticism that shatters the illusion of how the lobby operates secretly cannot survive sunlight or public scrutiny. Nonetheless, it’s worrying that Al Jazeera continues to stonewall about the real reasons it has not scheduled the film.

Swisher’s documentary is a positive development, however, from the myopic discussions around the U.S. Israel lobby that greeted the 2007 book on the subject by academics Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer (who appears in the film). The authors were accused of anti-Semitism and scapegoating Jews. U.S. journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, now editor of The Atlantic, who is notorious for policingsupposedly acceptable boundaries of debate around Israel/Palestine, called Walt, without evidence, a “grubby Jew-baiter.”

Yes, Swisher and his team have been accused of anti-Semitism, more than a decade after the Mearsheimer-Walt book. But the label no longer sticks effectively, apart from the rigid ideologues who won’t tolerate any criticism of Israeli actions. When real anti-Semitism is surging globally, it’s a damning indictment on those who abuse the term for shabby political ends. The Israel lobby does this around the world.

A key theme throughout the film is the perceived need by Israel and its advocates to secretly and publicly smear supporters of Palestinian rights. That’s what being strongly pro-Israel means for the litany of Zionist lobby groups featured in the documentary, from The Israel Project to the Brandeis Center. It looks and feels grubby and desperate. BDS is framed as an existential threat to the continuation of the Jewish state, a severe exaggeration in the current moment, but it has undeniably achieved great psychological damage to the Israeli narrative and justification for indefinitely occupying millions of Palestinians.

One of the early reviews of the film, written by Anshel Pfeffer in Haaretz, argues that the U.S. Israel lobby and Israeli government are “begging a bunch of amateurs for intel [on BDS supporters].” Although he later admits that the film shows a “self-harming campaign” that costs the Israeli government millions of dollars every year, he ignores the wider implications for the many targeted liberal Jews, pro-Palestinian activists and Muslims whose lives and records are smeared by the lobby for daring to defend Palestinian rights. Free speech around Israel/Palestine is now under attack in the U.S. and across the globe. The FBI is using Canary Mission as a reference point to harass pro-Palestinian activists.

This Al Jazeera documentary deserves a wide audience because it exposes the motivations and methods of individuals and groups that will spend the next 50 or 100 years defending Israeli control of Palestinian lives.

Antony Loewenstein is a Jerusalem-based, independent journalist, film-maker, author of My Israel Question and Disaster Capitalism: Making A Killing Out Of Catastrophe and is currently writing a book on the global “war on drugs”, out in 2019. He has been reporting on Israel/Palestine since 2003.

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US network The Real News interview on US/Israeli mercenaries in Yemen

I was interviewed this week on US network The Real News:

The US-based mercenary company Spear Group, headed by an Israeli and hired by a Palestinian on behalf of the UAE, conducts extra-judicial killings in Yemen. Antony Loewenstein discusses the details:

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What does disaster capitalism really look like in the 21st century?

In the last 7+ years, I’ve been investigating and reporting on disaster capitalism around the world. This culminated in my book, Disaster Capitalism: Making A Killing Out Of Catastrophe, and the documentary, Disaster Capitalism.

There’s a great, long essay in the US magazine Public Books about disaster capitalism in the modern age, written by US academic Tom Winterbottom, and he assesses the various ways that three writers view the issue: Naomi Klein, George Monbiot and me. Below are some extracts from the essay:

That there are many cases of disaster capitalism is a point made by journalist Antony Loewenstein in his book, Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing out of Catastrophe (2015), and in the 2018 documentary Disaster Capitalism. In these comprehensive and unsettling works, he covers war (in Afghanistan), aid (in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake), and environmental exploitation (in Papua New Guinea). He also cites many other examples of exploitative economic practices—those that aim to make money for corporations or purposefully impoverish citizens—in Greece, the UK, the US, and Australia.

Early on in the book, Loewenstein makes an important terminological point: “Whether we call this disaster capitalism,” he writes, “or just a product of the unavoidable excesses and inequalities of capitalism itself, the end result is still a world ruled by unaccountable markets.” Although Loewenstein neglects to flesh this out, it is a crucial observation: what he sees in disparate locations and contexts is not necessarily produced or predicated by a disaster or extraordinary event. The crisis that Loewenstein documents pervades capitalist societies and lies in actors systematically embracing exploitative and damaging practices in the unfolding of the neoliberal story.

