Antony Loewenstein

During my recent New York book tour for Disaster Capitalism, I recorded an interview on The Laura Flanders TV show. It’s airing this week on TV channels around the world:

US website Pop Matters reviews my book, Disaster Capitalism; the reviewer is James Orbesen:

An anecdote: as a resident of Chicago, I often use public transit. Although the system is in no way perfect, it is popular, extensive, and runs (mostly) on time, which is quite a feat in itself. In August 2013, the fare card system, previously operated by the Chicago Transit Authority, was outsourced to the privately owned Cubic Transportation Systems. Riders accustomed to the yellow-and-blue Chicago card were forced to switch over to the Ventra card. Savings and efficiencies were promised, as well as utility, since Ventra could also function as a MasterCard, netting riders who by choice or circumstances are unbankable.

The rollout was disastrous. Riders were kept hanging for weeks waiting on their new cards. Card readers wouldn’t work or would take multiple tries, slowing down commuters, especially bus routes. Tens of thousands of dollars were lost from fares as frustrated bus drivers waved through harried riders during system crashes. Customer service calls entailed hour-long waits. One rider ended up receiving 267 Ventra cards in the mail through a fluke.

All of this frustration was supposedly done for the benefit of riders and taxpayers. Yet, the privatization scheme outsourced a piece of public infrastructure (one that was up, running, and embraced by commuters) into private hands that promised a solution to a problem that didn’t exist with a flawed product at the price tag of hundreds of millions of dollars across 12 years.

While Ventra is a relatively low stakes example of privatization, Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein’s latest book Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophedocuments instances far more sobering, far more enraging, and much more relevant, considering the ongoing migrant crises in parts of the world destabilized by war and natural disaster.

Loewenstein is a writer of strong convictions, with formulations such “In many ways, privatization had no moral code, apart from making money.” Those looking for a dispassionate NPR or New Yorker-esque examination of social and economic ills best look elsewhere. Instead, the author treks around the globe, relating his experiences of documenting the dangers of “disaster capitalism”, a term coined by author Naomi Klein, where disasters, natural or manmade, are followed by deep cuts to spending, privatization, and deregulation. What results is an increasing capture of and pressure on those most vulnerable to profit seeking entities.

Reporting on private military contractors in Afghanistan, outside NGOs in Haiti, resource extractors in Papua New Guinea, and large multinational corporations that handle immigrants and refugees arriving in Australia, Britain, and the US, Loewenstein is attentive to the causes and the actors involved in each context. Though largely suspicious of and primed to be dismissive towards those in positions of power (perhaps overly so), the author takes pains to examine and excoriate the systems, rather than the individuals in charge.

This is a fine direction and it allows us to focus more on structures than devolving into painting cardboard cutouts of the company man, the media shill, the heartless non-profit CEO, something reporting on the excesses of capitalism can breed (look to the coverage of pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli’s price gouging, the press anointed ‘pharma-bro’. Much attention was devoted to his “doucheness”, if you will, while little was devoted to the ethics of for-profit medicine). Loewenstein’s attention to structures also draws attention to the contradictions of capitalism, something best embodied in the costs of housing refugees on Australia’s Manus Island by a private contractor.

As Loewenstein reports, a large multinational charges the government, “$74,792 per detainee per year on Manus Island.” Ironically, the privatization of this service, intended to save taxpayers and increase efficiency, did the opposite. The author continues, “It was cheaper to place an asylum seeker in a room in the Sheraton hotel in Sydney than for one night on Manus…”

Combined with a high rate of self-harm reported by detainees, low morale among the staff, and the legal limbo asylum seekers find themselves in, it becomes clear the disaster capitalists aren’t interested in providing a service, but are only interested in milking a cash cow; namely, taxpayers and the economically insecure, along with the politically marginal.

There’s a tendency towards sameness in some of Loewenstein’s sections, as if each portion was tackled piecemeal, without a greater sense of a larger project. Redundancies occur. Essay collections often run into this kind of problem, but it’s a bit odd in a workof extended reportage, considering how wide ranging the author’s case studies are.

However, what cuts through this sameness is when Loewenstein interjects himself into the reporting. This provides a human face that readers might find lacking in his attention to big, impersonal structures. For example, he sits down with a Hazara refugee seeker housed on Australia’s Christmas Island. Loewenstein listened closely to the man’s story. “It was a difficult conversation. I tried to show empathy for his situation—I did not know his exact story or its validity, but I could see he was in a bad way.” Consideration of dollars and cents don’t enter the conversation, here—only the plight of the person does.

