Tag Archives: Guangzhou

LEADERSHIP WATCH

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The Reverend Rees continues to demonstrate the leadership skills and sure touch that earned him a MISERABLE little middle management equalities officer post paper shuffling for the NHS. Was it there he perfected that ability to wear a shiny suit and talk utter shite?

A brief glance through the Reverend’s weak and cowardly Tory budget for the coming year reveals virtually every department at the council will be making CUTS. Or “efficiency savings” as the Great Helmsman demands we call them. Deploying weasel words in a sad attempt to fool us that his atrocious cuts WRECKING our public services will somehow be improvements to these services if he applies enough heavy-handed PR spin to them.

However, if we’re being strictly accurate, all council departments are making “efficiencies” except ONE. The exception being the Reverend’s very own EXECUTIVE OFFICE, which is receiving a £600k boost to its budget for next year. Although, if we’re to be consistent, shouldn’t this 25 per cent uplift to his own budget be called an “INEFFICIENCY SPEND“?

Does the Reverend think CUTTING everyone else’s budget while BOOSTING his own to afford more trips to Manhattan, China and Cannes and run a junket for ‘World Mayors’ here in Bristol is a good example of the ‘city leadership’ he’s forever banging on about? Did they teach him to be a GREEDY self-serving bastard on his wanky leadership course at Yale? Or is his ‘I’m all right Jack’ approach to leadership just another one of his many embarrassing PERSONAL FAILINGS?

Surely leadership is about leading from the front and ensuring that he takes, at least, his share of any cuts to ENCOURAGE and LEAD his colleagues in these harsh times?

Got to be better than blathering on about leadership while blatantly showing none.

CANTONESE KOWTOW WITH FRIED REES

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The Reverend’s latest international junket in December to the Fortune 500 Global Forum in our human rights abusing twin city of Guangzhou in southern China raised a few eyebrows when the Reverend went armed with a top secret SALES BROCHURE.

Among the dazzling “opportunities” being offered to the high priests of global capital was a £2.5 BILLION chance to build the Rev an underground rail system (since recosted a month later for no apparent reason at £4.5 BILLION) and another MULTI-BILLION opportunity to create a corporate glass, steel and concrete tower block hell all over the Cumberland Basin.

The Rev’s brochure also offered some CHEAPER and more appetising deals such as building PROFITABLE homes for 5,000 economically negligible students and promoted the city’s high cost private rental sector as an excellent INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITY for any circling vultures of global capital.

Just to be clear, the Fortune 500 Global Forum was a meeting of international corporate business leaders seeking Chinese investment into their unreconstructed corporate globalisation project on the model that spectacularly FAILED in 2007, crashed the banks and created austerity.

Some characteristics of this project include use of CHEAP flexible labour; SYSTEMATIC tax avoidance; ‘light touch’ and/or self-regulation; RIGGED ‘free’ markets, asset stripping, privatisation, rent seeking, environmental destruction, MASS TRANSFER of labour and capital across international borders and financial and economic DOMINANCE by hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds. All overseen by transnational and democratically unaccountable bodies.

Surely Labour should be protecting Bristol from the threats of international high finance not inviting them to set up shop here?

INTERNATIONAL CUTS WATCH

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Bristol City Council seems to be avoiding cuts in some areas. Please step forward the Reverend Mayor, Marvin Rees, who’s decided there should be NO CUTS at all in his personal office; his new chief executive’s office or to his senior leadership team. Areas that have all chronically UNDERPERFORMED over the last five years and cost us a lot of money.

Not that the Reverend gives a shit about saving money when it comes to himself, his self-regarding PUBLICLY FUNDED international lifestyle or his personal office team of EGO PAMPERERS on the rates.

Back on November 30 the Reverend SUSPENDED non-essential spending at the council for ordinary staff delivering services. By Tuesday 6 December he was touching down in China, pretending he was on some sort sales mission.

What the fuck was he selling them? CREAKING, underfunded local public services? SUBSIDISED film studio facilities in Hengrove ideal for overblown costume drama? CHEAP tickets for dodgy middle class comedians at the Colston Hall? The USELESS services of the shittest Internal Audit team the world has ever known?

If a pointless ‘trade mission’ to China by a SMALL and FAILING municipal body led by a pompous, preening figurehead isn’t non-essential, what the fuck is?

LOCAL AMNESTY ALL A-FIZZ ON CHINA

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2008-6-30-guo-feixiong-2006-after-beatingChinese premier, XI JINPING, was in the country last month for a high profile state visit and to get brownosed by a British establishment desperate for Chinese cash to fund infrastructure projects like the Hinkley Point nuclear power station in Somerset.

To coincide with the CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY top dog’s arrival, Amnesty International published a list of high profile prisoners of conscience in China. The vast majority of whom are banged up for the crime of free speech and demanding democracy in China.

Among those on the list is a big hero of the Bristolian, GUO FEIXIONG. The pen name of Yang Maodong, a prominent writer and lawyer from Bristol’s Chinese twin city of Guangzhou.

Feixiong was SEIZED off the city’s streets by Guangzhou police on August 8, 2013, and finally arrested on September 11 2013 on a charge of “gathering a crowd to disrupt order of a public place”. His crime was to help organise a peaceful protest over BLATANT CENSORSHIP by the Chinese Communist Party of a local Guangzhou–based newspaper, the Southern Weekly.

Two years later, Feixiong remains in custody and still awaits trial on these spurious charges. According to his lawyer, his health has deteriorated while in detention and his lower legs are extremely weak. His sister and doctor say his condition could be caused from the HUNGER STRIKE he went on in protest at his treatment or from TORTURE.

His lawyer has applied twice for his release on medical bail, the first time in 2013 and then again in June 2014. The authorities refuse to grant bail, however, claiming that Feixiong poses a “DANGER TO SOCIETY”.

Feixiong was also imprisoned from 2006-2011 when he was SEVERELY TORTURED. This Included being beaten, ‘tiger benched’ and suspended from a ceiling by his arms with his legs bent back while being hit with an ELECTRIC PROD on the face, arms, and genitals.

Other Guangzhou-based citizens on the Amnesty list include TANG JINGLING, a  human rights lawyer, who was criminally detained in mid-May 2014 on suspicion of “CREATING A DISTURBANCE,” and WANG QINGYING and YUAN XINTING, who are close associates of Tang in the “Non-violent Citizens’ Disobedience Movement”.

All three have subsequently been formally arrested on a serious charge of “INCITING SUBVERSION OF STATE POWER” although there’s no sign of a trial.

Despite having an active Amnesty International branch in Bristol, which organises a SWANKY GARDEN PARTY at Bristol University’s swanky Goldney Hall every year, there’s no sign of the branch taking up the cases of any of these four prisoners of conscience from our Chinese twin city in any meaningful way.

Instead, it seems, our local Amnesty members prefer to sip sparkling wines in agreeable surroundings while Mayor Pro-Torture – himself an Amnesty member – is left in peace to regularly travel back and forth to Guangzhou to allegedly promote trade and pick up spurious awards from the torturers of the Chinese Communist Party.

Meanwhile, MERCHANT VENTURER Port of Bristol bosses Terrence Mordaunt and David Ord are similarly left in peace to seek financial support for their deepwater port plan at Avonmouth from the Chinese Communist Party bosses of the GUANGZHOU PORT AUTHORITY.

Surely we should be doing much more to support these prisoners of conscience held and tortured under our noses in our twin city?