Losing Ground – No Words

Rhodo Zeb — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 05:52:46 +0000

Well, I sort of missed out on the whole sum-up post to close out 09. It was an interesting year, that’s for sure.

What 2009 should be most remembered for, however, is quite simple: it was the year where the rule of law regressed and became more decadent and dishonest than ever before. And if you know anything about the history of for-profit incarceration (well, not to mention war) you may realize the serious fault-lines between public justice and private profit. At the most basic level, everyone knows there are people that can ‘lose your file’; the problem is how to build a system with lasting integrity.

2009 was a year where the crimes of the Bush Administration were swept under the rug, where Gonzo got screwed but torture-lover Yoo just went back to Berkeley to teach Admin law. Where we shouldn’t be ‘backward-looking’ much like the crooked cop doesn’t look back while his business partners are doing their work.

Millions of dollars got funneled around, millions in no bid contracts, millions lost and stolen and ‘mis-appropriated’. And somehow the ‘legal community’ is still back wrestling with the issue of criminal immunity for these contractors. Since when was the flexible, organic system I learned about in law school so incapable of calling a halt to honoring these mandatory arbitration clauses? Since when did a private contract trump criminal law?

We have to go back in the story, at least until Enron, to see how things have gone. There, massive fraud was carried out upon the government and individuals, and nothing was done about it. Couple people went to jail, and all those workers lost out on their pensions while shareholders got screwed, too.

Then of course we had our illegal president, whose people walked roughshod over legal principals and rule of law in favor of their plenary power concepts and fancy arguments. Unfortunately, they also had a good part of the judiciary as well, in the form of the Federalist Society, so there was little pushback…

Which concepts, of course, they abandoned the second they lost the executive branch, which is why usually we shouldn’t end up in this position unless we have a corroded system, because both parties are supposed to understand that they risk future abuse at the hands of the other party through the granting of such extraordinary power. Duh. Its not rocket science, some would even (irrationally, I might add) argue that such an outcome is impossible because it is too irrational, but anyway here we are.

The excessive abuses of the Bush Administration, while some may refrain from calling crimes, must be investigated fully, or Rule of Law will have been dealt a mortal blow by its most vocal supporter for decades.

How can US and international law be ignored, sneered at in fact, with no response?

Only a dead thing behaves this way…

Playing a Loser's Game

Rhodo Zeb — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 11:20:38 +0000

Just a brief update on just one of many many such injustices due to the opacity of China’s legal system and political interference in the law. From ESWN (scroll down for the update and even farther for the original report), about the poor People’s Daily employee (or ex-employee, depending on whether you prefer truth or misinformation):

According to the Central News Agency, the magazine People’s Forum of the People’s Daily group does not have any reporter who fled to Hong Kong. The person Qiu Weiming mentioned in news reports is an operations manager whose labor contract had not been renewed.

According to the agency, the person Qiu Weiming mentioned by the Hong Kong media is not a reporter at either People’s Daily or People’s Forum. He was an operations manager who was employed by the magazine People’s Forum for one year. When his contract came up this April, it was not renewed.

People’s Forum clarified to the China News Agency that Qiu Mingwei was employed by the magazine on April 8, 2008 after a selection process. Qiu signed a labor contract which included certain job goals. He was hired as the deputy director of the currents affairs section of the magazine. This department is responsible for managing advertisement distribution, and Qiu was responsible for managing advertisement distribution.

This one-year contract expired on April 10, 2009 after one year, at which time Qiu Weiming was not rehired. There were two reasons for not rehiring him. First, Qiu did not meet the management goals. As of April 8, 2009, Qiu accomplished less than 20% of the stipulated goals and therefore failed to honor the contract. Secondly, Qiu is not supposed to be part of the news staff, but he went many times to places like Hebei, Liaoning and elsewhere to gather news. This violates the relevant policies on the separation of operations and news functions at the magazine.

People’s Forum pointed out that since this is August 2009 and Qiu has left the magazine for four months already, anything that Qiu did in the interim is his personal activity which does not matter to the magazine.

Of course, now that this has hit the news, the individual’s reputation must be tarred and lied about. He is only an operations manager! He did a bad job! We fired him a long time ago! Please forget that he was identified presumably because he was in a sensitive position, or did they just summarily seize any Mainlanders identified in the march? (Sadly, that wouldn’t surprise me at this point.) Further, his story involves him returning to work and thereby finding out that he had big problems, whereas according to this storyline he was long gone by then.

Funny how an organization that is generally extremely sensitive about releasing information just went ahead and told us all about this guy, isn’t it. But it must be true, right? The entire government couldn’t be dedicated to exterminating facts and supplying lies instead, could it?

What other way is there? Injustice is poured directly on injustice, and that is how things are set up. This is a systemic and organizational problem, and the individuals involved in making up these lies have no control over the decision to do so, and even the authorities who do make the decisions are hemmed in and have little choice. Did I mention this guy has a young baby at home? I pray for his wife’s sanity in getting through this, and thank god that the baby is too young to be scarred by this, or the Party will have made one more enemy to add to their list of things to be afraid of.

On top of that, notice the last part in bold. What does that mean? Think about it for a second.

That is evidence of the fear the individuals working there feel because of this incident, and hence they are trying to put as much distance as possible between themselves and Qiu. So his friends are telling him to flee while management of the paper are carefully distancing themselves. Everyone is scared, because China justice is out of control and can leap up and attack literally anyone, although often top people can get a number of years or suspended death sentences. Nonetheless, six months from trial to execution for a top, top guy, from this link. There will soon be no corruption left because of the harsh penalties, obviously.

[Note: Jamestown Dot Org? You are on double secret block! Congratulations!]

工商法 » organizational.behavior

Losing Ground – No Words

Playing a Loser's Game