Bush ushers new era of India-US friendship

Cyber Age From The Statesman

Partnership based on principle & pragmatism
ND Batra

Last week Ronen Sen, India’s ambassador to the United States, lamented that the American non-proliferation high priesthood and Indian go-it-alone self-reliant nuclear brotherhood have highjacked the debate and clouded the real issue: whether it is possible for two open societies to trust each other and work together.

By offering India “full civil nuclear energy cooperation,” President Bush made an extraordinary gesture of friendship and a bold move in establishing long-term strategic and economic relations with a country that most sensible US experts perceive as a reliable global partner. Nuclear partnership with India is another facet of globalisation.

Thinking outside the box, as they say, Bush did not let the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty stand in the way of his new global vision, where an economically strong democratic India would play a stabilising role in world affairs, especially in Asia. The strategic partnership to see India grow and “become a major power in the twenty-first century” is not about containing any other rising power, rather to let India develop as an alternative model of economic growth which preserves fundamental freedoms.

Rapid economic growth of India, 8-9 percent a year for the next few decades, would lift millions of Indians out of abject poverty, without diminishing personal and political freedoms. Besides, an economically dynamic India would spill economic growth all around and would make the military containment of China by the USA or another power absolutely unnecessary.

The Asian theatre needs more than one economic and political power in order to reduce the possibility of a single hegemonic power rising and dominating the continent. Asia needs dynamic multipolarity. The nuclear agreement would remove hurdles in India’s search for alternative energy sources to fuel its growing economy. And to set the tone of mutual trust Bush has acknowledged India “as a responsible state with advanced nuclear technology.”

Recognising India as an exception to the rule, and accepting the fact that India should “acquire the same benefits and advantages as other such states” is a bold diplomatic move on the part of Bush. Only a courageous American President could have taken such a step. In spite of the recent silly diplomatic blunder over visa for the three Indian scientists, on the whole India is being increasingly admired in the USA. Eventually the US Congress would approve the nuclear deal. India would be able to buy nuclear fuel for its existing nuclear power plants and shop for building new ones.

The recent visit of French President Jacques Chirac to India and the agreement on civilian nuclear cooperation has already raised India’s international profile. And in the course of time as trust in partnership increases and diplomatic relations improve further, a whole new world of sophisticated American and European technology would be open to India, enabling it to leapfrog decades of sluggish economic growth. In return India would do what other nuclear powers have been doing under the nonproliferation treaty, that’s, open its civilian nuclear power plants to International Atomic Energy Agency and continue the moratorium on nuclear testing. Its nuclear military arsenal remains off limit.

Global transparency is necessary to stop non-state nuclear carpetbaggers like AQ Khan from trading nuclear weapons. Critics in India fear that the deal would create dependency relations with the USA but they need to consider how South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and China have benefited from strong economic partnership with the USA, without compromising their sovereignty. India is too big and too complex to be dictated by any outside power.

India must go beyond the present information technology outsourcing, must go up the value chain and penetrate deeply into corporate USA to learn from its spirit of constant innovation in technology and business methods. It is surprising that the Indian elite is more interested in UN Security Council permanent membership than the lifting of nuclear sanctions. India alone cannot solve its energy and infrastructural problems.

Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline is in the realm of a distant possibility but even if it becomes operational, it may not be enough to meet India’s gargantuan need for energy.
It may not be a very secure means of procuring energy looking at the political situation in Balochistan. Even Saudi oil facilities, as the recent failed suicide-bombing shows, may not be very reliable.

Clean coal technology, nuclear energy and solar energy are practical alternatives for which the USA has opened its doors to India. India needs hundreds of billions of dollars of foreign direct investment in building power plants and world-class infrastructure to increase its manufacturing base in order to create employment opportunities. Nuclear energy would reduce excessive dependency upon West Asian oil.

Strategic partnership was one of the important themes of Prime Minster Manmohan Singh’s well-received address to the joint US Congress session last July. India and the USA, as Dr Singh said, are natural partners because both are open societies and share similar values. “There are partnerships based on principle, and partnership based on pragmatism. I believe we are at a juncture where we can embark on partnership that we can draw both on principle as well as pragmatism.”

Democracy, multiethnic diversity, and human rights are some of the values that bring the two countries together, but equally important is the fact that India and the USA need each other for fighting global terrorism. Bush’s no-holds-barred campaign against militant Islamic Jihad and Al-Qaida terrorism has changed the perception in the Pakistani ruling elite as well as the masses that negotiations are the only way to resolve long standing issues, especially Kashmir. Bush’s policies have helped India fight its own terrorism.

India’s global diplomacy should have one primary goal: accelerated economic growth that reaches the bottom of the barrel, India’s huddled masses. The partnership with the USA would certainly help India hasten the pace of economic growth and serve India’s global interests.

Yo Americans, go to India and prosper

CLYDE PRESTOWITZ, author of Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East, says "if you are a short-term investor, China is probably where you should put your money. But if you are in it for the long haul, you might want to bet on India. That certainly seems to be what George Bush is doing as he heads out this week to make nice with his newest international friend." Read more

Also read this wonderful article.

China Rising

China Rising, truly

"Dreams that the country’s economic liberalization will someday lead to political reform remain distant. Indeed, if current trends continue, China’s political system is more likely to experience decay than democracy," says Minxin Pei, a China scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for Internatioanl Peace. Read more...

Islam and free speech

Cartooning is not the way to change minds

From The Statesman

By ND Batra

The Danish cartoons and their subsequent recrudescence in several newspapers, television, and the Internet about Prophet Mohammad might have been a fundamental right to exercise freedom of speech; but they have turned out to be a premeditated insult to the religious sensibilities of global Muslims. Most Muslims have taken the cartoons as a deliberate assault on their collective psyche, a crude attempt to deconstruct their culture and destruct their sacred narrative. Humans live by their stories. Some would die for them.

In many ways we see ourselves and know the physical world through our stories. Our nervous system and our personal and historical memories define our ability, our sense and sensibility, to describe and capture reality. Millions of words, for instance, have been written about Islamic jihad and yet it’s doubtful if the truth about this notoriously complex concept, evil to some and yet sacred to others, has been completely captured.

If somehow we could know a way of tuning up and enhancing the nervous system to a higher level, the linguistic description and hence the reality would change. Pardon the digression but think of the time when zero was discovered, presumably by the ancient Hindus; and the subsequent development of decimal system; and how that must have changed the perception of reality by subjecting physical phenomena to measurement. Measurement is a form of description of reality; so is cartooning, lampooning and parodying.

But as TS Eliot said, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” When Galileo’s telescope was latched to the human nervous system, the linguistic description of the firmament changed and the earth, as it were, ceased to be a stationary planet, though the Church refused to accept it.Or consider some modern political events. Had satellite pictures not revealed the existence of the Soviet’s missiles in Cuba in the 1960s, Americans and the rest of the world would not have perceived the seriousness of the threat to the United States.

If the remote-sensing technology could pick up sights and sounds of human sufferings, it would become possible to know how the Chinese have been decimating the Tibetans and their culture. The Tibetan genocide, like the Holocaust, would find full linguistic description. Description either leads to action or generates guilt. Guilt too motivates action. Through communications technology, the human nervous system extends itself and gives a better or a fuller account of reality, and a feeling of liberation from the constraints of earlier description of reality. New reality demands new laws, ethics and social relations, and creates new life styles, as one can see happening in the burgeoning economy of China, where communism is dead as the dodo.

Communications technology—television antennas, faxes, tape recorders, the Internet—which made free flow of information possible, has killed communism. Was this the assumption of the European media that free flow of information in the form of crude satirical cartoons might debase and eventually dissipate Islamic religious fundamentalism?

