Diplomatic immunity for e-Bay, Baazee.com?

CYBER AGE: FROM THE STATESMAN
ND Batra

The arrest of Avnish Bajaj, the CEO of e-Bay’s Indian subsidiary Baazee.com, in connection with the posting for auction of a teenage-sex video, should not have become a matter of such grave concern as it has been made out to be in the Indian media. The buck must stop at the CEO’s door. Period. And that’s why so many corporate chairmen, presidents and other top officials in the USA are in jail, some for direct involvement in the abuse of public trust and others for contributory criminal negligence. Ignorance of law, as has been said many times, is no excuse especially when software programmes are available to filter out what is illegal.

It was a failure of imagination on the part of e-Bay-Baazee that its top officials could not foresee this kind of criminal activity taking place on their platform. Despite all the noise about Bajaj’s temporary incarceration, it is important to keep in mind that child pornography, even the possession of it in the privacy of one’s home, is a serious crime in the USA, where Baazee.com’s parent company e-Bay is based. Dissemination of child pornography offline or online, or being a contributory to it, is treated almost at par with murder. Bajaj who went to Harvard and is a US citizen should have known that creating an auction platform would not have given him any immunity in the USA. And he should not have expected it in India either. But being a member of the new Brahmin class that is rising in India, NRIs and Indian-born US citizens returning home to “civilise” their motherland, people like Bajaj think that they are ushering in a new era of not only unprecedented economic growth but also of unbridled freedom, thus unfortunately mimicking the worst of America despite their presumed good intentions.

It is surprising that Infosys chairman NR Narayana Murthy described Bajaj’s arrest in the MMS scandal as “too drastic” an action. No, it was the proper thing to do to prevent India from gradually sliding into cultural anarchy. As India grows economically, it needs more social discipline. Worse than Murthy’s misplaced sympathy was the US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher’s statement that secretary of state Powell was concerned about the case. “I do know this situation is one of concern at the highest levels of the US Government,” Boucher said. “It’s a matter that we have been following.” I thought Powell had better things to do than interfere in a petty law enforcement case in India! Bajaj will get his day in the court but a high-profile case like this would alert other online service providers to watch their corner of cyberspace.

Corporate American leadership, whether e-Bay or Union Carbide (responsible for the Bhopal disaster), must accept responsibility for its actions. Instead of making amends for their criminal negligence, they seek diplomatic immunity based on the false argument that since they are contributing to economic growth, their crimes should be overlooked. It is most shameful when some in the Indian media try to cozy up with global companies doing business in India and ignore their abuses. Consider, for example, a typical response from an India journalist, who wrote, “As India continues its struggle to integrate itself with the global economy and attract more international investments, the experience of Bajaj could turn out to be a serious dampener.” That’s an absurd statement! Should India prostitute itself to attract foreign investment? What India needs is a courageous person like Eliot Spitzer, the New York Attorney General, who has taken upon himself the mission of preventing corporate greed and financial abuse. With the cleaning up of the corporate mess, Americans have begun to trust the market again.

NASSACOM forgets that the Baazee case is not about doing business in India but about trading and auctioning of online child pornography. NASSACOM’s admonition too was misplaced: “As a global, mature and responsible technology industry and the most attractive destination for services, we need to ensure that we do not send out the wrong signals to global customers and investors.” NASSACOM should let foreign investors know that the law of the land must be respected and that like any other “civilised and modern democracy,” India too would take “draconian measures” to protect its citizens, especially children. Listen to what the US Attorney General John Ashcroft said some time ago: “No one should be able to avoid prosecution for contributing to the abuse and exploitation of the nation’s children. The Department of Justice stands side-by-side with our partners in the law enforcement community to pursue those who victimise our children…”

Absence of moral outrage over the behaviour of school teenagers involved in the sex scandal and the lackadaisical attitude of school authorities has been no less shocking. Which makes me wonder where India is heading.

Dealing with your boss

To keep your job, act reasonably dumb before your boss. Why? Read more here.

US foreign policy

"Corporate power is the driving force behind US foreign policy - and the slaughter in Iraq," wrote JK Galbraith in The Guardian. Corporate Power is an expression of free market capitalism, but how does this lead to slaughter anywhere?

