10 Greatest Monopolies

Some used shrewd business decisions, some illegal practices. In some instances, states sponsored it, in some, the nature of the market promulgated it. No matter how they rose (and fell), these monopolies gained more than money. They achieved something some governments dare not dream: power, influence and enduring legacy:

1. Standard Oil

History’s richest man, John D. Rockefeller, presided over an oil monopoly a century before the Middle East sheiks do. Formed in 1870 mainly by John D., who had already made a substantial fortune by commodities trade during the Civil War, Stanford Oil incorporated oil producing, transporting, refining, and marketing into one single behemoth which grew both vertically and horizontally (purchase of producers and distributors). In 1882, all of Standard Oil’s properties were merged into the Standard Oil Trust, and by the end of the decade (1890), it controlled 88% of the refined oil flows in the United States. That same year, the Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act — the source of all American anti-monopoly laws – which was used two years later against Standard Oil. In 1911, the corporate behemoth was divided into smaller companies (which included many currently famous oil companies Amoco, Texco, Exxon, Chevron) but the monopoly wasn’t broken because the old John D. still controlled all those smaller companies. The real competition began only years later when Rockefeller’s heirs sold the inherited shares.

2. Salt Commission

In Tang China, (618-907 AD), the Salt Commission is one of the most influential agencies. After a peasant revolution, the land tax revenues fell in China and salt commission was created in 758 (based on Guanzi, a book written in 3^rd century BC book which proposes various salt taxation methods) to intensify the taxation of salt. Salt was essential for its nutritional and preservational values. Since the government controlled all major salt productions, the Tang dynasty was able to maintain th virtual monopoly on the salt trade, and benefited greatly from allocating licensed producers and licensed merchants. The enfranchising of licensed merchants enabled the imposition of the policy even to the further reaches of the nation. The revenues from salt taxation of salt slowly exceeded half of tax revenues within a few years of its inception, and by 1300 AD, it was creating 80% of all tax revenues in China. Although the salt commission began and ended with the Tang dynasty, the state monopoly on salt in China existed from sometime in 1^st century BC to the end of Imperial China in early 20^th century, making it the most enduring monopoly of all time.

3. De Beers

For a firm that started out by renting water pumps to miners during a diamond rush, De Beers succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its founder, Cecil Rhodes. In 1888, De Beers Consolidated Mines was formed with the sole purpose to be the owner of all diamond mining operations in South Africa. Using his colonial influences, Rhodes negotiated a strategic agreement with the London-based Diamond Syndicate in 1889, which fixed diamond prices. Whenever a new mine is discovered, it is absorbed into the De Beers cartel. At its height in the middle of the 20^th century, De Beers controlled 80% of the diamond market. Discovery of new mines in Russia, Canada, and Australia ended De Beers monopoly but De Beers is now more profitable today with a 40% market share than when it maintained an 80% market share.

4. Dutch East India Company

Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), established in 1602, was the world’s first multinational and mega- corporation, which possessed quasi-governmental powers, including the ability to wage war, negotiate treaties, coin money, and establish colonies. It is only natural that it also coined the standards for monopolies. To counter English and Portuguese colonial expansions, the Dutch government in 1602 sponsored “United East Indies Company” that was granted a monopoly over the Asian trade. The charter of the new company empowered it to build forts, maintain armies, and conclude treaties with Asian rulers. To establish its monopoly for the spice trade, the entire native populations in Indonesia were deported, decimated or enslaved in the Dutch plantations that replaced them. Although by 1669, the VOC was the richest private company the world had ever seen, a series of mismanagements and colonial encroachments by other great powers bankrupted the VOC in 1800.

5. Thurn and Taxis Mail

In 1489, Jeannetto de Tassis was appointed Chief Master of Postal Services in Italy. From that moment on to the early years of the 19^th century, his descendants, Thurn and Taxis family held its virtual monopoly on mail and postal services through a letters of grant and nobility given by Holy Roman Emperors Frederick III, Maximilian I and Charles V. In 1615, the position, Imperial Postmaster General was made hereditary. In its heydays at the end of the 18^th century, it took only forty hours to a letter from Paris to reach Brussels. The family’s horse relay system that connected nearly all of European capitals was the gold standard in communication. However, the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars greatly disrupted the family business. In 1867, postal monopoly was nationalized. By then, the family had diversified into a various other enterprises from foodstuffs to banking to to railroads and to this day, the family is one of the richest families in Europe.

6. Pan Am Airways

Thurn and Taxis monopoly may be broken, but the importance of communication and transportation (and monopoly producing power of it) was not. For the better part of the 20^th century, Pan American Airways dominated the airmail and transportation not only of the United States but also of both Americas. Founded in 1927, Pan Am greatly expended under Juan Trippe who bought out many independent carriers in the Caribbean, the Atlantic, and in South America. To counter the competition from foreign companies, the U.S. government itself endorsed the airline as the “chosen instrument” for U.S. air routes. After the World War II, however, despite its enormous lobbying campaign in the Congress, Pan Am gradually lost its status as America’s international airline to various American and foreign carriers. By 1991, “World’s Most Experienced Airline,” was broke.

7. U.S. Steel

U.S. Steel’s alumni were who’s who of America industrialists. J. P. Morgan and Elbert H. Gary founded it in 1901. The steel operations were owned by Andrew Carnegie. Its first president was Charles M. Schwab. Within five years of its founding, the corporation had become the largest steel producer and largest corporation in the world (as well as the world’s first billion-dollar corporation). During WWII, the U.S. Steel spearheaded American war efforts, employing over 300,000 employees and producing 20-30 million tons of steel every year. However, after the war, the Corporation (as it was famously known) has become a leviathan that had outlived its usefulness. As early as 1911, the federal government tried to break up the corporate goliath (which initially controlled 67% of all the steel produced in America), but it was the American steel industry’s own lack of innovation and efficiency that doomed U.S. Steel. It now produces less than 10 percent of the steel used in America and employs less than 50,000 people.