History teaches a lesson that it is through the control of linguistic descriptions, narratives and stories that the powerful, the ruling classes, exercise their hegemony. I have always wondered how Britain ruled so successfully over India for about two hundred years. To a great extent the British succeeded in the exercise of their soft cultural power by supplanting the native stories and narrative descriptions with their own literature and legends, so that appreciating Chaucer was deemed more civilized than discovering the beauty of Kalidasa.

China has begun to transplant its stories and historical descriptions upon the young Tibetans, and by the time they grow up into adulthood, their reality will clash with the truth held by their parents—unless modern communications technology, including wireless Internet, short-wave radio and miniature antenna dishes, keeps them alive as Tibetans. By denying them the Tibetan language and access to communications technology, that’s, by controlling their collective nervous system, China might do worse damage than Hitler did to the Jews.

There is something remarkable about the Jewish people, in the sense that from the Old Testament through Steven Spielberg, they have been natural born storytellers. Because of the faithful anecdotal and photographic accounts of the concentration camps, and documentaries and movies like “Shoah” and “Schindler’s List,” it is impossible to deny the truth of the Holocaust, in spite of what Iran’s President Ahmedinijad might have said recently. Most of us feel guilty for not having stopped the Holocaust. The Tibetans have no great filmmakers, no storytellers, and no access to communications technology. They don’t believe in Jihad. They might perish in the silence of the Himalayas. Storytelling is a form of Darwinian survival.

If the recipe for cultural domination and power is through the control of narrative and communications technology, which are in essence the collective nervous system of a society, then it becomes important to find ways of creating resistance movement within threatened cultures. We must “understand, and expose the dynamics of myth-making in society,” said Professor Herbert Schiller, a distinguished scholar of information, and “discover what happens when that process touches the lives of millions of people.” When mythmakers of today have the reach of satellite technology and the Internet, consequences for ancient cultures and human rights can be devastating.

The violent reaction against the Prophet Mohammad cartoons is in reality a form of cultural resistance against global homogenization, cultural hegemony masquerading as free speech.

America is in perpetutal motion

US work culture: in perpetual motion
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From The Statesman
ND Batra

Business Week reported recently that the US economy is much stronger than what the doomsayers have been telling us. The reason is simple: the old statistical system used by the Bureau of Economic Analysis is not good enough to capture the economic reality, the reality of the knowledge economy of the digital age.

Not everyone shares Business Week’s optimism. Knowledge economy is certainly adding to the intangible growth of the economy, which shows up as overall growth in GDP, but why is it not adding up to people’s feelings of well-being? On the contrary, many Americans have a feeling of diffused and widespread anxiety about their future. Pensions have been disappearing. Healthcare benefits are being reduced. Not many people feel confident about retiring.

Sometime ago a local newspaper editorialised, “Too many people juggle multiple jobs but still can’t afford the basics of shelter, food and healthcare... The dignity and purpose of work are undermined when a person who gives a full effort cannot afford life’s necessities.” Americans with cell phones, mobile computing, multiple jobs and multiple shifts have begun to mimic what some chain restaurants tout: We are open for 24 hours a day.

It is a society in perpetual motion, waiting for a coffee break, never fully resting, though occasionally dozing on the desk like a sleepless driver on the steering wheel.Mergers and acquisitions, hanging upon us like a chronic sickness, eliminate jobs without reducing the workload, which is shared by workers lucky enough not to be fired. Experts tell us that productivity is rising. No, Americans are working longer and in multiple shifts to fight the fear of being de-skilled and laid off.

Productivity is a measure of a firm’s output in relation to the resources consumed or how much an employee produces per hour. But many employees take work home or work early and late hours, which adds to their productivity without adding to their income for the extra hours they put in. This seems to push their productivity high and also comforts the management, that has been sold on the idea that computer and telecommunications technology are pushing the profits up.

Most jobs are becoming commoditised and can be substituted and shipped abroad. Computer-assisted design and manufacturing systems do help designers visualise new products on their screens, which can be directly sent to factories in China where cheap skilled labour can do the manufacturing. Computer-integrated manufacturing requires limited human input and eliminates highly paid manufacturing jobs, thus raising productivity.

Experts say that it is possible to customise products that have been mass-produced since Henry Ford introduced the assembly line system and Frederick Taylor added scientific management to business vocabulary. Soon we would be able to customise everything: clothes, shoes, golf clubs, or whatever.

Researchers point out the cost-saving potential of computer automation by eliminating intermediary processes, for example, typesetting in printing; or the use of the Internet for document transfer, such as audio-visual scripts or tapes; and eliminating other tasks which do not directly contribute to the end product.

Teleconferencing does save money but it has also ended opportunities for many to combine their work with vacations. Now the ubiquitous cell phone is transforming vacations to working vacations and homes to working homes. Over 11 million Americans never leave home for work. They telecommute, raising the spectre of hidden electronic sweatshops that somehow escape the scrutiny of civic groups and labour unions because homebound sweatshops are invisible. In spite of the noise about rising productivity, some researchers are puzzled at the “Productivity Paradox.” Investment in information technology does not necessarily produce positive financial gains, partly because many firms invest in technology as they don’t want to be left behind in the rat race.

One reason why every firm is rushing to cyberspace to build a Website is due to the fear that someone else might grab the domain name, which should be rightfully its own. This does not necessarily add to their bottom line, so they go on re-engineering and merging and eliminating jobs, creating a spiral of greater workload for those who want to keep their jobs.

As Alvin Toffler and other futurists foresaw, the hierarchical pyramid structure of the organisation with the boss at the top protected from blue and white-collar workers by layers of middle management would be flattened. The middle management layer has begun to disappear. A new organisational model, the “core and ring” model is emerging in the cyber age. The model has a dedicated core of highly paid top level strategists and planners, who get work done either by an army of temporary workers or by outsourcing the work to virtual neighbours, be they in China, Mexico or Thailand.

Most work, including design, production, marketing and distribution, wrote Venketaraman and Henderson in a 1998 article in Sloan Management Review, can be out-sourced. Labour is not eliminated but it is turned into a commodity. It may be the final triumph of market capitalism, but it is a 24 hours-a-day work week, which keeps the USA at the core with an ever increasing ring of temporary workers spread all over the globe.

If US economy is on the rise, as Business Week wants us to believe, why don’t the American people feel good?

American culture: A culture of anxiety

Meditation on American culture

By ND Batra
From The Statesman

Culture may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living.
T S Eliot (Notes Towards a Definition of Culture)

Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal wrote sometime ago, “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 a death-delivery system, but no one dares run a political campaign against guns in the USA 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 is he 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, during his campaign for the White House, 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 had 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, except probably China, 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 the American lexicon?

But consider this. A Saks Fifth Avenue ad showed two itsy-bitsy girls, one a coy blonde 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 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 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 was Timberland’s ad for its men’s Mixed-Media Jacket, which crowed: “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, reminded me of a plumber who came to my house to replace a leaky pipe and said 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 (time)-resistant.

And that reminds me of something else that was touted as calendar-resistant. A few years ago, a 30-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! The American woman is free. Seiko is ticking and the woman is waiting for another “gentleman caller”. Would he ever come? And how long would he stay?

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.

Corporate Reputation in The Digital Age

Good reputation equals good business
Cyber Age
ND Batra
From The Statesman

In the digital age, a company is nothing but its reputation and maintaining it is a big challenge.

Reputation is the foundation of trust and loyalty, which gives stakeholders confidence in dealing with the company. A company’s identity and image (along with its philanthropy) are the building blocks of its reputation.

Identity is a company’s assertion of its individuality and embodies the company’s vision, its reason for being there. It sums up its business case. The image of a company is the distinct memorable impression in the minds of the people as they interact with the company.

