Tag Archives: China

10 Things WikiLeaks Should Tell Us About

I’ve not written anything about WikiLeaks recently because I’ve found the whole circus surrounding Julian Assange rather dizzying. Reading the commentariat on Guardian Cif has hardly helped my feverish state of mind over the last few days and I must admit that I found myself beginning to loathe my fellow man for a moment. That moment has passed, I’m glad to say.

Suffice to say, I do think that Julian Assange should probably answer these charges in Sweden, but I also have the feeling that this is indeed part of an obvious and concerted campaign to ‘get him’. None of this dizziness, however, takes away from the fact that WikiLeaks has been serving up some interesting, if hardly surprising, morsels in the diplomatic cables episode [this blog referenced WikiLeaks a couple of years back regarding the leaked BNP membership list – much more exciting]. Hearing that China isn’t a monolithically stupid country convinced that the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea is a bastion of like-minded souls against the world didn’t take my breath away. Nor did the revelation that Putin’s as corrupt as the Church, or that pressure was brought to bear on Spain regarding the Jose Couso case. Sadly, these are slightly depressing truths that we all kind of knew already, just confirmed in dull, bureaucratic language.

To cheer myself up, I’ve been thinking of some things WikiLeaks could reveal in the future. Here are mine. You can share yours in the comments…

  1. Memos that prove me right about there being little or no evidence of WMDs in Iraq prior to the war, and that Blair misled parliament.
  2. Stuff about the banks and how they’re all bastards. Ideally some memos proving that they laugh at the rest of us for funding their rescue. Because I’m sure they do.
  3. Something about alien life. I’m not a conspiracy nut, but after the important-but-nowhere-near-as-exciting-as-it-might-have-been NASA announcement last week, it would be great to read.
  4. Categorical confirmation that Aznar and the PP intentionally misled the country over 11M.
  5. Anything that makes Dick Cheney look even madder than he already does (like, he picked out crowns for himself and Bush or something).
  6. Clear evidence of corruption in FIFA, UEFA and European leagues.
  7. Anything they have on Dr. David Kelly. I more or less accept the suicide story but the whole case stinks.
  8. Proof that 9/11 ‘truthers’ are led by a 7-foot lizard.
  9. Material covering the huge increase in opium crop since the beginning of the Afghanistan war, which companies are profiting and by how much.
  10. Anything at all to do with Catalan politics. Just so we can see how special they feel.

How about you? What would you like to see revealed by WikiLeaks?

My life as a door to door salesman

Some time back, I spent the best part of a year living in Australia. The majority of this temporary residence was spent living at Gun House, a military residence in Fremantle, Western Australia. I was an exceptionally lazy young man and spent most of this ‘gap year’ spongeing from my father and stepmother, listening to music and chatting with girls rather than finding gainful employment. I like to imagine that this is what most 19 year-olds will do, given half the chance… but I was probably worse than most.

The only job I did during my 8 months in Fremantle was a 3 1/2 month stint working as a door to door salesman for Primus, a company which offered cheaper phone calls in comparison with Telstra, the Australian national phone company. I’d like to state for the record here that we weren’t selling moon dust or snake oil. There was a genuine opportunity for people to save money on their phone bills by opting for another company when phoning interstate or overseas. That said, I probably would have done the job even if it was a scam. It was one of the best, and one of the worst, times of my life. I’ve been thinking about it again recently, so I thought I’d try to collect my memories of the time.

Aparna, my stepmum’s cousin helped me get to the interview which was somewhere near the Northbridge district of Perth. I know that as part of her task to help me settle in in Perth, she had also to try and get me employed. I turned up at the interview in baggy jeans and t-shirt and although the interview was full of warnings about hard work, commitment and so on it was pretty obvious from the start that if I could write, recite the pitch and above all, walk, then I had a job. They asked me to start immediately and so the next day, I was there in cheap trousers, cheap shirt, cheap tie and trainers. My training consisted of half an hour’s orientation and then we were in the car. There was myself, Will, an ambitious Cambodian-born Australian and a couple of other guys who were just starting out.

Will was my mentor for a few days, taking me along with him as he convinced the citizens of one district after another to sign up for cheaper interstate calls. As we started our beat, he immediately criticised my tie, letting me know that it looked cheap. He was wearing a $100 suit, with a nice tie and probably some cufflinks. His shoes (every door to door salesman needs strong, easily polished, durable shoes), were sturdy but showed signs of wear. He signed about eight households up to the service, using the same pitch each time, “Good afternoon, my name’s Will and we’re just in the neighbourhood checking that everyone’s signed up with Primus for cheaper phone calls. Oh you haven’t? Well I’ll tell you about the service and then we’ll get the paperwork sorted”. The pitch was cunningly engineered to make people think it was something that they’d almost forgotten about. Something they’d meant to do, even if they didn’t realise or remember.