8. Caviar

Caviar lined the Soviet coffers with gold during the Cold War. However, the Bolsheviks and the Communists are not the first in imposing the state monopoly on caviar. Although sturgeon and their eggs have been eaten by the Russians as early as the 8^th century BC, it was not until Ivan the Terrible’s time that sturgeon producing Northern Caspian region was annexed from Muslim Tatars. Caviar monopoly was enforced by Tsar Peter the Great, who also tried to introduce the delicacy to the fashionable French court (without much success). However, by the time it was reintroduced to the Western Europe in 1860, caviar had already became the symbol of Russian luxury, and the Tsarist state had slowly relaxed its monopoly laws. However, after the Bolshevik Revolution, the powerful Soviet Ministry of Fisheries reintroduced tight measures to conserve sturgeons and to maintain the high caviar prices. The collapse of the Soviet Union killed the state monopoly, but also opened the Pandora’s box of overfishing, pollution and caviar smuggling.

9. American Telephone and Telegraph

Originally founded by Alexander Graham Bell and his financiers, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company managed to corner the telecommunications market of the United States even though Bell’s patent on the telephone expired in 1894. Since it was expensive to place copper wires all over the country (for different companies) the U.S. government itself agreed to this natural monopoly of having one telephone company for the nation. In 1907, AT&T president Theodore Vail announced “One Policy, One System, Universal Service.”–a guideline which AT&T used to purchase competitors. In 1918, the federal government’s nationalization of telecommunication industry profited AT&T which won the contract for the laying out of a coast-to-coast telephone system (potential competitors were forbidden from installing new lines to compete, with state governments wishing to avoid “duplication.”) The ‘natural monopoly’ was broken in 1970s with new technologies slowly replacing copper wires approach. Upon the settlement of United States v. AT&T, AT&T was split into seven companies and the monopoly was ended.

10. HBC

The Hudson’s Bay Company (Compagnie de la Baie d’Hudson) is the oldest commercial corporation in North America and is one of the oldest in the world. Once the de facto government of North America and later its largest landowner, the company controlled nearly all of fur trade in the New World from its headquarters at York Factory on Hudson Bay. Although the company’s monopoly on fur trade (chartered by England’s King Charles II) was never complete due to the small competitions from independent fur traders, its trade covered 3 million square miles (where settlements are forbidden by its monopoly rules ) and employed 1,500 traders. Its network of trading posts formed the nucleus for later official authority in many areas of Western Canada and the United States. The decline of the fur trade and a high-profile illegal fur trade trial in 1849 broke the monopoly, but the company evolved into a mercantile business selling vital goods to settlers in the Canadian West. Today the company is best known for its department stores throughout Canada.

Afterthought:

Demysterifying Hoover ….

 

What happens in the Hoover Institution stays in Hoover. Usually. Sometimes some debate about this bastion of conservatism spills over to the adjacent university, and all the hell breaks loose in Stanford. So how did the liberal West Coast’s premier university end up with a conservative thinktank on its campus?

The 84-year-old Hoover Institution is the legacy of former Republican President Herbert Hoover, a graduate of Stanford’s first class, who retired to Stanford after his disastrous presidency and presided over the cataloging of papers and documents he acquired in his early days. Until his death in 1960, Hoover ruled his institute (later renamed institution to rival East Coast’s Brooklyn Institution) with an ironfist from his ninth floor office at the Hoover Tower, Stanford campus’ most ironic and iconic building.

From shelves inside the lanky tower, the collection itself has expended greatly—now there are two annexed wings and a vast underground storage where the non-browsable library in tightly guarded. The institution’s treasures include the video footage of the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima (one of the most requested archival items), a skull X-ray of Adolf Hitler (from which picture’s bad teeth appearances that experts deduced the Fuhrer has contracted some sort of STD) and recently, the Saddam Hussein papers—the diaries and governmental papers of the late Iraqi dictator which the university agreed to keep from public for next seven years.

Originally funded directly by the university, the institution now has an endowment of $450 million and is generously supported by donors–some famous, some controversial—which include Boeing, Exxon and Chrysler. However, more controversial than its donors themselves is the institution’s distinguished fellowship program. Originally named to distinguish itself from ordinary fellowship (which any scholar wishing to study at the institution can apply to), the Distinguished Fellowship are nominated by any of Hoover’s research taskforces in a process not much different from the one the university’s various departments use. However, since the Institution’s director is answerable to none but the President of the Stanford University, the nominations are usually scrutinized under a different light.

Distinguished fellows are usually invited to lead or to participate in the institution’s research departments, but under a system formulated by Mr. Hoover’s handpicked successor at the institution, W. Glenn Campbell, many of them ended up teaching in Stanford’s economics and political science departments—a fact the liberal student body cannot stomach. Distinguished or visiting fellows in the past included Newt Gingrich, George Shultz (whose honorary fellowship was commuted/demoted to a distinguished fellowship by the current director), Gen. John Abizaid, Edwin Meese, Condoleezza Rice, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, and Amy Zegart—the list has become Who’s who of Republican Party in recent years that under the Bush administration, as many as eight Hoover fellows sat on the Defense Policy Board advising Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who after his resignation would also be nominated for the fellowship.

Historically as well, Hoover has always been the centre of controversy. W. Glenn Campbell, director of Hoover from 1960-1989 was a staunch supporter of Ronald Reagan, whose crackdown on student protests of the Vietnam War he vocally supported. Meanwhile, his fundraising, which focussed on fighting communism abroad and on campus was frequently criticized. When Campbell turned 65, he fought vehemently against mandatory retirement age policy and secured a generous retirement package. Although his successor and the current director John Raisian hasn’t made any honorary fellow appointments in his 20-year tenure (and as he confided to me in a dinner last week, he hasn’t no plan to do so in near future), his predecessor did. As it is normally in the politicalized world, none of Campbell’s nominations (not of Margaret Thatcher, not of Ronald Reagan or not even that of Alexander Solzhenitsyn) were well-received. But it is with Mr. Rumsfeld that the sh*t hits….well, you get the idea.

