Blood & Treasure

murder for hire

Sir Ian Blair gives at least one game away on police privatization:

The tender offered by West Midlands and Surrey police signals a shift which would allow the private sector to provide staff who can carry out routine and repetitive tasks at cheaper rates and, perhaps most intriguingly, to provide temporary access to skilled staff – such as murder inquiry teams – which can be hired for incidents that are rare in most forces but for which all forces must permanently retain a group of very expensive staff.

So the salient feature of the murder squad is that it is 'very expensive'. There's also the implication here that local knowledge is of no use at all in investigating murder. More generally ACPO reassure us that tasks that are 'complex', 'central to the police mission' and 'impact on public safety' will stay with your actual warranted coppers, but seem a bit vague on the detail of what they believe these actually are.

FT takes sides in CPC faction fight

Open season on Bo Xilai continues. My, doesn’t it just: the basic allegation here is that Bo’s anti-organised crime campaign was simply an excuse to grab the assets of wealthy businesspeople in order to – wait for it – establish a comprehensive social security system.

Now, the two most popular of Bo’s initiatives are, funnily enough, his anti-mafia crackdown and his welfare measures. It seems to be necessary to discredit these in order to take him down. It’s also becoming apparent that at least some of Bo’s enemies want to take down what they believe to be a reliance on state-capitalist led growth and an emerging public welfare agenda along with him. And as Patrick Chovanec remarks in a related context, this kind of all out attack stems from very high level permission.

I’m not surprised that the FT would support this agenda; but I am a bit surprised that it would let itself be used as a channel by one side in a CPC faction fight. If you look at the sidebar, as well, there’s an odd reference to Wang Lijun having a hobby of human vivisection, which is straight Falun Gong propaganda.

There’s also generally a lot less here than meets the eye. As we’ve pointed out before, neither Bo nor Wang Yang are up for President or Premier. What’s at stake are posts on the nine-man Standing Committee, which both could still conceivably get, and neither of which would necessarily have economic oversight powers. And both Bo and Wang’s models are functions of the autonomy allowed to provincial level leaderships. The adoption of either ‘model’ nationwide would imply a recentralization of power under a strongman figure. This would be bad news whatever ‘model’ were adopted.

keeping it positive

Mr Scary the scaremonger is in his scariest mood. As Russia votes, here is Volodya’s version of what’s at stake. Even better than the virgin voters video.Titillating Transcript over here. You don't necessarily need it, but it's great in its own right. Sample: ‘Conflicts between fascists and ethnic mafias occur in every large city. Multiple innocent victims everywhere. The St. Petersburg Duma (legislature) basically gets taken over by Nazis. Protests are put down by violence.’ Never mind Chris Grayling and his Trot fetish,here's the real deal. Via the Stiftung's twitter feed.

a village votes

So Wukan goes to the polls and a good electoral time is had by all. Even the China Daily gets in on the act without obviously gritted teeth. A couple of things:

Speeches at the rally centred around the issue of land rights.

''I will retrieve the land that rightfully belongs to Wukan villagers!'' said Zhuang Liehong, 28, in a speech punctuated with fist-pumps that whipped the crowd into a frenzy.

This demand has been a feature of the Wukan protests from the beginning; also of the more recent protests in Panhe in Zhejiang province. The thing is that the original land seizures were illegal because people who hold rural hukou are supposed to be guaranteed access to land. The land itself is owned by the state. What Mr Zhuang is calling for is the restoration of property rights to the people over ‘ancestral land’ in contravention of a very basic provision of Chinese law and one of the fundamental aspects of Communist Party rule: the Party controls land like it controls the PLA. For now, it seems to have decided to ignore this challenge.

''In the end the Chinese government agreed to use elections as a way of solving the Wukan problem,'' Wang Zhenyao, a former senior Ministry of Civil Affairs official and pioneer of the village election system, told The Saturday Age. ''This is a historically big change.''

If we look at the ‘Wukan problem’ as a specific example of the MGI problem across the country as a whole, there are a couple of things the central government could do that would probably have more immediate effects than allowing (maybe) genuine village elections: it could set less stringent economic growth targets and it could allow local governments to keep more of what money they do make for themselves. Taxes and targets are major drivers of land seizures. There is absolutely no sign of any such policy emerging.

