absolutely alex’s adventures & times

Karma truly is a bitch.

Fresh after extorting $3 million in ransom money from the owners of the Saudi supertanker, Sirius Star, one of the Somali pirates involved in the nasty deed have reportedly drowned while running back to the lair from whence they came.

The boat carrying the drowned pirate and his associates capsized on the way home towards central Somalia. If the drowned pirate had not held on so tightly to the money, he might have lived to commit more heinous crimes. Guess the weight of the cash took him down. Three other pirates were reported to have lost their loot as the boat went down but escaped with their lives.

Some of the cash seems to have washed up onshore.

The group of high-seas robbers took the supertanker hostage in November, during a wave of high-profile piracy cases in the Gulf of Aden. The supertanker’s cargo was $100 million worth of oil when it was seized.

The international community is beefing up its defense against pirates, looking into how to cut down on the over 100 cases of piracy in the region in 2008 alone. In the meantime, this should serve a cautionary tale — crime doesn’t pay.

Billionaire extraordinaire Warren Buffett has spoken, and this time, he directs his wrath against the banking system and its greed.

Buffett called the banking meltdown “poetic justice” for bankers, their chickens coming home to roost for designing complex investments which are now haunting them and their companies’ bottomlines.

“It’s sort of a little poetic justice, in that the people that brewed this toxic Kool-Aid found themselves drinking a lot of it in the end,” he said in a corporate event in Toronto.

True, but Buffett has unfortunately overlooked two things – the evil bankers whom he derided would still have plenty of cash and get rescued despite their missteps, while ordinary folk who have done nothing wrong but save their earnings have been hard hit by the developments.

Witness the Federal Reserve’s bailout of the bad bets made precisely by the bankers vilified by Buffett. Interest rates have been cut aggressively by 1.25 percentage points in two successive steps last month, as the Federal Reserve got nervous at the extent of the damage to the housing market and the stock market. But these cuts are driven more by a panicky reaction to the falling markets than inflationary worries, a point that worries economists about the Fed’s handling of the economy.

And bankers don’t seem to lose the shirts off their backs when they develop sloppy investment instruments that falter badly, taking the economy down with them. These self-styled masters of the universe still get their hefty bonuses. And if they were fired, such as Merrill Lynch and Citigroup’s bosses, better yet – a cushy package ushers them out to continue playing their golf games. Or allows them to move on to start other dodgy hedge fund businesses. Or they might even be back at a different firm which would allow them to wreak more havoc in the very forgiving industry in which they operate.

Despite some spectacularly bad investments, banks still have many willing rescuers – witness eager sovereign funds like the Singapore government’s investment arm, Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, injecting $10 billion in funds into Swiss bank UBS, and Merrill Lynch given a second lease of life by selling $5 billion in new stock to another Singapore government investment arm, this time Temasek Holdings. The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority has also thrown $7.5 billion at Merrill, while the Chinese government’s investment company has bought a $5 billion stake in Morgan Stanley.

Meanwhile, ordinary folk are the ones left footing the bill – tougher credit, substantially lower interest rates, and the threat of a recession, which means possible job cuts.

So much as I think Buffett has often been a good Samaritan in the greed-fueled world of business and finance, giving away some 85 per cent of his Berkshire Hathaway stock worth over $40 billion to five foundations, his comments this time do not quite hit the mark.

But that is more that can be said of Google, whose ostensible motto is “don’t be evil”.

Google has been seeking to thwart the Microsoft-Yahoo tie-up after Microsoft’s unsolicited $44.7 billion bid for Yahoo.

Reasons it offers against the Microsoft-Yahoo merger include antitrust issues, this when Google already dominates the market overwhelmingly in internet search and online advertising.

Google had also placed calls to Yahoo to dissuade it from taking up Microsoft’s offer with offers of partnership between the two internet companies.

While all is fair in business, Google’s feelings of being threatened by the Microsoft-Yahoo merger has it acting disingenuously, going to the extent of it appealing to other companies like Time Warner to intervene with a counter offer to Yahoo and prevent a credible competition to it.