Dragon makes a move and Americans are all shook up

ND Batra: From The Statesman

WHAT’S in a name?
A lot.
Brand is the thing, the real thing in the global economy.
Suddenly the old question, “Guess, who is coming to dinner?” has assumed a new meaning.
Chop sticks, please. We’re Chinese.
Although no security alert or red flag went up when it was announced that a most celebrated icon of the US technology, IBM, was selling a part of itself, as it were, its brain, ThinkPad, to a Chinese company, Lenovo Group, for a paltry sum of $1.25 billion, a diffused state of anxiety and discomfort set in. Chinese companies, even when some of them don’t know how to manage themselves — Chinese Aviation Oil (Singapore) is a case in point — are nonetheless so ambitious that they are on an international hunt for acquisitions, especially for global brands.
IBM’s sale of its personal computer business would catapult Lenovo to become the third biggest computer company in the world, after Dell and Hewlett-Packard. “As Chinese companies move from prey to predator, they are also sitting on a powerful advantage: A possible currency revaluation. If the yuan rises 10 per cent, 20 per cent or even 40 per cent analysts expect, overseas acquisitions of household-name companies and properties become that much cheaper. In other words we haven’t seen anything yet from China,” writes Bloomberg’s columnist William Pesek Jr.
The Brits too have become alarmed and wonder whether America will become China-compatible one day, a secondary power at the service of a new superpower that’s sans freedom, sans, democracy, sans human rights. David Smith and Dominic Rushe recently wrote in the Sunday Times: “The sale of IBM’s personal computer business to a Chinese group shows that China is no longer content to be just the world’s workshop. It wants to own global businesses as well, and is using its low-cost advantages to embark on the acquisition trail. The Lenovo-IBM deal represents a coming of age for China. Until recently the economy that will dominate in the 21st century has been content to be the new workshop of the world. Now it has signalled that it wants a big slice of the control, and the boardroom action, as well.”
The fall of the dollar is not only bringing hordes of Europeans to shop and vacation, it is also bringing Chinese investors to buy businesses and industries, much as it happened in the 1980s when the Japanese went on a shopping spree. Of course ThinkPad will look like ThinkPad, which in fact is part of the deal that will allow Lenovo to keep the brand, and IBM, as a junior partner, would stand by it. But eventually ThinkPad would succumb to the Wal-Mart effect: Bring down the price. So would the quality, perhaps. But there are others who think that IBM’s sale of its PC business would have far reaching consequences because it is more than the simple fact that a part of Americana is being nibbled away by a foreign competitor. China’s unprecedented economic growth, galloping international trade and desperate hunt for raw materials, from oil to minerals, would give it a compelling reason for world domination.
Mark Helprin, a Wall Street Journal contributing editor and senior fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, recently wrote that the days of the US dominated unipolar world are over. He contends that China is following the example of the militaristic Japan under the Meiji and plans to dominate the Pacific Ocean. The immense economic growth generated by market economy has made China the world’s second largest economy in purchasing power parity with a total GDP of $6.5 trillion, which is likely to double in eight to 10 years at the present rate of growth. China “harbors major ambitions” and plans to counter the USA in outer space, oceans and in cyberspace (The acquisition of IBM PC business by Lenovo may be a step in that direction).
While the USA is bogged down in fighting Islamic insurgencies and terrorism, China is slowly taking weaker states of South-East Asia (consider, for example, the Asean-China free trade agreement) under its protective wings. Helprin warns: “This century will be not just the century of terrorism: terrorism will fade. It will be a naval century, with the Pacific its centre, and challenges in the remotest places of the world offered not by dervishes and crazy-men but by a great power that is at last and at least America’s equal. Unfortunately, it is in our nature neither to foresee nor prepare for what lies beyond the rim.” Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State designate, and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wouldn’t necessarily agree with that assessment.
All this might seem obsessively alarmist but no one should discount the Chinese goal of ultimately bringing Taiwan into its fold. Its trump card ironically may be the nuclear North Korea, about which the USA is extremely worried, a country over which China has more influence than it admits. But what has this to do with Lenovo buying ThinkPad from IBM? Diplomacy and corporate power work in tandem and China uses both to advance its national interests.

Does advertisement create numbness?

“As corporate interests exert tighter and tighter control over information and even art, critical evaluation is more essential than ever. As advertisements creep onto banana peels, attach themselves to paper cup sleeves, and interrupt our ATM transactions, we urgently need to cultivate forms of self-expression in order to counteract our self-defensive numbness and remember what it is to be human.”
-Rebecca Blood

That's incredible

That’s incredible, but many people believe that Jesus must have known the teaching of the Buddha and the philosophy of non-violence before he told Israelis, Turn the other cheek. And the three wise men that came to Bethlehem to see Christ when he was born? Did they come from India?
The book titled ”The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of Christ Within You" claims, as reported by The Los Angeles Times, that the three "Indian" wise men named him Isa, or "Lord" in Sanskrit. Isa, Ishwar, Ishu are some of the names by which Indians call their God.
“The book further goes on to claim that Jesus also travelled to India, where he practiced yoga meditation with the great sages during his "lost years" from age 13 to 30, a time of his life scarcely mentioned in the Bible.”
Is that possible? Well, if Alexander the Great could go to India, why not Jesus? The Silk Road was not for conquerors only. Early Buddhists used the Silk Road to spread their teaching to China. Read more.

