1 Why global protests are here to stay (Paul Mason in The Guardian) Two years on from the fall of Hosni Mubarak, the new Egyptian president is from the Muslim Brotherhood; on the streets of Cairo, the same kind of people who died in droves in 2011 are still getting killed. On the streets of Athens, the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn is staging anti-migrant progroms. In Russia, Pussy Riot are in jail and the leaders of the democracy movement facing criminal indictments. The war in Syria is killing 200 people a day.
It's an easy step from all this to the conclusion that 2011, the year it all kicked off, was a flash in the pan. But wrong. Something real and important was unleashed in 2011, and it has not yet gone away. I am confident enough now to call it a revolution. Some of its processes conform to the templates laid down in the revolutionary wave that swept Europe in 1848, but many do not: above all, the relationship between the physical and the mental, the political and the cultural, seem inverted.
There is a change in consciousness, the intuition that something big is possible; that a great change in the world's priorities is within people's grasp. The impervious nature of official politics – its inability to swerve even slightly towards the critique of capitalism intuitively felt by millions of people – has deepened the sense of alienation and mistrust.
But the changes in ideas, behaviour and expectations are running far ahead of changes in the physical world. If we take 1848–51 as a template, the crucial moments of reaction lie ahead: coups, crackdowns, intelligence-led disruption of the activists and hackers. But there is still one powerful factor militating against a return to stability of the kind achieved after 1848: the economy. Even if the Eurozone remains stabilised, and America avoids a political crisis over its budget, the developed world faces years of Japan-style stagnation.
2 Dell goes private (BBC) Michael Dell has said he will
buy back the world's number three PC-maker that he founded and that carries his
name. Along with technology investor Silver Lake, and with financial backing
from Microsoft, he will offer to buy the firm for $24.4bn. The move will take
Dell off the Nasdaq stock exchange after 25 years.
Mr Dell hopes
to turn the tide for a firm that has struggled to compete with cheap Asian
rivals and the boom in smartphones and tablet computers. Dell's success over
the last 29 years has made its founder one of the richest men in America. The
chief executive and chairman already owns about 14% of the firm. He and fellow
senior executives will retain their existing stakes.
The buy-out of
the remaining shares will be carried out by a consortium made up of Mr Dell
himself, his own investment fund, and Silver Lake. It will be financed by loans
from four banks, and by a $2bn loan from Microsoft. Analysts said the move
would give Mr Dell greater flexibility in turning the company around, by
dispensing with the need to deliver strong results every quarter to
shareholders on the stock market.
3
Citizen journalist takes on Chinese officialdom (Andrew Jacobs in The New York
Times) A former
migrant worker with a high school education, Zhu Ruifeng, a professed
citizen journalist whose freelance campaign against graft has earned him
pop-star acclaim and sent a chill through Chinese officialdom, has become an overnight celebrity in
China in the two months since he posted online secretly recorded video of an
18-year-old woman having sex with a memorably unattractive 57-year-old official
from the southwestern municipality of Chongqing. The official lost his job. Mr.
Zhu gained a million or so new microblog followers.
Not
surprisingly, Mr. Zhu, 43, has made a few enemies within the government. Late
last month, five men showed up at his apartment with state security ID cards.
As they thundered from the other side of his locked front door, Mr. Zhu dialed
foreign journalists, texted his lawyers and sent out an electronic S O S to the
multitudes. The agents left only after he promised to appear for questioning
the following morning.
The next day,
he emerged from the station house like a triumphant prizefighter, telling
waiting supporters how he had verbally outflanked interrogators during seven
hours of questioning. “I dared them to throw me in jail and then watch how many
human rights and journalism awards I win,” he crowed. “In the end, they turned
white with fear.”
Because he has
no state-issued journalist’s credentials, Mr. Zhu occupies a tenuous gray zone,
which partly explains his penchant for surrounding himself with reporters and
supporters — people he hopes might decrease the likelihood of his disappearing
into the black hole of the state’s security apparatus. “Here on Chinese soil,
it’s almost impossible for citizen journalists like him to survive long term,”
said Zhan Jiang, a media scholar at Beijing Foreign Studies University.
In a policy statement filled with populist rhetoric about the need for greater equality, China's State Council, or cabinet, pledged to boost the social safety net and then took aim at the nation's powerful state corporations, effectively warning them they would have to shoulder some of that extra cost.
"Narrowing the income gap is essential for ensuring social justice and social harmony," the State Council said in a statement posted on the central government website on Tuesday. "We need to raise income levels of the poor and adjust taxes on the excessively wealthy," it said.
In its most specific step, the State Council's new guidelines call for state companies to hand over an additional 5% or so of their profits to the government by 2015. According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Chinese central state-owned enterprises earned more than one trillion yuan, or $160 billion, in net profits in 2011, but only 82.3 billion yuan was paid out in dividends.
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