Rumsfeld’s nomination being made in late August of 2007 before the university opened, many faculty members viewed this as Hoover’s deliberate attempt to overstep its authority, to downplay the issue before the students arrive and to bypass the university. Mr. Rumsfeld’s involvement in everything from Iraq War to torture to Abu Gharib was discussed bitterly. Usually politically removed, the faculty itself lend its voice of dissent to student petitions—an action which led to the Hoover Institution being examined by the Faculty Senate.

In front of the Faculty Senate, Raisian expressed his regrets that his nomination was misconstrued but he refused to withdraw the nomination. Mr. Rumsfeld’s own decision not to come to Stanford averted the potential crisis but not before the Standard Daily lampooned the choice with a mock headline: “Fidel Castro nominated as a Hoover Fellow”.

Like it or not, Hoover Institution is here to stay. In 2003, a political on-campus group, SCPJ (Stanford Community for Peace and Justice) petitioned the university’s president John Hennessy and John Raisian to change Hoover’s mission statement and its ‘partial’ political stance. The petition was not reviewed because it is not in par with the university’s policies. Meanwhile, the students may just have to be thankful that in 1987, the plans for the construction of Reagan Library on the campus (a plan not unsurprisingly endorsed by the Hoover Institution) were defeated in the board of trustees, which no doubt thought that the legacy of one Republican President is enough for this already politically divided campus.

 

 

 

 

 

The Ghosts of Politics Yet to Come….

Future. Such an enticing mistress–and an unfaithful one at that. I submit to you recent articles: 

 

The Nation That Fell To Earth,  Niall Ferguson

The article appeared in 5th 9/11 anniversary issue of TIME in 2006, as a look back from a generation removed (2031).

Predictions: “For a time, Bush’s approval ratings sank below Richard Nixon’s and Jimmy Carter’s worst. Yet history has been a kinder judge of Bush’s presidency. … on Nov. 3, 2008, [John] McCain conceded defeat to Mark Warner, the former Governor of Virginia…. To most Americans, the key issue in 2008 was … “the economy, stupid.” …. The Chinese stock-market crash sent a shock wave through the entire Asian economy. … Output collapsed. Unemployment soared. The Chinese banking system, which had never been entirely free of corruption, imploded.”

 

The Countdown to a Meltdown, James Fallow

The article appeared in June issue of The Atlantic magazine as a look back from two election cycles later (2016).

Predictions: An independent will win the White House in 2016. “But by dying when he did, at eighty-two, [Fidel Castro became] the “October surprise” of the 2008 campaign. … The fourth—and worst—world oil shock started [in 2008]. Our [unnamed] forty-fourth president seemed actually to welcome being universally known as “the Preacher.”" There came a market crash in 2009-2010. “Toyota’s acquisition of General Motors and Ford, in 2012, had a similar inevitability. … Political pros had always assumed that America’s first black president would be a Republican and a soldier, and they were right. He just didn’t turn out to be Colin Powell. … The Historic Campus of our best-known university, Harvard, is still prestigious worldwide. But its role is increasingly that of the theme park, like Oxford or Heidelberg, while the most ambitious students compete for fellowships at the Har-Bai and Har-Bei campuses in Mumbai and Beijing.”

 

Apocalypse Later: A Futurologist Looks Back at 2008, John Feffer 

The article appeared on August 21, 2008 at TomDispatch.com, as a nostalgic, apologetic look back from 2016.

Predictions: “[We thought] the new team in Washington … would close down Guantanamo and reverse the U.S. position on torture. They would begin the long process of withdrawing troops from Iraq. They would repeal the tax cuts for the wealthy and renegotiate the free trade agreements, and launch an Apollo-style program to develop alternative energies….  As it turned out, we were all wrong. But they came close enough. We finally signed the Kyoto agreement. The new administration made a big deal about it. The president gave the pen to Al Gore, who said that it meant more to him than the Nobel Prize and the Oscar combined.”

 

The Age of Mammals: Looking Back on the First Quarter of the Twenty-First Century, Rebecca Solnit

Ms. Solnit writes this apocalyptic future of 2026 in the Republic of San Francisco as the year-end summary for Tomdispatch in 2006.

Predictions:  “By the time the Republican Party itself split in 2012 into two adversarial wings dubbed the Fundament party and the Conservatives, the American Empire was dismantling itself. Of course, the United States still nominally exists — we’ll pay a bow to it this year at the Decolonization Day fireworks on July 4 — but it is a largely symbolic entity, like the British Royal Family was for a century before its dissolution in 2020. … Every schoolchild now knows the Old Map/New Map system and can recite the lands that vanished: half the Netherlands, much of Bangladesh, the Amazon Delta, the New Orleans and Shanghai lowlands. …. former President Bush the Younger, extradited from Paraguay [was] found guilty [for war crimes] in 2013.”

 

 

Tomorrow’s world war today, Niall Ferguson

The second of three Ferguson articles on the list. Although not a futurist (and he himself hates futurists), Mr. Ferguson shared his MidEast views for 2007-11 in this January 16, 2006 article in LA Times. 

Predictions: “More than two-fifths of the population of Iran had been aged 14 or younger in 1995. This was the generation that was ready to fight in 2007. Tehran had a nuclear missile pointed at Tel Aviv. … The devastating thermonuclear exchange of August 2007 represented not only the failure of diplomacy; … the true significance of the 2007-11 war was to vindicate the Bush administration’s principle of preemption. For, if that principle had only been adhered to in 2006, Iran’s nuclear aspirations might have been thwarted at minimal cost. And then – hard though it is to imagine now – the Great Gulf War might never have happened.” Mr. Ferguson later defended his fiery article with an article equally controversial: One strike, Iran could be out. 

