Bold strokes to change the world?

From The Statesman
Cyber age: ND Batra

Probably the most touching moment during President Bush’s State of the Union address on Wednesday night occurred when the entire assembly gave a standing ovation to two women, Safia Taleb al-Suhail of Iraq and Janet Norwood of Texas. The women embraced each other like two long lost sisters. Eleven years ago, Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service agents had assassinated Safia’s father but the family survived. On the day of elections, while bullets were flying, Safia along with her family went to the polling booth to cast their votes for a new Iraq. The other woman, Janet Norwood, had lost her son, Marine Corps Sergeant Byron Norwood, during the assault on Fallujah. But before going to Iraq Byron told his mother how proud he was to be a Marine, and as she had protected him as a child, now it was his turn to protect her.

Although the showcasing of these two families for a worldwide television audience was a diplomatic act, the emotions were genuine. In that moment death had become meaningful. Some leaders are capable of doing that. “The fall of imperial communism was only a dream – until, one day, it was accomplished. Our generation has dreams of its own, and we also go forward with confidence. The road to Providence is uneven and unpredictable – yet we know it leads to freedom,” Bush said eloquently, brimming with confidence. Elections of course do not a democracy make but can you do without them? Something new has begun. The process of reaching out by the Shia majority to various sections of Iraq, especially Sunnis, is gradually taking place. Though the Sunnis would be losing their exclusive control over political power in Iraq after 80 years of domination, they hold a key to Iraq’s political stability. They have the sympathy of other Arabs in the region who are mostly Sunnis. They cannot be ignored regardless of the political set up that emerges after the 275-member transitional national assembly chooses an interim government and drafts a constitution.

Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Sunni, may not be in power for long, but I am sure in the long run he would be proved right. He had said: “The terrorists now know that they cannot win.” Millions of Iraqis have already rejected terrorism by braving the danger and voting fearlessly. Though the Sunnis were not as jubilant about voting as others, hopefully “the voice of all Iraqis” is present in the future political set up. “We are entering a new era of our history, and all Iraqis – whether they voted or not – should stand side by side to build their future… let us go together towards a bright future – Sunnis and Shias, Muslims and Christians, Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen,” Allawi said. That is a plea for secularism, and truly this would be the only way Iraqis could ask the USA: Quit Iraq. Prolonged differences among religious and ethnic groups and unsettled conditions would prevail upon the USA to stay on, in fact, much against its wishes. I don’t believe the Americans want to continue the occupation a day longer than necessary. Domestic pressure continues to be unbearable; nonetheless, Americans don’t want Bush to quit unless the job is done in Iraq. That’s why they voted him to power again.

Although the main mission of the transitional national assembly will be to write a constitution, its selection of the interim government could set a tone for a broad political inclusiveness. The national assembly would choose a President and two deputy presidents, who then would choose a Prime Minister and a cabinet. Even at this early stage, there would be a great scope for give-and-take and an opportunity for power sharing. For example, a key political position in the cabinet could be given to a Sunni.

There is another reason to allow Sunnis to participate fully in the government. The Sunnis might act as a strong counterweight to the dominant influence of the neighbouring Shia Iran; similarly Iraqi Shias might counterbalance the Sunni Arab influence, thus creating the possibility of making Iraq truly independent of both Iran and Arab countries. Constitutional arrangement based on federalism and local autonomy might serve Iraq well, as it has done by and large in India.

President Jacques Chirac of France, who relentlessly opposed the Iraqi invasion along with most of other Europe, expressed cautious optimism. “These elections mark an important step in the political reconstruction of Iraq. The strategy of terrorist groups has partly failed,” he said. Russian President Vladimir Putin called it a historic event for the Iraqi people, but it was German foreign minister Joschka Fischer who held an olive branch of reconciliation with the Bush administration. “The challenge of putting Iraq on a stable democratic footing is one we must all take on together,” he said. Once again Europe is calling for togetherness, for sharing responsibilities, and the Iraqi elections provide a great opportunity for a new relationship among the USA, Europe and other major powers to fight global terrorism and poverty. That’s the only way to spread freedom and democracy.

Global brain emerging?

