Dan O'Huiginn

English-language German news site thelocal puts out a review of the events of 2009. Shorter version: a year of no significance.
Also, not entirely unrelatedly:

Germans have less faith in their political system than at any point in the post-war period, mainly due to what they see as a weak response to the financial crisis, a poll published Sunday showed.

I’m piously encouraged by Johann Hari’s list of objects of emulation from 2009

Linked, because it has slipped my mind for almost a year, and because it’s highly entertaining (if a little obvious). If sharks were men:

There would, of course, also be schools in the big boxes. In these schools the little fish would learn how to swim into the sharks’ jaws. They would need to know geography, for example, so that they could find the big sharks, who lie idly around somewhere. The principal subject would, of course, be the moral education of the little fish. They would be taught that it would be the best and most beautiful thing in the world if a little fish sacrificed itself cheerfully…

In September, a German military cock-up killed 142 people. mostly civilians. Here is a lengthy article covering not just the details of the incident, but how politicians on all sides downplayed it in the run-up to the election, knowing how opposed the German public were to the war:

“Not a single politician or senior military official told the public the full truth. The subject was to be kept off the radar during Germany’s fall parliamentary election campaign, so as not to ruffle the feathers of an already skeptical electorate. Now the incident has been magnified to a far greater extent than would have been the case if those involved had decided to come clean with the public in the first place.”

Much as I love Germany’s political system of consensus and coalitions, it does tend to result in situations just like this — where the political class stand together against public opinion, and nobody has much incentive to rock the boat.

Alexander Lukashenko has often been referred to as Europe’s last dictator. All of a sudden, though, he seems to be on a push to rapidly liberalize Belarus’ economy and turn it into a high-tech paradise. But is this socialist island really ready to attract Western investors?
[Spiegel]

This is really simple. Business isn’t the opposite of dictatorship; it’s something almost orthogonal to it. If one man’s whim completely changes the government of a country, then it’s a dictatorship. Obviously I’m glad his current passions encompass encouraging business rather than staging purges, but that doesn’t make Lukashenko any less a dictator.

Der Spiegel, like everybody else, pulls apart Ban Ki-Moon

Jacob Heilbrunn, a commentator for the respected American journal Foreign Policy, called Ban “the world’s most dangerous Korean.” The moniker is a terrible insult, since by rights it belongs to Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s erratic dictator. But it’s also a gauge of the disappointment currently reigning in the United States. Heilbrunn fears the UN is rapidly becoming irrelevant under Ban’s stewardship. Ban’s sole achievement is having attained his post, Heilbrunn claims, calling the secretary-general a “nowhere man.”

Once upon a time there was an excellent blog called Volsunga. But its author got busy, or bored, and the blog vanished into the ether. It’s now no longer even in the wayback machine, so far as I can see. But – the author has returned!.

Meanwhile, here is another new blog from another excellent person. I like this trend; the more blogs the better.

Also in Der Spiegel, polling of Turkish Germans:

Turks are the largest ethnic minority in Germany and make up almost 4 percent of the country’s population. Yet only 21 percent of those polled feel happy to call Germany home.

On the never-vanishing topic of Islam in France, this article in the FT is pretty good.

Farhad Khosrokhavar, director of research at France’s Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, estimates that 15 to 20 per cent of French Muslims do not practise Islam at all. Fasting during Ramadan is considered a basic duty of the religion, yet only about 70 per cent of French ­Muslims even claim to do it. In short, European Islam has many of the same problems as European Christianity.

Via Art Goldhammer, unsurprisingly

[GRAIN](http://www.grain.org/briefings/?id=212) reports on what happens when a food crisis meets an economic crisis, and is given a healthy shove by government policies:
>On the one hand, “food insecure” governments that rely on imports to feed their people are snatching up vast areas of farmland abroad for their own offshore food production. On the other hand, food corporations and private investors, hungry for profits in the midst of the deepening financial crisis, see investment in foreign farmland as an important new source of revenue. As a result, fertile agricultural land is becoming increasingly privatised and concentrated.
They’ve also been obsessively collecting [news clippings](http://farmlandgrab.blogspot.com/) to back up their case.

