‘Corrupt, smut-driven, racist and lawless’…

January 11, 2010

 … that’s right, it is The Guardian’s columnist Martin Kettle explaining why he has fallen out of love with Italy.

Like the steady stream of northern European literary greats from Goethe to Browning to Keats and Shelley (stay in a house in Rome associated with these and more if you wish…), Kettle admits to a youth in which he fell for ‘a world of the senses, where the heart ruled the head, where beauty replaced ugliness and where easygoing moral naturalness replaced all the buttoned-up severity of the protestant world’.

All that, however, is over for Kettle. He dismisses his love affair as a naive, adolescent fling: ‘Italy has never been the liberal Eden that progressive Europeans sometimes delude themselves into imagining it to be,’ he writes. Instead, Kettle is now focused on an all-too-common kind of Italian who allows Silvio Berlusconi to be elected three times, just as a certain kind of parallel American allowed George W. Bush to be chosen twice. The difference, says Kettle, is that where Bush gave rise to Obama, Berlusconi has produced no such credible, corrective liberal reaction. It’s all right, right and more right.

The outburst gives rise to a riposte in The Guardian from the deputy head of the Italian embassy in London, Giovanni Brauzzi. There isn’t much to Brauzzi’s comment – beyond its inevitable counter-indignation – yet there may be something to Brauzzi’s tangential implication that Italians are less racist than popularly perceived.

The hook for Kettle’s article was a house-to-house search by police in a town near Brescia for illegal immigrants in the run-up to Christmas. Kettle referenced John Hooper’s report for The Guardian from Coccaglio where what has been dubbed ‘Operation White Christmas’ (the conservative town council denies having come up with the racist epithet) took place. He didn’t however reiterate Hooper’s point that in a town of only 8,000, 3,000 people marched in protest against Operation White Christmas.

How racist is the average Italian? I confess that I have no answer to this question about which I can demonstrate any conviction. I am willing to say that the average Italian is parochial – little-travelled, largely ignorant of the wider world, unaccomplished in foreign languages – but that is not the same as the charge of malicious racism levelled by Kettle.

In defence of Italians (inasmuch as this term means anything), poll results published on December 3 by the German Marshall Fund of the US, which cover each major European and north American state, show Italy in quite a liberal light.

Less than one-quarter of Italians, for instance, agreed with the statement ‘Immigrants take jobs away from natives’, whereas more than half of Britons did. Only about one-tenth of Italians agreed with the statement ‘Legal immigrants have no equal rights to benefits’, but 45 percent of Britons did. Most Italians favour giving voting rights to immigrants where most Britons do not. And marginally fewer Italians than Britons agreed with the statement ‘Legal immigrants increase crime’. Both Italians and Britons are against giving illegal immigrants the chance to obtain legal status (unlike the super- and uber- liberal French and Germans).

In the Brit-Italian comparisons it should probably be borne in mind that Britain has a higher proportion of immigrants in its population than Italy does, and that the number in Britain increased very rapidly in the past decade (though quite rapidly in Italy as well; in Britain the demand came from economic growth, in Italy from a shrinking indigenous population).

There is, of course, one constant in attitudes to immigrants around the world: everybody, in every country, thinks there are way more of them than there really are. In the survey cited, the average American estimated that immigratnts make up 35% of the US population (versus reality of around 14%). In Canada the estimate was 37% (reality 20%). And in Europe the average stated was 24% (versus actual highs of around 13% in Spain and Germany). Which all reminds me of the following conversation with a local bar owner some years ago… Bar owner: ‘I’m thinking of getting a Rottweiler.’ Me: ‘What for?’ Bar owner: ‘Albanians.’ Me: ‘But we haven’t really got any Albanians around here.’ Bar owner: ‘But we might have.’

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Chinese soft power

January 5, 2010

The Chinese government decides to remind us that, whereas Italy is an institutionally weak state, China is the authentic institutional Third World, the real McCoy (or real Mackay if you prefer the likely Scottish origin of this term) of arbitrary, unprofessional and gratuitously nasty behaviour. I refer to the execution of a mentally-ill Briton, and an 11-year jail sentence for one of China’s best-known pro-democracy campaigners, which occurred in the same week.

 Akmal Shaikh, 53, a former London minicab manager, was executed in Urumqi for arriving in China with a suitcase containing 4kg of heroin. He had a long history of psychiatric problems. It appears that drug traffickers duped him into carrying the drugs and sent him to China saying it was part of a plan for him to fulfil his ambition of becoming a ‘pop star’. Arrested on arrival, Shaikh was given a 30 minute trial. During a statement he made during his also brief appeal, judges laughed at Shaikh’s nonsensical discourse and confirmed the death penalty, as this China law blog relates.

The 11-year jail sentence was handed down to writer Liu Xiaobo for ‘inciting subversion of state power’. Liu is one of the main drafters of Charter ’08, the Chinese pro-democracy manifesto published two years ago and modelled on Charter ’77, which was launched by dissidents in Czechoslovakia in the midst of the Cold War. Liu was also given a very brief trial at which his lawyers were allowed almost no time to present a defence (the obvious defence is that Liu has done nothing other than exercise rights guaranteed by China’s constitution). The court condemned him at Christmas, presumably in the hope that foreigners were thinking about other things.

If this was the hope, it may have been misplaced, since the cases of both Liu Xiaobo and Akmal Shaikh have received worldwide media coverage. Not for a long time has China faced so much negative press in such a short period.

The Chinese government and its running dogs have shot back with what philosophers call ‘moral equivalence’, or the argument that ‘you’re just the same as we are, only from a different culture’. This might involve reference to the fact that the death penalty is used in the United States, or that all countries have to defend against attacks on state power. 

But these attempts at obfuscation  do not cloud what is stark reality. In the Shaikh case, the court refused to allow either an independent local doctor or a psychiatrist sent from Britain to meet or assess the defendant. China’s 1997 Criminal Code states that a person who is unable to recognize or control his own misconduct does not bear criminal responsibility. However there is no clear requirement for a court to order a psychiatric evaluation. The main justice-related role of psychiatric institutions in China continues to be as places in which to lock up sane people who have criticised the state.  