Together, identity and image raise the profile of a company, its reputation, its significance beyond commercialism and profit making. “A company’s identity,” says Paul Argenti of Dartmouth’s Tuck School in one of his books, “is the visual manifestation of the company’s reality as conveyed through the organization’s name, logo, motto, products, services, buildings, stationery, uniform, and all other tangible pieces of evidence created by the organization and communicated to a variety of constituencies.”

Stakeholders’ perception of the company, however, emerges from the totality of the impression, not so much from what is created by the company but in spite of it. While a company might do its utmost to build and control its identity, it cannot totally control the image, the impression and the perception, the public has about it.

A company’s identity and the image are never the same, but the closer they are, the better the reality. This is the basis of the company’s reputation. A company’s name, symbols, products, services, employees, buildings, its tangibles and intangibles, are not a cluster of facts but a dynamic system that creates specific value and meaning for stakeholders.

While it is desirable to achieve consistency in identity, McDonalds’ golden arches, for example, the perception of the company should no be expected to be the same in every country.

McDonalds’ is one of the fast food chains in the USA but in China it has the image of a classy American cuisine, desired by the young and the old, in spite of the fact that the identity of the company, its sounds and images, are quite consistent.The same identity provokes a different image in Karachi where several arsons have taken place without much public outrage.

A corporate identity must embody the company’s core values, the sum and substance of what is called its business case. Identity is the visualisation of its mission, and answers the unasked question: Who are we? What are we doing here?

Through logos, mottos, slogans and brands, a company enacts the drama of self-presentation and builds its image and perception in the mind of the public and various stakeholders. As mentioned earlier, while the identity of a company is a constant, image and perception are variables that ultimately determine the company’s reputation.

While a consistent and well-defined identity a company projects before the public helps it to build a perception of the company about what it stands for, the reputation is built over time and depends upon how the company conducts itself.

A strong reputation matters because it enhances a company’s attractiveness, muffles criticism and creates public support for a company’s activities.Customers don’t mind paying a little extra for a product when it comes from a company with a strong reputation for quality and fairness.

When a company faces conflicts, its good reputation enables corporate diplomats to conduct negotiations from a position of strength and self-confidence.

A company with a strong reputation attracts talented employees, who like to stay with the company for personal and professional growth. The likeability of the company by the employees and their day-today interaction with various stakeholders adds to the reputation of the company.

Employees become the corporeal identity of the company embodying its values and mission. But when a CEO is found with his pants down or his hand in the cookie jar, as it has happened with Enron, for example, the reputation comes crashing down. No amount of identity metamorphosis could bring the reputation back.

Apart from the integrity of corporate leadership that inspires respect and loyalty from employees and the general public, companies like Microsoft have enhanced their reputation by carrying out global philanthropic activities.

Corporate philanthropic giving at local, national and global levels should become part of a company’s business case. At the time of international catastrophes such as the Indian Ocean tsunami, Katrina hurricane in New Orleans, and earthquake in Pakistan, global companies get ample opportunities to showcase the humane side of their businesses by working with NGOs and other civic groups.

When a company is engaged in doing social good, let it be known to the public. After all, virtue is not hide in.

Some companies make use of institutional advertising to let the public know how involved they are in adding to the public good, just as Beyond Petroleum (BP), formerly British Petroleum, is doing with its corporate ads. It is informing the public about its commitment to the development of alternative sources of energy. BP looks green.

An imaginative and creative corporate advertising programme can enhance the reputation of a company and increase its likeability in the minds of various stakeholders. Likeability generates goodwill and creditability, which are precious assets for a company to attract and retain good, highly skilled employees.

Philanthropic activities of a company must be thoughtfully and tastefully publicised through corporate advertising to project the humane side of the company as Microsoft is doing through its global foundation to fight AIDS and tuberculosis.In contradistinction, what is Google doing? I want to know.

Dragon chokes Google

Good and evil in the Google Age
From The Statesman
Cyber Age
ND Batra

Today you can google-froogle anything from sushi kits to death kits, and so easily that Internet pioneers might be wondering, what have we wrought? Of course, inventors cannot control whether people would mess up with their inventions or use them to enhance the quality of life. Nor do they know what the government would do with their inventions.

In 1973, when two young computer scientists, Vinton G Cerf and Robert E Kahn, came up with the revolutionary idea of making different isolated computers talk to each other through a common language, they did not anticipate the Internet to become such a driving force for good — and evil — in our lives. E-trading, e-pornography, e-surveillance, e-death, and who knows what else is in store for us.

Welcome to the digital age, which makes networking and sharing inevitable. For example, you might wonder how a 26-year-old man Gerald Krein from Klamath Falls, Oregon, narrowly failed in enticing 32 women in chat rooms to commit a mass suicide on Valentine’s Day a year ago.“

The common theme is that these were women who were vulnerable, who were depressed. He invited them to engage in certain sexual acts with him-and they were to hang themselves naked from a beam in his house,” Klamath County sheriff Tim Evinger told the media. Had Krein succeeded, he might have used his Webcam to netcast the event to the world-32 women hanging naked by a roof beam.

Sexual asphyxiation is a most extreme form of the sexual act. In a land of extremes, of death by choice, it would have probably created a stir; and then been shrugged off as a bizarre event after the media had milked it dry for ratings.
(By the way, Oregon is the first state where the physician-assisted suicide solution for terminal patients has recently received the US Supreme Court approval.)

A Canadian woman, probably a prospect for after life, who saw the message entitled Suicide Ideology in a chatroom and learned to her horror that another chatroom woman intended to kill not only herself but her two children also, promptly informed the police.

Depressed women have been known to kill their children. At least 31 women had agreed to participate in the mass suicide, Krein told the police investigators upon his arrest. Chatroom records showed that Krein had been networking with women to solicit suicide since 2000.

Getting out of deep depression through extreme sex, consummated finally with collective suicide by hanging, if that’s a probable explanation, then one might also understand why some people blow themselves up in their zealous commitment to jihad, which without networking and sharing wouldn’t be so blindingly enticing.

Dying alone is terrible. Dying becomes easier when people die together. The Internet provides togetherness to faceless strangers.

Group suicide of strangers, mostly young people, who meet on the Internet, has not been an infrequent occurrence in Japan, a nation where hara-kiri has been an ancient ritual, a Samurai tradition.

In Japanese chat rooms, bulletin boards, and suicide-related websites, people come together to share their ideas about not how best to escape from their suicidal fantasies but how to execute them; for example, sealing themselves in a coal-burning room and dying of carbon monoxide poisoning; in cars parked in remote mountain places; overdosing on camera; jumping together from high-rise buildings.

Though some suicide pacts succeed, others end up in terrible injuries and life-long miseries.Yukio Saito, a Methodist minister, who founded, and oversees, a suicide hotline, Phone of Life, made a very insightful remark to Reuters: “The idea of dying together is somehow reassuring. Dying alone is lonely and takes more courage. The way these suicides are carried out is sensational for the media, and very suggestive for people who may be thinking of taking their lives.”

Think of Jim Jones of the People’s Temple, the cult leader who led 913 followers to a mass suicide death pact in 1978 in Jonestown, Guyana. Had Rev Jones had a website, let us say, Your Guide to Death is Beautiful, with a seductive young woman giving step by step instructions and the precise time from here to thereafter, he might have attracted millions of people to an unheard of mass suicide.

You could imagine what a charismatic jihadi leader might do online when he wraps up mass suicide bombings with a noble religious cause.No wonder the US justice department has asked a federal judge to force Google to let the government peep into millions of private searches the American people have been doing using its search engine.

Google says no, but that is laughable. Google bent its knees before the Chinese government, where profits trump morality, so how long would it resist the US justice department especially when other cyber age giants, MSN, Yahoo and AOL, for example, see no evil in compliance?