Cyber Age/ND Batra/ From The Statesman

Some of the biggies of the computer world, IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, among others, announced that they are forming a consortium to educate the corporate world to adopt open-source grid computing for commercial applications. The impulse is not charitable. It is competitive, and always so in a world dominated by Microsoft. The initial barrier to the widespread use of the concept of the grid may be psychological: Grid—> gridlock, which is a form of terror. A powerful idea is linguistically stymied. We need a new lingo, but apart from that, it is an idea whose time has come. And it is very simple.
When you turn off your computer and go home, no one can use the computing power locked in on your office desktop. Nor can the dispersed unused computing power of hundreds of other computers be utilized or leased by your company to anyone, which is such wastage especially when the power could be tasked to solve complicated problems. If you multiply this unutilized computing power by millions of computers around the world, India, China, the United States, Europe, you get some sense of the unused resources.
But this has begun to change. A few years ago, the National Science Foundation in the United States undertook an ambitious project called the TeraGrid. By virtualizing four geographically dispersed supercomputing centers into a grid, it became possible to make them work as if they were one giant virtual computer, which could be accessed from any of the four gateways. Virtualization is a buzzword of the cyber age. It is an Internet technology approach that optimizes, pools and shares resources so that supply and demand match in an ever-rising crescendo.
The supercomputing clusters that have been networked are: the San Diego Supercomputing Center at the University of California, San Diego; Caltech, Pasadena, California; the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign; and the US department of energy’s Argonne National Laboratory. Others are getting on the bandwagon. The TeraGrid is capable of creating eight times the power of the most powerful supercomputer today, capable of carrying out trillions of operations per second, according to one estimate.
Grid computing enables not only geographically dispersed computers but also different operating systems to coalesce as one brain, and provide the user a steady, consistent and economical access to enhanced resources from any point of access on the grid. The unleashed supercomputing power, emanating from a single unified source, could be used for solving large-scale data-intensive science applications, such as designing new drug remedies based on molecular modeling, tsunami-earthquake modeling and forecast, and military operations in insurgency-ridden battlefields. In a grid-based virtual laboratory, a scientist, for example, could examine millions of molecules in the Chemical Data Bank to identify and select those that have the most potential use for designing a new drug for breast cancer. The grid power could be used for teleimmersion, giving users high-bandwidth access to virtual environment such as a simulated surgical operation; a rising pandemic; or a massive stampede at the next Kumbh Mela in India.
Eventually all computers will be linked with local, national and international grids, enhancing computing power and sharing databases and applications that may reside anywhere. Just as TCP/IP protocol broke the barriers and made the Internet possible, grid computing must have a single worldwide standard and most bets are on the Globus, an open sources system that would make it possible to tap the Internet on demand from anywhere.
The Globus Toolkit, a collection of software applications and resources to support grid computing, could locate where a particular database is housed; how to divide and distribute a given computing work among several computers on the grid system; and whether the user is an authorized person. Once a handheld or desktop machine or any other device is plugged into the Globus, it would draw not only its computational power from the grid but could also use myriad applications, such as audio-video streams, databases, videoconferencing and so on.
A company needing 25 terabytes of computing power could simply tap into the grid to perform a specific task and once the job is done, the resource is returned to the grid for others to use. Your cell phone could become a gateway to a supercomputing power grid. Universities could form their own grids and be networked into national and international grids, creating the possibility of on-demand grid power. The central processing unit need not be on every desk, but those who have it could share it with others.
The wireless revolution that’s sweeping the world now would make grid computing a global phenomenon. Sometime ago Larry Smarr, an Internet pioneer, was quoted in Technology Review: “Because of the miniaturization of components, we will have billions of endpoints that are sensors, actuators and embedded processors. They’ll be in everything, monitoring stress in bridges, monitoring the environment, ultimately, they will be in our bodies, monitoring our hearts.” The foundation for grid computing infrastructure must be based on security as the first principle, of course.
Some regard grid computing as the natural evolution of the Internet. It is one of those technologies whose value is perceived to be so great as to make its universal acceptance inevitable, thus making it possible to define common standards that would transcend heterogeneous systems and turn them into a universal platform. When all major research universities and technology institutes are virtualized into one international computer grid, the impact of the emergent brainpower would be immeasurable. But think about what it would do to the business world when it goes on the grid. Imagine global retailers like Wal-Mart going on the grid to make their supply-chain systems more efficient. Grid technology might enable even Sri Lanka to compete with the Chinese textile juggernaut. Size and geography won’t matter.

How much freedom does a man need?

Cyber Age/ND Batra/From The Statesman

“And then there came a day of fire,” Bush said at his second inaugural indirectly referring to terrorists’ attacks that pulled the United States out of a long slumber. Rather too soon, the end of communism had brought about a sense of complacency, a grand illusion as if it were the end of history seen as struggle in the Hegelian sense, and the final triumph of freedom. As Francis Fukuyama prematurely gushed after the collapse of the Soviet Union, “What we are witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

Of course that did not happen. It did not happen in Russia after the Soviet Union dissipated; and it did not happen in China in spite of 1989 Tiananman Square pro-democracy protests and in spite of rapid economic growth and broadening prosperity under state controlled market capitalism. China has been growing at the rate of 8-9 percent for more than a decade and is on the path to become an economic and military superpower in the next few decades. If the authoritarian rule has not hindered China from growing at a phenomenal rate to which there seems to be no end, one might wonder: How could they do it without civil liberties? How much freedom does a man need?

Democracy did not happen in the Muslim-Arab world where Islamic fundamentalism, partly as a reaction to the Soviet communism and partly due to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, has been taking hold of the hearts and minds of the people. In fact after the collapse of the Soviet Union worldwide tyranny might have increased, if metrics were available. China has ceased to be an imminent threat as its economic growth became increasingly tied up with exports to the United States and foreign direct investments. Along with that human rights including Tibet too ceased to be an issue in the United States and China relations. Between the United Sates and Saudi Arabia or other pro-American Arab countries in the region where Islamic fundamentalism has been holding a long sway, human rights and freedom were seldom an issue. After the 2001 terrorists attacks, the United States clasped Pakistan with financial and military ties to make it an ally against the Taliban and Ala Qaeda terrorism. And to maintain its hold over Pakistan, the United States overlooked even the black-marketing of nuclear technology by one of its most revered scientists, AQ Khan. Unelected generals rule the land.

Is this diplomatic paradigm shift from the realpolitik of supping with the devil to the messianic fervor of universally spreading freedom for the real? Or was the inaugural rhetoric of liberty a latter-day rationale for the invasion of Iraq where though weapons of mass destruction could not be found, the tyrant had to be removed nonetheless for the spread of liberty?

Bush said that the United States would remain vulnerable to terrorism so long tyranny and hate ideology prevailed abroad and for which there’s no other solution except to expand freedom. “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world…. Across the generations, we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government because no one is fit to be a master and no one deserves to be a slave.” Bush has come to the same conclusion as Abraham Lincoln had reached at the time the Civil War, “I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” So the ultimate guarantee for freedom at home is to end tyranny abroad by supporting “the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture….” But what about poverty and disease?

Bush is not going to challenge every authoritarian nation: Democratize or else. He may not push guns for freedom but he is certainly not going to give up what he has already undertaken. With Iraq in mind, Bush said, “Our country has accepted obligations that are difficult to fulfill, and would be dishonorable to abandon. Yet, because we have acted in the great liberating tradition of this nation, tens of millions have achieved their freedom.”

Elections in Afghanistan and the Palestinian Authority have kindled some hope that eventually elections and sharing of power in Iraq might bring about the beginning of law and order in Iraq too. And keeping in mind the forcefulness and the tenor of his inaugural address, Bush cannot run away from his commitment to establish a semblance of democratic regime in Iraq. The January 30 elections in Iraq in many ways would be a momentous event to watch, probably another bloody day to which the world has become used to do, nonetheless, a new day when millions of Iraqis would exercise their freedom.

But a free country too could harbor terrorists. Nor does freedom mean the end of poverty and unemployment, a fertile ground for terrorism. The Bush freedom package must include economic aid including preferential trade for poor countries.