So while there isn’t much sympathy for Microsoft, Google’s actions does leave an unpleasant taste in the mouth and would only lose them credibility on being the team which is out to use technology to help others while differing from the bullying path that Microsoft has taken.

” . . . The plaintiff is not entitled to any relief whatsoever.”

Hallelujah! Thank goodness common sense has prevailed. There’s hope for the US justice system yet.

The DC Superior Court has dismissed the frivolous lawsuit brought by an administrative judge, Roy Pearson, against his neighborhood dry-cleaners, Korean immigrants, the Chungs.

Pearson had sued the Chungs for a whooping $54 million, all because they had misplaced his pair of pants. Better yet, Pearson has to pay the administrative costs for the Chungs.

Pearson may also have to pay the Chungs’ legal costs, which could cost him tens of thousands of dollars. At the same time, his job as an administrative judge is hanging on the line, after his case came to light and provoked an uproar by the public angry at his bullying and abuse of the justice system over a frivolous suit.

The sorry saga started two years ago, when Pearson brought a pair of pants to the Chungs for alterations and the Chungs initially misplaced. They were found later and the Chungs tried to return them to Pearson, but he claims that they were not his and accused them of defrauding him.

He rejected several attempts at settlement of sums from $3,000 to $12,000. Arguing that he did not receive service that qualified as “satisfaction guaranteed” as promised on the sign in the Chungs’ shop, he sued for the incredible (and much derided) amount. The exorbitant amount was based on the city’s fine for violation of consumer protection laws, at $1,500 a day. Also included in the sum was the car rental fees that Pearson calculated he would need to ferry his dry-cleaning to a dry-cleaner in a different area, mental anguish and attorney’s fees, even though he represented himself. The $54 million is a reduction of an original sum of $65 million he had asked for.

Pearson’s greed and excessive bullying behavior has captured world-wide attention and prompted calls for him to be disbarred.

He should be feeling pretty shitty about himself. The Chungs had said, post-verdict, that they were just relieved at winning the case and bore him no ill-will. They even said they would welcome him back as a customer. Are they nuts? After all this, Pearson should be banned from going to a dry-cleaner ever again!

Pearson could, of course, still appeal the verdict. However, it seems unlikely that he’d get anything, not only because of how ridiculous his suit is, but also due to the tide of public opinion against him. He only has himself to blame.

It had to happen sooner or later, and for China, it’s finally waking up to the ugly realities of the danger of its production methods, especially in the area of food and medication.

The past few months have exposed an embarrassing but chilling series of food and product safety neglect by China’s manufacturers. First there was the pet food recall in the US, when those made in China were found to contain melamine, and more recently, toothpaste that contained harmful substances was found in the US and a few Latin American countries.

The international headlines screaming the dangers of these products from China and their harm to the buying public’s health had finally shamed the Chinese government into doing something about its food and drug safety regulations as the authorities announced plans to introduce nationwide inspections.

Ambitions plans were also declared by the Chinese authorities, such as the establishment of a new food and drug safety guarantee system. It promised to have new controls on food and drug imports and exports and increase random testing on medicines by 2010. And the government planned to conduct safety checks on a large majority of food makers while its regulators would crack down on the sale of counterfeit drugs and medical devices.

It all sounds good on paper but with pervasive corruption and the vastness of China being the reality, it remains to be seen if the enforcement would be rigorous enough.

Sadly, China’s society is gripped by a relentless materialistic mentality. With communism’s erosion and the absence of religion as a guiding force, mammonism is more often than not the people’s inspiration.

Officials can be easily bought over with bribes, especially those outside of big cities, while greedy businessmen disregard health risks and have no qualms about unethical business practices and cutting corners to save costs and make a quick buck. Workers hired on the cheap are often too ignorant, afraid or weak to know better or resist when pressed into complicity and wrong-doing.

But more distressingly, deep down the Chinese authorities’ attitude had hardly changed either.

Its first reaction to any accusations to the harm of its food or medical exports, as always, is to just plain deny anything.

