Category — Business

Even though the product it advertises is hardly better than a toilet roll, the new ad campaign for The Times of India hits the spot quite well!

For those who haven’t seen it yet, it shows the newspaper publishing the news of the selection of Prakash Mirajkar (aka Pakya) in the hockey team. The ad starts with a celebratory mood amongst Pakya’s friends… who reach his home where his parents come to know of this good news. The happy couple are excited and the mother takes the copy of the newspaper to Pakya’s grandfather. Grandpa reads the news and suddenly nostalgia overcomes him as he goes up to the attic/store-room where he fishes out an old sepia-tinted copy of TOI. The headline on this copy breaks the news of his exclusion from the hockey camp. The old man slides the current newspaper with the good news, on top of the old one… and breaks out into a silent dance… while the impromptu music played by the celebrating crowd plays outside… in the background.

As far as newspapers go… this ad campaign, handled excellently by JWT, conveys the timelessness and loyalty that TOI wants to associate with itself and its readers. Therefore, it is such a pity that the product being advertised is TOI!!

Hewlett-Packard has ousted Carly Fiorina, its Chairman and CEO. She had always been criticized for pushing through HP’s merger with Compaq.

Fiorina, who joined HP as CEO in 1999, became a lightning rod for criticism from investors and some in the Silicon Valley establishment for pushing through the 2002 merger with rival PC maker Compaq.

Critics, including family members of HP founders William Hewlett and David Packard, argued that the merger diluted the value of HP’s crown jewel, its profitable printer and imaging business.

[source: Reuters]

The disillusionment within the company and its investors was such that immediately after the announcement of Fiorina’s ouster, HP’s stock jumped up 10 percent!!

Incidentally, Carly Fiorina was considered to be the most powerful businesswoman in the world (and 10th most powerful woman) in 2004 by Forbes.com.

As an aside, the same Forbes.com considered Sonia Gandhi to be the 3^rd most powerful woman in the world in 2004!!

Jagdish Tytler, a minister in charge of a pretty superfluous ministry (he’s the minister for overseas Indians) says, in an interview to rediff.com, that his ministry will listen to Indians abroad.

By all means! … But I’d much rather prefer it if his government listens to Indians within the country first… instead of turning its ears only towards the Left!

And I couldn’t help but chuckle when the minister was asked which countries he had covered in his extensive foreign jaunts and he started off by mentioning Brussels!! :-P

Sucheta Dalal alerts us to the Government’s silent intrusion into the privacy of honest tax-paying citizens.

The average honest tax payer, especially the non-salaried class would have ordinarily welcomed this effort to flush out chronic tax evaders, except that the rot in the regulatory and enforcement machinery is deep that these measures are viewed with extreme cynicism and even anger.

Each of these actions only allow government agencies to intrude a little more into the lives or ordinary citizens. Confidential information about their assets and spending habits will now filter through porous government departments from a variety of different sources.

Time to sit up and take notice!!

John Perkins is an ‘Economic Hit Man’. His job is simple (well, not really). When the US faces any economic threat, he is called upon to do a job that’s the financial equivalent of carrying out a ‘hit’ on whoever or whatever threatens the economy. In his own words, “It’s almost James Bondish…”

John Perkins has written a book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man in which he talks about how his job involved cheating poorer countries out of trillions of dollars in turn helping build up the American economy. I just came across his interview via a post on Metafilter.

Perkins says in his interview…

Basically what we were trained to do and what our job is to do is to build up the American empire. To bring — to create situations where as many resources as possible flow into this country, to our corporations, and our government, and in fact we’ve been very successful. We’ve built the largest empire in the history of the world. It’s been done over the last 50 years since World War II with very little military might, actually. It’s only in rare instances like Iraq where the military comes in as a last resort. This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men. I was very much a part of that.

As blunt as it gets, isn’t it?! It gets better still…

Well, the company I worked for was a company named Chas. T. Main in Boston, Massachusetts. We were about 2,000 employees, and I became its chief economist. I ended up having fifty people working for me. But my real job was deal-making. It was giving loans to other countries, huge loans, much bigger than they could possibly repay. One of the conditions of the loan–let’s say a $1 billion to a country like Indonesia or Ecuador–and this country would then have to give ninety percent of that loan back to a U.S. company, or U.S. companies, to build the infrastructure–a Halliburton or a Bechtel. These were big ones. Those companies would then go in and build an electrical system or ports or highways, and these would basically serve just a few of the very wealthiest families in those countries. The poor people in those countries would be stuck ultimately with this amazing debt that they couldn’t possibly repay. A country today like Ecuador owes over fifty percent of its national budget just to pay down its debt. And it really can’t do it. So, we literally have them over a barrel.

Later in the interview Perkins discloses why US invaded Iraq…

We knew Saudi Arabia was the key to dropping our dependency, or to controlling the situation. And we worked out this deal whereby the Royal House of Saud agreed to send most of their petro-dollars back to the United States and invest them in U.S. government securities. The Treasury Department would use the interest from these securities to hire U.S. companies to build Saudi Arabia–new cities, new infrastructure–which we’ve done. And the House of Saud would agree to maintain the price of oil within acceptable limits to us, which they’ve done all of these years, and we would agree to keep the House of Saud in power as long as they did this, which we’ve done, which is one of the reasons we went to war with Iraq in the first place. And in Iraq we tried to implement the same policy that was so successful in Saudi Arabia, but Saddam Hussein didn’t buy. When the economic hit men fail in this scenario, the next step is what we call the jackals. Jackals are C.I.A.-sanctioned people that come in and try to foment a coup or revolution. If that doesn’t work, they perform assassinations. or try to. In the case of Iraq, they weren’t able to get through to Saddam Hussein. He had — His bodyguards were too good. He had doubles. They couldn’t get through to him. So the third line of defense, if the economic hit men and the jackals fail, the next line of defense is our young men and women, who are sent in to die and kill, which is what we’ve obviously done in Iraq.

Hmmm… interesting! … So it WAS oil after all!! ;-)

Check out the rest of the interview… Perkins talks about how a Panamian president was assasinated after he sorta double-crossed one US corporation. It’s very Michael Mooresque! (which actually isn’t saying much!) :-P