 

 

 

An imaginary retrospective of 2009, Niall Ferguson 

Niall Ferguson looks back from a year ahead (end of 2009)

Predictions: “Timothy Geithner, US Treasury secretary, requested an additional $300bn to provide further equity injections for Citigroup, Bank of America and the seven other big banks, just a week after imposing an agonising “mega-merger” on the automobile industry. … Japan was plunged back into the deflationary nightmare of the 1990s by yen appreciation and a collapse of consumer confidence.  Obama’s decision to fly to Tehran in June … produced a dramatic improvement in the Middle East region. Al-Qaeda’s bungled attempt to assassinate Obama – on the eve of Thanksgiving – only served to discredit radical Islamism and to reinforce Obama’s public image as “The One”.”  

Running Away from Revolutionary Road

Spoilers Alert: The latest movie from Sam Mendes is a little movie that could, but it is no American Beauty

Verdict: 7/10

There are a few things revolutionary about Revolutionary Road. It is about a couple living in the 1950s suburbia, who are united only by their defeated ambitions if by anything. Kate Winslet and Leonarod diCaprio in their first onscreen reunion since Titanic deliver powerful performances as April and Frank Wheeler. Into their life an array of character, including an insane mathematician John Givings, who provides the voice of conscience through his blunt observances and Mendes’ astute camera focuses. However, Givings’ voice was artificial, manufactured and reminiscent of Mendes’ earlier, more beautiful American Beauty.

From the first moment we met him, Frank Wheeler doesn’t have ambitions–he has ideas, whims and anti-ambitions. April, on the other hand, has a strong ambition to be an actress–an ambition perhaps tailored to her desires of escaping reality. Escapism is the prevailing mode in the movie–April wants to escape her suburban Stepford wife status; Frank wants to escape the conformity of the male-dominated workplace; all people in their surrounds try to find escapism somewhere or the other, whether it be in television, gossip about others, adultery or insanity.

April’s Great Escape plan to Paris, however, is not fueled by her love for the city life there, but by her unrealistic assumptions of life there, and by her desire to escape suburbia dead or alive. Frank also briefly shares this escapism, but after he managed to find another way to break the monotony of his office life (but not through adultery, the movie emphasizes), he finds his feet firmly on the ground of reality again.

The marriage of Frank and April is an example of the attraction of the polar opposites. However, when they began to live in two different worlds, the rift widens. Even Frank’s attempts to reforms the ways of  his citylife cannot heal the differences. In the end, to April, the child she is carrying becomes the fetters weighing her down. So she leaves by cutting those fetters loose, but not before leaving the scarlet letter of condemnation in her home, her prison.

To surmise, Revolutionary Road–not so-titled because the Wheelers are revolutionaries or they are traveling towards some cloud-cuckoo-land, but named after the road they reside–is a good movie. It is a big movie that explores a small facet of the 50s suburbia, before the woman liberation movement that switched gender roles between Kevin Spacey’s and Annette Benning’s characters in American Beauty. Despite engaging acting, the movie lacks certain elements, foists some onto the viewers (through John Givings) and overuses sex and running away as physical forms of escape.

The final scenes of other couples reminiscing the Wheelers serve as a testament to the fact that the rifts exist in all couples and that there are things even couples shouldn’t talk to each other about–their escapisms, for instance. Yes, that may be the reason we ourselves go to movies to escape too, but it is now almost cliched to see the movie couples trying to escape their two-dimensional confines too. If there is a lasting moral to Revolutionary Road, it is that by running away, we are no closer to our ambitions, aspirations and even destinies.

An Evening With A Tricky Dick

No, I didn’t see Nixon, but Musharraf was his natural successor. However, Stanford University’s hosting of former Pakistani President was not as eventful as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s appearance in Columbia last year.

Magnanimity. The word sounds extremely ironic coming from General Pervez Musharraf—the former President of Pakistan—who displayed little of that in his eight year Presidency. However, magnanimity (on part of India and the international community) is exactly what Mr. Musharraf advocated to solve the recent crisis between India and Pakistan who arose form the Bombay terrorist attacks last month.

Mr. Pervez Musharraf gave a talk and a Q&A session to a packed Memorial Auditorium in Stanford University on his lecture tour on the United States. It is not an extraordinary event; many heads of state do that after they left the office to earn extra cash and to rehabilitate their popularity. (Note to President Bush: don’t do that, unless you want more shoes.) Surprisingly, Mr. Musharraf’s popularity also grew after his resignation last year, partially due to the economic rebound Pakistan witnessed under his rule and to even worse corruption levels in the government that succeeded him.

This polarizing attitude is reflected inside the Memorial Auditorium today. Musharraf said as little as possible (information-wise) in his own talk to the crowd, but the candid Q&A session was wildly received with both boos and cheers by one of the rowdiest audience I have ever seen in an academic setting. The first question-cum-accusation of an Indian student who listed Musharraf’s undemocratic acts starting from his coup d’etat was well-received; so was Musharraf’s strongman reply that he can go back to the podium and justify every single one of those accusations.

The mainstream media also reports this event: here and here. I see however from a totally different perspective. The event is just the reflection of the politics at its worst; Musharraf is a prime example of two classic adages: “Absolute power corrupts absolutely” and “Desperate times call for desperate measures.” Today, he talked about the global community’s shared commitments to defeat extremism and terrorism, but also defended his Pakistan’s questionable tactics in pursuing those commitments, by underlining the differences between strategies and tactics. However, it seemed Mr. Musharraf’s sole strategy was to remain in power and he no doubt used all tactics in the book.