The Liu case is a reminder that China’s courts are subject to direction by the Communist Party’s  Central Political-Legal Committee, currently headed by former Minister of Public Security Zhou Yongkang, which determines the outcome of many ‘special’ cases and makes sure that others – such as challenges to the Party – are never admitted to trial. Liu’s 11-year sentence was not really a judicial decision at all. 

A selction of British press comment on the execution of Akmal Shaikh:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2009/dec/29/china-akmal-shaikh-execution

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/29/amnesty-akmal-shaikh-execution-reaction

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/dec/29/china-akmal-shaikh-death-penalty

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/6904175/Execution-of-Briton-Akmal-Shaikh-China-defiant-in-the-face-of-criticism.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/china-defiant-after-britons-execution-1852307.html

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6970154.ece

More information about Liu Xiaobo:

http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/3029/prmID/172

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/12/21/china-liu-xiaobo-s-trial-travesty-justice

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Xiaobo

Deja vu all over again: the letter which Vaclev Havel and others connected with Charter ’77 tried to deliver to the Chinese embassy in Prague (as reprinted in the Washington Post) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/08/AR2010010803376.html?hpid%3Dopinionsbox1&sub=AR

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Professor Plum and Miss Scarlett, in the bedroom, with big daggers and no motive …

December 8, 2009

The conviction of Raffaele Sollecito and Amanda Knox for, amongst other things, murder, in Perugia highlights a simple, cultural question: how do you like your theories – straight-up conspiracy, or otherwise? Because, it seems to me, you need to be a conspiracy junky to go for this one.

Despite a trial of 11 months, the basic issues of this case do not appear to be hugely complicated. First up, remember that the trial took 11 months largely because it only sat for, at most, two half days a week, and that the whole thing was stopped for two months because it was, err, the summer. If the court had concentrated full-time, Monday to Friday, on this case, and not skipped off to the seaside or wherever, a rough calculation suggests it would have been done in around 10 weeks. One point of view I completely disagree with is this, quoted from one Michele Ainis, who is cited as an expert in Italian constitutional law in The New York Times: ‘It’s true that the longer the trial,’ he says, ‘the longer the pain, but it also means that there can be an in-depth analysis of the facts.’ This conflates the kind of time wasting and dicking around that goes on in the Italian court system with a higher form of investigation. The truth, surely, is that this case reminds us of just how dangerous the Italian ‘part-time’ approach to legal cases may be.

So to the basic issues. There is a crime scene, the location of which – to my knowledge – no one disputes. It is the room of the murdered student Meredith Kercher, where her dead body was found. One person is tied to the crime scene by heavy forensic evidence – finger-prints, a bloody hand-print, and DNA. This is Rudy Guede, already sentenced to 30 years for Kercher’s murder in an earlier trial. There was no conspiracy theory about Guede. He was found because his prints and DNA were at the scene, and the police located him in their database (he already had a police record). When they went looking for Guede a couple of weeks after the murder, they discovered that he had fled from Italy to Germany.

Sollecito and Knox were not brought into the case because police found clear forensic evidence and then went looking for them. They were brought into the case because police and the investigating magistrate became suspicious of them, and then went looking for evidence. Perhaps critically, the authorities decided that Sollecito and Knox were involved before it was clear that prints and DNA at the scene belonged to Guede. Subsequently, the prosecution case became that all three persons were responsible for the murder.

So what evidence is there that Sollecito and Knox were present at the crime scene? There was no forensic evidence presented in the case to show that Knox had been in the room – no prints, no DNA, nothing. With respect to Sollecito, the prosecution said that traces of his DNA were found on a bra clasp belonging to Kercher which police bagged on a return visit to the crime scene 46 days after the murder. There was no other Sollecito DNA found in the room, including on the rest of the bra, and no prints. Despite this lack of forensic evidence, the prosecution made a case that Kercher was killed at the end of a violent sex game involving Guede, Sollecito and Knox. Perhaps you see now what I mean about one’s propensity for conspiracy theories. In order for this to be possible, Sollecito and Knox must have been present at the crime scene in such as way as to leave Guede’s forensic detritus all over the place and yet remove all of their own prints and DNA except for a bit of Sollecito’s on a bra clasp. How? The two explanations I can think of are a) that Sollecito and Knox took part in a sex game dressed in some kind of protective forensive overalls while Guede didn’t, or b) that afterwards Sollecito and Knox selectively cleaned up only evidence of themselves, leaving Guede’s intact, using some kind of finger print and DNA differentiator machine they happened to have about their persons.

This is not terribly compelling. Apart from the bra clasp (whose belated discovery points most obviously to shocking standards of police work), only two other bits of forensic evidence were presented against Sollecito and Knox. In a communal bathroom, where some drops of Kercher’s blood were found, there was Knox’s DNA. Given that Knox says she took a shower in the room the morning after the murder and noticed the blood, this hardly seems damning. Finally there is a tiny trace of what prosecutors claim is Kercher’s DNA on a knife at Sollecito’s apartment. This would be of real interest, except that the trace is so minute that independent experts say that it cannot be relied on (and indeed would not be admitted in many jurisdictions). Moreover, this knife is a possible fit for only one of three major wounds on Kercher’s body.

Given the paucity of forensic evidence against Sollecito and Knox, as opposed to the very substantial amount against Guede, most people, I suspect, would want to hear a compelling case for the motivation of the first two. After the chief prosecutor’s intimations of a cult killing (oh yes), about which I blogged back in February 2009, were knocked back, the prosecution had nothing more substantive to offer. The prosecutiing team switched, without any hard evidence, to an argument that Knox, orchestrating the murder, was driven by hatred of Kercher. As this line was pursued, the presiding judge, Giancarlo Massei, allowed both hearsay and subjective assessment to be offered in court. Chief prosecutor Mignini, for instance, told the court (referencing some missing money): ‘We do not know with certainty what intentions they [Guede, Sollecito, Knox, at the onset of their alleged murderous sex game] may have had. But it is possible that there was an argument, which then degenerated, between Mez [Meredith] and Amanda over the money that disappeared. Or perhaps the British student was upset by Guede’s presence.’