National security, protecting children from pornography, and my goodness, there are a host of other reasons for the government to see where people have been going in cyberspace, in spite of the fact that the Bill of Rights says loud and clear, it is none of your business, Uncle Sam.

Would Judge Alito think for himself?

Supreme Court mirrors American values
Cyber Age: ND Batra
From The Statesman

US Supreme Court mirrors America’s conflicting values “to cultivate a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of citizenry, it is necessary that the path to leadership be visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity”. Thus spoke the US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor regarding the admission policy of the University of Michigan a few years ago.

Justice O’Connor, who occupied a middle-of-the road open-minded position on the US Supreme Court, is retiring. Samuel Alito, a federal appeal court judge, has gone through the Senate Judiciary Committee’s grilling whether he is “the right person” to serve on the Supreme Court, whose decisions in the long run shape American society.

Like India, the USA is an imperfect and messy democracy and the goal of inclusiveness has been a struggle for every generation. Time and time again, the US Supreme Court has played a critical role in bringing the American people back to the basics, the vision of the founding fathers of an inclusive society.

The Supreme Court is not only the ultimate authority in the interpretation of the Constitution. It is regarded as the supreme moral authority in the USA. The only way to overrule the Supreme Court is to amend the Constitution, which is a long, arduous and daunting process.

When the Supreme Court speaks, the question of what is right and what is wrong is settled until the next time when another crisis brings the nine justices together to ponder over and argue once again what the Constitution means, after all.

Its decisions are seldom unanimous and the voice of dissenting justices is never lost. Even a lone dissenting opinion might become the voice of the court majority in another time when the mode of consciousness of society changes.

That’s why there is so much partisan political struggle as to who gets appointed to the Supreme Court.

By and large the court is a reactive institution. It listens and questions. But when it does speak, everyone listens. That’s how it holds American society together whenever it seems to be coming apart, for example, in the 2000 Bush-Gore presidential election.

On 23 June, 2003, for example, the Supreme Court spoke about the affirmative action policy of the University of Michigan and its decision has impacted every private and public institution as well as businesses in their recruitment practices.

One of the decisions involved the University of Michigan Law School that had been using a holistic method of admission in which race was included as one of the factors.
The court upheld the practice thus affirming the 1978 (Bakke case) decision that allowed race to be considered a “plus” factor for admission, emphasising that diversity enriches educational environment.

The court was, however, troubled with the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science and the Arts that used a point system that automatically granted 20 points to a minority student (Blacks, Hispanics or Native Americans) toward a minimum of 100 (on a scale of 150) required for admission.

The plaintiffs had complained of reverse discrimination that disqualified otherwise qualified white students. In this case, a 6-3 majority led by the late Chief Justice Rhenquest called the numerical system not good enough to enrich diversity.

An individualised admission programme would consider the whole person, including race as a factor, among others. In the Law School case, Justice O’Connor wrote for the 5-4 majority: “Effective participation by members of all racial and ethnic groups in the civil life of our nation is essential if the dream of one nation, indivisible, is to be realised…. Access to legal education (and thus the legal profession) must be inclusive of talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity so that all members of our heterogeneous society may participate in the educational instructions that provide the training and education necessary to succeed in America.“

Sometimes I hear similar voices coming from the Indian Supreme Court also. Great democracies echo each other. Since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Americans have been given a legal recourse to fight against discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex or national origin.

It has opened many doors for minorities to advance in fields that were shut on them.The US military wouldn’t be what it is today without affirmative action. It is the biggest repository of the American Dream and minorities are drawn to it with the hope that service to the nation would open up opportunities for them. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a retired General, exemplified what a person could achieve once affirmative action opened the door.

American businesses too have embraced diversity as something good for them to succeed in the multi-cultural global environment.

The Supreme Court heard myriad briefs filed in support of the University of Michigan and its decision embodies their collective voice: Diversity is a compelling national interest. So is the right to reproductive freedom, as a Democrat would put it. But a conservative Republican would ask, what about the right to life and liberty of a child in the womb?

In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled in the Roe vs Wade case that women have the right to abortion, a precedent that has stood the test of time. What would Judge Alito do if the Supreme Court were to face the question again? The Judiciary Committee couldn’t figure it out in spite of all the stabs inflicted on him.

Unlike the race question, the abortion question is not finally settled, at least not in the opinion of conservatives who believe that a conservative majority on the Supreme Court would overturn Roe vs Wade abortion decision.

But the most intriguing thing about a Supreme Court Justice is that once confirmed, he or she begins to listen to his or her own inner voice as reflected in the Constitution rather than to the President who appointed him or her; much as Thomas Becket did by embracing the will of God as soon as he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by his friend and patron King Henry II (1133-1189), who wanted him to do his bidding rather than listen to God.

“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Henry cried. The King’s goons murdered Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in December 1170. You can’t do that to US Supreme Court Justices. They are there for life. And they don’t retire or die that quickly.

It pays to kowtow in China

Murdoch stooped to conquor in China, as did Microsoft, Google and others. World is safe for freedom. But who needs freedom if China can do without it?
http://www.peek-a-booty.org/pbhtml/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=15

Our man in India

India has become a haven for free-wheeling spies.

Taming corporate executives

Cyber age
Corporate America’s rotten apples
ND BATRA
From The Statesman

Wal-Mart is in the news again. Its former vice-chairman Thomas Coughlin would plead guilty for misappropriating “$500,000 from Wal-Mart through fraudulent re-imbursements and improper use of gift cards,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

What goes through the thick skull of these otherwise brilliant people that they begin to think of themselves as invincible once they sit on the top floor is beyond my comprehension. Coughlin, who earned millions in compensation from the penny-pinching global retailer, was caught misusing gift cards amounting to a paltry sum of $ 5,100, the report said.

Why do powerful people throw away their reputation for a handful of silver or blonde hair? By the end of the month, the former chairman of the defunct global energy giant Enron would face trial for killing the goose he thought was laying golden eggs.

The functioning of corporate America is based on authoritarianism, not on internal checks and balances. In contrast, the US political system is based on a healthy distrust of people in power. The tripartite system of government of co-equals in power, the White House, Congress and the Judiciary, and other built-in checks and balances along with a free Press have kept politicians from abusing power by exposing them to public ridicule, threatening to impeach them or put them in jail.

Think of Presidents, state governors and legislators who have been disgraced because of their abuse of power. The notorious lobbyists Jack Abramoff has agreed to name names and testify against members of Congress whom he bribed to buy favours for his business clients. Watch the unfolding American drama of political corruption. The founding fathers did not leave the functioning of the political system to the innate goodness of the people seeking power. Nor did they leave the development of good political behaviour to any kind of special education or training in ethics course work in schools or colleges; or the culture of the sports arena, for that matter.

The temptation of power trumps everything else, so transparency and accountability are indispensable to a self-renewing democracy.That unfortunately is not the case with Wall Street where most Americans are vested through their pensions and other retirement accounts. Today we live in a world where corporate power overshadows most of our activities.

The classic Marxist-Leninist class struggle, workers versus capitalists, has been replaced by public interest civic groups versus corporate global. As someone said: The beat goes on.

Corporate leaders rise to power on the promise of maximising profit, market value and economic health of their companies. Shareholders are selfish and passive. Boards of directors are morally passive; their interest is limited to increasing shareholders’ value. They worship executives who maximise their investments.

So long as an executive performs well and exceeds the expectations of Wall Street, he could get away with some excesses.Last July, former chief executive Bernard Ebbers of WorldCom (now MCI, Inc), whose $11-billion fraud dumped the telecommunications company into bankruptcy was sentenced to serve 25 years in prison.