If we assume instead that a Wukan model of village autonomy is adopted more generally (big assumption) then what you have here is basically a double edged squeeze on local cadres. Central government will on the one hand keep up the economic pressure on local governments, and on the other indulge a certain level of protest against whatever local officials get up to in meeting central government demands. What happens to a dictatorship when the footsoldiers start to think they’re being made scapegoats for the failings of the system as a whole? Perhaps we’ll find out.

like his granddad

Bruce Cumings is basically saying nothing is going to change in North Korea, regime wise, but he's saying it very well. He also captures an intensely self-referential approach to court life under the Kim dynasty, as well as suggesting that KJU is being lined up as a kind of re-incarnation of Kim Il-sung:

Most interesting, though, was Jong-un’s body language: tall, hefty, grinning, he already looked like a politician, at home with his sudden role as “beloved successor”. Gone was the dour, dyspeptic, cynical, ill-at-ease Kim Jong-il, swaddled in a puffy ski jacket, his face hidden behind sunglasses. Jong-un, in looks and style, is the spitting image of his grandfather when he came to power in the late 1940s; he even shaves his sideburns up high (the documentary showed photos of Kim Il-sung with the same haircut). It was as if his DNA had passed uncontaminated to the grandson (as no doubt the regime wants its people to believe).

really cool grumpy old men

Zhou Youguang, the  inventor of Pinyin transliteration, comes out for democracy at the age of 106:

Chatting recently in his study, filled with overflowing bookshelves, Mr. Zhou declared democracy “the natural form of a modern society.” He rejected the argument that China is not suited to it. “You can have democracy no matter what level of development,” he said. “Just look at the Arab Spring.”

Many Chinese intellectuals share such beliefs. But the most outspoken are often the aged — Communist Party elders or retired cadres who either rely on the Chinese reverence for the elderly or who no longer worry about the consequences.

True, that. Here's 88 year old Du Daozheng, publisher of 21st Century magazine, defying the bastards to do their worst. There's going to be a real issue when these guys shuffle off. They provide X amount of protection to the young turks.

it makes him seethe

Universal fear and loathing: The Daily Mail readership summed up in a letter to the Daily Mail.

joined by spiritual leader

The singer was joined by Oprah Winfrey, spiritual leader Deepak Chopra, and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to kick off the Born This Way Foundation that Gaga's mother and inspiration will help steer.

You can tell that America is decadent because this doesn't seem to be a front for gun running. And also, because it exists.

made of palladium

Forget the laffer curve nonsense: this is why the British overclass want to pay less tax.

and people say *we* monkey around

In memory of the late Davy Jones, one of Manchester's quirkier exports, here's a heavily redacted FBI file on the Monkees. Excerpt:

During the concert, subliminal messages were displayed on the screen which in the opinion of XXXXXX constituted 'left wing innovations of a political nature'.

via. I dont know what led the G-Men to the manque moptops. Maybe it was that line about 'being the young generation' and 'having something to say.' 

Personally, I want to know what MI5 made of the Bay City Rollers.

 

 

some advice for sociopathic youth

Don't boast about who your parents are in front of a crowd!  And, in particular, don't put it on your Weibo (Twitter) account!

However, according to netizens' screenshots of Tao's Weibo, he has been posting on his Weibo as recently as last week, claiming that he would be set free and his father would get him out when things calm down. 

"I am still a juvenile. Do you idiots believe I will be sentenced?" he was quoted as saying on his Weibo on Thursday, according to the screenshots. 

Not a phenomenon limited to China, mind. According to a US lawyer buddy of mine who specializes in domestic abuse cases, over half of his victories nowadays are won at least partially thanks to postings by abusers on their Facebook accounts or other social media. 

On this particular case, obsessive stalking is strikingly common on Chinese campuses.  My first Chinese girlfriend lived with seven other girls in a dorm, and every single one of them had a stalker.  

small world: beijing edition

Good Bloomburg report on the vast wealth at the top end of the National People's Congress here.  I'm disappointed they don't have statistics for the median NPC and median US Congress level, though, which I suspect would look a lot more even. 

The NPC is probably the least meaningful way in which the super-rich exert power, though; it's icing on the cake, plus, as Victor Shih points out in the article, an extra layer of political protection.  The NPC very rarely does anything in the way of actual lawmaking - hell, it only meets for 2 weeks a year, and the members aren't salaried. The Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, its "advisory" little brother that meets at the same time (the "Two Sessions"), does even less.

So what actually happens at the Two Sessions?  Well, it's essentially a big conference. So like any effective conference, academic, NGO, business, all the actual meaningful work and decisions have been arranged long beforehand. So the members basically behave like attendees at any conference.