I can’t be sure but I suppose we visited a hundred houses or so each day, of which we were expected to sign up about 12-18. Each sign-up was worth around $12 to us, on which we paid no taxes or social security (‘self-employed contractors’ as we were). We used the same pitch on each house, giving the person who’d answered the door little chance to speak or even think. We launched straight from the pitch into the sign-up process as an attempt to get the hapless customer to believe that they’d already agreed to the deal. Sometimes that worked and other times, we’d have to answer their questions about how much it would cost to call Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, England, China, India, New Zealand or Vietnam.

It wasn’t hard to pick up the pitch, or the attitude you needed to use with it. Grinning, chuckling, smarmy comments and winks were, perhaps surprisingly, as useful as they are in the movies. I guess that having grown up in Devon, where very few (if any) salesmen came to the door, I was more surprised by the way the stereotype really applied than I would have been had I grown up in a big town.

Every day at about 11am, we’d leave our office near Northbridge in Perth and set off for the suburbs. We worked from Rockingham to Two Rocks, and covered much territory in between. Some areas we covered were well-to-do districts (not great for doorstep sales), some were fairly built-up (lots of flats equals lots of sales) and some were low-income outer suburbs (redback spiders above the doors). I saw it all, from swarms of bees to bored housewives, from kangaroos to gold miners (a trio of whom once insisted on giving me a bong before they signd up… I was so stoned for the rest of the day that I didn’t make any more sales in the remaining two hours). I stopped at Aboriginal houses which were empty, as all life went on in the garden, and plush beach villas, most of which were empty just because it wasn’t the holidays. But most of our targets were in the low-income white suburbs… these were the people who really wanted to save money, after all.

Abuse was a fairly common thing. This ranged from the odd, simple “Fuck off!” to a man threatening that he’d “have [my] balls for breakfast”, to an Asian colleague being chased down the street by a gentleman with a metal bar. Some triad boys once threatened me with knives. But I also experienced a lot of kindness. The kindness of strangers is, to misquote, oddly reliable. I was treated for sunstroke by a kindly widow, I was given a bellyful of beer by a couple of proper ockers who asked me what I thought of their wives; I was given a cuppa and a chip butty by some Yorkshire expats. In fact, kindness definitely outweighed abuse. But abuse gets to you.

What really ended up pissing me off about the job was my colleagues. Some of them were lovely: Simon, a fellow Englishman who became a good friend, for example. But then there were the wide boys, like Miguel and Jermaine. These two wanted to be gangsters (one of them probably is now, if he’s not dead), and pushed my patience to superhuman levels. And my boss, Alex. This guy was getting about $16 for every sale I made. For every sale I got $12 and he got $16. A good business for him but utterly demoralising for me.

All we did with our pay was drink, party and eat fast food. We went to a karaoke bar called Seoul Karaoke and nicked bottles from the storage area by the loos. Everyone took speed and ecstasy at the weekend and many of us would start work hungover… it was a highly unhealthy lifestyle. And that’s without mentioning my unpleasant experience with Rohypnol.

I’m not sure why I’ve written this, other than to relive an experience I’ll hopefully never have to go through again. If any prospective door-to-door salesmen read this, I have one piece of advice: if you must do it, do it. But get out as soon as you can. Doorstep sales is a depressing, dehumanising job.

What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?

News: Women, unions and blogging

The reason for a lack of updates here is simple: too much work. However, the world has carried on spinning.

The Spanish political arena is currently fairly dull. Zapatero announced a female majority cabinet, which is obviously an interesting statement. It doesn’t say much about what his second government will achieve. My guess is: not a hell of a lot. Libertad Digital reckons that ETA are pushing for talks with the government by letting off bombs. Talks should happen, but probably won’t, given that the PP is committed to breaking the historic pact of support for the government’s terrorism policy. The struggle for power in the PP is the only story really worth following.

Good news: unionised dock workers in Durban refused to unload millions of dollars worth of Chinese weapons bound for Zimbabwe. Action by local human rights groups and trade unions prevented the delivery of arms and ammunition for Mugabe’s regime from a Chinese ship. Apparently, the ship is now enroute for Mozambique. I can only hope that union workers there will also fight the ‘free market’ which allows China to arm Mugabe’s psychotic and murderous regime. I mean, could the timing be any more obvious? This is the moral equivalent of Mussolini’s assistance to Franco’s rebellion.

We met up with Graeme of South of Watford fame (Madrid’s best English-language blog) last night. I got a bit drunk (sorry about that) but we had a great evening, ending up in Plaça Reial, where I insulted an arsehole of a waiter.