It’s reminiscent of how it mishandled the SARS epidemic, which spread a lot further and infected more than it should have, as China kept mum and buried its head in the sand, pretending nothing is going on and refusing to issue warnings to contain the spread.

The Chinese authorities still haven’t learnt its lessons very well, as seen in its handling of bird flu, but constant international pressure is making it rethink its strategy a little more.

If there is one tactic that the Chinese psyche would respond to, it would most likely be shame.

Naming and shaming, and bringing to light the wrongdoings of its manufacturers, have more often than not succeeded in making the Chinese authorities take action.

Unfortunately, the shady practices and unscrupulous businessmen have been around for ages, and their activities are only recently surfacing as China goes international with its products.

For years, it has been lax about goods for domestic consumption. There have been various cases of inferior or downright dangerous materials being included in food and medication produced in China. One famous case was the sale of infant formula that was watered down and substituted with bogus materials, which led to the deaths, organ damage and malnourishment of a large amount of babies in China. That case caused anguish and provoked condemnation in the country but it hasn’t made the authorities do much.

Another case involved slimming pills, which contained a variant of fenfluramine, an appetite suppressant that had been banned in the US for damaging heart valves. The pills led to deaths and health problems to its users, mostly women. Those pills were exported to Singapore and caused a death there too, along with health complication in others. One of the victims took the case to court in Singapore, but only the Singaporean importer of the pills was punished.

With China’s growing economic might and as its products find their way to more countries, more needs to be done by its authorities to ensure that stringent standards and proper procedures are followed by its manufacturers. It will definitely be a tough and expensive job for the Chinese authorities as its regulatory system is weak away from the center, and local officials are often fiefs that do not strictly follow central orders.

But if it is serious about growing its economic power, maintaining credibility with importers of other countries and ensuring that a “Made in China” label does not become equated with inferior or dangerous goods, China will have no other choice but to get tough and crack down on errant manufacturers and corrupt officials. It will have to do it soon too, before the mistrust of Chinese products spreads even more and clips its fast-growing sector of economic growth.

No wonder lawyers have such a bad rap.

No thanks to low-lives like Roy Pearson, an administrative law judge for the District of Columbia who is suing his local dry cleaners for an exorbitant $65 million for misplacing his pair of pants which he brought in for alternations 2 years ago.

He arrived at the amount by citing the “mental suffering, inconvenience and discomfort” from the incident, the cost of weekend rental car payments clocked up for transporting his dry cleaning elsewhere and the hours he put in towards representing himself on the case. The sum also comes from Pearson’s interpretation of DC’s consumer protection law, which fines violators $1,500 per violation, per day, which he further multiplied by three, for the three defendants of the dry cleaner’s family, the Chungs, immigrants from South Korea.

Though the pants turned up later, he denied there were his, claiming that the Chungs were trying to pull one on him. Pearson also repeatedly turned down offers of compensation from the Chungs.

What kind of shamelessly greedy, morally reprehensible and entitled person is Pearson? What makes him think he has any right to the ridiculous and frivolous claims he is making?

To highlight the level of his vitriol, Pearson wasn’t satisfied with just making himself the plaintiff. He sought to expand it to a class action suit, but was thankfully denied by a DC civil judge.

This smacks of a flagrant abuse of power of someone who knows the system and works it to his advantage. Taxpayers in DC ought to demand investigations into whether Pearson was spending office hours building his absurd case.

Suits like his are an abuse of the judicial system, clogging it up when there are more urgent, and deserving, cases to be pursued, wasting everyone’s time. It’s also a classic example of the rampant number of suits demanding excessive liability in the US.

Just imagine the amount of distress and trouble this is causing the Chungs. They have been so overwhelmed by the whole episode they were talking of returning to Seoul. But the Chungs ought to fight back. Counter sue, on the grounds of the loss of business, stress and the legal costs incurred. Pearson should be made to pay restitution to them.

Oh yes, Pearson should also be denied of the services of dry cleaners. Ever again.

One more thing – disbar Pearson and fire him. His severe lack of judgment in this whole sorry saga is justifiably sufficient to show how unfit he is for his job.

Help the Chungs here.