They network, and catch up with old conference buddies. It looks good on their CVs.  They use it as a junket and skip the sessions to go sight-seeing.  They use it as a platform to promote their worthy causes or crackpot views. Want to argue that the moral decline of Chinese society is because of the abandonment of the eight-legged essay?  This is the place to do it.  They find out about new sources of funding, and work out business deals. And they get the chance to access the center of power; the geographical and political distance to Beijing is still a vital part of Chinese politics.

The one thing that doesn't happen often, as far as I know, is conference hook-ups (hookers are a different matter ...), not least because only about 20 percent of the delegates are female. Though I do like to think that for at least some secretly gay members, the Great Hall of the People is their Brokeback Mountain.

'under the weight of previous corruption'

Tom Watson lays out the Daniel Morgan murder case. Ellroy-on-Thames. Ah, the 80's. The age of opportunity.

getting the North right

So North Korea may have declared a moratorium on nuclear weapons development generally, and flinging missiles all over the place in particular. Here's what Good Friends, a small Buddhist charity which operates clandestinely in NK, had to say  (pdf) last week:

According to the sources the leadership’s policy direction is to accept China’s assistance for economic development while working toward peace through dialogue and cooperation with the United States.

Not a specific prediction, but not bad at all: it's exactly what a policy of 'working towards peace' would imply. And hey, it's better than Stratfor.

Trotsky on workfare

The very principle of compulsory labor service is for the Communist quite unquestionable. “He who works not, neither shall he eat.” And as all must eat, all are obliged to work. Compulsory labor service is sketched in our Constitution and in our Labor Code. But hitherto it has always remained a mere principle. Its application has always had an accidental, impartial, episodic character. Only now, when along the whole line we have reached the question of the economic re-birth of the country, have problems of compulsory labor service arisen before us in the most concrete way possible. The only solution of economic difficulties that is correct from the point of view both of principle and of practice is to treat the population of the whole country as the reservoir of the necessary labor power – an almost inexhaustible reservoir – and to introduce strict order into the work of its registration, mobilization, and utilization.

You'll note that this is much more systematic than Chris 'Lev Davidovich' Grayling's current plan to help out his Party's business mates by giving them free labour underwritten by the taxpayer. On the other hand, Leon and friends did pay his conscripts, at least nominally.

linguistic nuances

Dinner with a Russianist friend, who mentioned that US coverage of the Russian protests in December had optimistically translated the "Росси́я для ру́сских" being chanted by some protestors as "Give Russia back to the people."  This interpretation might be more convincing, he said, if several of the older groups of protestors hadn't also been flying - unidentified by the US media - the black-yellow-white flag traditionally associated with Russian nationalism and the Black Hundreds.

daisy, daisy, give me your answer do

The Sun siezes up, sputters incoherently. Enters wanking and grunting phase. Whatevere else it was, it was always coherent. We always knew what it wanted. In other news, Alan Rusbridger has Rupert Murdoch's cock in a jar on his desk. Yowzah.

the inner life of the tax advantaged

A Channel Islands based businessman claims he has been "gagged" by the richest woman in the world, a woman who fornicates wildly with her legal representatives and other men while acting on behalf of her ex-husband, an al-Qaeda paymaster with prior knowledge of the 7/7 attacks. Perhaps also he has been "tied down" by Superinjunctions, which among their many other drawbacks lend credibility to such reports.

stratback

So, is anybody else's impression of the Stratfor e-mail leaks that they just confirm that Stratfor is a waste of money?  I mean, one could ascertain this from reading any of George Friedman's books - The Coming War With Japan!* - but it's nice of Anonymous to make things so clear.

*Fantastic last line in its 1991 Foreign Affairs review: "One of the authors has published several works of fiction and the other is a national security expert at the Heritage Foundation."   Friedman actually doubles down on the threat of a future Japanese empire in The Next 100 Years. 

MGI watch: Yichang

Actually, more like a combination MGI/labour dispute. For the last six days, thousands of former employees of the giant state-owned engineering firm Gezhouba, which was the main contractor on the Three Gorges Dam project have been demonstrating in Yichang, a city in central Hubei, over pensions and health insurance benefits. The demonstrators - all apparently in their sixties and seventies - are apparently designed to bring traffic flow to a halt in a major central Chinese communications artery, which also happens to contain the company headquarters. Nobody moves till grandad gets his wedge.

Thus far, the authorities have not responded violently: perhaps because of the age of the protestors and perhaps because the protestors are making it clear that their gripe is exclusivley with Gezhouba, and therefore with that part of the central government responsible for it. Latest reports in Chinese state media say that teh company has offered some concessions, that the roads are partially open, and that the demonstrations continue.