Be it detention centers in the US, relief aid in Haiti, military contractors in Afghanistan, economic sanctions on Greece, complicit corporate-sponsored NGOs in the developing world, or prison systems across much of the Western world, “predatory behavior” does vary “from country to country, but the strategy is the same: exaggerate a threat, man-made or natural, and let loose unaccountable private-sector contractors to exploit it.” Loewenstein frequently uses the term “disaster” seemingly interchangeably with terms like “exploitative,” “crisis,” and “predatory” as descriptors of capitalism. That he settles on no single word is not a weakness, but rather an intriguing diagnosis: capitalism in its current expression and at its worst is all of those things and more.

Once you pry open the terminology a little bit, as Loewenstein implies, one finds that the leverage of “disaster capitalism” now stretches far beyond that which Klein identified. In Loewenstein’s reckoning, there are still the more “traditional” disasters and economic shock therapy “solutions,” and perhaps it is those more obvious shocks that generate the conditions that allow for a particularly nefarious and obvious expression of largely harmful neoliberal capitalism, as is beginning to unfold in Puerto Rico.

In the background, however, a more unsettling picture also emerges, in which those exploitative machinations continue to take hold, progressively and aggressively, even without a disaster or shock. Indeed, after reading Loewenstein’s book, one is left wondering what isn’t impacted by the nefarious tendrils of “disaster” capitalism—education, the aid system, non-profit organizations, the democratic electoral system, privacy, healthcare, big tech, big data, underemployment. Nothing is safe from the imperial reach of a commodified system of capital. Disaster or not, it now seems that capitalism seeks to get into unexplored cracks and expand whether or not we like or even recognize it. A disaster often serves to foreground these ever-present traits. As such, “disaster” may no longer refer to specific shocks or changes in the economic system but rather to the system itself. “Disaster” can serve as a modifier concerning the very nature of capitalism and its development within a broad framework of neoliberalism. That is, it is inherently disastrous and in crisis, not exceptionally.

Klein, Monbiot, and Loewenstein chime with the positive possibility of resolution and change, often by citing cases in which the greedy reach of capitalism has been at least limited: the ongoing fight for Puerto Rico is testament to that. The three authors also ultimately demand—somewhat hopefully, or perhaps hopelessly—a need for modern societies “to view humans as more than just consumers.” Monbiot goes further, pushing for a “regime change,” in which the system is replaced rather than reformed.5 As such, their objective seems not to be “benevolent capitalism” or “sustainable capitalism” but rather “not capitalism.”

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Full interview with UK writer Johann Hari on his vital messages around depression

Back in May, I interviewed UK journalist Johann Hari at the Sydney Writer’s Festival about his new book, Lost Connections, on fresh ways to see depression and anxiety. It was a sold-out event and the full audio is now available:

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Interview on US radio station Loud and Clear about real life effects of failed disaster relief

I was interviewed yesterday by US radio station Loud and Clear, the hosts are Brian Becker and former CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, on Hurricane Florence in North Carolina and the ways in which disaster capitalism affects both the relief effort and long-term trends:

Listen to “As Hurricane Florence makes landfall, will some corporations ultimately profit?” on Spreaker.

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From New Orleans to Puerto Rico, vulture companies run rampant

Too often after natural disasters, corporations are looking to make a profit.

I was interviewed by the US magazine Ark Republic about this issue in a story written by Jesse Shramenko. Extracts below:

Antony Loewenstein, a Jerusalem-based freelance journalist, writer and documentarian made the film, Disaster Capitalism, to address the direction of development in Haiti, Afghanistan and Papau New Guinea. For him, similar predatory choices in New Orleans after Katrina materialized in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria.

“After the devastating Hurricane Maria in 2017, there were moves to privatise the water, land and school system,” Loewenstein said. “The country was already financially on its knee, long troubled by a colonial relationship with Washington, but the natural disaster worsened these trends.”

Continues Loewenstein. “Charter schools are now being pushed on the nation without public consultation, akin to how authorities reacted after 2005’s Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. In the US, the worst-off children were not helped by this policy.”