Bush's second term: Making elephants fly

FromThe Statesman BY ND BATRA

Although the ghost of weapons of mass destruction has been finally laid to rest with the release of the latest official report, George Bush has shown no regret for invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein. In spite of the fact that now a majority of Americans believe the Iraqi invasion was a mistake, Bush continues to believe regime change was the right thing to do to prevent Iraq from becoming a sanctuary for terrorists.

Of course, foreign policy cannot be run on public opinion polls, which heave up and down so often that it would be politically crazy to be solely guided by them. National leaders at times take measures that are unpopular but necessary according to their perception of the problem the country faces and their political vision. What hurts their cause, however, is the language in which they frame their thoughts and deeds.

That the result of the Iraqi invasion turned out to be much different, much bloodier than expected, has not lessened the Bush administration’s newly framed resolve to bring about changes in West Asia through democratic processes. As secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld – the man who coined terms like “Old Europe” and “New Europe” and widened the Atlantic Ocean with his tongue wagging – said recently: “Just having elections in Iraq is an enormous success and a victory. Following the elections in Afghanistan and the one held recently in the Palestinian Authority, the Iraqi vote will mark still another success for democracy and a defeat for pro-dictatorship and extremist elements in the region.”

This epitomises the new policy, which has moved beyond fighting terrorism to include what Bush has been calling as exporting and spreading freedom abroad. Bush now admits that his ill-famed utterances like “Bring ‘em on,” challenging insurgents to attack US forces in Iraq was a mistake, though he still does not realise how much damage the expression “Axis of Evil” has done to US diplomacy. Evil is of course everywhere and the world has become a dangerous place. No nation is safe from evildoers, jihadis and non-jihadis, but by characterising that evil is limited to a small axis of three countries, Bush absolved others by default.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis says: “The terrorists of 11 September exposed vulnerabilities in the defences of all states,” which necessitated for Bush to preside over “the most sweeping redesign of US grand strategy since the presidency of Franklin D Roosevelt. The basis for Bush’s grand strategy, like Roosevelt’s, comes from the shock of surprise attack and will not change. None of FDR’s successors, Democrat or Republican, could escape the lesson he drew from the events of 7 December 1941 (Pearl Harbour): that distance alone no longer protected Americans from assaults at the hands of hostile states. Neither Bush nor his successors, whatever their party, can ignore what the events of 11 September 2001, made clear: the deterrence against states affords insufficient protection from attacks by gangs, which can now inflict the kind of damage only states fighting wars used to be able to achieve. In that sense, the course for Bush’s second term remains that of his first one: restoration of security in a suddenly more dangerous world.”

The USA was not the first country to bear the brunt of terrorists. India had long suffered terrorist attacks sponsored by its neighbour, which brought the two countries to the brink of war a few years ago. But by then, the USA had begun to look at the situation differently. Terrorism was a global phenomenon and had to be eliminated from all corners of the earth. The horrific events of 9/11 necessitated the establishment of US presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan to defeat the Taliban and fight Al-Qaida terrorists. But the US presence has had an unintended consequence in the region, in the sense that Pakistan felt persuaded to withdraw its support from terrorist groups operating from its territory against Kashmir. India and Pakistan have been opening up to each other at several levels and the cease-fire is holding up along the Line of Actual Control. The prospects of settlement of disputes including Kashmir and long-term peace are brighter today than ever before. Albeit indirectly, the Indian sub-continent has been the greatest beneficiary of Bush’s pre-emptive policies, regardless of their partial failures and successes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

To make elephants fly, the second term Bush administration needs a new diplomatic tongue (and good manners, especially), to reframe its policy of pre-emption in terms of international cooperation, to eliminate terrorism and to save the nation state system itself. Saudis and Pakistani military rulers know that breeding and financing terrorists can boomerang. The Bush administration should help EU, especially France and Germany, so that the Islamic terrorism growing in their bellies is purged. Prof Gaddis says: “The President and his advisors preferred flaunting US power to explaining its purpose…. It is a failure of both language and vision that the USA has yet to make its case for pre-emption” in terms of the self-interest and survival of each nation; and a collective security system, which could best be under US leadership. Well, at least for the present, until China rises and challenges the USA.

Notoriety Pays

How bad girls bite back

Damien Cave of The New York Times says, “Women, it seems, have finally upended the double standard that allows scandal-slagged men to re-emerge to a hero's welcome while the ladies are pushed back down into the muck” ReadMe…