Last year, A.Q. Khan—the Pakistani scientist accused of selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and DPRK—gave an interview to ABC News saying he had been made a scapegoat by Musharraf and his government to cover up the government’s own involvement in the issue. In this case of he says, she says, Musharraf apparently didn’t have much to say—he defended his detaining (without access even to the Western intelligent services) and somewhat contradictory pardon of A.Q. Khan by using that magic word: “sensitivity”.

On Afghanistan and Taliban, Mr. Musharraf is quick to admit failures but even quicker to point fingers at the West, which abandoned the region after the Cold War ended. Maybe Mr. Musharraf’s statement that CIA/Charlie Wilson’s War was the last nail in the Soviet Union’s coffin is correct, but the West’s sanctions on the Pakistan (which Mr. Musharraf dated to the end of the Cold War) didn’t occurred until Pakistan started pursuing its nuclear ambitions eight years later.

During the heated Q&A session, Musharraf stated he has constitutional authority to sack of the Chief Justice (although he didn’t elaborate on the justification) and that he didn’t consult the legislature because of a conflict of interest between the legislature and the judiciary. He also blamed the bad press he and Pakistan has been receiving to ‘aspersions’ which became an overused word by the end of the talk. He skillfully treaded around the controversial issues of misappropriated U.S. anti-terror assistance funds (by noting Pakistan only received a few billion, as opposed to many billions of aid) and of National Reconciliation Ordinance, which granted amnesty to politicos accused of various crimes which ranged from corruption to terrorism (by taking a shelter behind his empty facade of democracy).

By the end of the talk, Mr. Musharraf’s talk has become nothing but a vacillating effort to redeem his presidency. Whether he was talking about his control over military or Kashmiri crisis or his deportations of Al-Qaeda and Pakistanis to U.S. torture camps, he glorified himself and shifted the blame to the others (not unlike a certain U.S. president a generation before). In his main talk, Mr. Musharraf metaphorically pointed out the tree of terrorism, its branches and ramifications and repeatedly, ad nauseum, emphasized its roots being more political. Yes, I partially agree. Maybe politicians like Musharraf are the root of many problems.

The Tale of Two Webs

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, ending a symbolic ornament of the Cold War, the conflict that staked paranoia into the hearts of the people on the both sides of the wall. It has been twenty years since that chilly November morning, but since then, more walls has been created in Russia and China-the invisible ones that are far more segregative and deadlier than the Berlin Wall.

The walls are of course those instituted on the internet. It is true that a conglomerate can never monopolize a market like internet. That is the reason that we believe in little search engines that could like cuil. That explains why Orkut is phenomenal in India and Brazil and Friendster is in Asia in this age of Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. However, in nowhere is this gap more prominent than in Russia, where they apparently have an entirely different internet structure.

A photoshop contest winner in Cracked.com asked us to harken back to the past, and ponder about the future

The Russians have Yandex, their own search engine. They have moiKrug.ru-the Russian equivalent of Linkedln. Instead of Facebook, they use vkontakte.ru, which copycats the former’s design. Instead of youtube, they have another clone, rutube.ru. This self-imposed segregation creates a internet society similar yet different from the West in Russia, something  a Soviet Russia which invented this own version of MonopolyTM will probably revel.

However, it is bad for the outside world. Through social networking, one can have friends from Estonia, New Zealand, Peru, Germany, and South Africa but it is less likely to get one from Russia because they have their own social spheres, which hinders communication and spreading information-the values which can make the world a safer, better place in this new century.

Russians may not be deliberately disassociating from the Western networks, but China actually is, on the other hand. Taking lessons from glasnost and perestroika, China has learnt to monitor the websites,  to control the information available, and to change history itself. To use a recently popular buzzword, China imposed ‘pay to play’ policy on Google and Yahoo! to comply with its ideological whims. And when even the prestigious organizations like the IOC yield to China, and when social networking got filtered (MySpace launched squeaky clean, non-political China version), you know it is bad times.

Nonetheless, the specter of internet is haunting China and Russia. We have seen the advance of Web 2.0-an age where everyone contributes to the community. It is time to usher in the era of Web 3.0-an age where everyone is spurred into an action, whether it may be environmental, social or political. The era has already begun with grassroot internet movement for Obama presidential campaign, and has the precedent in 2001’s ousting of Philippine President Joseph Estrada through a riot coordinated through text messaging.

In 1989, China’s democracy movement was crashed in the bloody square of Tienanmen [see China's efforts to change that history here] when the Politburo called in the troops from the far away provinces to quash the revolt. Imagine an era when the troops from afar feel equally compassionate and caring towards the revolting students. It is an era where globalization has bridged the gaps and information has spread its wings. It will be the era of Web 3.0-the era in which we truly transcends meager national boundaries to network and communicate, the era in which the web-coordinated governed supplants their puppet masters. It is an era I am looking forward to; it is an era we can achieve in our watch. Let a billion free netizens bloom.

2008–the Year in Review

Pessimism is in the air-and it is contagious too. A few weeks before, during a conversation on the global financial meltdown, I assured my friends that if we are to harken back to 2008 in three years’ time, we will definitely laugh at our Cassandra-like pessimism and anxieties mainly with. They were not convinced–neither was I.

This was indeed a terrible year for the establishment and the politicians who inhibit it, a year when gossip columns shifted from covering celebrity DUIs to Spitzer’s hypocrisy, baby Edwards and  Blagojevich’s caveat emptor. In America’s longest election season, Hilary Clinton did everything (3AM phone-calls, Rev. Wright); Rudi Giulani nothing. Both lost. So did that not-so-maverick-y senator, whose campaign only proved that he himself was not so above partisan mudslinging. McCain threw his experience card away by nominating a folksy, yet inexperienced, Alaskan Governor who has strange ideas for naming kids, and even stranger ones on foreign policy.

