Mass spying: how the US stamps its supremacy on the Pacific region

Antony Loewenstein                          Guardian/UK                9 October 2013

While Washington distracts itself with shutdown shenanigans and failed attempts to control the situation in the Middle East, president Obama’s “pivot to Asia” looks increasingly shaky. Beijing is quietly filling the gap, signing multi-billion dollar trade deals with Indonesia and calling for a regional infrastructure bank.  Meanwhile in recent years, New Zealand has been feeling some of the US's attention, and prime minister John Key is more than happy to shift his country’s traditional skepticism towards Washington into a much friendlier embrace. Canberra is watching approvingly.

 It’s almost impossible to recall a critical comment by leaders of either country towards global US surveillance. We are like obedient school children, scared that the bully won’t like us if we dare argue harder for our own national interests.  The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), warmly backed by Australian prime minister Tony Abbott and New Zealand, is just the latest example of US client states allowing US multinationals far too much influence in their markets in a futile attempt to challenge ever-increasing Chinese business ties in Asia.

This erosion of sovereignty goes to the heart with what’s wrong with today’s secretive and unaccountable arrangements between nations desperate to remain under the US's security blanket, and New Zealand provides an intriguing case-study in how not to behave, including using US spy services to monitor the phone calls of Kiwi journalist Jon Stephenson and his colleagues while reporting the war in Afghanistan. There’s no indication that Australia isn’t following exactly the same path, with new evidence that Australia knew about the US spying network Prism long before it was made public.    

We still don’t know the exact extent of intelligence sharing between Australia and the US, except it’s very close and guaranteed to continue. New Zealand is a close Australian neighbour, but news from there rarely enters our media. This is a shame because we can learn a lot from the scandal surrounding the illegal monitoring of Dotcom and the public outcry which followed, something missing in Australia after countless post-Snowden stories detailing corporate and government spying on all citizens. 

Dotcom is the founder of Megaupload (today called Mega), a file sharing website that incurred the wrath of US authorities. Washington wanted to punish him but Dotcom obtained New Zealand residency in late 2010, bringing a close US ally into the mix. Intelligence matters usually remain top-secret, leading New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager tells me, but this case was different, blowing open the illegal spying on Dotcom. His lawyers scrutinised all the police warrants after the FBI-requested raid on his house. The government communications security bureau (GCSB) has always claimed it never monitored New Zealand citizens; Dotcom soon discovered this was false. Public outrage followed, and an investigation revealed many other cases of GCSB over-reach since 2003. Prime minister Key responded by changing legislation to allow spying on residents.

Hager explained to me what his investigations uncovered: With Dotcom, GCSB helped the police by monitoring Dotcom's e-mail. What this largely meant in practice was that the GCSB sent a request through to the NSA to do the monitoring for them and received the results back.  The Key government now wants to increase its monitoring capabilities even more, and New Zealanders are showing concern.  N Z journalist Martin Bradbury has also been a vocal critic of the Dotcom case. He’s pushing for a New Zealand digital bill of rights and tells me that “the case against Dotcom is more about the US stamping their supremacy onto the Pacific by expressing US jurisdiction extends not just into New Zealand domestically, but also into cyberspace itself.”    This brings us back to China and the US’s attempts to convince its Pacific friends to fear a belligerent and spying Beijing. The irony isn’t lost on the informed who realise Washington’s global spying network is far more pernicious and widespread than anything the Obama administration and corporate media tell us is coming from the Chinese.

Neither China nor the US are benign in the spying stakes. Both are guilty of aggressively pursuing their interests without informing their citizens of their rights and actions. Australia and NZ are weak players in an increasingly hostile battle between two super-powers, and many other nations in our region are being seduced by the soft power of Beijing (including Papua New Guinea, partly due to its vast resource wealth).  A lack of transparency abounds. What is desperately needed is an adversarial press determined to demand answers about Australia’s intelligence relationship with the US – and whether all citizens should now presume they’re being monitored on a daily basis.