It is possible that horoscopes are based in scientific fact, that farting in Denmark can cause earthquakes in Japan, and that my dog can sing in Welsh. Nonetheless, such claims are not normally admissible in court without a demonstrable basis in fact. Here, for the record, are Mignini’s above remarks in the original Italian: ‘Non sappiamo con certezza [I suspect a logician or a philosopher might translate this as: ‘We have no clue’] che intenzioni avessero, ma è possibile che ci sia stata una discussione, poi degenerata, tra Mez e Amanda per i soldi scomparsi. O forse la studentessa inglese era contrariata per la presenza di Guede.’ Whatever the intention, said Mignini, group leader Knox, ‘voleva vendicarsi di quella smorfiosa troppo seria e morigerata per i suoi gusti’. So Knox led Sollecito, whom she had known for six days, and Guede, whom she barely knew, in a violent sex game which left no trace of her presence at the crime scene and ended in Kercher’s murder.

The question one asks next is how could a jury convict based on the evidence presented? We do not know and we should not speculate. Within 90 days the presiding judge will publish some kind of explanation. For now, however, it may be worth reflecting on what I understand to have been the methodology behind the jury’s decision.

In a British court, a judge provides direction to jurors (about things that must be considered, things which may not be considered), before they retire to consider their verdict. Moreover, jurors are ‘sequestered’, which means that they should not have been reading newspapers, watching television news, discussing the case with members of the public, and so on; they are supposed to concentrate exclusively on the case, which runs each working day until it ends.

A British judge’s direction to jurors is important and is frequently shown to have played a role in miscarriages of justice. The direction, however, is given in front of the court and the public. In a case such as that of Sollecito and Knox in Italy – as I understand it – it is two ‘professional’ jurors (i.e. members of the legal establishment) who sum up the evidence, and provide guidance as to what is most important, to six lay jurors in camera. Personally, I am at a loss as to what jurisprudential benefit this can offer. It means there is no clear public record of the direction that is provided. And it means that the lay jurors never escape from the paternal oversight of the court apparatus. This seems to me another example of the deference to the supposed expert with which Italy is plagued — rule by what in previous blogs I have termed a ‘bureaucratic aristocracy’. Myself, I would be much happier placing more trust in ordinary people. That is not the Italian way, despite – in my view – the daily evidence that it is this country’s professional classes that represent not its greatest asset but its biggest problem.

This brings us to the family of the murdered girl. After the verdicts, Kercher family members gave a press conference and made two points. The first is that in a situation like this you have to trust ‘the system’; the second is that they now have a decision and hence some kind of closure. Although I sympathise profoundly, I disagree with both these points. On the first, I know of no legal system in the world that has not produced miscarriages of justice; in the UK I followed some of these, professionally, in the distant past as a journalist. Given (for a rich country) the extreme institutional weakness of Italy, there is no case for blindly trusting the system here. The system can work in Italy, but it is reasonable to be more sceptical that it will than in most other OECD countries. On the second point, I suspect that within days of the verdicts (if not already) the Kerchers will realise these verdicts bring no closure, because the Italian justice system does not really do closure. Appeals are granted almost automatically. Moreover, as defence lawyers have been quick to note, the verdicts in this case of themselves demand appeals. With the conspiracy theory accepted, Guede is not alleged to have delivered the fatal blows, and yet has gone down for 30 years. Sollecito and Knox (the latter deemed to have delivered the mortal blow) have been given sentences of 25 and 26 years respectively. These are not the life (ergastolo) terms that the alleged crime would warrant. The sentences are inconsistent, almost made to be appealed. Indeed they look to some observers like ‘get me out of here and make this somebody else’s problem’ sentences on the part of the jury. And that is exactly what will happen in a process as likely to prolong as to curtail the suffering of Meredith Kercher’s family and friends.

On this question, here is something that I read in the Corriere della Sera: ‘Per la giuria popolare [i.e. the lay jurors] non è stata una decisione facile: condannare due ragazzi di 25 e 22 anni all’ergastolo sarebbe stato distruggere per sempre la loro vita; assolverli avrebbe significato sconfessare non solo l’intera inchiesta ma anche i giudici che prima di loro si sono espressi. Ed è arrivata una condanna a metà.’ Well, you said it, not me. If you don’t read Italian, what the newspaper appears to be suggesting is that Sollecito and Knox’s sentences were a compromise between embarrassing the court and the prosecution, and condemning the two to life in prison, which would be consistent with Guede’s term.

Separately, it is notable how upleasantly politicised this trial has become at the international level. This can only get worse. Knox is American, and various Americans are alleging anti-Americanism. I cannot see the evidence for this. Sollecito is Italian and he has gone down too. What is at issue here is the institutional weaknesses of Italian justice and the particular facts of the Perugia trial, not some assault on Uncle Sam. Moreover, Americans need to be a little careful about getting on their high horse over Italian justice. Theirs, after all, is the first country I am aware of to imprison fully one percent of its population, in an approach to law and order that most Europeans find despicable. This failure is not generally one of institutional shortcomings, but instead of a tolerance for levels of inequality and general ‘unfairness’ in society that are not present in Europe. Nonetheless, miscarriages of justice, as I said earlier, occur in all jurisdictions. The last case I paid any attention to before this one was OJ Simpson…

Those sceptical of the verdicts that have been handed down in Perugia need to remain closely focused. At the same time, I think Knox’s family is absolutely right to attract as much publicity as possible to the case. When confronted with institutional failure, as I have seen again and again in developing countries in Asia, it is essential to maintain the glare of public attention. This is the main way in which institutionally weak societies are compelled to confront their failings. The international noise needs to be loud, but not shrill.