One of the really spot-on things to come over the past decade from the European left, and Mayday protesters in particular, was their focus on ‘precarity’ – the trend of work to move from big corporations towards agencies, and freelancers, and short-term contracts. Acclaimed by many, with some justification*, as liberating workers from grey Fordist hierarchies, it is now leaving them high and dry without any security. Which, of course, was totally predictable – but it’s noteworthy that people did predict it, and devote their energies to campaigning around it**.
It’s a safe bet that precarious work – ranging from short-term contracts, through various degrees of informality, through to the outright illegal – is going to continue expanding across the economy in the next couple of years. There’s a strong argument that this is good and progressive, with informal work providing at least some safety net for the unemployed. Even the Wall Street Journal has been describing the informal economy as “one of the last safe havens in a darkening financial climate“.
Considerably more interesting, though, are the stories being collected by Robert Neuwirth. Neuwrith is one of desperately few people with a genuinely global outlook, and responsible for the excellent squatter city blog (and book). He’s now turning his attention to the informal economy.
Maybe it’s taking things to far to talk about informal work as being the poor’s best response to the collapse of capitalism, and to ask governments to find ways of accommodating the legally grey. Still, I prefer it to the usual assumption that the world’s poor should grow up to be obedient salarymen, and I have no doubt that Neuwrith will come out with a more nuanced version at some time in the future.
* I write all this as somebody self-employed, with minimal job security and few fallback plans, earning considerably less than I did when fully employed. I wouldn’t want it any other way, however tough things get through this recesssion. On the other hand, I can be relatively relaxed about all this because being a skilled worker my options are somewhat more appealing.
** Yes, this is me saying nice things about Hardt and Negri. Pay attention, it doesn’t happen often

Panama is still one of the biggest and most important tax havens. As well as its absurd tax regime, its corporate disclosure regime means it is very difficult to get information about Panamanian companies.
Or rather, it was. Panama recently put online their company registry. You can now retrieve the names of the current directors of every Panamanian company, as well as all the company’s filings themselves (minutes of company meetings, details of shareholdings, ownership, certificates of incorporation etc. etc.).
Nice, but you can only search by the name of the company. If you want to find somebody who is dodging tax or doing something else dubious, you really need to search by director’s name.
This tool fixes that problem. I’ve scraped all 600,000 company records, going back 30 years, and indexed by directors.

Now you can, for instance, look up recently-arrested arms dealer Monzer al-Kassar, and you find a couple of companies. Looking through the records, you find the company’s current treasurer is Hans-Ulrich Ming, chairman of Swiss firm Pax Anlage. Previous directors include Enrico Ravano, president of Contship, the Italian company that controls the Calabrian port of Gioia Tauro. A Feb 2008 report for the Italian parliament accused Ravano of complicity in cocaine smuggling by the Calabrian mafia through Gioia Tauro – the report cited Italian estimates that 80% of all Europe’s cocaine is smuggled through Gioia Tauro. Ravano’s connection to al Kassar could help to stand up accusations (which al Kassar has always denied) that al Kassar was involved in drug trafficking as well as weapons trafficking; and helps to undermine Ravano’s recent denials that he’s had anything to do with any trafficking of any sort. [This set of connections was in fact found manually, by Global Witness, and was part of the inspiration to build the search]
Or take Nadhmi Auchi: Iraqi-British billionnaire, companion of Saddam Hussein in the ’50s, convicted of fraud in France (but appealing). I’ve not yet looked through the records of companies held by him and his friends – but there are plenty of records there, doubtless including some interesting connections.

And there are plenty more interesting names to look up. Most satisfyingly, it’s already proving useful in figuring out the activities of various currently-active arms dealers…
Want the raw data? Here is a database dump.

When Naomi Klein explored the Chinese surveillance industry earlier this year, she touched on the idea that Chinese companies are now trying to sell their surveillance equipment to the outside world.
True enough, but as she was writing for Rolling Stone she concentrated on possible exports to America. That’s a sideline: the US, with its own massive surveillance industry, needs no foreign assistance to spy on its citizens. The more interesting story is China’s growing exports of surveillance know-how to the developing world.
Thanks to Chinese technology even the smallest, poorest and most politically isolated nations are gaining the ability to conduct sophisticated electronic monitoring and censorship. That means above all Africa, but also perhaps Asia, Latin America and the former Soviet bloc.
Some specific cases have already been identified: Chinese knowledge has helped with internet censorship in Belarus and radio-jamming in Zimbabwe. Like there is more that goes unreported, both because of the secrecy involved and because there is no obvious Western angle for the english-language media.
More broadly, look at Chinese government documents. The primary official statement of its Africa policy is this document from 2006:

China will cooperate closely with immigration departments of African countries in tackling the problem of illegal migration, improve exchange of immigration control information and set up an unimpeded and efficient channel for intelligence and information exchange.
…
In order to enhance the ability of both sides to address non-traditional security threats, it is necessary to increase intelligence exchange, explore more effective ways and means for closer cooperation in combating terrorism, small arms smuggling, drug trafficking, transnational economic crimes, etc.