The Center for Research On Education Outcomes, revealed data in 2013 showing disparities between traditional public schools and charter schools New Orleans.

Out of 658,720 students, only 37,043 were enrolled in charter schools, 81% of whom were living in poverty. Across the board, Black charter school student and other Black charters had a total of 428 less days to learn math than Black students of traditional public schools who had 156 less days to learn math.

Charter schools, like other businesses that pop up after natural and social catastrophes bank on the misfortune of others, to simply make money, hence the term disaster capitalism. While private enterprise profits from natural disasters, the public ultimately suffers. In other words, death and destruction are big business.

Whereas privatizing government housing after Katrina was implemented, privatizing electricity is the agenda in Puerto Rico.

“Policy makers have clear choices when addressing the aftermath of a natural disaster; rebuild public services back better and more resilient to future disasters or abandon public works and solely engage the private sector. The effect of the latter is clear, making many services inaccessible for residents who can’t afford it,” Loewenstein said.

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Holding airlines to account for deporting refugees

I was happy to sign this recent statement and campaign run by the Australasian Centre for  Corporate Responsibility

The position of airlines in respect of participation in forced deportations to danger is clear.

Under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the corporate responsibility to respect human rights means taking measures to avoid causing or contributing to adverse human rights impacts. This applies regardless of the size or structure of the business, and over and above local laws.

To discharge their responsibility, airlines should not participate in deportations where there is evidence that the fundamental human rights to an adequate legal process have been denied, as well as where there is a real risk of serious, irreparable harm to an individual.

Relevant international legal and human rights standards in relation to the deportation of asylum seekers include the Refugee Convention, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention against Torture and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Given the inadequacy of Australian law and policy in upholding these standards, airlines should engage a heightened due diligence process in order to determine the potential for contribution to adverse human rights impacts before conducting any deportations as a provider of services to the Australian government.

Contribution to human rights abuses and failure to discharge their international obligations can do damage to a company’s reputation, undermine its social licence to operate, and pose material risks to a company’s financial interests.

Behrouz Boochani,  Kurdish journalist, human rights defender, poet and film producer who has been detained on Manus Island since 2013
Brynn O’Brien, Executive Director Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility, member of the Multi-Stakeholder Advisory Group on Implementation of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights
Tanya Jackson-Vaughan, Executive Director, The Refugee Advice and Casework Service
Professor Gillian Triggs, former President of the Australian Human Rights Commission
Janet Holmes à Court
Rhyll McMaster, poet and author and great niece of founding CEO of Qantas Sir Fergus McMaster
Father Rod Bower, Archdeacon of the Central Coast
Carrillo Gantner AO, Chairman, Sidney Myer Fund
Jennifer Robinson, Barrister, Doughty Street Chambers, London
Adjunct Professor George Newhouse, human rights lawyer, National Justice Project
Shen Narayanasamy, Director No Business in Abuse and GetUp Human Rights Director
Nayuka Gorrie, Kurnai/Gunai, Gunditjmara, Wiradjuri and Yorta Yorta writer
Mark Seymour,  rock legend
John Butler,  singer, songwriter, music producer
Margaret Pomeranz AM,  film critic, writer, producer and television personality
Judith Lucy, comedian and radio, television and film actress, author
Kate McCartney, writer, director, performer
Marieke Hardy, writer, broadcaster, television producer
Tom Zubrycki, documentary filmmaker
Holly Throsby, musician, novelist
Margaret Throsby AM, ABC broadcaster
Tony Wheeler AO, publishing entrepreneur, businessman and travel writer, co-founder of the Lonely Planet guidebook company
Michelle de Kretser, novelist
Thomas Keneally AO, Ambassador, Sydney Asylum Seeker Centre, novelist and playwright
Andrew Bovell, writer for theatre, film and television
Benjamin Law, author, broadcaster and TV screenwriter
Christos Tsiolkas, author, playwright, essayist and screen writer
Nigel Westlake, composer (Babe score), performer and conductor
Ana Kokkinos, film and television director and screenwriter
Neil Armfield AO, theatre, film, opera director
Tim Winton, writer
Yassmin Abdel-Magied, author, engineer
Linda Jaivin, author and translator
Anna Krien, journalist, essayist, fiction writer and poet
James Bradley, novelist and critic
Alison Croggon, writer and critic
Mireille Juchau, novelist
Gail Jones, novelist and Professor of Literature
Drusilla Modjeska, writer
Professor Terri-ann White FAHA, director UWA Publishing
Dhakshy Sooriyakumaran, founder YLab, Engineer, strategy Consultant
Van T Rudd, visual artist
Fiona Katauskas, cartoonist, illustrator
Mahmoud Salameh, cartoonist, visual artist
Hoda Afshar, visual artist
Alan Hunt, artist
Jiva Parthipan, artist
Andrew Bradley (Quro), musician, artist
Tim “Tigermoth” Paterson, musician, artist
Andrew Garvie (DJ Katch), musician and record label director, founder of Resin Dogs
Alex Kelly, film maker
Asher Wolf, journalist, human rights defender
Robin de Crespigny, author, filmmaker
Christopher Gordon, composer, Deputy Mayor of the City of Ryde
Archie Law, Chair, Sydney Peace Foundation
Glenn Osboldstone, Lawyers for Forests
Lizzie O’Shea, lawyer and writer