Finally, finally, here is my reminder of the ways to create the kind of mess that this case represents: 1. lousy police work; the handling of the forensics in Perugia has been shoddy and yet the outcome of the case has rested largely on forensic evidence 2. A ‘professional’ class which sets its example by not following the rules. This is a society where policemen don’t wear seatbelts, park how they like, etc. In this case we have seen the judicial equivalent: despite rules which say that the findings of police investigations are secret until prosecutors ask for an indictment, in Perugia (as in almost all high-profile cases in Italy) there have been relentless leaks to the press from the outset. If the police and the magistracy leak information in contravention of basic rules of procedure, what reasonable expectation can there be for other people’s behaviour? Italian primary school teachers (thankfully) seem to understand that their job is about setting the right example, but not the rest of the Italian professional class. 

Links of interest:

A New York Times op-ed lets rip (but forgets about all those incarcerated Americans) before the verdicts are announced. 

From the Guardian’s generally excellent John Hooper, first a timeline for the murder and a guide to how weak forensic and circumstantial evidence might suggest that Sollecito and Knox were involved. 

Then Hooper’s review of questions raised about the Italian legal system and a discussion of questions of ‘face’ in Italy (something familiar to any student of China). Note that this story is filed after the one above and Hooper’s view, given more time for reflection, seems much more sceptical of the court’s decision. (I raise this point merely to remind readers of the pressures that serious journalists face, writing about complex issues to deadline.) 

Video

Final statements to court. Personally, I am not convinced these statements reflect the greatest legal advice. Sollecito reads a rather anodyne prepared statement, with just a few (presumably huge) words on each page, and looks stilted.  Knox attempts some kind of sucking up to the court, thanking jurors and prosecution for doing their job. If I had been subject to the kind of investigation, detention and character assassination witnessed in this trial, I would not have been thanking anyone.

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Lost in translation

November 17, 2009

A four-state research trip begins at Fiumincino in Rome, where on a Sunday afternoon the worst chaos I have seen in the Italian capital’s airport reigns. Hundreds of people are crammed into the main security area, a single incoherent mass that takes an hour to pass through the security check. Amid the crush, a British genius yells ‘You need to open more channels’ as if he is the only person in the room that this has occurred to. One guesses the airport cannot find enough people to work on a Sunday afternoon, despite an economy shrinking five percent this year. A couple of Italians lose control completely, screaming like lunatics at the security staff; one of them continues in the same vein at a policeman who appears on the scene.

My Air China flight is delayed a couple of hours because it has been snowing in Beijing, so I can afford to be more patient than some; eventually I get to the gate. Seated in economy I dread a sleepless night travelling east, followed by the jetlag from hell. But soon after take-off I doze off and sleep better and longer than I often do when given a business class seat-bed for a speaking engagement.

The reason for my plane’s delay is snow in Beijing – where I am going first – which closed the airport for half a day. The BBC reports this is due to ‘cloud seeding’, a technique developed in the United States but popularised in China. It involves using airplanes or small rockets to seed clouds with silver idodide that induces rain. You cannot make extra rain like this, as I understand it, but you can make rain fall in places other than where it might fall naturally. The Beijing area is perennially short of water. According to media reports, Chinese meteorologists failed to calculate that wind and temperature conditions on this occasion would cause precipitation in the form of snow. The same thing is said to have occurred in February.

It is a brief, one-night stop in Beijing. On both occasions that I pass through the airport, for landing and for taking off to Tokyo, I have a good look out of the window at the Beijing area. Stories continue to be published in the press that pollution has improved. But all I see looking out of plane windows is a cigarette-smoke yellow haze that sits like an inverted shallow bowl over the city area. A pollution report published by the US embassy in Beijing suggests that the pollution story depends on which pollutants you choose to measure; it focuses on fine particles and tells a less sanguine tale than the official Chinese one.

And so to Japan, where I am ever-more struck by just how little English people speak, even in big cities. I am headed out to the countryside to look at the history of land reform, in what promises to be a supercharged, bucolic version of Lost in Translation, minus Scarlet Johansson.

On the upside, I can read about a quarter of the characters I see in Japan, because they come from Chinese. On the downside, I manage to leave my ‘Survival Japanese’ phrasebook at the friend’s house in Tokyo where I stay the first night.

The car I hire in suburban Tokyo has satellite navigation, but only in Japanese. The one real break I get is that before driving out of Tokyo I manage to enter a marker in the navigation system at the place I am staying. If not, I doubt I would ever have returned.

As much as any place I have been, Tokyo has to be seen to be believed. The vast majority of this vast city is low-rise, clap-board style houses reached by narrow (perhaps six metre wide) lanes which, in my experience, are never cul-de-sacs. These lanes, which are all demarcated with white lines that set aside a little of the precious space on either side for pedestrians and cyclists, go on and on and on.

To prove the point, I leave Tokyo by randomly weaving – following a general north-west trajectory shown on the navigation system – and drive for more than two hours through the lanes until I have had enough and switch to a bigger road. Every so often I come across a market, a school, a group of small one-room restaurants and bars, or a railway line. The more central parts of Tokyo are charming. But the sprawl that connects Tokyo with a series of what claim to be separate towns and cities (you only know it from the names) is ugly and unpleasant. I had not realised before how much Japan has succumbed to the American acceptance of acres of malls, discount stores, fast food restaurants and car showrooms along every significant highway in the country. This has brutalised large swathes of a naturally very beautiful place.

Still, driving into the central mountain range of Honshu island, I eventually reach hills too steep for development. This is where the forest land that covers so much of Japan begins. And it is very attractive forest, comprised of many different tree species, part evergreen and part deciduous. At this time of year the colours are phenomenal. I stay a night in Chichibu, epicentre of a large-scale nineteenth century peasant revolt, and then head across to Niigata on the west coast, an area famed for Japan’s best rice (and hence sake). It is here that a small number of pre-Second World War landlord houses I want to look at are preserved.

Niigata City itself is a reasonably attractive place, easy to navigate, and with excellent food. It comes as a shock that three hours on the expressway through the mountains to get there costs Euro50 in tolls.

The lack of English thing isn’t getting any better. There are shops I go into where the staff appears to have not a single word of English among it. I wander out again, empty-handed. I stay in quite a reasonable hotel, but the English there is up to very little. Eventually I find a woman in the back office who speaks enough English to help me programme the navigation system to find the farms I want to see. I don’t think I have ever felt so cut off from people around me in a place I have visited. They are very friendly and polite. We just cannot communicate.

