Inttellectual property protection, American style (#349, Topic B)

USA talks big about intellectual-property protection. So, it is really an eye-opener to read a front-page story in today's Wall Street Journal captioned as "Ethiopia Battles Starbucks Over Rights to Coffee Names." It seems that the world's best coffee is produced in the Sidamo region of Ethiopia; its beans give the hint of "black cherry, chocolate and dark rum" wrapped together. The international chain labels it "Shirkina Sun-Dried Sidamo," (Shirkina, a word supplied by local farmers = partnership), and sells it for $13 per half-pound, back in 2004. How much were these farmers paid? "About 75 cents a pound" -- or 37.5 cents per half-pound. When the director-general of Ethiopia's intellectual-property office raised the issue of "unfair price gap," and wanted to trademark the names, the chain tried to sweet-talk him from doing so. Doing so "would place too much responsibility on the company to defend Ethiopia's trademark;" "it is not something you would do as a business." Intellectual-property protection, it seems, is a one-way street. According to WSJ, Ethiopia pioneered the coffee trade "more than 500 years ago." According to the World Bank, Ethiopia's total export in fiscal year 2006 was about $1 billion, of which coffee accounted for $354 million. In March 2005, the Ethiopia government applied for three trademarks for her three coffee-growing regions -- but "the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office blocked Ethiopia's application for Sidamo because Starbucks had already applied to trademark the name 'Shirkina Sun-Dried Sidamo." This is nothing new. Western phamaceutical companies have made a practice of trademarking Chinese herbal-medicine ingredients -- millennia old -- and then turning around to accuse Chinese merchants of intellectual-property violation for featuring these same herbal-medicine ingredients in their products. Well, the WSJ story continued by saying that the National Coffee Association, a U.S. trade group, sent a letter to the trademark office "urging it to deny Ethiopia trademarks for Sidamo and Harar [another coffee-growing region]." On what ground? "They are generic names." Specific geographic names as generic names? Talk to any farmer in Champagne -- similar products outside of this region may only use phrases such as "sparkling wine." Oh, excuse me; Champagne is an exception, because it is done by a developed country. According to the National Coffee Association, anothe reason to deny Ethiopia's application is "Ethiopia does not have the capacity to manage the trademarks." Bingo. If this is not enough, the WSJ further stated that "the U.S. trademark office provisionally refused Ethiopia's request for Sidamo and Harar." According to WSJ, "Ethiopia is now appealing the decision." In the meantime, Oxfam, a nonprofit relief and development group, (if my memory serves, it was initiated by quite a few World Bank staffers) began publicizing it by urging customers to complain about the company's stance. So much for intellectual-property protection in a developed country.

Voting in a democracy (#348, Topic P)

Our retirement community holds, on the first Sunday evening of each month, a "fireside forum." Tonight's forum was billed as "Our place in the world of politics." I thought our refers to USA. I was wrong; it refers only to a school at the state university. Luckily, the talk was short, lasting about 15 minutes. Then it was the Q&A period. The first question was raised by a fellow resident whom I know. She asked: "Except for [our retirement community], which has high voter participation, why citizens do not care to vote?" (One research component of this school deals with voting; that unit provided voting machines for our retirement community.) That was indeed an interesting question. But the answer was even more interesting. Candidly, the speaker said: "Many people feel that they have nothing at stake, so they simply do not vote." After a moment, he added: "Many countries declare the election day a national holiday. But this is not so in USA. Perhaps you could write to your senators and propose making the election day a national holiday." To my way of thinking, voting is another example of "Do what I say, don't do what I do." USA travles around the world promoting democracy, which, according to the president, equals voting. But the percentage of eligible voters in USA who voted in the past several presidential elections -- if my memory serves -- never exceeded 60%. When the speaker was answering this question, I thought to myself. What is needed, for USA, is not promoting democracy around the world, but showing the world that citizens of USA respect democracy and cast vote. Show the world a passing grade in voter participation -- say, 70% -- and then promote democracy around the world. Before this threshold is reached, look inward and educate the citizenry instead.