When the earth goes out of balance

Cyber Age/ND Batra/From The Statesman


A few days ago my neighbor Cindy called to say hello and asked if my family in India was doing okay. And the next day the school principal phoned to inquire about a little girl Medha Gopal in our neighborhood who had gone to India with her parents and had not reported back to the school. I was deeply touched; but if you multiply these small gestures by the millions of unheard voices, you would know how ordinary Americans feel about the massive tragedy. And they give generously. I explained to them what parts of India were ravaged by the tsunami and how the people were coping with it.
But the only way I could feel the pain and suffering of those who lost their children and other loved ones in the tsunami that struck death and destruction in the Indian Ocean communities was to ask myself, What if my family were there? In fact only last May my son and his friends were vacationing in one of the island holiday resorts in Thailand. The hypothetical question and the thought-experiment simply horrified me. I get creeps whenever I think about it. The tragedy became all the more made shocking by the daily flow of television images of floating corpses being hauled out from the ocean and carted away; grief-stricken parents holding their dead children in their arms; orphaned children lost in a sea of hopelessness, nowhere to go. Nature red in tooth and claw, no, sometime you cannot pour pain and suffering into a metaphor.
Distanced from the huge tragedy and yet feeling its pain vicariously, the only deed I could think of doing was to send a handful of dollars to the prime minister’s national relief fund, hoping that it would reach the needy. Someone would buy a boat or raise a new roof over her surviving family. And millions of people like me have been doing the same, out of compassion or just being thankful that we were not there. It could happen to us, the thought struck again and again. We are all in it together, as we were on 9/11, the man-made horrific event which in caparison, though spectacular, was puny in magnitude.
When the earth goes out of balance, as it happened on 26 December, boundaries disappear, fences collapse and sovereignties become meaningless. Everything is reduced to the least denominator, the survival by chance and of the fittest. The ocean that sustained life for millennia has done its terrible job of killing more than 150,000 people: in a heartbeat. Now the question is, Can we reach and lift someone from the rubbles and make him stand up and walk again? The nightmare for survivors has only just begun. Hundreds and hundreds of people who were injured while escaping the tsunami desperately need urgent medical care. Many need to be on the operating table to have their infected limbs amputated to save their lives. Malaria, dysentery, diarrhea, cholera and other infectious diseases that thrive on putrid water would in the long term be no less dangerous than the tsunami.
It requires more than writing a check from the comfort of one’s living room, so no one should underestimate the problem of logistics, of actually delivering help to the needy, keeping in mind the damaged or non-existent infrastructure, shortages of hospital equipments and medical instruments for performing life saving surgeries, and inadequate supply of clean drinking water and amenities for daily hygiene. International response in financial terms has been so quick and amazing, with most coming from Australia, Germany, Japan; and Uncle Sam, in spite of all the commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, offering a decent sum of $350 million and that’s apart from the sea and airborne infrastructure and manpower support for delivering help to the stricken people.
India has courageously stood up to manage the disaster and help Sri Lanka too, while politely declining to accept international aid. India’s self-help has diverted the international resources to the most stricken areas of Indonesia and Sri Lanka. The question is how far the international community would help the tsunami victims. Would they be abandoned once television cameras are not on them? I hope not.
Major powers are paying special attention to Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country, in order to wean it away Arab-Islamic militants’ grip and establish a beachhead of political influence there. There is nothing morally wrong with combining humanitarian aid with diplomatic goals. The United States, EU and other major powers in the region including India, China, Japan and Australia have a genuine interest in the stability of Indonesia to fight Islamic terrorism. But other people who have suffered the tsunami devastation, particularly, Sri Lanka, should not be forgotten simply because they are not a terrorist threat to major powers as Islamic terrorist are.
Natural calamities of this magnitude require well-organized pre-emptive efforts on an international scale so that their adverse effect on human life is minimized. A substantial portion of the $ 4 billion pledged aid should be spent on extending the Pacific Ocean tsunami early warning system to the Indian Ocean. Although India has refused to accept international aid, it cannot afford to forget its responsibilities in the Indian Ocean and must take an aggressive lead in establishing not only the early warning system but also pre-emptive measures to minimize the impact of a natural disaster of this magnitude when the next time the Indian Ocean hiccups.

Why Europe is drifting away from America

“It is not so much, then, that militaristic Americans are from Mars and pacifistic Europeans from Venus. It would be more accurate to say that from an evangelical point of view, Americans are bound for heaven and Europeans for hell.”

Niall Ferguson in The Atlantic Monthly

Tsunami relief

Ways to help with tsunami relief

Beyond goodwill hunting in tsunami’s destruction

The only way you could feel the pain and suffering of those who lost their children and other loved ones in the tsunami that struck death and destruction in the Indian Ocean communities was to ask yourself, What if my family were there?

What's Superspeculation?

Cyberage by ND Batra From The Statesman

The American Tongue

I can’t stop wondering how the American tongue wags, twists and turns to create new expressions, reinforcing its dynamic character that reflects the restless innovative temper of the American people. Grammarians and linguists tell us that human language is a stable system, slow and conservative in assimilating foreign influences. But the American tongue is so open that it is never at loss to come up with something fresh to capture the meaning of a new phenomenon created by technological innovations, and in the process extends its own boundaries of expressiveness. Consider this, for example: Can you do superspeculation about the future of a product, corporation or even a country? But what is superspeculation? The dictionary is of no help.

Talking of unauthorised commercial messages, Nat Ives wrote in The New York Times, “There are agencies and creative executives working on what might be superspeculation, like the team in Vaughn Whelan and Partners in Toronto.” The ad agency created a gratuitous commercial for a beer company, Molson, to shock and awe the marketing guys, in a manner of speaking, and “show them five years of advertising, so they could see the future.” The agency wanted the Molson account and thought of doing superspeculation, imagining the future as it could be, better than the company was realising with its present marketing campaign.

Defending the practice of superspeculation, Harry Webber, the founder of Smart Communications was quoted saying: “If Madison Avenue is no longer the evangelist for creative thinking in the USA, then somebody has to take up the cause.” I thought evangelists were those frenzied religious folks who hectored the lost sheep back to the fold. Can Madison Avenue, the American hub for marketplace creativity, evangelise capitalism through superspeculation? Evangelism at the service of capitalism! That’s something new. Superspeculation counters failure of imagination, which creates myopia that leads to dystopia. Columnist Maureen Dowd wrote about defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld: “Redolent of the myopia that has led to the administration’s dystopia.” She was referring to Rumsfeld’s insensitivity and indifference when he sent machine-signed letters of condolence to the families of the Iraqi war dead.

Absence of creativity or inability to do superspeculation leads to coarsening of behaviour as you could have seen in the full-page ad by World Wrestling Entertainment showing its chairman Vincent McMahon addressing the troops in Iraq: “So, if it is alright with you, when I get back home, I am going to look up some of these negative nay-say-types. I am going to tell them you said that they can go to hell.” Telling those who don’t agree with you to go to hell is not a sign of toughness. It is a sign of helplessness.

But at times you feel that being tough isn’t tough enough. So what do you do? Consider the expression “hardcore,” which is normally associated with pornography. The US Supreme Court ruled in the Miller case that “hardcore” porn has no socially redeeming value; therefore, it is not entitled to the First Amendment protection. In other words, it could be regulated by being zoned out of town or shoved to safe harbour (late hours, 12 midnight to 6 a.m., when kids aren’t there). But recently I found an unusual use of “hardcore.”

In an extremely provocative article, “What’s Next for Google?” in Technology Review, Charles H Ferguson says that “if Microsoft got “hardcore” about search (as Bill Gates has promised), then yes, Google would be in for a very rough time.” Getting “hardcore” is being more than single-minded. Microsoft notorious for its single-mindedness and brute force in crushing the competition could become “hardcore” and, as Ferguson says, the giant corporation could do “cashectomy” on Google and dominate the search ecology with its dominant architecture as it has done with its desktop operating system Windows. “Cashectomy” is an etymological despoliation, if I may say so, of vasectomy, a surgical act that induces permanent sterility in a man. But is it more benign than castration? Doing “cashectomy” is evocative of wealth and power.