[Abridged]    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/09/mass-spying-pacific-prism

Pope Francis is launching a Vatican Spring

This week his committee of eight cardinals began work on a radical reform of the scandal-hit Vatican

Paul  Vallelly                     Independent/UK               4 October 2013

It ought to have been, for Pope Francis, a day of happiness. It was the first visit of his life to Assisi, the home of the saint whose name the new pontiff chose as a kind of mission statement. But the news came in that as many as 300 migrants were feared dead after the sinking of an overloaded boat off the coast of the southern island of Lampedusa. “Today is a day for crying,” he said instead.

Yet that was apt too. Lampedusa, the first European port of overcrowded call for many people fleeing poverty and war in Africa, was the first place to which Francis travelled outside Rome as Pope. The great saint of Assisi, who cast off a pampered life as the son of a rich merchant to live among the destitute, may be the great exemplar of embraced poverty. But it is in places like Lampedusa that the reality of involuntary poverty in this globalised world is made manifest. 

The figure on the cross in Assisi’s Church of San Damiano was one, the Pope noted, on which Jesus is depicted not as dead, but alive, his eyes open to a world in which we all need to live more simply. Francis has embraced that by shunning his gold-leafed papal palace for the spartan quarters of a Vatican guest house.

As a measure of his intent to turn the Church upside down the Pope took with him the eight cardinals with whom he had spent the past three days in a closed meeting with no Vatican officials present. It was the first gathering of a sadical new body Francis has set up to act as a counter-weight to the bureaucrats who form the Church’s governing Curia.

The chosen eight have all in the past been strong critics of the way Rome has acted as the master of local churches around the world rather than their servant. This week they began work on a radical reform of the scandal-hit Vatican. But they are also looking at how to give a greater role to lay people, to women, to divorced and remarried Catholics – who have traditionally been marginalised– and to ensure that the Church prioritises the poor. They have discussed setting up church courts all around the world to deal with paedophile priests more swiftly and severely.

All this was once unthinkable. But this new Pope has given an extraordinary interview saying the church had grown “obsessed” with “small minded rules” and lost sight of the primacy of compassion. Without change “the moral edifice of the Church is likely to fall like a house of cards”.  This week he gave an even more startling interview in which he said the Curial court was “the leprosy of the papacy” whose “Vatican-centric view neglects the world around us” adding “I’ll do everything I can to change it”. Being open to modernity, he said, is a duty.

Conservative Catholics are blanching at all this. The moral philosopher Germain Grisez, the darling of the conservative theology of the previous two popes, has attacked Francis for “letting loose with his thoughts” as self-indulgentlyas he might unburden himself with friends after a good dinner and plenty of wine”. Ouch! Yet Pope Francis, undeterred, is revealing himself as more revolutionary with every day that passes.

‘Pope Francis – Untying the Knots’ by Paul Vallely is published by Bloomsbury      [Abridged]

Twitter: @pvall

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/pope-francis-is-launching-a-vatican-spring-8859523.html

The American dream has become a burden for most

As wages stagnate and costs rise, US workers recognise the guiding ideal of this nation for the delusional myth it is

Gary Younge                     Guardian/UK                            22 September 2013

The final chapter of America's Promise, a high-school textbook on American history, ends with a rallying cry to national mythology.. “The full promise of America has yet to be realised. This is the real promise of America; the ability to dream of a better world to come."

Such are the assumptions beamed from the torch of Lady Liberty, coursing through the veins of the nation's political culture and imbibed with mothers' milk. Their nation, many will tell you, is not just a land mass but an ideal. Such devout optimism, even  in the midst of adversity makes America, in equal parts, both exciting and delusional. According to Gallup, since 1977 people have consistently believed their financial situation will improve next year even when previous years have consistently been worse.

But when President Barack Obama was planning his run for a second term his pollsters noticed a profound shift in the national mood. "The language around the American dream wasn't carrying the same resonance," They weren't sure a college education was worth it."

This wasn't just about the recession, but a far more protracted, profound and painful descent in expectations and aspirations that has been taking place for several decades. For underpinning that faith in a better tomorrow was an understanding that inequality in wealth would be tolerated so long as it was coupled with a guarantee of equality of opportunity. In recent years they have seen both heading in the wrong direction – the gap between rich and poor has grown even as possibilities for economic and social advancement have stalled.