After a couple of days it is time to head back to Tokyo. Getting to the capital is easy enough. Getting across the capital to my friend’s house is where the navigation system marker turns out to be critical. On a Sunday evening I am led by the machine through a maze of flyovers, tunnels, and complex intersections that would have seen me make a dozen mistakes or more trying to follow a map. Even with the satellite system, I get back after five or six hours in the car remembering why I have come to loathe driving: it is all wasted time; you can’t do anything while you are controlling a car.

Next day I fly to Taipei, stay in a grotty airport hotel, and go back to the airport for an early connection to Manila. There I switch to a local flight to Bacolod, the capital Negros Occidental, a place that has been dubbed ‘Sugarlandia’. In the 19th century it was turned into a sugar estate monoculture by European and American families and has remained pretty much that.

As the plane descends, you can already see multiple fires where farmers are burning off the residue in fields where sugar cane has been cut. There is sugar everywhere, even around the airport. November is part of the cutting season and every road seems to have one or more big trucks piled high with brown cane heading towards the nearest Central, as the sugar refineries are known.

I spend three days trying to understand why the land reform programme introduced after the 1986 flight of Ferdinand Marcos has failed to change the lives of most farmers here. Many landlords have found ways to hang on to their estates – the biggest local player is Eduardo ‘Danding’ Cojuangco, perhaps Marcos’s number one crony, who has never been brought to book – while farmers who have obtained plots have often ended up selling them because of debts to usurers. They then become estate workers again earning, at current exchange rates, about US$2 a day. With the help of some well-informed contacts, I manage to visit land reform cooperatives that are being somewhat more successful. We travel into deep countryside that is as stunningly beautiful as it is poor.

Then it is time for a stopover in Manila so that I can obtain a difficult-to-come-by book, a recent biography of Danding Cojuangco. Reading this on the plane home, I am pleased to note a striking parallel between the late Filipino fantasist duce Ferdinand Marcos and current Italian fantasist duce Silvio Berlusconi.

It seems that not only was the latter embarrassed by secret recordings of his pillow talk. Back in 1972, just before Ferdy plunged the Philippines into more than a decade of martial law, recordings of his bedroom exchanges with a B-movie actress called Dovie Beams (who had been making a movie in the Philippines) began to circulate in Manila. The tape, recorded by the actress before she fled the country, featured Ferdy moaning, singing his favourite folk songs, and begging for oral sex. The University of the Philippines radio station took to playing the recordings over and over. Ferdy, as was his standard refrain, said the whole thing was a communist conspiracy and sought to have various journalists jailed. Now where else have we heard and seen that?

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Fit for a King

October 21, 2009

Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, finally comes out and tells it (more or less) like it is. Bless him. In a speech to businessmen in Edinburgh, Mr King observes that the Anglo-Saxon financial system has so far been bailed out, to the tune of trillions of dollars, with no fundamental change in the way the banking system operates. Huge bonuses will again be paid to bankers this year-end, despite the fact their earnings depend on a limitless supply of almost free taxpayer money. We give them free money, they make a profit: clever stuff.

Mr King suggests this is unfair, paraphrasing Churchill: ‘never in the field of financial endeavour has so much money been owed by so few to so many,’ he says. The solution turns out to be the same one that people like the governor figured out 80 years ago, in the wake of the Great Crash. The retail and investment functions of banking need to be separated, so that speculative activity by investment bankers faces a serious prospect of punishment by bankruptcy when things go wrong. When every kind of financial function is merged under one roof, this does not happen. In the latest crash: ‘Banks and their creditors knew that if they were sufficiently important to the economy or the rest of the financial system, and things went wrong, the government would always stand behind them,’ says Mr King. ‘And they were right.’

Of course Mr King does not mention America’s Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which split banking functions in order to ring-fence speculative activities. That would be tantamount to admitting that banking regulators have not learned anything for the best part of a century. But his logic is exactly that of Glass-Steagall when he describes banking functions that are necessary to the community and those which are simply a matter of private speculation: ‘The banking system provides two crucial services to the rest of the economy: providing companies and households a ready means by which they can make payments for goods and services and intermediating flows of savings to finance investment,’ says Mr King (he could have put the second point more clearly by saying that banks, uniquely, provide working capital to industry). ‘Those are the utility aspects of banking where we all have a common interest in ensuring continuity of service,’ he goes on. ‘And for this reason they are quite different in nature from some of the riskier financial activities that banks undertake, such as proprietary trading.’

Mr King’s reflections on the financial crisis are about as candid and thoughtful as anyone connected with government in the UK or the US has managed in the past year. He is quickly supported by a forceful opinion piece from Martin Wolf in the Financial Times. Sadly, however, it is highly unlikely that there will be a new Glass-Steagall Act on either side of the Atlantic. The senior economic advisers to the Anglo-Saxon governments, whether Fat Larry Summers or Alastair ‘Hello’ Darling, are far too spineless and mired in the mathematical drivel of ‘modern’ economic theory. There will be an incremental regulatory ‘solution’ to the financial system’s instability, involving new rules relating to capital adequacy. This has been tried for decades, and does not work because banks’ prudential requirements for capital vary over the economic cycle and cannot be reduced to a workable regulatory formula. Still, there will be lots of new jobs for regulators until the next financial crisis.

A simple, radical solution, as Mr King recognises, is what is actually needed. It should not be embarrassing to admit that what people figured out in the 1930s is better than what their successors thought in the 1990s (when Glass-Steagall was finally repealed under Bill ‘Mind-On-Other-Things’ Clinton).

 Moreover, there is one new thing that governments could do to stop the cycle of ever more severe financial crises that has afflicted the world since the end of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system in 1971. There is not a hope in hell that this change will be discussed, let alone happen, but it is worth mentioning. The change is simple: end the absurd tax treatment of corporate debt, whereby interest on debt is deductible as a business expense before taxes are paid. This is not the case with equity, where dividends have to be paid after tax. The contrasting, and logically indefensible treatment of debt and equity in contemporary tax systems first encourages companies (including banks) to load up on debt, and second discourages the creation of more employee-owned firms. It is one of those things that is so dumb, so fundamentally wrong, that it is not even discussed.