Shankari Chandran, lawyer and writer
Robert Henderson, Economics, Finance and Banking Consultant and formerly chief economist (markets) with National Australia Bank
Raj Thamotheram, founder & chair of Preventable Surprises
Pablo Berrutti, Responsible Investment professional
Simon O’Connor, Responsible Investment professional
Matt McAdam, Responsible Investment professional
Phil Vernon, Managing Director, Australian Ethical Investment
Simon Sheikh, Managing Director, Future Super
Terry Pinnell, Chair Ethical Advisers Co-op
Sharan Burrow, General Secretary, International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC)
Michele O’Neill, President, Australian Council of Trade Unions
Sam Huggard, Secretary, New Zealand Council of Trade Unions
Luke Hilakari, Secretary, Victorian Trades Hall Council
Meredith Hammat, Secretary, UnionsWA
David Smith, National Secretary, Australian Services Union
Tim Kennedy, National Secretary, National Union of Workers
Jo-anne Schofield, National Secretary, United Voice
Paul Bastian, National Secretary, Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union
Jeanne Rea, National President, National Tertiary Education Union
Michael Thompson, NSW State Secretary, National Tertiary Education Union
Allen Hicks, National Secretary, Electrical Trades Union of Australia
Grant Phillips, Secretary, Newcastle & Northern branch, Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union
Graham Smith, Federal Secretary, Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union
Mick Nairn, President, Fire Brigade Employees’ Union
Susan Hopgood, Federal Secretary, Australian Education Union
John Dixon, General Secretary, NSW Teachers Federation
Annie Butler, Federal Secretary, Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation
Paddy Crumlin, National Secretary, Maritime Union of Australia
Michael O’Connor, National Secretary, Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union
Kate Lee, Executive Officer, Union Aid Abroad, APHEDA
Jacquie Widin, President, SEARCH Foundation
Melissa Parke, former federal member for Fremantle and Minister for International Development
Debbie Stothard, Secretary General and Coordinator, International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH)
Associate Professor Justine Nolan, Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales, member of the Multi-Stakeholder Advisory Group on Implementation of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights
Professor Denise Bradley AC
Dennis Altman AM FASSA,  Ambassador Human Rights Law Centre, Patron, Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives and Gay and Lesbian Foundation of Australia
Professor Brigitta Olubas, School of the Arts and Media, UNSW
Simon Holmes à Court, Senior Advisor, Climate and Energy College, Melbourne University
Dr Shelley Marshall, Senior Research Fellow, Graduate School of Business and Law, RMIT University
Dr Julia Dehm, Lecturer, La Trobe Law School
Dr Alice de Jonge, Senior Lecturer, Monash Business School
Chris Nash, Professor of Journalism (Adjunct), School of Media, Film and Journalism, Faculty of Arts, Monash University
Antony Loewenstein, independent journalist, author and film-maker
Tessa Khan, international human rights lawyer
Rawan Arraf, human rights lawyer
Claire Palmer, barrister
Peter O’Brien, Principal, O’Brien criminal and civil solicitors
Tim Lo Surdo, Democracy in Colour
Ben Oquist, Executive Director, The Australia Institute
Tim Hollo, Executive Director, The Green Institute
Christine Milne, Global Greens Ambassador and former Leader of the Australian Greens
Sophie Black, Head of Publishing, The Wheeler Centre
Elaine Pearson, Australia Director, Human Rights Watch
Claire Mallinson, National Director, Amnesty International Australia
Madeleine Bridgett, barrister and Co-Chair Business and Human Rights Sub-Committee, Australian Lawyers for Human Rights
Keren Adams, Director of Legal Advocacy, Human Rights Law Centre, member of the Multi-Stakeholder Advisory Group on Implementation of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights
Professor Paul Redmond AM, Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney, member of the Multi-Stakeholder Advisory Group on Implementation of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights
Kon Karapanagiotidis OAM, CEO, Asylum Seekers’ Resource Centre
Luke Fletcher, Executive Director, Jubilee Australia
Lyn Harrison, CEO, House of Welcome
Frances Rush, CEO, Asylum Seekers Centre Sydney
Carolina Gottardo, Director, Jesuit Refugee Service Australia
Phil Glendenning AM, Director, Edmund Rice Centre & President, Refugee Council of Australia
Paul Power, CEO, Refugee Council of Australia
Aran Mylvaganam, Tamil Refugee Council
Brendan Doyle, Secretary, Blue Mountains Refugee Support Group
Margaret Hughes Bennelong Friends of Refugees & Amnesty International Australia
Anthea Vogl, National Convener, Academics for Refugees
Jessie Taylor, President, Liberty Victoria
Dr Safdar Ahmed, Artist and Director, Refugee Art Project
Emeritus Professor Alison Mackinnon, AM, University of South Australia