Between 2007 and 2010 the median American family lost a generation of wealth, putting them on a par with where they were in 1992. Last week the census revealed that median household income is roughly the same as it was in 1988 and that the poverty rate had actually increased since 1973. Meanwhile, median male earnings in 2010 were on a par with 1964. This is not for want of effort. American workers continue to make gains in productivity and American companies continue to reap the benefits. Last year corporate profits, as a share of the economy, were the highest since the second world war. The trouble is, none of the benefits went back to them

.

And while wages have stagnated, costs have shot up. A family's health insurance contributions have increased 90% over the past decade. Over the past five years tuition costs have leapt 27% at state universities and 13% at private institutions above inflation. A nation that has long prided itself on being forward-thinking is reconciling itself to going backwards. Both parties supported the financial deregulation and international trade liberalisation that laid the foundations for this despondency. Each blames the other for its consequences. Neither is capable of doing anything about it because the very monied interests that made this situation possible also make the politicians.

Little of this is unique to the US. The main countries within the European Union, including Britain, are suffering from wage stagnation. The retraction has not been taking place as long as it has in the US, but has been on the same trajectory for quite some time. But there are two key differences. The Germans, British and French were not raised with a guiding myth that is being contradicted at the end of every month when families routinely find they can't meet their expenses. Second, most European nations do have a welfare state (at least for now) that contends with the fallout. Those who look to America as a trendsetter that maps our future should be careful what they wish for.

The self-proclaimed leader of the free world is turning into a low-wage economy with a class system more rigid than most and a middle class that wavers between poverty and precariousness. More than half the people using the food bank in Larimer County, Colorado, that I visited last year were working. More than one in four families in New York's homeless shelters includes at least one working adult. In the absence of a living wage and an ethical pay structure, the work ethic, on which the American dream is founded, doesn't work.         [Abridged]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/22/american-dream-wages-stagnate-delusional-myth

Millions of Catholics have been waiting for this

Posted by  Andrew Brown                 Guardian/UK                1 October 2013

This is going to be an interesting week for Pope Francis. His "countercuria" – a group of eight cardinals from around the world, selected partly for their known hostility to the way the Vatican has been run – is meeting for the first time. Already he has announced that they will form a permanent council. Although that arrangement may not survive him, the intention to remove the church's strategic planning from the curia – the permanent "civil service" in the Vatican – is clear.

Before that committee reports, there is his remarkable interview with the editor of La Republicca, a cradle Catholic turned atheist, which the paper splashed on this morning. This continues on the lines of his earlier interview with a fellow Jesuit, but is even more outspoken:  "The curia as a whole is … what in an army is called the quartermaster's office, it manages the services that serve the Holy See. But it has one defect: it is Vatican-centric. It sees and looks after the interests of the Vatican, which are still, for the most part, temporal interests. This Vatican-centric view neglects the world around us. I do not share this view and I'll do everything I can to change it."

Later, in an extraordinary phrase, he says:  "Heads of the church have often been narcissists, flattered and thrilled by their courtiers. The court is the leprosy of the papacy."

There are times when it is almost impossible to believe this is a pope speaking:  Proselytism is solemn nonsense, it makes no sense. We need to get to know each other, listen to each other and improve our knowledge of the world around us … The world is crisscrossed by roads that come closer together and move apart, but the important thing is that they lead towards the good."

Even more astonishing:   "Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place."
It really is difficult to imagine anything more opposed to the spirit of fortress Catholicism, and the doctrines that "error has no rights" and "there is no salvation outside the church".

One of the strangest things about this interview is that it comes from a man who has pressed ahead with the canonisation ofJohn Paul II, whose policy and vision of the papacy he seems more and more directly to reject.

He defends the liberation theologians, whom John Paul II persecuted and in some cases excommunicated:
"[Marxism] certainly gave a political aspect to their theology, but many of them were believers and with a high concept of humanity."   He also speaks with affection of a communist teacher he had – again something unthinkable for the Polish pope who shaped the church he has inherited.