Posted in Britain, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Fit for a King

Video highlights I

October 20, 2009

Internet connection speeds in rural Umbria, which were are low as 11,000 baud (via a mobile phone) at the start of the decade, are now just about fast enough to watch video. If you are somewhere with genuine first-world communications technology, or in Umbria and can cope with a bit of buffering, try the two following, unrelated, clips.

The first features Bird and Fortune, British comics, explaining the financial crisis. Select the ‘Bird and Fortune’ entry on this Financial Times list of videos. The analysis seems to me at least as good as what you get in the regular FT, but it is quite a lot funnier.

The second video is an interview with the son of the two people whose untimely deaths I described in ‘Not so hip’ (a copy of which is here in the Parenting category). It is conducted by Italy’s own Beppe Grillo, best-known for organising crowds to assemble in town piazzas and shout ‘Fuck Off’ in unison at Italian politicians. Mr Grillo and supporters have come to the rescue of the son, Rudra, although it is my understanding that the Pietralunga commune did also offer his uncle a state job so he could look after him.

Posted in Italy, Parenting | Comments Off on Video highlights I

Sub judice

October 16, 2009

There is very little respect for the concept of sub judice in Italy, as this latest long article about the Perugia diabolical murder trial reminds. But pending certain important developments regarding estate agent Davide Leonardi, I am being English and temporarily suspending blog entries about him.  The public letter about our dispute with Davide Leonardi, and Leonardi SRL, in English and in Italian, should should soon be available for electronic download.

Posted in Italy to avoid | Comments Off on Sub judice

The surreal and the banal

October 11, 2009

A series of incidents in recent weeks makes me suspect that life is becoming weirder than ever. First, the locals around our house in the Apennine hills insist that two brown bears have been seen in the area. The central Italian brown bear, ursus arctos marsicanus, is supposed to be all but extinct, killed off (like so many dogs) by poison left by hunters, and by poachers. The bears may also be culturally unsuited to contemporary Italian life since they are famously monogamous. Still, the neighbours insist that two of only a few dozen remaining bears have made their way to northern Umbria from the national park of Abruzzo.Brown bear_rear_paw_print The local media blame the Aquila earthquake for precipitating a journey of many hundred kilometres. I suspect myself that the repeated visits of Silvio Berlusconi to the region may be a contributing factor.

 

Our son, now five, announces he will capture the bears and return them to their home. A quick online search reveals these bears weigh several hundred kilos and have claws up to 15 centimetres long, so I count myself out. Luca laughs in the face of the reported danger, and marches off into the woods, backed up by a sister and mother. He is increasingly assertive. Not long after this, I come back into the house from the garden to find him listening attentively on the telephone. ‘Who is it, Luca?’ I ask, assuming his mother. He holds up an arm, gesturing that I should not interfere. ‘Yes,’ he says gravely into the mouthpiece. ‘I see, I see… that is important.’ I go off into the kitchen while the conversation continues. After a couple more minutes, Luca comes into the kitchen and I hear him say: ‘So would you like to speak to Mr Studwell?’ He hands over the telephone. It is a journalist from Voice of America wanting comment on the latest Chinese corruption scandal. Next time I’ll just ask Luca to give his own view. This would suit the journalist, who is disconsolate when I say I do not know the details of the case and so cannot comment.

 

Another stranger than fiction moment is the Italian government’s decision to give a state funeral to television quiz master, Mike Bongiorno.mike_bongiorno This is a little like Ken Dodd being carried on a gun carriage through Hyde Park on his way to interment in St. Paul’s, with the royal family walking behind in Knotty Ash outfits. The queen would begin a funeral oratory with the words ‘What a lovely day for sticking a brush up…’ and the congregation would all wear false buck teeth. I am not necessarily against such a celebration when Dodd passes, but in England it is not going to happen. Kenneth DoddIn Italy, by contrast, it does. Mike, of course, was a great defender of Silvio Berlusconi. He died in Monte Carlo.

 

Up in Trieste for a couple of days’ break with the wife, the surreality is capped when I turn on the television (for perhaps the first time in a year) and what should be showing but that interview. I find the added details of Berlusconi’s conduct deeply uninteresting. What fascinates is the studied unpleasantness of the two running dogs who represent him on the programme. They just look and sound, to me, so amoral and horrible. And this is the big point with Berlusconi: everyone who dislikes him tries to focus your attention on him – but it is not about the man, it is about what he reflects in Italy, just as what was most interesting about George W. Bush was what he reflected in America. The sharpest, cruellest and most provocative thing to have been said in Italy in recent months came surely from Berlusconi himself when he declaimed, with unintended import, that: ‘Most Italians privately wish they could be like me and recognise themselves in me and the way I behave.’ Ouch.

 

To be honest, I am feeling mildly sympathetic to Berlusconi as the constitutional court strips him of his immunity from prosecution. The political left has scented blood and is desperately trying to paint a monochrome picture in which Berlusconi is black and everyone against him is white. Yet Berlusconi is quite right when he asserts that the Italian judiciary is shockingly politicised and often deeply unprofessional (on this subject, see the upcoming review of The Dark Heart of Italy). Of course, he doesn’t quite put it this way. He just calls anyone he doesn’t like a ‘lefty’ or a ‘commie’. And he also doesn’t speak from particularly high moral ground since he faces more accusations of graft than Al Capone. So a reasoned debate about how to reverse the long-term decline of Italy and make it a happier place to live turns into the usual slanging match. The latest episode saw Berlusconi phoning up a late night television show to say the president should have used ‘his influence’ to get a different decision from the constitutional court. Challenged by a woman on the programme, he dismissed her as ‘more beautiful than intelligent’.