The former financial chief officer of the company, Scott Sullivan, who pleaded guilty and testified against his former boss, told the jury that he had warned Ebbers that accounting adjustments, creative accounting or cooking books, whatever you call it, could not be justified. Ebbers told him nevertheless that the company had to “hit the numbers”, and meet the financial and revenue targets. Ebbers of course blamed his underlings for the fraud, said to be the largest in US history.

At its peak in 1999, WoldCom had a market capitalisation of $180 billion, and Ebbers was a toast of Wall Street. That was the problem: a reputation built on sand.When WorldCom real earnings could not meet the forecast, Ebbers asked the account department to “adjust the numbers”. Corporate accounting departments are notorious for “slouching towards Gomorrah”.

Wall Street analysts and financial journalists who out of fear or favour work as paid employees of big corporations rather than watchdogs of public interests went along with the web of lies woven by the WorldCom team until the whole edifice began to collapse in 2000; and the share price sank to $15 from a high of $65. Ebbers’ personal fortune, too, was linked with WorldCom’s market share price and to keep it high, he raised analysts’ expectations.

But Wall Street is a hard and cruel taskmaster. One cannot get away with lies for too long, but sometimes the price a company and eventually the public pay is too high; and the damage to the reputation is irreparable. But what can be done? Can we make corporate bosses honest? Can we instil ethics into their souls?

Robert J Schiller, a Yale professor and author of Irrational Exuberance, faults the education that US business schools impart to budding corporate executives. Writing in the New York Times, he said that instead of emphasising ethics and liberal arts, “Modern business education often encourages excessive respect for anything that can be considered a result of the free market.” Teach them ethics, he says.

No, that’s not enough. Let them write case histories of former CEOs who have been disgraced and are serving prison terms. Better still; give the business school graduates experiential knowledge by putting them into jail with common criminals.
Let them see whether greed is good.

Credit card bliss

cyber age: ND Batra

Credit card conundrum
From The Statesman


During the holiday weeks, millions of American consumers used credit cards to charge their gifts. Now that the bills have begun to pour in, many of them won’t know how to pay them. In spite of the recent legislation in the USA that makes personal bankruptcy rather more difficult, more than a million people would end up as bankrupt.

But never mind; they would do it again. Bankruptcy is no shame in the USA. It is a method of reorganising your life and business. But let’s not blame the holiday season for overspending because Americans love to use the card to make all kinds of payments: medical bills, groceries at the supermarket, college tuition bills; and even online porn. In fact, consumers are rewarded for using their charge cards.

Many card companies offer cash back, frequent flyer miles, or some other grizzly temptation every time the customer uses the card. Enter any major chain store, especially during a holiday season, a beautiful girl greets you: “If you open the credit card account now, you will get 10 per cent discount on all your sales today.” With very little background check, instant credit is issued to the customer and the spending spree begins.

Fortunately, the economy is very healthy; nonetheless, the total household debt of $1.7 trillion (2004) is a staggering sum. Without savings, how can a family balance its budget in tough times, except through more borrowing with the credit card? An average American family has several credit cards and borrowing from one to pay the other is a common practice among many delinquent debtors, until they reach the bankruptcy court.

Bankers do not feel that credit card delinquencies pose a serious threat to the American banking system because most card customers are good, so good that their business covers up not only the losses due to bankruptcies but also due to frauds.

A few years ago, there was a message on my office answering machine. An urgent female voice said: “This is not another sales pitch, but I urge you to call me back because twice last month someone charged your card in California.”

My credit card company, of which I’m a charter member (no big deal except that I don’t pay the annual fee), keeps an electronic eye on my purchasing pattern, and probably the computer shouted ‘foul’: Man lives in the East, charges card on the West Coast, how come? The Visa lady assured me that I won’t be liable for the fraud but they do want to catch the thief. I did spend my vacations in California the summer before with my family and left my electronic footprints wherever I went and someone thought it was a good time to rob me.

In any case, the cardholder liability is limited, but it is a terrible hassle to face inquiries. Every year, thousands of people become victims of card frauds. There have been several media reports, including an investigative report from the CBS “60 Minutes”, whipping the Nigerians for most of the credit card frauds in the USA.

The Nigerians or the Russians may be slick operators, but credit card thieves come in all colours and nationalities and they have the same modus operandi: access a computer terminal linked to national credit data banks maintained by one of the three nationwide credit bureaus. Once logged on, the crook can get a person’s social security, credit status, and address, and with his stolen ID he can live the other person’s life.

It seems that credit card companies are not much scared of frauds because they simply write them off as business losses or expenses, or they pass them on to their customers in the form of higher finance charges. The federal law limits to $50 the cardholder’s liability for unauthorised use.

So the usurer, the debtor and the crook, all are doing good business, but it is a continuous challenge to the American ingenuity that some foreign or homegrown variety of card thieves should outsmart one of the best systems in the world.

But imagine what would happen to India if credit cards were issued as generously (or irresponsibly) as they are done in the USA. Most Indians would be suddenly thrown into the consumer mainstream, with unforeseen consequences for the economy. Would it create an economic miracle or bubble bust? The American miracle depends on spending, not on savings. Would the American model work for India?

I am a trifle confused. I don’t know what Dante, the immortal creator of the Divine Comedy, was thinking when he placed the usurers in one of the hottest circles in Hell.Charles Lamb, the British essayist, too said in a letter: “All bankrupts, of whatever denominations, civil or religious, ought to be hanged.” The usurer and the bankrupt are doing well in America. So are credit-card crooks and con artists. So shall they flourish in India, as growing prosperity feeds the middle class hunger for consumer goods.

TO HAVE SECURITY AND FREEDOM

When security trumps everything

ND BATRA
From The Staesman

Multinationals spin and hype to push the envelop of our expectations of absolute security — not only physical security but also of our health. They tickle our fantasies and seed our dreams. In slogans and jingles they capture our hidden desires. Sometime one-liners have an unintended message symbolic of the new era we are sliding into willy-nilly.

In a full-blown two-page advertisement in major newspapers and magazines, not long ago, a digital multinational company created a thought-provoking blurb for the kind of world that might be emerging from the digitally networked wireless society. On one side of the double page blow up, a sharp-looking vigilant cop said in the ad: “I have x-ray vision.

I have the power to see a bank robbery from across town. I have the power to see how many people are robbing the bank. I even have the power to see which one is wearing the ski mask. I am more than a police officer.”

This has been a long cherished fantasy of security experts, which is now being fed feverishly by the developing digital surveillance technology, including the airline screening system that the US Transport Agency has put into place, raking up much controversy.

Reading the ad I wondered why this technology could not be used in Iraq for controlling insurgency that is killing and maiming Americans and Iraqis. Could keeping the peace be helped with technology? Probably.

As the adman continued on the next page, the police officer’s extraordinary power came from the fact that he’s wirelessly networked with a ubiquitous surveillance system. “I am the x-ray glasses (which the police officer wears)…. I have the power to send videos and data without the use of wires. I have the power to link a bank’s surveillance camera to a squad car en rout to robbery. I have the power to show cops what they’re up against.”

But keep in mind that it’s not the police officer that said: “I am here to protect and serve.” It’s the computer company boasting: “I am more than a network.” We were being asked to trust the network that would improve the efficiency of our otherwise dumb police and promised other wonders such as hastening the development of new drugs.

In general, ads promise to fulfil an existing need or turn our suppressed wants and subliminal desires into urgent needs that must be fulfilled.

Continuing the series, the ad offered much more. The second part showed a seashell that promised to fight cancer. “I have an extract in my shell that has the power to slow cancers in mice. I have the power to be the next penicillin.” That’s an unsubstantiated claim, but I couldn’t stop wondering what if that turned out to be true. Admen are no buffoons. They weave our collective dreams and wishes on paper and screen. I must suspend my disbelief.