I don’t think I’m being too conspiratorial if I read into that an ambition to supply the backbone for surveillance across Africa.

Bangalore’s government has an excellent solution to the social problem of gated communities: simply abolish them by fiat.

It is noticed that several layouts within the old BMP area and the erstwhile
CMC area have established barricade preventing entry of vehicles and
pedestrians and have also put up boards mentioning that entry is
restricted.. They have even posted guards to prevent people from using the
road. Such layouts generally call themselves as “Gated community”. It is
hereby brought to the public notice that under the Town and Country Planning
Act, there is no such concept of a “Gated Community”. Once when any layout
is formed, the roads in the said layout automatically come under the
jurisdiction of the respective municipal corporation the general public has
free access to use the roads within the layout. Hence, establishing
barricades and preventing general public from using the internal road of a
layout is against the law.

It makes me sad that this kind of thing is unimaginable in Europe or the US.
[via the [sarai urban-study list](http://www.sarai.net/mailing-lists/mailing-lists/urban-study)]

Nobody except me will like this rant by Nataša Velikonja, but I’m going to post it anyway:

Europe is boring. Boring for its self-sufficiency, among its own boundaries; Europe is a jail of virtual affluence and credit standard in which migrants without asylum, lesbians without lovers, intellectuals without mass media, and the homeless without comrades are wandering around. Europe is boring for its “white” conviction that it is better than the others, as it is supposedly the cradle of education, culture and literature. It is boring in its perpetual ecstasy with its fat kisses and broken glass on our lips. It is boring with its perpetual integration, which is being swallowed as a sacrificed young body, while images of hatred, slaughter and genocide are whirling in its eyes. Europe is boring because of its ritualized oblivion and ritualized machines of desire that never stop their craving.

Incidentally, why are there so many excellent Slovenian writers/activists/theorists these days? Is it just that when your main export is Slavoj Zizek, you at least have somebody interesting to kick against? Or that small nations have to synthesize foreign culture, not having enough local production to be tediously inward-looking? Or just the result of decades buffeted by Tito, Austrian Social Democracy, and Italian radical theorists?

[Mother Jones’ account](http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/03/viktor-bout.html) of the Victor Bout arrest is good, but it’s more fun reaing the [DEA’s charges](http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2008/March/bout-complaint.pdf) against him. Not for the facts – Mother Jones summarises most of the interesting bits – but for the sheer semiotics of the thing.
Just look at the document: Monospaced Courier 12 in numbered paragraphs. Badly reproduced text, lines sloping up the page. Government stamps and signatures. It fits so perfectly into nostalgic stereotypes: typewriter keys clattering in a nondescript government building, as a sweating government agent writes up his report.
And the text plays up to every cliche. The boilerplate allegation that Bout “affected interstate and foreign commerce“. The long, oft-repeated list of aliases (VIKTOR BOUT, a/k/a “Boris,” a/k/a “Victor Anatoliyevich Bout,” a/k/a “Victor But,” a/k/a “Viktor Budd,” a/k/a “Viktor Butt,” a/k/a “Viktor Bulakin,” a/k/a “Vadim Markovich Aminov”). The whole document is begging to be stuffed into a brown paper envelope and sent to Bob Woodward or Fox Mulder.
Since I don’t spend much time reading US legal documents (maybe I should?), I have no idea how standard all of this is. Apparently a lot of US court documents really do still have to be produced in this format. Intentional or not, though, the layout makes it all seem like part of a great cloak-and-dagger Cold War adventure. I’d like to believe that somebody in the US goverment has figured this out, reasoned that it gives people the impression they have mountains of secret information, and decided to stick to Courier.
Oh, and the content? Still reasonably entertaining. Bout’s henchman Andrew Smulian comes off as a complete muppet, calling Bout on a phone the DEA had given him. It looks like the main problem with arranging the sting was that they couldn’t do it in Moscow, but had to entice Bout out to more US-friendly Thailand. Mostly, though, I’m just reading for the typography.

Getting your PhD into the national press is pretty impressive. But getting two articles devoted to it (one on the front page) before you even submit, must mean you’re on to something. Alternatively, perhaps you have a journalist friend who doesn’t mind writing the same article twice.
Today’s [Observer](http://education.guardian.co.uk/faithschools/story/0,,2261448,00.html) devotes much of its front page to a report by Anushka Asthana, beginning:

Damning new evidence that faith schools are siphoning off middle-class pupils can be revealed today, as research shows they are failing to take children from the poorest backgrounds nationwide.