A few things, you will be relieved to learn, are running to form. What is technically the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development recently released its annual World Bank Doing Business report, which shows that as a place to set up a business Italy has dropped another 21 places in the past year, falling to 75th  in the world (but, hey, there are more than 180 countries in the world). As a place to run a business, Italy comes 78th in the world, one place below Panama (which, if you are interested, is deemed to be a far easier place to start a business). The World Bank report complements the latest International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecasts which predict that Italy’s economy will shrink 5.1 per cent this year after contracting 1 per cent in 2008; the economy has grown less than 1 per cent a year on average since 2000. What is particularly striking about the latest forecast for Italian economic shrinkage is that it is substantially greater than that for either the UK or the US, the countries that are seen as the twin epicentres of the current global financial crisis. Perhaps this is all another conspiracy against Silvio. Perhaps.

Posted in Italy, Parenting | Comments Off on The surreal and the banal

A Great Wall

September 6, 2009

If you are wondering where I have been, the answer is China, stuck behind what is called the Great Firewall of China. In all the time I have been involved with the country, I don’t think the government has ever blocked so many web sites or web searches. As one example, using Baidu, the most popular domestic search engine, it is currently not possible to do blog searches based on the names of 19 of 25 current members of the Politburo, including the president and prime minister (no idea why you can search the other six). The whole of WordPress, which hosts this blog, is blocked in China. As are thousands and thousands of news outlets, service providers and often seemingly innocuous sites which hardly seem capable of upsetting anybody. The censorship is always severe, but it is particularly severe at present because of the riots in Xinjiang in the west of China earlier this year, the passing on June 4 of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, and the still to come 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic in October.

It is possible to go around, or over, the Great Firewall, using a ‘proxy’ server. If I have understood correctly, this routes all your traffic via an additional server which makes Chinese censors think your destination is one place when in fact it is really somewhere else, the true destination being hidden behind the proxy server. I tried one free proxy for a while and it worked only patchily. People who follow these things say that the free proxies are under constant electronic attack from China’s cyber-police; I have no idea how they conduct their electronic warfare, but I do know they have very substantial resources. So before I left I shelled out US$60 at www.witopia.com for a Virtual Private Network service – a sort of Cadillac proxy – that allowed me to view and access anything. The problem is that this necessarily slows things down, involving as it does both encryption and routing via a proxy. So I found the best way to operate is to surf with the VPN off and when you hit something that is blocked – the message on google is typically that the link was ‘broken’, on Chinese search engines you are told you may have infringed some unspecifed law – you turn on the VPN (which boots up in half a minute) and revisit the page. George Orwell would have loved it.

 Witopia means I could have blogged from China, but by the time I was sorted out I had lost the habit and was charging round trying to finish the work I had to finish before we left. So here is a very brief review.

 This was the longest period I have spent in China for about seven years. You wonder what has changed. Well, apart from the 24-hour construction and the unbelievable pollution, both of which have been constants since I first went to China in 1991, I think there are four fundamental differences between the start and end of this decade:

1.  Almost everyone has a small dog. Pekinese%20%20KushanThis may seem like an eccentric observation in ‘the world’s fastest-growing economy’, but it knocked me backwards. The small dog population of Beijing surely now numbers in the hundreds of thousands, if not a million-plus. Ten years ago, dogs were exceptional things. In the traditional Communist view, they are bourgeois pests. Even today, there is a rule in Beijing that dogs inside the fifth ringroad cannot exceed 30 centimetres at the shoulder, hence the plague of Pekinese, miniature poodles, the ones that look like anorexic foxes, and other assorted rug-rats. Even my friends have got these little dogs. But being liberal ne’er do-well types, they have rescue dogs and runts and so they provided few insights into the thinking of the owners of the standard pure-bred micro-pooch. I developed three theories, but had no time to test any of them through interviews with the general dog-owning public. The theories about the dog phenomenon: a) it is a foreign-funded act of counter-revolution, and will be crushed by a Tiananmen dog massacre that drives back the forces of splittist canine adventurism b) it is not counter-revolutionary, but instead the populist leading edge of Chinese market socialist civilisation and Chinese leaders including the president will soon appear an international meetings with a rug-rat under each arm; in turn, Obama’s purchase of a small dog for his children reflects his acknowledgement of the superiority of Chinese socialism c) Chinese society remains so whacked-out after the depravities of the Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, etc, that talking to small dogs about how you flayed your primary-school teacher is now an important form of national healing/therapy. Whichever of these theories has more merit, I can report that thankfully – unlike Paris – there is very little dog shit on the street.

2. Lots of people wear fou zhu. This translates as ‘buddhist pearls’ and refers to bracelets of (I believe usually 12) small balls worn around the wristbuddhist beads, which one fiddles with in the manner of Roman Catholics with their rosary beads. The number of these in Beijing is perhaps less than the number of small dogs, but whereas the latter are preferred by vacuous young women and garrulous grannies, the former are also very popular with men. I was impressed by the degree to which the Buddist pearl thing has invaded society’s deeper recesses after a meeting with an official at the National Development Reform Commission – the country’s central planning agency – where the gentleman concerned couldn’t leave his little balls alone. I immediately went out and got some for myself. The possible explanations for the rise of the Buddist pearl fashion, I suspect, are variants of a) through c), above.  

3. In some respects the economy is now genuinely quite big. China is still a poor country, with an annual GDP-per capita in 2008 of US$3,300. But the sheer force of numbers – specifically, the 1.3 billion population number – means that some markets are very large. China has 2,600 Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurantsKFC, it will likely be the world’s biggest car market this year, it is set to install 200 gigawatts of wind turbines by 2020 (the total installed electricity generating capacity of the UK is 80 gigawatts). Of course the usual caveats apply: even KFC, with a product poor-ish people can afford, is finding it hard to shift more drumsticks as it pushes into the poorest part of the hinterland; the cars made by domestic Chinese firms could not be sold elsewhere in the world because they cannot not pass the safety tests; and the Chinese-made wind turbines are noisy, inefficient and occasionally catch fire. Nonetheless, unlike the 1990s when we lived in Beijing, some things are being done at serious scale. I wrote an article for the September issue of The Far Eastern Economic Review (sorry, subscription only) about goings-on in the steel industry, which is one business that is definitely done at scale (36  percent of global output last year).