Microsoft’s masochism evokes sexual images like “hardcore” and “cashectomy” and unless it is stopped, it might bring disaster to the competition and to society as well because absence of competition would give the company control over networked databases on which the search ecology is based. Ferguson’s article is an example of negative superspeculation, a future that must not happen.

But could this be done to prevent the consequences of a future that one could not prevent from happening, say, the tsunami in the Indian Ocean? Well, that would depend upon who lives in the vulnerable future. The multi-billion-dollar Thai tourist industry might do superspeculation and take pre-emptive steps to mitigate the consequences of the future that cannot be prevented, but why would anyone bother about the poor living on the seaboard of eastern India?

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?

Drug companies too can kill

From The Statesman

Drug companies too can kill
ND Batra

Drug companies might have killed more people than all the terrorists put together. But who is counting? Raymond V Gilmartin, CEO of the pharmaceutical giant, Merck & Co., said in an open letter the company “is continuing to offer to refund patients for their unused Vioxx.” But Gilmartin didn’t say what kind of refund would Merck give to children whose mothers have been killed by Vioxx, an arthritis painkiller.
After a study established that patients taking the arthritis drug Vioxx for 18 months had twice the risk of heart attacks and strokes than those placed on a placebo, Merck pulled the drug off the market in September. Memos and e-mails leaked from the company to the media indicate that Merck had some knowledge about the side effects of the drug long before it was taken off the shelf. Did the company use its corporate power to choke the bad news? That would be for the lawyers to prove when they pursue class action suits, which might cost the company billions of dollars in settlement.
The US Drug and Food Administration, which approved the drug in 1999, now reports that Vioxx might have been responsible for causing an additional 27,785 heart attacks or deaths from 1999 through 2003. How much is the FDA culpable for not supervising the drug properly? Dr David J Graham, the researcher who led the Vioxx study for the FDA told the Senate Finance Committee Vioxx is a “national disaster” and that the FDA embodies “a profound regulatory failure” and is “incapable of protecting America against another Vioxx.” The drug, Dr Graham said, should have been removed from the market four years ago, alleging some people in the company knew the drug was not very safe but kept quiet. This is nothing but reckless disregard of the truth, what one might call as actual malice against the public, if the whistleblower scientist is proven correct.
But can any drug be totally safe? What are FDA’s safety standards? Sandra L Kweder, the FDA’s deputy director in the Office of New Drugs said, “Unless a new drug’s demonstrated benefits outweighs its known risks for an intended population, FDA will not approve the drug. However, we cannot anticipate all possible effects of a drug during clinical trials that precede approval.” But Dr Graham in his testimony before the Senate Finance Committee compared FDA drug warnings with weather forecasting. He told the Committee that if a weather forecaster said that there’s 80 per cent chance of rain, naturally a person would take an umbrella to his office. But the FDA believes that an umbrella won’t be necessary unless there is a 95 per cent probability of rain.
The analogical criticism of the FDA, however interesting, does not answer the question of acceptable risk for a drug. If a drug kills five patients but saves or makes the lives of a million livable, should that drug be put on the market? Should the FDA obligate the pharmaceutical company that manufactures the drug to put a label, such as: Five in a million users of the drug will die or develop some other serious problems?
Many people wonder whether the FDA has become a promotional arm of the pharmaceutical industry or is intrinsically incapable of doing its work properly. Dr Jerry Avorn, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, has authored a new book, Powerful Medicines: The Benefits, Risks and Costs of Prescription Drugs. Talking with Ray Suarez of PBS NewsHour whether the FDA was doing a good job of protecting the public, Dr Avorn said, “I think it’s fair to say in light of both the Vioxx experience and also the experience we’ve had with other drugs in the recent past that, no, the system is not working well at all. There’s an enormous focus within the FDA about approving drugs quickly and getting them on to the market. And that’s okay if it’s done well. But then the attention of the FDA really drops off. And the vigilance disappears when it comes to requiring and analysing the data that we need to be able to learn about the safety of the drugs once they’re in widespread use.”
It is difficult to say whether the FDA suffers from a short attention span or is intimidated by corporate power, but Congress and the media can’t ignore the problem of drug safety any longer. In the meantime, Merck has begun its public diplomacy to win the hearts and minds of its shareholders if not the American public. Apparently the three full-page ads in major newspapers were not meant to assure the millions of people who have used Vioxx. Like the rest of corporate USA, Merck is interested in the bottom line; and that’s what Gilmartin said, “Our business prospects are strong and we are well prepared to address the challenges posed by the withdrawal of Vioxx.”
There is nothing wrong in Merck’s interest in delivering “returns to shareholders,” provided it also includes the welfare of the American patient. Now that Merck stands on trial in the court of public opinion and before Congress and faces class action suits, it would be its burden to prove what the ad claims: “Our ethical standards are the foundation of our company. Merck has consistently been recognised as one of the world’s ethical companies.” Who has conferred such a high distinction upon Merck? Where did the company executives learn their ethics? Are they confusing ethics with technical standards and profit making?

Offshoring is Brain-sharing

Cyber Age: Offshoring Is Brain-sharing

Corporate greed

Consider what Arthur Levitt Jr., a former chairman of the SEC, said in a recent piece in WSJ entitled “Money, Money, Money.” “Exorbitant compensation feeds the worst instincts and egos of powerful CEOs, fueled by their desire to win at all costs and resulting, too often, in the cutting of ethical corners.“

If Condoleezza Rice were a mother

If Condoleezza Rice were the mother of young children, would she have looked at Iraq differently?

What would Lady Macbeth have done?

“I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.''

Dr Rice is in and the whole world is watching

From The Statesman
http://www.thestatesman.net

America’s face to the world

ND Batra

Condoleezza Rice, the new US secretary of state, has a world to heal, without giving up the fight against global terrorism. As a most trusted confidante of President Bush, whom she is said to have helped form a vision of the world based on freedom and democracy, she could launch a new phase of American diplomacy. A broken and wounded world expects much from her. She brings to the job greater clarity and more credibility than Colin Powell, about whom the world was not sure whether his voice was authentic.