On her way to become a hobgoblin for liberal media, Sarah Palin stopped only to shop and wink, but even her spending couldn’t stop Wall Street-and McCain’s campaign-from crashing. The Feds looked the other way as the Lehman Brothers’ stocks plummeted to a point where its headquarters came to worth more than the entire company. On the other hand, it helped AIG, which celebrated the bailout by throwing a lavish staff party. Automakers flew to Washington to proclaim their confidence in American cars. In the first half of the year, the oil prices increased from 100$ to 150$ before dropping precipitous in the second half. Apple learnt its five billion dollars lesson on the dangers of depending on one person when a internet rumor sleazed Steve Jobs’ health.

Change is also in the air in New Zealand where longtime Prime Minister Helen Clark got replaced by a stockbroker-New Zealand is apparently where the stockbrokers thrive after getting fired from the Lehman Brothers. Meanwhile, Republican politician comes in a close second to stockbroker on the jobs being cut list. Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC), notorious as Senator No for his isolationist policies, died. His successor to the curmudgeon title, Ted Stevens (R-AK), whose accomplishment so far has been calling internet a series of tubes, narrowly lost a senate race which, had he won, would have made him the first felon (nay, the first felon who got caught) in the Senate. The democrats dreamt of a filibuster-proof senate, but Joe Lieberman nightmare still hovered over their heads.

China celebrated its big coming out Olympics with virtual fireworks, lip-synching and by taking child-labor to the next step. While the international media is trying to downplay China’s gold medal count with Michael Phelps’ eight golds, Russia rolled her tanks into Georgia. Nicholas Sarkozy, found time to negotiate Russo-Georgian ceasefire while also managing a supermodel wife and YSL’s funeral.

In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi is back along with his gaffes: he called Barack Obama ’sun-tanned’. South Africa lost its AIDS conspiracy theories and its President, his seat. Meanwhile, Mbeki’s failed power-sharing talks kept Robert Mugabe in power in neighboring Zimbabwe.

Like Giuliani with early primaries and Mugabe with cholera, Burma’s junta blithely ignored a cyclone that devastated the nation’s agribusinesses. In neighboring Thailand, one prime minister got kicked out for appearing in a cooking channel and prime ministers changed faster than the sentries in the royal palace. Mortgage crisis hits Nepal as its king got evicted.

Putin stepped down in Russia but the rest of the world crowned him the new “Tsar”. Ahmedinajed visited Venezuela to pledge millions for an “anti-imperialistic” funds while Iran is witnessing its greatest economic crisis. The “Dear Leader” of North Korea disappeared while doctored photographs replaced him.

Pervez Musharraf resigned in Pakistan. Zardari Khan (or as the rest of the world calls him, Mr. Bhutto) succeeded him. So far, his only accomplishment has been getting a fatwa (because he called Sarah Palin ‘gorgeous’).  The U.S. Has increased its forays into Pakistan to hunt terrorists who were meanwhile creating havoc and mayhem in Delhi.

However, it would be unjust to label 2008 as the year when optimism ended. The change is in the air, from New Zealand to Pakistan to France, where Greenpeace put Sarkozy’s pictures on the famous Obama poster which was originally created by an underground artist. Yes, change and hope-the very campaign slogans of Barack Obama-are in the air. These words which carried him to the White House to become the first African American President of the United States were proof positives that the overrated tradition of optimism is still alive and kicking. Unfortunately, Americans felt equally enthusiastic and optimistic the same eight years ago when another prolonged election season ended at the Supreme Court. Once again, history has been a harsher judge.

The Blessing in Disguise

Financial crises are usually seen as blessings in disguise because they have the power change the course of history, mostly for the better. However, if the current crisis is a blessing in disguise, then it is in a very good disguise too. Low-income and middle-income family will suffer terribly; many will eventually lose their jobs. The pyramid schemes will be exposed. Moreover, in an age of globalization, there won’t be any miracle rescue packages nor economic Marshall plans. So, the bottomline is everyone must help oneself but have to bailout everyone else too. However, the worst of this maelstrom has passed us. A disastrous collapse of the Wall Street has been averted, so we can look ahead finally.

The financial crisis has already brought a blessing to Washington D.C.–the Obama administration. The crisis not only ended deficit ridden Republican Administration at its eighth year, it also revealed that two decades of Greenspan Chairmanship at the Federal Reserve—an undying legacy of Reagan’s  Republican Revolution—did more harm than good to the American economy.

Whatever you may think about Greenspan, the maestro presided over an unprecedented economic boom and propelled American consumerism into the frontiers. Today, Americans consume 13 Trillion dollars of goods, most of them produced in the developing world. This mean that when American market is in turmoil, the entire world will suffer. China—optimistically looked upon as a global survivor—can’t replace America when it is saving a lot for future economic growth/investment (which is exactly what Greenspan Fed dissuaded in the U.S.) and only consuming one-tenth of what Americans are consuming.

So, the positive externality is that America foreign dependence is likely to go down as well. Chinese and Saudi Arabian investors have been gobbling up the U.S. real estate and investment markets in past few years. When the crisis came, the sheiks and communist cadres knew little, cared little and did little. The Obama administration will impose protectionist measures (which I don’t agree) but the silver lining will be that the Congress may now consider the foreign investments with increased wariness.

American unemployment is going up, but Mr. Obama has promised three million jobs—it is clear that he have a master plan to revitalize America. After the WWII, the unemployed masses found their salvation in FHA’s development loans for suburbias. Mr. Obama should direct a similar national initiative to reform mass-transport infrastructure into a system akin to those in Europe. An affordable mass-transit and GPS/Satellite roadpricing are two of many environmentally-friendly ventures American government can do with a large unemployed workforce.