Here the author hits what exactly is needed or, at least, one of the essential ingredients to combatting unrestricted capitalism and the neoliberal capture of national governments. “Humanity must not be outsourced to the highest bidder,” he states, “Awareness does not necessarily bring change, but it is the first, vital step in doing so. What we do with this information, living in nations with power, is our choice.”

 Rating: 7/10

My investigative feature in The Nation:

Before its failed occupation of Afghanistan, the Soviet Union discovered that the country was rich in natural resources. In the 1980s, Soviet mining experts drafted maps and collected data that would lay dormant in the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul until the rise of the Taliban. These charts documented a vast amount of iron, copper, gold, cobalt, rare earth metals, and lithium.

Fearing what the Taliban might do with this wealth, a tiny group of Afghan geologists hid the maps in their homes until the arrival of American forces in 2001. By 2007, the US Geological Survey had undertaken the most comprehensive study of the mineral deposits below the country’s surface. An internal Pentagon memo claimed that Afghanistan could develop into the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” referring to the mineral that is an integral component of laptop and smartphone batteries.

Washington was ecstatic about the findings and in 2010 claimed that at least $1 trillion in resources was up for grabs. “There is stunning potential here,” said Gen. David Petraeus, then the head of US Central Command, speaking to The New York Times. US officials said that the deposits could sustain the Afghan economy and generate thousands of jobs, reducing corruption and reliance on foreign aid. Currently, with 60 percent of the country’s budget provided by foreign donors, outside investment is crucial. Acknowledging the inability of the Afghan Ministry of Mines and Petroleum to handle a burgeoning resource industry, the US government pledged to help implement accountability mechanisms. However, regulations like the mining law—revised in 2014 to bring greater transparency—have had little effect on illegal mining and the non-payment of royalties.

The warning signs were there. “This is a country that has no mining culture,” Jack Medlin, a geologist in the US Geological Survey’s international-affairs program, told the Times. During my visit to Afghanistan in May, I often heard from locals that the resource industry was never going to provide enough money to support the economy once foreign aid dried up. Afghan mining expert Javed Noorani told The Nation that President Ashraf Ghani is “more constrained in his actions against the criminal networks operating in the mining sector than President [Hamid] Karzai was. Today there is open plunder of gemstones by the partners in his government, and his silence and passivity puzzle me, like many others.”

Mining and Petroleum Minister Daud Shah Saba told Iranian mining officials in October that only 25 percent of Afghanistan’s mines had been identified, indicating that the US mineral survey perhaps wasn’t as comprehensive as claimed. In 2015, according to Saba, the government will earn only $30 million from resources for the third consecutive year—far less than the projected $1.5 billion. “Unfortunately, we have failed to well manage and well control our mining sector,” the minister told Bloomberg News in October. “With the current fragile and messy situation, it’s really hard to say when Afghanistan should expect any profits from it.”

* * *

The facts on the ground explain the troubles. Logar Province hasn’t seen peace for decades. Situated close to Kabul, the country’s capital, the area was a main supply route for the American-backed mujahideen as they poured in from Pakistan in the late 1970s and early ’80s during the Soviet occupation. Swedish journalist Borge Almqvist visited the province in 1982 and commented that “the most common sight, except for ruins, are graves.”

By 1995, the Taliban controlled Logar, and today, all sides of the modern Afghan conflict intersect there. Insurgents rule large swaths of the area, and suicide bombings kill civilians and Afghan security forces. The locals are caught between the Taliban, a small but growing Islamic State (ISIS) presence, and Afghan troops.

Logar is also home to one of the world’s largest untapped copper deposits, at Mes Aynak. The Chinese company China Metallurgical Group Corp. (MCC) controls the $3 billion mine, having obtained rights to the area in 2007, but operations haven’t commenced because of security concerns and the discovery by archaeologists of ancient Buddhist relics dating back to the Bronze Age.

Local and international archaeologists have spent years finding, cleaning, and preserving the relics, and they remain opposed to the mine. Nor do they have much faith that the security situation would allow the mine to operate successfully. One Afghan archaeologist working at the site, Aziz Wafa, told Reuters in April that “for the Chinese [violence] is a problem, but not for the Afghans. I was born in a war, I grew up in a war, and I will die in a war.”

When Ghani visited Be