Wall Street the follower? (#347, Topic M)

The four newspapers I regularly read cover yesterday's "meltdown" in the Shanghai Stock Exchange (#346) somewhat differently. The lead story in today's New York Times does it comprehensively -- showing major stock exchanges' movements in chart form over a 30-hour time period, beginning with the Tokyo Stock Exchange (opening at 8 pm EST 2/25 Monday = 9 am 2/26 Tuesday, local time), down by less than 1%; continuing with SSE (opening at 8:30 pm EST 2/25 = 9:30 am 2/26, Shanghai time), down by 8.8%; then with Europe's and Brazil's, down by 3% and 6.6%, respectively; and ending with the Wall Street, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down by 3.3%. The Washington Post does it dramatically, with a 4-column headline: "Stock Sell-Off in China Hits Wall Street," and a 15" x 7" chart, in red, on the front page of its Business section, showing detailed movements of the DJIA from Monday's close (12, 632.26) to 12,500 (at 9:30 am), to 12,450 (at about 12:15 pm), to 12,350 (at about 2:15 pm), to below 12,100 minutes before 3 pm (WP gives no specifics, but 2/27's low, reached at that time, was 12,086,86), to 12,216.24 at close. The Wall Street Journal does it analytically, showing two versions of the DJIA in graphic form, one official, and the other recalculated (to adjust for computer delays from 2 pm to 3:30 pm); it covers the story more cautiously: "Market's Slide Spotlights Risks." Invetor's Business Daily covers it sensationally; its headline "China Triggers Global Sell-Off" and an accompanying graph, captioned "Asian Contagion Revisited," seem to attribute every ill to China. Given IBD's editorial stance, this is understandable. What is puzzling to me is a second story by NYT's Shanghai correspondent. Labeling investors in Shanghai as naive, the correspondent cited reasons, such as (1) out of 15 initial public offerings in 2006, 12 had appreciation of 10% or more by yearend, and (2) when a company's CEO was under investigation, its stock went higher. Really. When reading it, I cannot help asking myself: Are there similar phenomena on Wall Street? According to IBD (1/2/07 issue), there were 198 IPOs in USA in 2006: "Restaurant chain Chipostle Mexican Grille started things with a bang in January, doubling on its first day and more than tripling by early May." MasterCard, Crocs, and J. Crew "are still trading at more than double their initial price." On the second point, if my memory serves me, a week or so ago, the CEO of a home-improvement chain in US resigned (along with a retirement package worth more than $200 million), and its stock went up by more than 15%. So, what is new? In any case, today, the price on the SSE rebounds with an increase of 3.8%, and DJIA follows suit with an increase of 52.39 points, or 0.4%. It seems that the Wall Street no longer leads, but follows the Chinese financial markets instead. We'll see what tomorrow holds.

Financial market melt-down (#346, Topic M)

The lead story in this morning's NPR program concerned a 9% decline in Shanghai Stock Exchange's index, said to be the most severe in a decade. This decline had a domino effect, affecting first European markets and then the Wall Street -- suggesting that (1) international financial markets are intimately linked, and (2) China is now a major player in these markets -- after all, its index showed an increase of some 48% in 2006, whereas that on Wall Street was only 14%. On Wall Street, not sure why the market dropped in China (as far as I could gather, it was due to the Financial ministry's invoking new rules to tighten margin-purchase of securities and, thus, to rein in rampant speculation), conventional wisdom seemed to attribute this drop to a slowing of China's industrial growth. If so, this would adversely affect the demand for raw materials -- particularly copper, aluminum, and oil. Thus, shares of companies producing these industrial materials led the market down -- slowly though consistently at first, relentlessly as it gathered steam, and dramatically when programmed trading took over at 2:59. At 2:59, before programmed trading kicked in, the market, as measured by the Dow Jones Industrial Average, was about 12,350, down by about 260 points, or 2%. As soon as programmed trading began, trading volume soared as to completely overwhelm NYSE's computer system -- the volume was over 2 billion shares, a record. But, even more dramatic was its effect on the DJIA -- in a matter of 60 seconds, at 3:00, the DJIA dropped by another 160+ points. At one point, the DJIA was down by 560+ points -- said to be the most severe after the market reopened on 9/17/2001, after the 9/11/2001 incident. As the market closed at 4:00, the market was down by a solid 416 points, slightly less than 4%. After the market closed, the financial punditry had a field day, asking one another what might be in store tomorrow. Their vagueness was matched only by their verbosity. At 8:00 pm EST (9:00 local time), the stock market in Tokyo opened (a leading stock was down by 3%); the Shanghai Stock Exchange opened at 8:30 (9:30 local time), but I did not hear anything. We'll wait for tomorrow's morning papers to find out -- whether the meltdown was a one-day event or whether it would last for a while. I suspect the former, but I am no financial pundit.

