The question skews the interests of (for-profit) companies in the private sector. Alas, their complaint has a whiff of a desire for an easy, free rescue by the U.S. government as the industry hopes to surf the recent tides of “resource nationalism”. Surely the government can rescue Silicon Valley from its follies, since the Fed rescued Wall Street from its foolish deals. After all, both made fortunes from hype: one from irresponsible lending hype and the other from the Y2K bug. Never mind that the market value of Microsoft is now twice the value of Citigroup, the American banking giant!

The essential fact remains that such materials and the so-called intellectual property rights are privately owned, produced and sold with a fundamental “design flaw” of easy duplication that easily crosses national borders and is effortlessly duplicated on Main Street USA, in a Bangkok backstreet, or swapped over the Internet with one side being 12 time zones away from the other. These inventions have superseded the mindset of laws and international conventions enacted a long time ago, before Microsoft, Google and iPods gained currency. The IT sector has created a modern “give it away” business model, unheard of a few decades ago. These private companies operate on a worldwide basis and they, not their home governments, are best placed to challenge illegal practices in local (foreign) courts. If such jurisdictions are lucrative for their sales and marketing operations, they cannot run back to the U.S. government for cover and enforcement muscle, where those unresponsive “foreign” legal systems happen to be the source of other advantages gained by the U.S. economy. It can all be negotiated into a new legal structure, but chances are that other “shocking” findings (such as cheap or unsafe labor practices) will come up in any global rounds of fair trade negotiations. And what will be the impact on the price of goods that eventually end up at Wal-Mart, and the resulting inflation? Surely the U.S. Trade Representative knows the answer to that one.

Continue »

First, a few thoughts on the wording of this question: The modern vocabulary in use is probably the most noticeable, and dangerously undiplomatic, of all. Lately, the word “threat” and off-the-cuff sounding of false alarms is used in a faux, if not disingenuous, debate. Those who cannot see the light insist on turning up the heat, quick to dispense irresponsible labels.

Continue »

I wonder which Israel we ought to consider for the fact that there are several ideas (imagined or in some stage of conception) all lumped into an opaque State of Israel and presented as the promised land of level-headedness and peace for all Jews mentioned in Siddur, the Jewish book of prayers and rites of practice. In reality, however, it is a place for experiments and fantasies practiced by a militant Jewish minority in some sort of a trial and error scheme. The ideal of peace and tranquility has remained elusive for all 60 years of the promised nation-state since a group, self-defined as Zionists, set out to form a Jewish refuge. In reality, it has been six decades of a state of siege and the presumed mindset of war, where all adults are afraid of the draft for war duty and of bloodshed the next day. Simply put, the State of Israel has served as an arena for bloodshed of the same Jews that were promised peace. The enigma of militants was truly exposed when a founding member of the Zionist movement, Yitzhak Rabin, was killed for his decision to change course and pursue real peace. The militants celebrated by ripping up a negotiated peace deal and blockading of their peace partners.

Continue »