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US network The Real News Network interview on Erik Prince in Afghanistan

My interview on US news program The Real News Network on Blackwater founder Erik Prince and his vocal desire to privatise the war in Afghanistan:

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Not welcoming Donald Trump to Australia

Malcolm Turnbull may just have been replaced as Australian Prime Minister by Scott Morrison – a man with blood on his hands over his disgraceful treatment of refugees many years ago – but this publicly-released letter that I’ve signed still stands:

An alliance of organisations and individuals have formed the Unite Against Trump Alliance to begin coordinating a protest against US President Donald Trump when he visits Australia in November. The following statement, initiated by outgoing NSW Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon, is being circulated for sign-ons in the lead up to the protests that are being organised across the country including in Cairns, Canberra and Brisbane.

To sign on to the statement, visit the Unite Against Trump Sydney page.

***

Disgracefully, Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull has invited US President Donald Trump to visit Australia. This is likely to occur after the APEC summit in PNG in November.

Donald Trump is a racist, misogynist, lying billionaire who is trying to drag global politics to the far right. His brand of extreme nationalism, Islamophobia, greed, anti-refugee, anti-immigrant, anti-women, anti-LGBTI, anti-union and anti-environment rhetoric and policies are abhorrent to the majority of the Australian public.

The Turnbull government has aligned with Trump’s bigoted and militaristic global agenda at every opportunity. We want to see Australia distanced from Trump’s values. His values do not represent the interests of most people on the planet or the planet itself.

More than ever we need to join together in Australia and across borders to struggle for a world that respects the equal rights and wonderful diversity of humanity, protects our fragile environment and equitably shares the enormous wealth all around us.

We call on Malcolm Turnbull to rescind Trump’s invitation to Australia and for the parliament to prohibit him from speaking if his visit goes ahead.

We pledge that if Trump does visit we will meet him with mass demonstrations to show our opposition to everything his Presidency stands for.