None of this makes him a liberal exactly. The saint he says he feels closest to is Augustine (also, of course, Luther's guiding light), who worked out the doctrine of original sin. In fact I can't help feeling that if Luther had continued as an Augustinian friar, and – who knows – become pope himself, he would have sounded quite a lot like Francis, except for his antisemitism, which Francis explicitly repudiates.

But he certainly offers no comfort to the neoliberals, either. "I think so-called unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded. We need great freedom, no discrimination, no demagoguery and a lot of love. We need rules of conduct and also, if necessary, direct intervention from the state to correct the more intolerable inequalities."

Whatever else happens, this papacy is going to be astounding fun to watch, not least because – although we talk of the pope leading his church – he knows very well that there are a great many Catholics, not all of them in the priesthood, who are determined not to follow in the direction he is pointing them. On the other hand there are millions throughout the world who have been waiting decades for a pope who talks like this.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2013/oct/01/millions-catholics-pope-francis

Paradigm Shift

by Ian Harris          Otago Daily Times        Sept. 27, 2013

 One of the biggest shifts in western history has been occurring quietly over the past 400 years, a shift in the way people relate to the planet that sustains them. And today it’s accelerating.  In the time-honoured religious story of the West, the relationship was crystal-clear. Earth came into existence in a mighty act of creation by a God who dwelt beyond it. Human beings were the pinnacle of planetary life, and to them God gave dominion over the earth and every living thing.

Though some Christians still regard that story as true and binding, a growing number do not. Their perceptions of where the world came from, and their place in it, have undergone a sea change. They now see that old story as poetry and myth – and as such it still has much to offer.  But in looking to origins, they embrace a new story of how we come to be here. It is a story that transforms people’s understanding of the planet, changes their perspective on the place of human life upon it, and provides a new platform for religious interpretation.

This new story, the gift of science to the church, tells us that humans are products of stardust and time. For 13.7 billion years Earth has been evolving geologically, physically, biologically, and human life and culture are simply a late flowering in the selfsame process.

That means humans belong fully and firmly to the earth. Their life here is almost certainly all the life they will know. It is here they must find meaning and purpose, here they must develop an understanding of God that will not only hold up within the new story, but add value to it. An immediate casualty of the new perspective is the notion that the human species, as the peak of creation, has the right and duty to lord it over nature. Homo sapiens has to take a demotion and see itself as descended from cosmic gas and debris, just like everything else.

In only one decisive respect are humans unique: they have language. This allows them to think abstractly, share their thoughts with others, and open their imaginations to create metaphor, myth, religion, the gods, and God. Sir Lloyd Geering outlines the process superbly in his latest book, From the Big Bang to God.

And collectively, humans are the consciousness of the planet. They make up what the French priest, philosopher and palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin called the “noosphere” – that film of awareness of others around the globe, and increasingly awareness of the earth, which humans share in a way that is true of no other life form.

It’s that consciousness, together with its moral cousin conscience, which is now being challenged to respond to one of the great salvation/destruction questions of our time: How should we live upon the earth so that our presence enhances not just ourselves, not just human life, but our planetary home?

The question is urgent, because since the Industrial Revolution humans have been using, exploiting, polluting, sometimes trashing the environment on which life depends at an ever-increasing rate. That has brought the world to the brink, forcing humankind to choose between ensuring the planet will be able to nurture future generations, or destroying it.

American physicist David Robinson puts the choice starkly in The Poised Century: “Given consciousness, we have the capacity for conscious evolution, the ability to look at our own actions, see their effect on ourselves and the world, and then act in new ways that will change our course from extinction to sustainability.”  In that light, the current political emphasis on economic growth and prosperity through galloping consumerism is madness. Robinson asks: “Is there a better way to be better off?”, and answers yes – as long as communities develop “a new economics that values who we are over what we have, that values being over accumulation [of goods].”

That happens to accord with an insight which the churches have fostered for centuries. For them, the measure of a human life lies not in a person’s property, possessions or power, but in the love and compassion shown towards others. Those “others” now have to include not only future generations, but increasingly the planet on which all life depends.  In addressing this salvation/destruction issue, far-reaching political, economic and personal choices have to be made. And in promoting values and shaping worldviews fit for our times, good religion has a vital part to play. The challenge to everyone, including the churches, is: What price salvation now?