The seashell, mercenaria mercenaria, hard clam shell whose delicate meat goes into the famous New England clam chowder soup, is more than a shell. Not so much because of its natural potential but more so because of the power of the network that can turn it into modern medicine. How can the Internet have so much potential for pharmaceutical research? It is through online collaboration.

“I have the power to move clinical trials online so new drugs get to the market faster.” Drug testing that moves from labs to animal trials and finally for human use takes years before the Food and Drug Administration gives its final approval for marketing.

But networking can abridge the time for patients who can’t wait, let say, HIV positives. Clinical trials can be outsourced to India, for example.

And that’s the beauty of the digital age. Whatever work can be done online in the USA can be done equally well elsewhere, wherever there is sufficient brainpower.

And India has brainpower aplenty.

“I have the power to protect a patient’s privacy,” said the voice of the network. Isn’t that what we want to hear? Threat to privacy is at the heart of the network debate. Some people hate being cocooned in anonymous networks where privacy may not survive.

“I can use the power of e-learning to let doctors share research with other doctors. I think sharing is caring.” Yes, sharing is one of the greatest potentials of a networked society, but beware that terrorists could use the same technology also, which in fact some of them, especially Al- Qaida, are already using.

And that brings us back to the police officer, the one who used his wirelessly enhanced networked vision to fight bank robbers except that banks are not robbed by masked gunslingers nowadays but by computer hackers and conmen who may be operating anonymously from any wireless hotspot across the globe.

In the age of terrorism, we are asked not to grudge the police pre-emptive powers to save us from whatever dangers might happen. That is exactly what President George W Bush has been telling us as to why he authorised the National Security Agency to carry out warrant-less interceptions of communications of people suspected of Al-Qaida contacts in the USA. Only if we know that the power won’t be misused.

Making the world safe

Cyber Age: ND Batra

Global interdependence
From The Statesman

Today, India is a much friendlier place to live and do business in than it was a few years ago. There is tremendous optimism in the country that poverty can be reduced and widespread prosperity is achievable.
Although this does not diminish the bold foreign policy initiatives taken by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s administration, the US goodwill toward India is quite visible.
Americans have begun to believe that the USA has a vital interest in India’s gradual but steady rise as an economic power. Asia must remain a multi-player stage and no single power should attempt to exercise its hegemony.
Though 2050 is a long way off, Goldman Sachs’ modest forecast that India would become the third greatest economic power could not be brushed away. Eight to 10 per cent economic growth is in the realm of possibility once infrastructure begins to improve.
It is important for the USA to establish a long-term cooperative relationship with India both for economic and diplomatic reasons; and President Bush couldn’t have a better person at the helm than an ex-international banker, David Mulford. Unlike political demagogues, bankers don’t throw their weight around.
As some of the most down-to-earth people with their eyes focused on changing economic horizons, bankers offer cold and calculated assessment of the situation and measure their words precisely for market effect. But when a banker becomes a diplomat, the only way he can exercise his influence is through the power of persuasion, by seeking cooperation and convergence of national interests.
America’s attractiveness in India is primarily due to its culture and values. Most people around the world perceive American culture as the culture of Hollywood, pop music, movies and television programmes suffused with sex and violence; but that’s only partly true.
American culture is a culture of openness, of 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. Americans fervently believe that global poverty can be eliminated; sickness can be cured. Bill and Melinda Gates are some of them.
China has understood only one aspect of the US culture, the free marketplace. By opening its markets and shuttering its people’s mouths (suppressing all protests), China has become the fastest growing economy.
But China is not a model for the developing world. If the USA were to shut its doors on China, the Chinese export-driven economy would be hard hit. So China keeps lending money to America at rock-bottom rates by buying US treasury Bills. China has no other place to park its trade surpluses.
But why does the USA keep playing the game? The USA knows that China cannot stop there. It would open itself to other cultural influences, including free expression and democracy.Sino-US interdependence is good for keeping the peace.
A similar phenomenon of interdependence has been taking place for quite sometime between India and the USA. Although pollsters tell Americans that they are the most disliked people in the world, it may not be the whole truth. Indians, more than a billion, think highly of the American people. They might disagree with some of the US policies; nonetheless, they are fascinated with American society.
So are the French, the Germans and the Russians, in spite of occasional protests. And the Brits? From British nannies to the British Prime Minister, America needs them so badly; another example of interdependence. Professor Joseph Nye of Harvard believes that a country can become attractive by “co-opting people rather than coercing them”.
But if trade with China and rising prosperity have co-opted the Chinese people and given them new hopes and new dreams, why hasn’t a similar policy worked for North Korea and Iran? Honestly, the USA has not tried hard enough to use the power of engagement, which is the best way to exercise power.
Prof Nye 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, an expensive new weapons system”.
Prof Nye acknowledges that to fight terrorism both hard and soft powers are necessary but you catch flies better with honey than with vinegar.American civil society is far more persuasive in presenting the USA to other people than the government does.
But you might say, what about the moral courage of the American President who in the midst of daily terrorist bombing attacks cannot stop believing that free elections and democracy would work for Iraq? This, too, is part of the culture that makes America so attractive. Corporate America, too, makes the USA attractive.
When an American apparel maker opens a factory in Bangladesh, it creates new hopes and dreams for the people. How long would Islamic jihadists stop Bangladeshis, for example, from improving their economic condition by seeking direct foreign investment? And that raises an intriguing question.
If most US investment goes to China, it deprives smaller countries of any hope of raising their economic standards through direct foreign investments. Bangladeshi or Sri Lankan apparel makers cannot compete with Chinese cheap products made cheaper by hidden subsidies. The USA should encourage corporate America, through economic incentives and other means, to invest in small developing countries, too.T
he best way for the USA to become attractive in Afghanistan, Nepal, Bangladesh or Indonesia is through economic investment that creates jobs. That is the job of Karen Hughes, the under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs. She must coordinate US national interests with those of other nations through bilateralism and multilateralism.India offers her a great opportunity to raise the level of cooperation and partnership between the two countries. The impact of the joint exercise of Indo-US soft power would be felt across the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean.

Watch your e-mail

Betrayed by email
ND Batra
From The Statesman

E-mail seems so personal and private. After all there is nothing between you and the laptop screen; and when you press the key SEND, you have the illusion that nothing could be more confidential than the digital stream that you have let loose.

But nothing is beyond the reach of corporate lawyers and law enforcement authorities in this age of total awareness. Desperate housewives seeking fortunes in divorce have e-mail as their best bet after their husbands have begun to rejuvenate their libidos somewhere else. In early March, The Boeing Company fired its 68-year-old CEO, Harry Stonecipher, for having an extramarital sexual affair with a company employee. He had the brazen foolishness to be expressive about his carnal desires in sexually explicit manner in e-mail exchanges with the woman. None should have read the top dog’s e-mail but someone did.

Stonecipjer, ironically, was plucked from his retirement to rebuild the image of Boeing after the company had suffered a scandalous period under its previous CEO. Enron, the defunct energy conglomerate that put up a power plant in Dhabol, Maharshtra, was undone by its e-mail, which in hindsight you might say was good for the stakeholders and public at large. The company did not comprehend the liability issues in dealing with email, which makes me believe that every business should have its annual e-mail audit.

Employees should be given workplace and documentation training. Since most American office workers use the Internet and communicate via e-mail, bosses are watching closely how their employees use the company’s electronic resources. Several court decisions regarding workplace privacy indicate that in the United States employees have few privacy rights over their e-mail, if it is stored in the company’s system.

Employers no doubt have legitimate concerns about what their workers do in their cubicles, especially regarding the confidentiality of their trade secrets; on-going contractual negotiations; pornography and sexual messages exchanged among employees that might lead to legal liabilities for the company; and whistle-blowing and other activities that may affect the reputation of the company.