Signed:

Lee Rhiannon — Greens Senator for NSW

David Shoebridge — NSW Greens MLC

Sydney Stop the War Coalition

Imogen Grant — President, University of Sydney Students’ Representative Council

Stephen Smyth — President CFMEU QLD Energy and Mining Division

National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) NSW

Professor Raymond Evans — Griffith University

Jeff Sparrow — author and journalist

Antony Loewenstein — author and filmmaker

Stephen Jolly — Yarra Councillor and president of Victorian Socialists

Aran Mvlvaganam, Tamil Refugee Council spokesperson and Finances Sector Union organiser

Michael Thomson, NSW National Tertiary Education Union secretary

Craig McGregor, Victorian Allied Health Professionals Association secretary (VAHPA)

Latin American Social Forum (LASF)

Sue Bolton, Socialist Alliance councillor, Moreland City Council, Victoria

Victorian Socialists

Hersha Kadkol — National Ethno-Cultural Officer National Union of Students

Jasmine Duff & Kim Stern — National LGBTI Officers, National Union of Students

Zac Solomon — President UNSW Students’ Representative Council

Stuart Traill — Electricity Supply Industry Coordinator ETU (QLD and NT Branch)

Dr Peter Slezak — academic UNSW

Hanan Dover — Muslim Community Advocate

Whistleblowers, Activists and Citizens Alliance (WACA)

Lucia Sorbera — Senior Lecturer and Chair of Arabic Studies Department University of Sydney Community Action Against Homophobia (CAAH)

Sydney University Education Action Group (EAG)

Nick Reimer, academic University of Sydney

University of Sydney Students’ Representative Council

Mark Pace — National Union of Students president

Leonie Hendricks, Retired NSW NMA state secretary

Lisa Milner, academic Southern Cross University

Leonie Hendricks, Queensland Greens/CPSU organiser

Jenny Haines, academic UTS

Jacob Grech, Renegade Activists

Barbara McGrady, Indigenous photojournalist

David Brophy, Academic University of Sydney

Kirra Jackson, Vice President UTS Student Union

Pauline Pants-down

Tim Nelthorpe, NUW organiser

Patricia Cornelius, playwright

Michael Schembri, advocate Finance Sector Union and gay left activist

Grandmothers Against Detention

Coalition for Justice and Peace in Palestine (CJPP)

Close The Camps Action Collective

Cathy Peters, Convenor Coalition for Justice and Peace in Palestine

Michael Brull, writer

Lizzie O’Shea, Social Justice Officer

Maurice Blackburn Lawyers

UNSW Education Collective

Palestine Action Group, Sydney (PAG)

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NPR covers the growing trend of offshoring refugees in remote locations

The 21st century sees many nations looking for ways to punish, isolate and deter refugees (while often contributing to the reasons these people are fleeing in the first place through wars and occupations).

I recently published a major investigation in US magazine The Nation on how Australia is inspiring the EU and others over its draconian refugee policies.

NPR in the US has featured this reporting in a story written by Isabella Alexander:

Key parts of Europe’s new plans have a controversial precedent — in Australia.

Antony Loewenstein, a reporter who has spent the past several years investigating Europe’s move toward externalized border controls, revealed in June that officials from individual European countries and the EU had secretly met with Australian officials about their refugee policies.

As part of a complex system established by the Australian government in 2001, migrants and refugees who were imprisoned in privatized detention centers on the Australian mainland were increasingly sent to small Pacific islands that border the country — Manus in Papua New Guinea and the nation of Nauru.

Although access to these centers has been tightly controlled, reactions from the international community have grown louder as news from the inside slowly trickles out — stories of routine abuse, rape and death from beatings or suicide. Australia, which campaigned for three years to gain a seat at the United Nations Human Rights Council, received a scathing report from the council during its first week in session in 2017. In a 20-page exposé, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, detailed a system of abuse designed to punish and use migrants as an example to deter future ones.

“It is not because [the refugees] are bad people. It is because in order to stop people smugglers we [have] to deprive them of the product,” Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said in a phone call with President Trump in 2017, according to a transcript in The Washington Post. The product he was referring to is their basic right to seek asylum.

According to Loewenstein’s reporting, European officials were looking to adopt a similar practice.

If Australia, a democratic nation signatory to international human rights conventions, has successfully outsourced its processing centers with no concrete outside intervention, what is to stop Europe, which receives significantly more migrants, from doing so?

European leaders have an opportunity to learn from Australia’s human rights failings and avoid the potentially catastrophic consequences of establishing similar processing centers outside of the bloc in North Africa.

Read the whole piece.

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US network The Real News interview on UAE using mercenaries in Yemen

My interview on US network The Real News about the United Arab Emirates using private, military contractors in the horrific war in Yemen and the involvement of Australia and the US:

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