Eastern wisdom on leadership

There is no such thing as a perfect leader either in the past or present, in China or elsewhere. If there is one, he is only pretending, like a pig inserting scallions into its nose in an effort to look like an elephant. - Liu Shao-ch'i

Question of the day

Would China use North Korea to blackmail the United States on Taiwan? Do you hear China whispering, Taiwan or us?

When global corporations go bubble and bust

From The Statesman
ND Batra

Corporations exist to make money, not to spread capitalism, freedom or democracy. One of the best ways of making money is to dominate the market by eliminating competition. So corporations expand through mergers and acquisitions. Or they make unique products that give them unique positions in the marketplace. When they grow big and rich, it becomes difficult to keep their capital bottled up in one place. Some of it flows into the pockets of the people who control them. These people become victims of their own success and meet their hubris. Consider what Arthur Levitt Jr., former chairman of Security and Exchange Commission, said in a recent article in The Wall Street Journal entitled “Money, Money, Money”. “Exorbitant compensation feeds the worst instincts and egos of powerful CEOs, fuelled by their desire to win at all costs and resulting, too often, in the cutting of ethical corners.”

Could that observation also be true about Raymond V Gilmartin, the CEO of Merck & Co.? In his testimony before the Senate Committee, Gilmartin said that even his wife took Vioxx, the painkiller that for some people became a killer drug. Freudians might say he had a subconscious desire to hasten his wife’s mortality, which of course is ridiculous, but did he care enough for the American patient as much as he did for the shareholders of his company? Cynics might say, wives come and go but a corporation has to go on.

Levitt blames the prevailing corporate boardroom culture of interlocking relationship, of “you scratch my back, and I yours,” for unseemly greed. And he wonders, “How likely is that a board member would challenge the person who invited him to join, and can re-invite him? How likely is it that a board member would stand up to the CEO who directed the company’s foundation to support his favorite charity? Or hired his law firm? Or his wife’s interior decorating shop?”
Greater corporate board independence and accountability, public exposure of excessive executive compensation based on comparative performance of similar work might offer some hope, Levitt says, but I am afraid it won’t be more than a palliative. And thereby hangs the question: In the era of resurgence of America values, if the recent vote for George Bush is really worth something, how much does a company executive deserve? Or what punishment he wouldn’t deserve if he pulled the company down the drain. Did Michael Ovitz, for example, who was fired from Disney, really earn $140 million for 15 months of work in 1995?

Talking of American values and corporate executive greed, where should one draw the map? Is corporate greed limited to the blue states? Are the red states too “red in tooth and claw”? Pardon me for mixing metaphors and cultures, but in the age of globalization shouldn’t our sight extend to the roaring economic giant China? If a Chinese business goes bust, can the USA turn the other cheek? Consider the case of Chen Jiulin, the Chinese entrepreneur who used his country’s mystique of flying dragons and crouching tigers, “Chinese Wisdom and International Expertise,” to turn China Aviation Oil (Singapore) Corp. into a most sought-after investors’ sweetheart. Millions of dollars of investors’ money poured into the company and by October the stock had risen by 80 per cent. But then the truth was out.

On 25 November, Chinese Aviation Oil bent its knees before a Singapore court and sought protection from its creditors. The miracle company had lost $550 million in speculative bets on oil. But the state-owned parent company in Beijing knew the unfolding disaster and tried to stem it by selling 15 per cent of China Aviation Oil (Singapore) to investors to raise money to cover the losses, however, without full disclosures to the investors. In the USA, this kind of hush-hush sale is called inside trading, the kind of illegal activity for which many American CEOs, Martha Stewart et al, are serving jail terms. Of course Chen Jiulin, the East-West business philosopher, the suspended CEO of China Aviation Oil (Singapore), who ran away to his village in China where he grew up as a farm boy, has been brought back to Singapore to facilitate the inquiry in the biggest collapse since the Barings Bank 1995, which suffered a loss of $1.2 billion.