In spite of his well-articulated magnificent presence, Powell was an over-rated diplomat. His domestic reputation rested on the fact that the son of Jamaican immigrants, raised in the Bronx, a Vietnam vet, rose to become chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, national security advisor and finally the secretary of state. He celebrated his Horatio Alger kind of rags-to-fame and riches achievements in his best selling book My American Journey. The Powell Doctrine –attack only when absolutely essential but with an overwhelming force and know how to get out – was nothing but a distillation of the best practices of some of the past great generals.

Powell’s international reputation rested on a dubious premise that in spite of the fact that he differed with the Bush administration on its policy of pre-emption in general and the war against Iraq in particular, he heroically continued exercising his moderating voice among the hawks like defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney. If the chief function of a diplomat is to persuade others, Powell persuaded no one; not the President; not his own Cabinet colleagues; not the public; and not the international community. Using satellite imagery on 5 February 2003, he tried to convince the UN Security Council that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Technically brilliant and highly oratorical, it was nonetheless a disastrous performance.

By giving the impression that he was trying to give a moderate face to the Bush administration’s policy of pre-emption, Powell raised false hopes abroad. Last year on his visit to Islamabad, he declared Pakistan to be a non-Nato ally, which made no sense to anyone and pleased none. It was a diplomatic blunder of sub-continental proportion. His defenders say as a loyal soldier, he has continued supporting the commander-in-chief, President Bush, in spite of fundamental differences, but that is a deceptive behaviour. He would have served the country better by being a man of conscience rather than a blind follower of something he did not believe in. May be he would write another book about his experiences in living with contradictions in an atmosphere of cognitive dissonance. Diplomacy is not deception. It is not a charm offensive; nor a point-counterpoint game of chess. In the ultimate analysis, it is building alliances by creating shared meanings and common goals. It is persuasion using all the available means, short of war.

With Powell’s departure, it falls upon the shoulders of Condoleeza Rice to give a new tone and set up a new structure for the US foreign policy, which must go beyond pre-emption. Much is being talked about her past; how she grew up in the segregated South; how her father, a priest, imbued in her an unshakable faith in the ultimate goodness of American society; her self-discipline and dedication to whatever she chose to do, whether it was concert piano, ice skating or being a provost at Stanford University.

The most remarkable thing about Rice is she won the confidence of George Bush, who graciously introduced her at the time of appointment as secretary of state as “America’s face to the world.” Her relations with Bush, which began during the 2000 presidential campaign when she became his foreign policy advisor, grew into mutual admiration and trust. Bush admires Rice’s sharp analytical mind; she is captivated by his uncluttered vision, his habit of cutting through verbiage and getting to the heart of the matter. Probably she understood that behind the occasionally mangled English and malapropism, there lies a clear-headed and determined person with a vision.

What is expected of her? In what way would she be different from Colin Powell? As the President’s trusted person, she would speak with an authentic voice and in that sense she would be a true face of the Bush administration to the world. With so much credibility, she must dust up the roadmap for Israel-Palestine peace process and instigate earnest negotiations for the establishment of a genuine Palestinian democratic state that lives in peace with Israel, an indispensable first step in winning over the Arab-Muslim world. Lessons of Iraq must not be forgotten; though hopefully peace would return some day and Iraqis would have their own democratically elected government. Although Iran and North Korea cannot be ignored, any attempt to force a regime change would unleash forces that the USA might not be able to control. Dr Rice of course understands all that and much more.

Recent columns published in The Statesman

Revisiting Bush’s policy of pre-emption
Section: Perspective Date:Nov 17,2004Cyber Age/ ND Batra

The USA needs deeper engagement with the world through international economic aid, building up democratic institutions and strengthening weaker or failing states so that they don’t become havens for terrorists. It cannot depend

Bush unbound?
Section: Perspective Date:Nov 10,2004

The US presidential election ended gracefully and with clarity. It was a celebration of democracy. And if, as they say, the end is the beginning of something new, Bush’s second term could be more productive at home and less destructive abroad. But that wo

Outsourcing healthcare and other American problems
Section: Editorial Date:Nov 03,2004A few days ago

I shocked one of my colleagues when I showed him a Washington Post story how a 53-year old man Howard Staab, suffering from a life-threatening heart problem, could not afford $200,000 for heart surgery and instead went to New Delhi’s


America’s most (un)civil war
Section: Perspective Date:Oct 27,2004 by ND BATRA

The USA is a fierce democracy; non-violent may be, but brutal. Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry said the “W” in George W Bush’s name stands for wrong – wrong on war, wrong on peace, wrong on budget, wrong on social securit

Democracy’s work is never done
Section: Perspective Date:Oct 20,2004 by ND Batra

The continued insurgency in Iraq has unfortunately distracted our attention from some positive developments in Afghanistan. The election in Afghanistan held under the auspicious of the United Nations and international observers is the first sm

Seductions of cyberspace
Section: Perspective Date:Oct 13,2004

As the legend goes, on the Internet nobody knows whether a person is a dirty old man trying to seduce teenagers; a gender-swapping woman playing with big boys in a virtual MUD room; or a teenager posing as an expert. As a New Yorker cartoon by Peter Stein

cyber age: ND Batra: Who would do a better job in Iraq?
Section: Perspective Date:Oct 06,2004

The political war about war in Iraq has heated up to the point that other domestic issues including economy, jobs, social security, education and health care have been sidetracked. The daily flow of images of car bombs and suicide explosions in Baghdad, i

cyber age: ND Batra: Doing away with business patent methods
Section: Perspective Date:Sep 29,2004

Vivius, Inc., based in Minneapolis, is a most recent example of companies rushing to patent their unique methods of doing business, thus creating impenetrable walls to hide ideas that should be tested and debated in public. The company, according to Busin

Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Discussion: Internet privacy and e-commerce

Discussion: Internet privacy and e-commerce

What is your position on collecting and distributing consumer information collected through the Internet? Should companies be allowed to collect this data and sell it to third parties? Why or why not?