Along the same lines, the congress should use the auto-bailout plans to enforce the Big Three automakers to produce the cars energy-efficient and market-compatible with foreign imported cars like Toyota Prius. During the last regulations on automakers under Nixon-Ford-Carter administrations, the American fuel efficiency nearly doubled—it is now time to do it again.

The global economies usually have boom-and-bust cycles nearly every decade, but this 2008 one is pretty big. It is the big one that they predicted since 1987. Yet, we were hit hard not because of warnings are ignored but also because we believed, we were led to believe, we wanted to believe—and we even hoped and prayed—this prosperity (which is tenuously built on the ever-expending gap between the rich and the poor and the exploitation of labor in the developing world) will last forever and that mortgage prices and demand will go up forever. In our past, there had been many boom-bust cycles, and in our future, there will be more, but this one—mainly due to the media coverage it receives in increasingly tech-savvy world—will serve as a cautionary tale for a few generations to come.

Or will it?

I don’ approve of the following, but I thought these quotes are illuminating and reflective of a culture not far historical:

Thomas Jefferson on Immigration:

“They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty. These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their number, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass. [Notes on Virginia]

….Uncle Thomas had pretty strong advice on racism, too…

“The improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life….. [N]ature has given to our black brethren talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence both in Africa and America. I can add with truth that nobody wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body and mind to what it ought to be as fast as the imbecility of their present existence….[U]nfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people. [Notes on Virginia]

2009: Our Odyssey, Eight Years On

2001: A Space Odyssey—a masterpiece, a chaos, a visual symphony, an incomprehensible mess. Call it what you may, but it remains one of the most impressive and enduring films of all time. It has been forty years since its direction and eight years since the events in the movie but how far have we traveled toward the self-fulfilling man-child prophecy?

After reading an obituary for the writer Arthur C. Clarke, I re-watched the movie 2001: The Space Odyssey last week. It has been exactly forty years since Stanley Kubrick directed it—visually mesmerizing and deafeningly silent epic, a film ahead of its time, an IMAX experience before IMAXs are even conceptualized.

But how ahead of time is the technology in 2001? There are those who lament that we haven’t reach that stage of space travel portrayed in the movie. True, we don’t have Lunar Hiltons, manned missions to Jupiter. The commercial space travel is also non-existent—despite Sir Richard Branson’s projects and a couple of trips the Russians offered to celebrities and tycoons for millions of dollars. We don’t have faux gravity or grip shoes. Not that we need them anyway.

However, on another level—that of computers—we have relocated HAL into dustbin of history. In the movie, it is said that HAL was built in 1992, and it was still being used in 2001—something utterly unimaginable in an age where even laptops are updated at least biannually. Speech recognition and motion tracking—the features that once made HAL9000 a dangerous foe—now assist the disabled, and assume their place at bathroom taps and urinals.

Nonetheless, HAL’s influence on popular culture is more indelible. Four decades after its ‘mind’ was gone, HAL is still alive and kicking, as evidenced in Pixar’s modern space opera WALL-E. When they unveiled a gizmo with an all-purpose circular dial, Apple invoked the line, “Open the pod bay doors.” HAL’s omnipresent eye—the symbol of a technological Big Brother—has appropriately came to represent Web 2.0, the epoch in which everyone is watching and everyone is being watched.

The age of Web 2.0 rendered Clarkian realm somewhat obsolete. Skype (and other innumerable services) now provide a better communication network than those Dave Bowman had in 2001. Phones and other gadgets have become smaller. Internet may now provide Dave with a quicker online shopping  and better tracking system.

But one question still casts a big shadow: have we outgrown our world? That seems to be the question Kubrick asked and we mused at the end of 2001. With unplugging of HAL, Dave Bowman broke human dependence on machines—a dependence that began with the arrival of the monolith at the dawn—and he therefore transcended limitations, expectations, dimensions and even rationality and order. It was a pivotal moment; like its namesake myth of Odysseus, the movie ends ambiguously: is it the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?

My answer to “Have we outgrown our world?” is no. We haven’t—we shrank it with mercantilism, imperialism, capitalism and globalization, we withered it with radicalism, bigotry, war and pollution, but we haven’t outgrown it. We won’t be able to until we throw off the yoke weighed down on our shoulders by our establishments—centuries of religion, culture, tradition, faith and even nature.

In Homer’s epic, Odysseus longed to return to Ithaca, and return he did—only to learn that he must leave Ithaca again to one final greatest adventure. For millennia, we paid too close an attention to our egocentric Ithacas—our lifestyles, our one-way cultures, our values, our prejudices and our blind faith—to embark on that final great adventure. It is now time to do so. HAL, open the pod bay doors.

Small Things That Changed History

11. Thirst

The Mayflower landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620 because the ship ran out of beer. In August 1620, the Pilgrims left Southampton, England on two ships the Speedwell and the Mayflower. Later, the former sprang a leak and the pilgrims consolidated themselves on the Mayflower. After 64 days, on November 9, 1620, the Mayflower sighted Cape Cod. Their patent from the Virginia Company of London authorized them to establish a plantation between 38 and 41 degrees north latitude but Cape Cod was just north of 42 degrees. However, the terrible weather and depleting supply of beer dissuaded the pilgrims from traveling southwards.  The colonists headed to a nearby shelter, then called “Thievish Harbor,” and settled there.

10. A sneeze

According to some historians the massacre of the boulevards after the coup d’état of Napoleon III   resulted from a mistaken command. Napoleon III is said to have been suffering from a severe cold, and to have exclaimed “Ma sacré toux!“—”My wretched cough”—which was misinterpreted by a zealous officer as “Massacrez tous,” or “Kill everybody.” There were some 1,200 prisoners of war incarcerated by the State, and they too were accordingly killed.