These concerns are not new but the speed with which transactions are done on the Internet has created paranoia. It has been widely reported that office workers do visit popular sports websites to check scores and also do online shopping and stock trading. Many of them keep a chatline or instant messaging service open while doing other work.

Some multi-tasking in the workplace has always been there but the Web has created new opportunities and now it is becoming a common occurrence. With continuous restructuring and layoffs, many working people keep looking for new job opportunities. One never knows where the axe might fall. American corporate culture has changed. Being loyal to the company has no meaning nowadays. You can’t be loyal to a company that might outsource your job to hmm… China!

Companies are watching who is applying for jobs and if anyone is trying to cross over to a competitor, he should not expect his boss to be merciful. That was the painful lesson Richard Fraser, a Pennsylvania independent insurance sales representative with Nationwide Mutual Insurance, learnt a few years ago when he offered his services to the company’s competitor via e-mail. Although he was not a salaried employee of the company and had an independent office, he was using the company’s e-mail system and his computer was networked with the company’s server. In his lawsuit against his employer that he filed after he was fired, Mr Fraser alleged that the company had violated his electronic privacy right under federal laws, the Wiretap Act and Stored Communication Act, but the judge saw no merit in the case. Sending or receiving an e-mail message leaves a copy on the company’s server, which is much like a filing cabinet, and the company has the right to scrutinize the content.

It is important to understand, therefore, that e-mail is the least safe method if an employee wants to keep his online transactions confidential. The delete key is the most deceptive piece of software technology ever invented. Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Michigan, a major health insurance company, fired seven employees in 1999 for violating the company’s policy and ignoring the written warning against e-mailing obscenities using the company’s computers. Discharging employees for sending pornographic pictures and sexual jokes to colleagues via e-mail is not something new.

When the bosses at First Union Corporation, one of the largest banks in the USA, wondered what was slowing down the company’s server, they discovered that some of the employees were e-mailing videos of people having sex and other lascivious material that strained the system’s capacity. The employees lost their jobs for violating the policy and no one shed tears for them. Employers cannot afford to ignore online lewd conduct of their employees, partly out of fear that some might perceive the company as tolerating a hostile work environment and accuse it of gross negligence. But more importantly, such conduct destroys the work ethic. I

ronically, as offline and online worlds collide and converge, workers do not regard the office as a place of work only. Nor is the home exclusively for the family. If a person is expected to carry his office on laptop to his home, why can’t he do his family chores in the office? The question can’t be ignored because the number of people who telecommute and have their home computers networked to their office server is increasing. So where does the right to privacy end for an employee when home and office commingle? Maybe privacy does not exist any longer – whether you are the boss or at the bottom of the barrel.

Eastward Ho

The
CorporateDiplomat

"As part of India's look East policy, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will leave for Kuala Lumpur on Sunday to attend the first ever East Asia Summit (EAS), which has a long-term objective of establishing an Asian economic community on the lines of the European Union."

Read more

CORPORATE AMERICA AND CIVIL LIBERTIES

Cyber Age:ND Batra

Restore civil liberties
From The Statesman

The USA Patriot Act hastily enacted in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks has diminished civil liberties, though the American people accepted it stoically as a necessary evil to secure their lives and civil liberties.

The Act gave enormous powers to law enforcement authorities to invade citizens’ privacy and collect information, with little checks and balances, to uncover suspicious patterns of behaviour that might be linked to terrorism.

There has been no empirical evidence that the Patriot Act has pre-empted or prevented terrorist activities in the country, though one might say, in a manner of post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, because there has been no terrorist attack in the USA since 11 September, 2001. So, this in itself is strong evidence that the Patriot Act has been working.

With time, the Patriot Act began to be perceived as the most un-American legislative measure and it has outraged politicians on both sides of the aisle, apart from libraries, corporate America, and small and large businesses that are required to do surveillance on the activities of their patrons, employees and customers.

As The Los Angeles editorial said: “When Congress approved the Patriot Act, it put its trust in prosecutors and investigators to use their expanded powers responsibly. It now appears that trust was misplaced.”

The law enforcement authorities put hundreds of thousands of people under surveillance by demanding to see their private records from various sources without being questioned about the necessity of doing so.

While the victims of surveillance and searches might not have noticed their civil rights being diminished, but the information providers, libraries and retailers, for example, have felt the suffocating power of the Patriot Act.

Since there is no way electronic information can be returned to the owner or be shredded, there is nothing to prevent authorities from misusing the information for political purposes. American society is not based upon blind trust of the people in power. On the contrary, with a healthy doze of cynicism and paranoia, it is presumed that power might be misused and therefore it must be checked and balanced. No one should have power more than is absolutely essential to the job.

The Patriot Act imposed unhealthy silence upon civil society, the countervailing force that has kept America open, free, innovative and creative. The Patriot Act might have been responsible for creating the collective mindset that not only silenced the media about the truth about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but also turned some of the finest investigative journalists, including stars from The New York Times and The Washington Post, into unintentional and unself-conscious collaborators of The White House.

The Patriot Act will expire on 31 December and the Bush administration has sought Congress to reauthorise the Act with minor revisions; but a bi-partisan group of six Senators threatened filibuster unless the reauthorisation Bill contained sufficient safeguards to prevent abuse.

Supporting changes in the revised anti-terror Act are several major US business groups, including Association of Corporate Counsel, the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Association of Realtors, Financial Services Roundtable and Business Civil Liberties Inc, asking for changes in rules that give authorities unbridled access to their confidential records.

Why would the American businessman turn against his benefactor in the White House, a most pro-business administration ever?

According to The Wall Street Journal, the groups’ letter to the Senate Judiciary Chair Arlen Specter, a Republican from Pennsylvania, said: “…we are concerned that the rights of businesses to confidential files — records about our customers or our employees, as well as our trade secrets and other proprietary information — can too easily be obtained by the Patriot Act. It is our belief that these new powers lack sufficient checks and balances.”

This is a remarkable statement coming from corporate American, which a few years ago was hit by a spiral of corporate scandals from the energy giant Enron to domestic diva Martha Stewart. Without checks and balances, freedom evaporates and so does trust; and so does the free marketplace, which is based upon nothing but trust.

In the USA, checks-and-balances based freedom is an economic necessity. Since the 11 September terrorists attacks, American businesses have been willingly cooperating with federal law enforcement authorities, primarily to protect and safeguard their businesses and, of course, to appear as responsible corporate citizens.

But in the process, they have been willy-nilly turned into collaborators and informers against their own people, employees, customers and clients at home as well as abroad, as it normally happens in authoritarian regimes like China, for example.

What corporate American wants is the right to question and challenge government requests for records when the information is proprietary (trade secrets) and privileged (confidential negotiations) and has no relevance to the terrorism threat and national security.

An in-camera court could decide in confidence whether such a demand for information is necessary, whether an alternative is available; and how the information would be used and for how long it would be kept in records to prevent its future misuse.

By protecting itself from the excesses of the Patriot Act, corporate America might help restore our civil liberties. That would be a highly patriotic act.

Wal-Mart goes to India

Terms of endearment
ND Batra

From The Statesman

West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee was reported to have asked at a meeting of business leaders in October, “Why do we need Wal-Mart to come?” That’s a good question, which Wal-Mart has yet to answer.

There is a genuine apprehension that small shopkeepers and intermediaries would be adversely affected by the arrival of the global retailer, as it has happened in many places in the USA where many mom-and-pop corner stores have shuttered down and others are struggling to survive.

“The High Cost of Low Price,” a recently released documentary by Robert Greenwald shows the seamy side of the retail giant, including the denial of health coverage to employees, exploitative wages for women and the elderly, ethnic and gender discrimination and many other not so legal practices, for which ultimately the taxpayer bears the burden.