This ‘new evidence’ is, of course, a complete revolution compared to the [last time Asthana wrote this article](http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/sep/16/religion.faithschools), back in September. That one only made page 2:

Faith schools are ‘cherry picking’ too many children from affluent families and contributing to racial and religious segregation, according to the most extensive research of its kind…

[OK, there are some differences. For a start first article only covers London, the second is nationwide. But the articles don’t take much trouble to explain what’s actually new. Besides, how can I concentrate on the technicalities while distracted by visions of the Heath Robinson contraption which will ‘cherry-pick’ the affluent, and ‘siphon off’ the merely middle-class?]
What about the research papers on which the articles are based? Neither has been published or peer-reviewed. Neither is the work of a notably eminent scholar. Neither has sent shock-waves through the social science community. And – they’re both the work the same PhD student, [Rebecca Allen](http://www.rebeccaallen.co.uk/index.html), who is currently finishing her PhD at the University of London’s Institute of Education. The first was an [conference paper](http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/167585.pdf) (the online version is marked ‘draft paper – please do not cite'; blasting it at 450,000 Observer readers clearly doesn’t count as citing). The second I can only guess is Allen’s PhD thesis.
So, how did Anushka Asthana spot this academic rising star, assess her work, and decide that it was a matter of national importance? I’d like to think she spends her days poring over conference proceedings and hustling preprints out of postdocs. But I’ll go with circumstantial evidence – and the way everything in the British media works, and put it down to Oxbridge cliqueyness. In this case, Anushka Asthana (the journalist) and Rebecca Allen (the PhD student) were contemporaries at Cambridge, on the same Economics course in 1999. Slanderous as the accusation may be, I think I’ll chalk this one up to the old girl’s network.
[FWIW, I do think that class segregation of schools is a Bad Thing, and probably should make the news. I’d prefer that news reports are based on academic research rather than think-tank lobbying. But I don’t trust ‘evidence’ that isn’t publicly available, I don’t trust journalists who sensationalize everything and put nothing in context, and I wish journalism – and politics – didn’t always come down to looking after your friends]

This is the only article I’ve read on the US presidential elections which hasn’t been a waste of time. Briefly, Obama is more fond of behavioral economics than Clinton. Therefore she wants small targeted changes that have the most effect cheaply; he is suspicious of policies which rely on everybody being a rational actor, fully informed about government policy. Why hasn’t anybody else mentioned that?
On a vaguely-related topic, I find it fascinating watching the campaign idly from afar, and so being on the outer reaches of massive, smart media campaigns. They twist everything I read so thoroughly hat I end up with firm feelings about the candidates, without (barring the article above and maybe two or three others) having the faintest idea what they stand for. The only thing that comes close is Apple’s marketing, which is perfectly capable of convincing me that I need an iWhatever even when the rational part of my head knows it’s overpriced rubbish.

Missed this one last month in the UK: a woman was convicted for “possessing records likely to be used for terrorism”, whatever that means. As far as I can see, she had downloaded some documents on guns and bombs (like, er, just about every teenage boy in the country), and written some angry poems about killing people.
So, basically, she’s been fantasizing about being a jihadi rather than fantasizing about being James Bond.
For this she’s already been in jail for 5 months, and has a 9 month suspended sentence.

Can we please ban journalists from using the word ‘controversial’ as a substitute for explaining the issue. Passages like this from the Independent make me want to throttle somebody:

Candidates rarely talk about reducing the country’s vast appetite for fossil fuels for fear of being attacked as anti-business. In recent weeks public pressure has seen both Mrs Clinton and Mr Obama discretely sign up for carbon ‘cap-and-trade’ systems for industry.
The Democratic candidates are far more comfortable talking up renewable energy and hybrid cars and most give their support to controversial ethanol and “clean coal” projects.

The only reason the Democrats are pushing ethanol and clean coal is that they aren’t controversial among politicians. Bush has [supported](http://www.news.com/2100-1028_3-6152754.html) [both](http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/powersystems/cleancoal/). The ‘controversy’ is just everybody playing their roles as usual: politicians of both parties like ethanol and clean coal, because they would help farmers and the mining industry. Environmentalists (Greenpeace, Sierra Club, etc) think they’re expensive and still release too much pollution. In short, they aren’t the best solution, but they’re probably the best solution with a snowball’s chance in hell of being enacted.
Also: has anybody else noticed how people used to say “Climate change is as big a problem as X”, but recently they’ve taken to saying “X is as big a problem as climate change”