“The scandal has raised questions about corporate governance in China,” wrote Clifford Coonan in The Times. But Coonan isn’t alone in this; Michael Coleman, managing director of Singapore-based Aisling Analytics Pte. was quoted in Bloomberg.com, saying: “It does raise some serious questions about Chinese companies. Can they govern themselves effectively? So far, all the evidence suggests that they can’t.”Which should be a mater of serious global concern and more so when the world is rushing to invest in Chinese companies without knowing how hollow are those outfits. By controlling information and hyping their prospects, they blow bubbles that can’t be sustained. So they bust, but who do you call? China Aviation Oil (Singapore) was simply an arm of the parent Chinese government controlled company, which had created a monopoly over aviation oil supply to China.

Even outside its borders, China tries to create conditions of complete command and control by creating cartels and monopolies. Singapore might convict China Aviation Oil’s Jiulan, but that would be shadow fighting. What can Singapore or any other government do about the Chinese government that spreads its tentacles abroad through private companies?

A leader has spoken

South Carolina Senator Fritz Hollings finally showed the courage to tell the truth about the destructive role of lobbyists’ money and their power over Congress. Talking with Mike Wallace of CBS, the senator said that lobbyists are the real lawmakers because they have not only access to senators but “it's all those K Street lawyers now and lobbyists and interests making up the legislation, and they work with staffs and everything else. The bills, and the special interests overwhelm us with submitted legislation”
What do Senators and Congressmen do? They spend their days and nights raising money for the next election. Speechwriters write their speeches, lobbyists craft bills for them and public relations firms do the thinking for them. What a wonderful life it must be to be a senator!

A place where you don't have to wear pants?

A self-correcting system
Is the world currency system correcting itself or is the fall of the dollar Bush’s fault? John Cassidy in The New Yorker: “Ultimately, the value of a currency is an international verdict on the honesty and competence of the government that issued it. President Bush may have recovered in the domestic polls, but in the currency markets his ratings are still falling.” But the value of the dollar has fallen only in Europe. Or you might say, Euro is rising against the dollar. Does it mean the world trusts Europe more than the United States? I have not seen any measurable indices of trust in Europe rising in the world. There is more to the dollar fall than the falling trust in the Bush administration.

Be warned and take note, ye Americans
Will America become China-compatible one day, a secondary power at the service of a new superpower that’s sans freedom, sans, democracy, sans human rights? David Smith and Dominic Rushe say in the Sunday Times. “The sale of IBM's personal computer business to a Chinese group shows that China is no longer content to be just the world's workshop. It wants to own global businesses as well, and is using its low-cost advantages to embark on the acquisition trail…. The Lenovo-IBM deal represents a coming of age for China. Until recently the economy that will dominate in the 21st century has been content to be the new workshop of the world. Now it has signalled that it wants a big slice of the control, and the boardroom action, as well.”

Ad of the day
“Isn’t it strange that your dry cleaning got you to a place where you don’t have to wear pants?” Citi/ AAdvantage

Dragon in the American tent

No security alert or red flag went up when it was announced that a most celebrated icon of the US technology IBM was selling a part of itself to a Chinese company, Lenovo Group for a paltry sum of $1. 25 billion. Chinese companies, even when some of them don’t know how to manage themselves--Chinese Aviation Oil (Singapore) is a case in point--are nonetheless so ambitious that they are on an international hunt for acquisitions, especially for global brands.
IBM’s sale of its personal computer business would catapult Lenovo to become the third biggest computer company in the world, after Dell and Hewlett-Packard. “As Chinese companies move from prey to predator, they are also sitting on a powerful advantage: A possible currency revaluation. If the yuan rises 10 percent, 20 percent or even 40 percent analysts expect, overseas acquisitions of household-name companies and properties become that much cheaper. In other words we haven’t seen anything yet from China,“ writes Bloomberg’s William Pesek Jr.

American tongue-in-cheek

ND Batra

From The Statesman


Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal wonders “why no one has yet run for office by campaigning against the computer. After all, you couldn’t ask for a better sin-delivery system than a PC with a fast Web connection.” Well, you might as well call a gun as a death-delivery system, but no one dares run a political campaign against guns in the United States and get elected. If you talk against guns, some gun lover would fire back, “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” If a politician runs against guns, it means that not only he is challenging the people’s right to bear arms (Second Amendment) but also getting into a crossfire with the National Rifle Association—the 500-pound gorilla who does not need a gun to kill you. Senator John Kerry, who lost to George W. Bush, eagerly flaunted his Vietnam credentials, Purple Hearts and all, as well as his love for hunting by going on a goose-hunt, which proved to be of no avail.