Small entrepreneurs are the backbone of the Indian economy as well as the burgeoning middle class; and they must not be savaged. Nonetheless, they need to be exposed to the challenges of globalisation, to Wal-Mart’s organisational innovations.

Fortunately the retail space in India, unlike in the USA, is expanding rapidly and something like Wal-Mart is going to occur with or without Wal-Mart. Talking with analysts in June, John Menzer, president and CEO of Wal-Mart’s international operations, said: “India represents a $250-billion retail market, growing 7.2 per cent a year, but modern retailing is just starting to emerge.”

India is not only “a huge organic growth market for Wal-Mart”, but also a fast growing outsourcing market, with expected $1.5 billion merchandise export to Wal-Mart’ stores this year. But that is nothing what Wal-Mart exports from China, $70 billion annually, and has created myriad entrepreneurial opportunities by establishing a most modern supply chain system.

Chief minister Bhattacharjee should focus on not only how Wal-Mart treats its employees, keeping in mind that in the USA the retailer does not encourage unionisation, but also whether Kolkata could be another outsourcing hub for the hungry giant global with 2,000 worldwide stores, including 40 in China.

When small things aggregate, they bring about great changes. The world’s biggest retail giant, Wal-Mart sells almost everything and at the lowest prices, providing low and middle-class people affordable access to goods which would have been otherwise beyond their monthly budgets. The retailer is able to do so by buying massive quantities from inshore and offshore sources and hiring people at blood and sweat wages, mostly women, and that should be of great concern to political leaders like Mr Bhattacharjee and others.

In the long run, such business practices may have greater impact upon the world than Al Qaida, tsunami and the earthquake. As Nelson Liechten-stein, professor of US labour history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote in the Globalist, “Wal-Mart rezones our cities, determines the real minimum wage, channels capital throughout the world — and conducts a kind of international diplomacy with a score of nations.”

As the retail giant scrounges and sponges the Third World for cheap goods, in the process it creates employment for hundreds of thousands of people in developing countries, especially China. In the USA, it keeps overheads low by hiring mostly female workers at wages much less generous than it pays to its male employees.

In 2001, six women said to Wal-Mart, this is discrimination against women and you can’t do it. Six women snowballed into more than a million current and former women employees who in a class-action suit charged that Wal-Mart, one of the nation’s largest employers, paid less and gave fewer promotions to women than to male employees. In the land of presumed equality, this is a serious accusation and has become a public relations disaster.

And the US district court judge, Martin J Jenkins, found that the plaintiffs did “present largely uncontested descriptive statistics which show that women working in Wal-Mart stores are paid less than men in every region, that pay disparities exist in most job categories, that the salary gap widens over time for men and women hired into the same jobs at the same time, that women take longer to enter management positions, and that the higher one looks in the organisation, the lower the percentage of women.”

Gender and race-based discrimination is an anathema in American society; and that’s how it should be in India, whenever a foreign company is allowed to do business. This is, however, not the first gender-discrimination class-action suit against corporate America. Home Depot, Texaco, Coca-Cola, Public Super Markets and many others were hit with class-action suits for discriminatory employment practices and paid millions of dollars in settlement.

A legal and humanitarian precedent set in the USA should be followed whenever Wal-Mart and other multinationals come to India, where local companies, too, should have no choice but to offer competitive opportunities to their female employees at par with what they offer to males: another consequence of globalisation. These should be the terms of endearment that political leaders offer to global corporations wanting to do business in India.

Can Wal-Mart do business in India?

Age of corporate diplomacy
By ND Batra
From The Statesman

When American Airlines, the second US carrier to start a nonstop service to India, planned its Chicago O’Hare to New Delhi flight, its management realised that open skies do not necessarily mean open hearts and minds, in spite of the excellent business climate and trust between the two countries. In an international business venture of this magnitude, failure is not an option. Competition is knocking at the door.

Cultural sensibilities, such as cuisine, had to be taken into account, especially as competition becomes hot on the lucrative non-stop route to one of the world’s fastest growing economies.

According to company sources, “With assistance from the American Airlines Indian Employee Resource Group, and in conjunction with Indian chefs based in the USA and India, the Americans structured a special menu for the Delhi flights that features Indian, Indian-inspired vegetarian and Western meal selections.No beef or pork will be served on the flights to and from Delhi. Only chicken, lamb and seafood dishes will be featured.”

Another airline, Continental, began its non-stop flight from Newark, New Jersey to Delhi on 1 November; and European and Indian carriers are bound to follow soon.Besides, as US Today reported, the non-stop flight has to fly over Russian airspace, which required agreement between the two governments and further corporate diplomacy. So there is a lesson here. Since the foreign policies of a country could put a damper on its international commerce, multinational corporations must have their own corporate diplomats and protocol officers for business development abroad.

Corporate diplomacy is crucial to the credibility of a company in explaining, positioning and carrying out its business, especially in these times when the image of the USA abroad is not bright.

International commerce depends upon the goodwill of the public, which must be continuously built so that it works as a shock absorber when some unforeseen calamity occurs and crisis communication strategy has to be deployed.

The creation and the development of this intangible and valuable asset, the public goodwill, is the function of corporate diplomacy.

In the 21st century, doing business in a foreign country must be much more than making profits. In his keynote address to Owens Corning Executive Summit at Tampa, Florida, Bill Shireman, President and CEO, Future 500, said: “The world is demanding a lot of the modern corporation.” When a company captures market share, he said, it also captures mind share, the deep support of the people.

When the host population perceives a corporation as a good citizen, it produces collateral benefits for the home country. On the other hand, when the local population perceives a country as hostile, foreign businesses could be hit hard, as it happened in Karachi when KFC was torched for the second time recently.

And ironically it happened at a time when Karen Hughes, US under-secretary for public diplomacy, was leading a delegation to Pakistan and visiting Muzafarrabad (Pakistani Kashmir) to assure the people and the government about the US commitment for the rehabilitation of the people affected by the 8 October earthquake. Accompanying Ms Hughes were some top corporate executives from Xerox, Pfizer and UPS, but the Pakistani public remained unimpressed. The foundation for grassroot public diplomacy, which is more than show-and-tell visits by celebrities, has not been laid in Pakistan.

Resentment against US foreign policy has been contaminating the image of US corporate brands, especially in Arab-Muslim countries, which requires corporate America to do its own public diplomacy.

Doing effective global corporate diplomacy requires local knowledge, competencies and tools for implementing strategic communications to deal effectively with foreign publics.

The overarching goal of corporate diplomacy is to develop an effective corporate voice and to learn to use all available means of persuasion, media and human networks, to shape public opinion as well as policies of the government in the host country.

KFC, McDonald’s and Coca Cola cannot depend upon their international brands to survive in hostile environment. They have to engage in creative business-to-people diplomacy.

Global business needs a new kind of corporate diplomat, one who must be responsive and effective in communicating with different publics, interest groups, activists, governments and stakeholders in international settings by using various media forms, print, radio/television and the Internet.

The corporate diplomat must be able to create a powerful corporate identity that serves the mission of the corporation as a responsible global corporate citizen and at the same time support the culture of the host country.

Developing intercultural sense and sensibility will enable the practitioners of corporate diplomacy to develop culturally sensitive best business practices throughout the supply chain.

Special focus must be placed on: developing strategic communications for foreign media; maintaining brand reputation; developing rapid response crisis communication strategies; developing corporate advocacy for environment, open trade and free markets; using philanthropy and community relations to counter negative sentiments; dealing with foreign bureaucracy, influentials, activists and opinion leaders.

Above all, emphasis must be on maintaining corporate integrity abroad; and being a good global citizen