Revisiting Bush's policy of pre-emption

From The Statesman
Wednesday 17 November, 2004
http://www.thestatesman.net

Revisiting Bush’s policy of pre-emption

Cyber Age/ ND Batra

The USA needs deeper engagement with the world through international economic aid, building up democratic institutions and strengthening weaker or failing states so that they don’t become havens for terrorists. It cannot depend solely upon its firepower and modern war technology to subdue a restive people. Consider what happened at the funeral of Yasser Arafat, where Palestinian authorities could not control frenzied, hysterical mourners, who jumped barbed wires, climbed over the walls of Muqatta, descended on the compound, and raised passionate chants to grieve the passing away of their beloved leader. Such street-battle scarred people, whether in Palestine or elsewhere, need to be engaged culturally, economically and politically to wean them away from Islamic militant ideology. Pre-emptive policy needs revisiting.
During the 2002 brinkmanship between India and Pakistan, the USA by sharing selective military intelligence with both countries played a low-profile but significant role in defusing the crisis; and since then Washington has been unobtrusively supporting the process of normalisation. Today, the Indian sub-continent is a more hospitable place for business and investment than it was a few years ago. Although this does not diminish the bold foreign policy initiatives taken by the Vajpayee and Singh administrations, the quiet diplomacy of the USA has begun to bear fruit.
The only way the USA can exercise its influence is through the use of diplomatic power, the power of persuasion through cooperation, commonality of national interests and developing common goals such as economic growth, fighting terrorism and eliminating AIDS. Diplomatic power arises from the attraction of a nation’s culture and values, apart from its economic and military prowess. Most people around the world perceive American culture as a culture of Hollywood, pop music, blockbuster movies and steamy television programmes, but that’s only partly true. American culture is a culture of openness, of freedom and open roads that lead to the free marketplace of goods and ideas. It is a culture of optimism that holds the possibility of expanding human horizons. The Arab-Muslim world needs to be informed and educated about.
India like China has understood the power of US openness, the free marketplace, and has become one of the fastest growing world’s economies. If the USA, for example, were to shut its doors on India by blocking outsourcing, India’s technology-driven export economy would receive a setback. Bush’s Democratic opponent Senator Kerry talked against outsourcing. From economic and diplomatic point of view, Bush is a better choice for India. China has benefited tremendously by opening its economy and eventually would open itself to other cultural influences including free expression and democracy. By opening its markets to China, the USA has exercised its diplomatic power and changed a hostile nation to a friendly global power. A similar phenomenon has begun to take place in Pakistan, where the economy is picking up steam and foreign currency reserve is swelling. Americans may be resented and even disliked in some places, but they are also a most admired and envied people in the world. India and China aspire to catch up with the USA one day.
Joseph Nye of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Governance says that a country can become attractive by “co-opting people rather than coercing them.” He suggests that international influence “comes from an effective aid and information programme abroad. What is needed is increased investment in soft power, the complex machinery of interdependence, rather than in hard power – that is, expensive new weapons system.” Although fighting terrorism requires both hard and soft power, attraction of the soft power, “is much cheaper than coercion, and an asset that needs to be nourished.” Just as trade with China and rising prosperity has co-opted the Chinese people and has given them new hopes and new dreams, a similar policy might transform Iran too.
The Bush administration must explore new directions in international relations instead of using pre-emptive power. For example, it is important that the USA uses media power to present an alternative view of reality to the Arab and Muslim world. Unlike the quick catastrophic victory in Iraq, the results of such cultural engagement would not be immediately visible but they would be long lasting. All battles ultimately have to be fought and won in the minds and hearts of the people. “Effective broadcasting,” wrote Edward Kaufman in The Battle for Hearts and Minds, “strengthens the traditional triad of diplomacy, economic leverage, and military power and is the fourth dimension of foreign conflict resolution… Perceptions change when outside information challenges certain assumptions.” International broadcasting done in local languages, for example, as done by BBC, must become part of the larger front of public diplomacy, the deployment of soft power of culture, to win the war of ideas.
More than anything else it is corporate America that makes the USA attractive. If American apparel makers were to open factories in Palestine, for example, they would create new hopes and dreams for the Palestinian people. The USA should encourage corporate America, through economic incentives and other means, to invest in West Asia to raise and sustain democratic dreams, the kind of dreams about which Bush talked about in his recent joint press conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Internet porn and the First Amendment

Internet porn and the First Amendment

Pornography has been proliferating on the Internet and is obviously a serious problem, especially for parents of computer savvy children. What should be done? Should porn be controlled? Can it be controlled somehow when the Internet is boundless? Should Congress regulate it legislatively? Or is it better to leave its control to programmers, software companies and the marketplace?

Bush unbound?

From The Statesman
http://www.thestatesman.net

10 November, 2004


Bush unbound?
ND Batra

The US presidential election ended gracefully and with clarity. It was a celebration of democracy. And if, as they say, the end is the beginning of something new, Bush’s second term could be more productive at home and less destructive abroad. But that would depend upon how creatively he accommodates or co-opts others’ ideas.

As Democrats and Republicans assimilate the causes of their respective defeat and victory, the bitterness and ugliness of the campaign would hopefully diminish, if not disappear altogether. Some are already planning for the future. After all, political power is never static. The election divided the map of the USA into a vast red territory that went for Bush and three disjointed puddles of blue that voted for Kerry, giving a totally misleading impression of homogeneity in each division. Underneath every red state, there is blue and vice versa. And as consciousness changes, the blue would surface up and dominate the red.

Terrorism and the question of legalising gay marriages that became a test of character and moral values drove many voters to Bush. While the Bible-thumping voters might have helped Bush get re-elected, the rich would more likely reap the economic benefits of his second term. The stock market rose 3.5 per cent in two days after the election.

Though magnanimous in victory, Bush was nonetheless quick to assert that his ambitious agenda cannot wait. People have spoken and Congress must listen up, he admonished during his first post-election press conference held in the White House. He seemed in a hurry to accomplish his agenda, the social political and economic platform that he set up during his election campaign. Knowing that the last 18 months or so of his second term would be the time for the next presidential poll campaign, he can’t afford to be a lame duck President too soon. Bush does not want to not end up simply building his legacy in the form of a presidential library or writing a bestseller memoir. Bush seems to have established a tryst with destiny. He has put the country on notice. “I earned capital in the campaign, political campaign, and now I intend to spend it,” he said. The decisive victory over Senator Kerry has given him a tremendous sense of power, especially when he sees that both houses of Congress are now under Republican control. He said he would tell Congress that the people have spoken and embraced his political platform, and so should they; especially regarding social security, taxation, health care, medical liability reforms and other initiatives. But of course when the reality sets in, he would know that his fellow Republicans in the Senate and the House too have their own political agendas to safeguard their political future.