"Contending with Endless International Conflict" (#345, Topic F)

Our retirement community has a Lifelong Learning Center, offering courses and lectures from time to time. The topic for today's hour-long lecture is captioned above. It was a follow-up lecture on "The Clash of Civilizations," which was given a couple of weeks ago, which I missed. Despite snow on the ground, about 50 fellow residents were in attendance today. (The flyer announcing the talk said that the earlier lecture attracted 85.) Our lecturer opened the lecture by asking attendees to provide a single word that best captured the reason for conflict. "People," one ventured; no. "Religion;" no. "Envy;" no. "Freedom;" no. "Survival;" no. "Greed;" no. It turned out that the word our lecturer had in mind is Difference. Difference? After some discussion, I ventured that since difference in physical features can never be erased, thus, conflict, were difference used as the criterion, can never be resolved. I mentioned that, in China, the approach is "Live and let live." Before I could say another word, I was asked to stop -- "I just want a short comment or question. You should give an hour-long talk yourself." So I shut up. To a large extent, the lecture was off-topic. After an hour, as the talk was at the tail-end of a Q&A period, I left and returned home for lunch, as I promised my wife before going to the lecture.

Call center (#344, Topic D)

One reason we went to the beach over the weekend was to set up a DSL connection. Apparently, the demand for DSL service was extremely high, as we had to wait for 5 weeks; our appointment to get connected was set for 2/23. As it turned out, we were invited for dinner on Thursday, 2/22; repeated calls to Verizon, asking whether our account could be serviced in the afternoon of 2/23, were merely answered by a recorded message; we did not receive acknowledgment of any kind. As the dinner invitation was for an important occasion, we took a chance by attending it and then left for the beach early Friday morning. Luckily, Verizon's service technican came around 12:30, so our chance-taking paid off. (Hey, maybe the Year of the Golden Pig is good for us.) We also booked Verizon to do the internal connection, knowing that we would be unable to do it ourselves (the DSL service in our apartment was done by a consultant, and he had a hard time connecting). And a good thing that we did. Doing the connecting was indeed difficult, as the Verizon technician had to call his technical support staff for guidance. What I overheard was indeed a revelation. Though I did not know to whom he was talking, I suspected that that person was in a call center perhaps on the other side of the globe. Apparently, the question our technican had was somewhat advanced, above the level of that support staffer's capabilities. Our man repeatedly said to the other party: "I told you I already had that," "You are repeating yourself," "You don't know what you are talking about." After a while, our man demanded that he talk to another support staffer or to a supervisor, on the ground that "I cannot understand you." At first, this demand was resisted, but was later honored. There was a clear change of our man's attitude, saying to his new contact (who appeared to be a woman) "I am glad you said that," "Thank you for telling me that," "You made my day," etc. So, after I was able to sign on, our man said that he had a hard time understanding the first staffer's enunciation -- blurred and fast -- further strengthening my suspicion that that staffer was with a call center on the other side of the globe. I asked our man to confirm my suspicion, he merely shrugged. I mentioned to him that at least he was able to talk to two live persons; all I was able to connect was with recorded messages of one type or another -- a 24-hour technical support line was a mere recorded message; a forwarding telephone number was answered by a message I consider inexcusable: "This number cannot be reached from your area." Any way, I was happy that I was able to get DSL connection without too much inconvenience.

Freedom of speech in action (#343, Topic A)

At the beach, other than shopping (Rohobeth DE, with 4 discount shopping malls next to one another totalling 200+ brand-name stores with thousands of parking spaces, and with no sales-tax to boot, is a shopper's heaven), the alternative is to read newspapers -- most newspapers published on the East Coast are available. In today's Washington Post, one of its headlines is: "Terrorist" Remark Puts Outdoorsman's Carrer in Jeopardy." The remark, according to the story, written on his blog, is thus: "Excuse me, maybe I'm a traditionalist, but I see no place for these [military-style assault] weapons among our hunting fraternity." The writer, despite his spending "much of his life writing for prominent outdoor magazines, delivering lecutres across the country and starring in cable TV shows about big-game hunting in the West," was quickly shot/shut down. Within days, his TV program on the Outdoor Channel was cancelled, the National Rife Association announced suspending professional ties with him, his editorship with Outdoor Life magazine "came to a sudden end," and Remington Arms and other "biggest names in gunmaking" "severed all sponsorship ties ... immediately." According to a fellow gun-owning-writer, this persona non grata "has been a voice for these people -- for hunting and for guns -- and they just turned on him in an instant." NRA's contention was: "Our folks fully understand that their rights are at stake," while Outdoor Life's editor-in-chief commented that "they ['terrorist'-rifle-owning' hunters] don't like to be called terrorists." So much for freedom of speech in action in USA.