But Gomes has a point: “With a week or two of patient work, someone with their hands on the keyboard of such a system—no matter what his or her age—could download a Kinsey library of erotica, play videogames depicting the cruelest kind of violence, steal a studio’s worth of music and movies, and gamble away small fortune.” If politicians can’t fight against the “girlie men” and “bushwhooping women” of Hollywood, how would they fight the Internet, where no man or beast has much control? Whether it was Dr. Alfred Kinsey or the Playboy that liberated Americans sexually, or corrupted them, as Rev. Jerry Falwell would say, nonetheless, sexual imagery, heterosexual, homosexual, omni-sexual, has been seeping into American social ecology, even into corporate brands. Is omni-sexual a new word in American lexicon?

But consider this. A Saks Fifth Avenue ad shows two itsy-bitsy girls, one a coy blond and the other a brash oriental with the belly-button up, pants slipping down with palms in her hip pockets, face-to-face on two opposite pages of a glossy magazine, with the tag line: “Saks loves it: both ways”. Both ways? Very naughty indeed, I thought and wondered if it were a new form of omni-sexuality. A constant hovering anxiety in the “Sex and the City” used to be the question on the mind of every single woman who met a hunk: Is he gay? Of course if he were a heterosexual, a girl could have a chance. She could steal him from his girlfriend or wife. But what can a girl a do with a homo? Oh, yes! She could cry with Dame Edna in Back with Vengeance! : “Darling, this is not a shoe. This is a cry for help, my possum.” Dame Edna has a new act for the world and could get away with her conceit, “Sorry dear, I am just not feeling naughty tonight,” but what can a single girl with sex on her mind do in New York, the city of spin, spin, spin, and sin. Girls are not calendar-resistant, are they? They wrinkle. They shrivel. Boys move on.

Of course you have heard of water-resistant and wind-resistant, but what is calendar-resistant? That’s Timberland’s ad for its men’s Mixed-Media Jacket, which says: “It is quite possible the jacket will last longer than you.” Something to leave behind to make the world a better place, when your “too, too sordid” self is gone! You could pass on the jacket to one of your poor relatives whom you never liked or donate it to the Salvation Army. That however reminds me of a plumber who came to my house to replace a leaky pipe and said that the new pipe had a life-long warranty. Amazed, I said: Whose life are we talking about? Yours or mine? He never felt so embarrassed. He had a triple by-pass a year before. Just like the Timberland’s jacket, the plumber’s pipe too was calendar-resistant. And that reminds of me something else that was touted as calendar-resistant. A few years ago, a young thirty-something brunette was shown gloating over her Seiko watch: “My husband has left me, but my Seiko is still with me.” Joy to the world! Seiko is ticking and the woman is waiting for another gentleman caller.

Talking of gentlemen and lovers, a few years ago I overheard an ambitious woman humming to herself: There are a thousand-and-one ways of getting rid of your lover. And she got rid of him, kept the sprawling house and the kids, and moved on to another city, another hunt. But that’s merciful, though she had a killer instinct and could have done more. In a red, red state in the South, where I was a professor once upon a time, the Bible belt where there are more divorces and single moms than in the blues states, a colleague whose department work I was evaluating said to me in a loud whisper, “In my county, we don’t kill anyone unless there’s a reason.” I got the message loud and clear. But that was no better than two men of God who one evening came to the beautiful Eagle Lake where the university had given me a living quarter and said that they wanted to deliver me from my sins. One of them said, “Do you go to church?” I said, no, but why? The other said, “Do you want to go to heaven or hell?” I said, “ I would rather stay here.” They laughed and left me alone.

Just as the Internet and Hollywood deliver to us our daily pipedream of sins, men of God are always ready to deliver us from our daily sins. Some call it checks and balances. I call it a supply chain system of American values.

Discussion: Internet democracy, Ukraine and China

On-site Internet voting system enables voters to cast ballots on Internet-connected machines located at polling places. Remote Internet voting system allows people to vote from any device, a computer or cell phone, connected with the Internet. What if Internet voting were available in Ukraine? There would have been no fraudulent voting. The political crisis could have been avoided. You might say the same thing about the 2000 US presidential election, which, as some contend, was undemocratically decided by the Supreme Court in favor of George W. Bush. Is the Internet truly a democratic medium that would create a new electronic democracy and spread freedom around the world? Would the Internet democratize China? Does it matter when all we need from China is cheap stuff?