Bush also knows that 48 per cent of voters who did not vote for him were not limited to the North-east, the upper lake region and the West; that underneath the vast swath of red states, there is a thick layer of the throbbing blue, the enduring Democratic sensibility that sees the USA differently. Although the election has left Democrats weak and humbled, he is aware that for any meaningful work to be done he might have to compromise. As he said, “My goal is to work on the ideal and to reach out and to continue to work and find common ground on issues.” But how far would he deviate from the ideal, his political platform regarding social security, taxation, health care, stem cell and other contentious issues remains to be seen.

The most contentious issue is of judicial appointments, especially for the US Supreme Court, where many justices are old, some too old. The influence of the Supreme Court justices extends beyond their graves. In many ways, they have shaped American society. Like most Americans, the justices of the Supreme Court too have conservative and liberal ideologies. And it is the President who, with the approval of Congress, appoints them.

One way of setting the agenda for generations to come would be to appoint justices who reflect the conservative philosophy of Bush. Recently, the 80 year-old Chief Justice Rehnquist underwent surgery for thyroid cancer. He may be the first to go. For Democrats and Republicans, whoever becomes the next Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is no less crucial than who sits it the White House. Presidential deeds and misdeeds can be undone but what the Supreme Court does lasts for generations. The Court’s influence comes from its exclusive power to interpret the Constitution, which shapes the culture, whether a woman can have an abortion, public school children can recite the Pledge of Allegiance that includes “under God” or a man can say to another man, I do.

The presidential election ultimately pivoted on values and Bush was able to convince a substantial majority of the American people that without values the nation can’t battle terrorism abroad and cultural anarchy at home.

Outsourcing healthcare and other American problems

From The Statesman
3 November, 2004

Outsourcing healthcare and other American problems

ND Batra

A few days ago I shocked one of my colleagues when I showed him a Washington Post story how a 53-year old man Howard Staab, suffering from a life-threatening heart problem, could not afford $200,000 for heart surgery and instead went to New Delhi’s Escort Heart Institute and Research Centre. At a meagre cost of $10,000 which also included round-trip fare, a visit to Taj Mahal and great food, Staab had his defective heart valve replaced by Escort surgeons.

Staab is one of the 150,000 foreigners who visited India last year for medical problems. Of course the uppity-nose correspondent John Lancaster of the Post could not resist his condescending remark: “Staab is one of a growing number of people known as medical tourists who are travelling to India in search of First World healthcare at a Third World prices.”Apollo Hospital’s founder Prathap Reddy was quoted saying: “If we do this, we can heal the world.” My colleague’s reaction was: Who would heal India, Mr Reddy? India might have to be satisfied with trickle-down benefits from the medical tourist industry that is projected to grow to $2.2 billion by 2012. But that is beside the point. Skyrocketing healthcare costs are making Americans desperate. State governors in defiance of the federal government are reaching out to foreign countries for cheaper prescription drugs.

If US healthcare providers and the insurance industry want to reduce healthcare costs, they might offer the American patient a choice: Go to India for surgery or pay up the bill, which might be ten times higher in the USA, and swallow up a the retirement nest egg. That presents a policy dilemma. If universal healthcare is the goal, how do you make it affordable? How much of it could be outsourced to countries like India and how much should be handled by the US healthcare industry? This year the flu vaccine shortage has made authorities think about the need for setting healthcare priorities. Should the limited healthcare opportunities be given to those who can afford it or those with the most need?

Until last year, most employers in the United States of America offered their employees free flu shots before the onset of the flu season. They did so in their own enlightened self-interest. It is more economical to keep workers healthy than let them fend themselves in the flu season and the work be disrupted due to sickness.For rest of the community, family health clinics offered flu shots at affordable rates. Since each year there are new strains of the flu virus, the vaccine has to be tailor-made, as it were. There used to be enough for everyone who wanted it. But no one ever thought what might happen if the production of flu vaccine was disrupted due to some catastrophe or even sabotage. Flu vaccine never entered into the calculus of the Homeland Security colour alert system.

Not long ago only most vulnerable people, children, senior citizens, and nursing home residents were advised to go for a flu shot. But since newer flu strains came to be associated with sources of foreign origin — China, Hong Kong, Thailand — most people thought what is good for older people must be good for younger people too. It is just like Viagra, which was initially meant for people with erectile dysfunction but later on even normal healthy people began to use it, thanks to the aggressive advertising push by the pharmaceutical company, Pfizer, and later on sby other manufacturers (Ciala, Levitra). Need was created. Market expanded.

Although widespread fear has made flu shot a universal choice, the market does not drive its demand and supply, unlike that of Viagra. In fact liability claims and low profits might have discouraged its production. Nonetheless, the supply managed to keep pace with the demand. But this year, one of the major vaccine manufacturers, Chiron, expected to provide 48 million doses against a total US demand of 100 million, had its licences suspended due to the problem of bacterial contamination in its plant in Liverpool, England.Most of the people, according to a survey reported by USA Today blamed drug companies and federal health officials. It has not become a serious political issue in the presidential campaign, though one Bush advertisement blamed trial lawyers associated with his Democratic opponent Kerry’s running mate, John Edwards.

But the shortage has created a national scare and an ethical dilemma for the medical profession. Although all healthy people have been excluded from receiving flu shots this year, how do you prioritise the limited supply among the vulnerable population? How do you decide who is the most vulnerable when in some cases a person needs more than one shot to get full protection. One after the other, healthcare facilities have struggled with the ethical dilemma and issued public statements limiting shots to high risk categories; for example, people suffering from asthma, diabetes, immune deficiency, children less than two-years-old and pregnant women, but not necessarily in that order.

The question is: If healthcare is everyone’s basic right, how do you ration it? The next President of the USA might find that outsourcing healthcare and buying cheaper drugs abroad may be the best solution. Another door might open for India.

http://www.thestatesman.net