4. The place is significantly more cosmopolitan. You still don’t get much change out of China if you do not speak the language. But people are trying to speak English, and the number of returnees who have lived, worked and studied overseas is giving a different feel to the biggest cities. They (try to) run interesting companies and do interesting things. I reckon their future is, if not the future of China, then at least its key barometer. More of this anon.

Posted in China | 1 Comment »

England versus Italy

August 12, 2009

It turns out to be necessary to do one more week in Cambridge, wandering the towers of the gargantuan University Library and photocopying a 10-centimetre wedge of research material, which I now know is close to the maximum that my back-pack can carry; it has to be over a thousand pages, though I don’t want to think about this because I have to read them.

The week gets off to a good start with breakfast with Tim Clissold, author of the excellent Mr China, the stranger-than-fiction tale of investing several hundred million dollars in China in the mid-1990s. Tim trained as an accountant, then learned Chinese, then teamed up with a high-flying American investment banker who had raised (what was) the single biggest fund for buying businesses in the Middle Kingdom. I wrote about this in The China Dream, but Tim’s warts-and-all inside story turned out to be perhaps the best insider tale of China business that has yet been written. And in the meantime, he drew a good salary, invested wisely, went on to do a stint of investment banking with Goldman Sachs, and then launched his own entrepreneurial investment career buying and turning around small-ish industrial businesses. I live and learn.

For me, the remarkable thing about Tim is his ability to see the most outrageous, grasping, brazen scams as intellectual curiosities. In his first career in China he was threatened, kidnapped and daily deceived. His response was that of an astute provincial accountant confronted by a loutish child on a bus: faint bemusement and a simple determination to deal with the situtation, with or without the conductor’s help. He is very good at seeing the other person’s point of view; but also rather principled.

Tim’s latest adventure is carbon trading in China; he maintains an office of about 20 people. It is, he says, at least as scurrilous as anything he has dealt with before and more than likely the basis of a new book. Pay-offs, forged signatures, phantom projects — all are par for the course in securing cash for supposed pollution reduction under the UN-sponsored global carbon trading scheme. The evening before we meet he had dinner with one of the top executives at China’s largest thermal power firm whose (almost certainly) forged signature, Tim gleefully observes, has been attached to a deal he is currently reviewing.

The Clissolds have moved back to the UK from China, although Tim still spends much of his time there. In his own moment of weakness, he bought a large pile in Richmond in North Yorkshire, only to find it infested with rats apparently immune to all known poisons. The family moved out and were surprised to find another family of expats from the East willing to buy the rodent colony. The Clissolds have reined in their delusions of grandeur and now lead a more modest life amid the bizarre sociology of North Yorkshire: inbred RangeRover driving eejits on the one hand, a thankless rural proletariat on the other, nothing in the middle. Tim takes modest comfort from his local status as the stand-out eccentric. He paces the town with a dog called xiong xiong which, having been brought back from Beijing, responds only to commands in Chinese. The scene he describes when barking commands at this dog in a local shop or pubs is what you would expect.

Clissold tips me off to interesting goings on in the world of ultra super critical boiler technology and, thus enthused, I read three of the best PhD theses my supervisor has seen (trying to figure out what I am supposed to be doing) and copy the aforementioned chunk of clever scribblings. When I take the early Friday flight back to Perugia after four days full on in Cambridge, it is one of the rare times going back to Italy that I am not quite sure what the point is: for a moment, England (and abroad) seems terribly serious and interesting and grown-up by comparison. I supposed this is the conclusion that thousands of Italians who are now leaving to work overseas have reached.

Landing in Perugia, I am exhausted. This is the problem with doing four 12-hour days; I cannot be productive for a fifth. Also, it seems, I am on the wrong side of the plane. Instead of one of the most beautiful airports in the world, I see only the capannone — the concrete industrial blocks — of the Tiber valley. What, as one Italian friend asks, is going on with all these new structures in an economy that is currently shrinking more than the UK’s and at the best of times barely grows?

I decide to drive up to Moravola, which as I said before is the best restoration project I have seen in Italy, and get in the way of Seonaid and Chris. They are working like lunatics, trying to run their boutique hotel themselves while guest numbers build up. This appears to involve a 5am to midnight shift, seven days a week, but they remain in good humour. We chat in the kitchen and are soon joined by a charming, designer Swiss couple. These are the kind of clients you want at this stage: relaxed, appreciative of the extraordinary quality of the project and unworried by somewhat slow service as Moravola builds up its business and hence its staff. We set about a bottle of white and talk about Europe, Italians and children. Looking at the surroundings and at Moravola, the Swiss wistfully conjecture how nice it would be if they had a place in the Umbrian sun themselves. Of course they don’t know how much work was involved and how unbelievably expensive the project would have been if Chris, a trained Norman Foster architect, hadn’t become a builder, fabricator and carpenter and done much of the construction work himself. After six or more years he has even acquired a sort of idealised builder physique. Not that the wife is complaining.

Seonaid, on a topic close to my own heart, causes much mirth by relating a recent exchange with a Danish architect who is using Leo Petturiti as his geometra for a client project in the Niccone valley. According to the Dane, the clients are not entirely convinced that Leo ‘gets’ their project vision. So the Dane gamely suggested to Seonaid that he bring the scrofulous one up to Moravola to give him a few ideas about quality restoration work. Large mistake. Unknown to this Scandinavian, Seonaid has already had her fill of Little Leo. When she and Chris first came to Italy to look for a property they wanted to buy a ruin on the west side of the Tiber that was being handled by Petturiti and James Stephens. They agreed a price, signed a contract, and made the compromesso downpayment. Deal done. Driving back to the UK, however, they got call from Stephens’ office to say they couldn’t actually have the property unless they paid a lot more money. Petturiti and Fat Boy had gotten a better offer. To cut a long story short, the illegality of what the agents did was so cut and dried that under threat of legal action Seonaid and Chris were eventually compensated. But it tells you plenty about the way certain people do business. And so when the Dane mentioned bringing Leo up, the response from Seonaid was that Leo will not set foot on her property so long as she breathes.

We finished the bottle. And the sun shone.

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Posted in Cambridge, Italy, Italy to avoid, Italy we like | Comments Off on England versus Italy

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