The next few weekends will be pretty busy and work is going to be intense over the coming weeks. But I’ll try to blog a bit more because I enjoy this.

Please don’t tell me where or when I may protest

The Olympic torch made a pretty pathetic tour through London today, beset at first by snow and wind, and later by numerous pro-Tibet campaigners intent on bringing their independentist protest to the fore again.

I was hoping that the torch would be fucked with at some point, because the relay is just another side of Britain’s craven pursuit of China’s acceptance. Because of 2012 the torch had to visit London, but at no point has the UK government spoken out about the violent crackdown taking place in what should be a free Tibet.

The most striking quote of the day for me came from the Chinese Olympic Committee representative, who said something along the lines of “It’s sad that people have to hijack the Olympics as a legitimate space for protest”. He went on to explain that while protest should be allowed (yeah, right!), the Olympics are a sporting event, not a political one.

Sorry but that just doesn’t wash. If there is any ‘non-political’ event as political as the Olympic Games, I’d like to know. I’m sick of committee organisers, politicians and police ‘advising’ on the best way to protest. Their suggestions inevitably involve meeting in some park, well away from TV cameras. Yeah, perhaps we could just do it in a labour camp. Actually, the torch relay is about the most suitable target for protest that I can think about at the moment.

Despite all the talk about Islamist terrorism, I’m still convinced that the number one threat that worries governments everywhere is organisation of labour and mass protest. We should continue our protests, illegal if need be, so that governments can’t sit pretty and pretend there is no opposition.

All this environmental stuff

I know I’m meant to be worried. Sometimes I do worry. And I’m glad that the news is talking about climate change and pollution again. I do consider it to be a far greater risk to my life than, say, ‘international terrorism’.

But when it comes down to it, I’m not planning to do much to help to deal with climate change, CO2 emissions, etc etc. There are a few reasons that I’ve come to this conclusion and the first is that stupid one I always criticise other people for using: I cannot make any difference so there’s no point bothering.

Now, before you say I’ve lost my mojo, just think. Given that I already conserve energy in a loose, easy sort of way at home, I’d say that my energy consumption is probably average for Spain. The new TV uses a lot of juice but then I never drive. If I managed to reduce that energy use to nil, the resulting effect on the overall consumption of energy in Spain (or in Catalonia or Barcelona, for that matter) would be so infinitesimally useless and pathetic that all I would really have succeeded in achieving would be ruining my quality of life by forcing myself to eat raw vegetables and lentils soaked in (spring) water over night. Never mind the emissions that a diet like that would cause.

A popular statistic around at the moment is that if the UK closed down all their CO2-emitting power stations, it would take China only six months to fill in the gas gap that we’d left behind. What about India and China together?

The problem with climate change is that there is literally nothing any of us can do to help the situation. Why not recycle? Did you know that most of the stuff you recycle ends up in land-fill? Gemma and I recycle religiously… it’s something to do, you know? And yet I know that it’s a complete waste of time.

When it comes down to it, the single worst thing I ever do to the environment is air travel. I like to fly to places. It’s much quicker than taking a canoe or a bullock-cart. It’s selfish of me and I know it’s not helping but I like to see my parents once a year if I can. How else am I going to do that? If I forswear that I’ll no longer fly then I guess they’d eventually fly out to see me here. So what would I have achieved then? I’ve got two sets of parents (both parents and both step-parents), a brother, a sister, a step-sister and two half-sisters. By my refusing to fly, I’d force them to fly. So there’s no point bothering with it.

My other reason for not helping any more than I already am is skepticism. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that things aren’t quite as bad as Al “I couldn’t even beat George Bush in an election I’d won” Gore would have us believe. The initial warnings on climate change, emissions and environmental damage which came out thirty years ago warned about very similar consequences and that it would be too late by 2006. Well, we haven’t done a single thing about it and now we’re being told we’ve got more time, even though the picture being painted is that things are even worse than we thought they were.

My point is: either we’re already screwed, or the science isn’t completely right. If the science is right, we’re already too late to do anything. While this doubtless smacks of lazy refusal to do more to combat climate change, it’s something I’ve struggled with for a long time. I was a real environmentalist a few years back and I’m still pissed off that Bush didn’t ratify Kyoto. So what’s changed? I got so sick of the religiosity behind the environmentalist movement that I started to question it. My central belief when it comes to politics has become: whatever people keep saying over and over again, mistrust it.

So that’s it. I’ll keep up with the useless recycling, the energy saving light-bulbs, the public transport and the support for green alternatives to burning coal for electricity production. But I’m going to keep up with my air travel, my expensive, energy hungry gadgets, the coal fire at home in Devon in the winter, putting the heater on, using the tumble-dryer etc etc etc. I make no apologies. I’m just sick of the whole business.