9. A comma

The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reads: A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed. Or does it? The Library of Congress’ ratified version reads thus, but the document held in the National Archives has two additional and unusual commas, one between “Militia” and “being” and another between “Arms” and “shall” –thus syntactically relating “A well regulated Militia” to “shall not be infringed”. Whether this mean the goal of the Amendment is to protect the militia against federal interference is the million-dollar question asked by the Constitutional scholars since, leading to many heated debates and even many more heated criminal court cases.
Trivia: Wife of Russian Tsar Alexander III, Princess Dagmar of Denmark once changed a place of a comma and saved a life. Her husband personally wrote the death sentences with the following words: “Pardon impossible, to be sent to Siberia.” The princess changed the sentence to “Pardon, impossible to be sent to Siberia.”

8. A nail

When Richard was preparing for a war at Bosworth Field in 1485 with Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, he sent a groom to make sure his favourite horse was ready. The groom asked the blacksmith to shoe the horse quickly with the available materials. After he had fastened three shoes, the blacksmith found he did not have enough nails for the fourth. The impatient groom took the horse anyway. However, in the thick of the battle, as Richard charged to prevent some of his men breaking line and  falling back, one of the horse’s shoes flew off. The horse stumbled and fell, and Richard was thrown to the ground and the horse galloped away. As Henry’s troops closing around him, Richard shouted futilely: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”– the lines since  immortalized by Shakespeare. But there would be no horse for him, and Richard perished on the Bosworth Field.

7. Bad Design

In 2000, Florida voters who were confused by Palm Beach County’s butterfly ballot cost Al Gore the presidency. Unlike regular ballots, the butterfly ballot uses two pages to put the presidential candidates’ name so that the county’s many elderly voters can read the print size. However the contention came when many  voters assumed that Gore and Bush are the first two choices as Florida law requires. Instead, they found Buchanan, on the opposite page, between them. In nearly 7,000 votes, voters marked more than one name on the county’s now-infamous “butterfly ballot,”–the number which is more than 10 times the winning margin George Bush received to claim Florida’s 25 electoral votes and the White House.

6. A Photo-Op

During 1988 elections in the U.S., the Republican nominee George H. W. Bush criticized the Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis for his liberal positions, especially his ’softness’ on defense policy. Dukakis has also been under fire  for his vocal criticism of “Star Wars” defense initiative.  To refute the facts that he was soft on defense, Dukakis orchestrated what would become the key image of his campaign—a publicity shoot that went terribly wrong. In September 1988, he visited the General Dynamics plant in Michigan to take part in a photo op in an M1 Abrams tank. Dukakis’ ridiculous “tank moment” was used in television ads by the Bush campaign, as evidence that Dukakis would not make a good commander-in-chief, and “Dukakis in the tank” remains shorthand for backfired public relations outings. Bush handily beat Dukakis in the election.

5.  Haemorrhoids (Piles)

On the morning of the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon was too exhausted and distracted by pain from his haemorrhoids to focus or to ride out. Two days earlier, his doctors had lost the leeches used to relieve the pain of his piles and accidentally overdosed him with laudanum, from whose ill-effects he was still suffering on the morning of the battle. Napoleon rescheduled launching his assault, originally planned for 6am, to 9am and then again to midday. Marshal Ney took command in Napoleon’s absence and made some poor decisions that altered the battle’s outcome.

4. A stamp

In the late 1800s, the United States government negotiated with Nicaraguan President Jose Santos Zelaya to build a canal through Nicaragua. President McKinley nearly signed the authorization to build Nicaragua Canal before he was assassinated. However, one Philipe Bunau-Varilla was lobbying Congress to suppport a French company constructing a similar canal across Panama. In the spring of 1902, Mt. Momotombo, a volcano in Nicaragua, erupted. Bunau-Varilla sent a copy of Nicaraguan stamp depicitng the volcano to all 45 U.S. Senators, with a note saying the menacing volcano would threaten the canal route. Although the volcano is far away from the planned route, the Senate voted in the favor of the Panama route.

3. A boardgame

During World War II, the British secret service smuggled escape kits to prisoners of war inside Germany through monopoly boxes. The secret service asked the British manufacturer of Monopoly, John Waddington Ltd. , to manufacture a “special edition” Monopoly set. The manufacturing was done is a secret room in the factory, where small niches in the games’ cardboard boxes were carved. Inside the playing pieces, metal files, magnetic compasses, and maps made of silk were included. Real money was substituted in the place of monopoly money. Departing allied soldiers and pilots were told that if they were captured they should look out for the special editions, identified by a red dot in the Free Parking space. By the end of the war, it’s estimated that more than 35,000 Allied POWs had escaped from German prison camps.

2. A key

Just before HMS Titanic’s departure from England in April 1912, Second Officer David Blair was removed from the ship’s roster. In the haste of being replaced, Blair failed to pass to his replacement the key to the crow’s nest locker, which held the binoculars. After the disaster, one of the surviving lookouts, Fred Fleet, giving evidence to the US inquiry, confirmed that they did not have any binoculars. Had they done so, he testified, they could have seen the iceberg earlier. When the inquiry chairman asked, “How much earlier?” the lookout replied, “Well, enough to get out of the way.” The key was later auctioned off.

1. A Translation

At the end of the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, the Allies issued an ultimatum demanding the unconditional surrender of Japan. Although she was nearing the breaking point, Japan wanted to negotiate for peace, rather than to unconditionally surrender. So, the Japanese Council of War issued a press statement saying it offer “no comment” on the ultimatum. The Japanese word used – mokusatsu – has several meaning: to ignore or to refrain from comment, its literally meaning being ‘to kill by silence’. The Japanese and American interpreters used “ignore”. The national pride and diplomacy prevented the Council of War from recanting the statement or correcting it. With the Japanese ‘refusal’ in mind, the Americans continued to fight in the Pacific until two atom bombs were dropped in August 1945 and Japan unconditionally surrendered.