IBM board of directors does not compute

It’s proxy voting season in America, when the shareholders, the real owners of corporations, get to have their say on how their businesses are run by electing the board of directors. Corporate magnates whine about the added regulatory burden they face since their ilk torpedoed the world economy five years ago, but reforms in recent years still leave shareholders powerless to influence the companies they own.

IBM, holding its annual shareholder meeting on Tuesday, is one of America’s great companies and one of my shareholdings. It’s also a poster child for how far reform has fallen short.

Shareholders elect boards of directors that have a legal duty to oversee management in the interest of shareholders. One of the worst abuses of the system is having one person serve as both Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Executive Officer. The very existence of a Chairman/CEO corrupts the idea of the board of directors effectively supervising management in the interest of shareholders. No one can supervise themselves objectively, and supervisors can’t be led by the person they’re supervising.

Management also routinely packs boards with likeminded executives that see the world (and appropriate pay levels) the way they do, though a Soviet-style system where nomination by management is tantamount to election. Because executives control the nomination process for lucrative and prestigious director positions, there’s strong, if unspoken, disincentive for director dissident, Rather than watchdogs for shareholder interests, corporate boards of directors become lap dogs for management whims.

Corporate management has successfully beaten back proposals for fair elections to choose directors. Enabling shareholders to nominate candidates to the board of directors on an equal basis would break management’s stranglehold on board members, and enable real oversight of management in the interest of shareholders. So management spent millions (in shareholder money) to stop democratic voting.

Among the more ludicrous arguments against fair elections was management’s claim it could lead to “special interests” gaining seats on the board. Of IBM’s 13 director nominees (all incumbents) this year, 10 are current or former Chairman/CEOs, including IBM’s own Virginia Rometty. Two more directors have served as university presidents, a different style of corporate potentate. No one questions whose interests they are serving; perhaps it’s obvious when you see that IBM has paid occupants of the Chairman/CEO post $116 million over the past three years.

As an IBM shareholder, I praise the company for decades of outstanding performance. But we’ll never know how much better its results could be with meaningful supervision of management by a board of directors that takes its legal responsibility to defend shareholder interests more seriously.

Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

Unhappy Earth Day, Mom

Since the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, there has been precious little progress toward creating a greener planet. Mounting instances of severe weather across the globe underscore the importance confronting climate change and its causes.

But efforts to limit environmental damage have disappointed this true believer again and again and again.

There’s plenty of blame to distribute for this futility now in its fifth decade, including industry, government and consumers. But I reserve special scorn for environmental advocacy organization that have repeatedly proven themselves no friends of the earth. As I wrote in Asia Times in 2009:

Environmental groups are most skilled at failure. Mother Earth faces the same issues it did when the first Earth Day was declared in 1970. The biggest development over these decades is that we’ve discovered in global warming a deadly new effect of the unabated pollution and profligacy that these groups so ineffectually opposed over all these decades.

For most environmental NGOs, “corporation” remains a dirty word, as do “America” and “wealth”. Deeply confident of their own righteousness, they reject compromise with friends and foes as scornful deception. They simply expect developed countries to accede to demands, not negotiate.

To borrow a phrase from the 1970s, environmental groups have to decide if they want to be part of the solution or remain part of the problem.

Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

Stepping up to the political plate

Season’s greetings. As a lifelong (Met) fan and reforming sportswriter, the start of the baseball season is always a reason for optimism and excitement. Every baseball game brings some unexpected pleasure, whether it’s an improbable hero, an unlikely play, or, at the very least, verdant candy for the mind and eyes. Every season unfolds in unexpected ways, such as last year’s turnaround of the Baltimore Orioles, after years of losing and alienating a wonderful baseball town, and the championship trophy for their fellow wearers of the black and orange, the San Francisco Giants, for the second time in three years.

The Giants and Orioles are also among the heavy hitters when it comes to political contributions by their owners and employees. It’s not surprising that baseball teams make political pitches. Nearly all of them play in publicly funded stadiums (the Giants are a welcome exception) and derive a host of other benefits from government – who do you think pays for those exit ramps into the parking lot?

Five teams’ associates contributed more than a $1 million during the 2011-12 political cycle, according the Sunlight Foundation, with baseball’s total political giving topping $24 million. Only one team eschewed political contributions altogether, the Toronto Blue Jays, which play in a different political league. Donations skew more than three to one toward Republicans, not surprising since rich people own teams (as well as play for them).

The Chicago Cubs haven’t won a World Series in more than a century, but they took the championship for 2012 political donations. With billionaire chairman Joe Ricketts leading the way, the Cubs were tied to $13.9 million in contributions, more than the rest of the teams and Major League Baseball’s headquarters combined.

An investment banker whose father founded discount broker Ameritrade, Ricketts created the Ending Spending Action fund and reportedly authored The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama: The Ricketts Plan to End His Spending for Good. Ricketts later abandoned the plan, but kept on giving to Republicans.

To his credit, Ricketts is sticking to his political principles in efforts to renovate Wrigley Field, the Cubs’ home ballpark that turns 100 next year. His $300 million plan doesn’t ask for a dime of public money. In fact, continuing a long tradition of what could look to outsiders like shakedowns, local politicians and community groups expect the Cubs to fork over close to $1 million to compensate Wrigley’s neighbors for the annoyances and inconveniences a baseball team can cause.

Ricketts’ plan also envisions goring a few holy cows (none of Harry Caray’s, of course), including limiting the once quaint, now thoroughly commercialized practice of watching the Cubs from the roof of houses across the street by adding a state of the art video screen behind the bleacher seats. He also wants permission for more night games – until 1988 the Cubs played all day games at home, having scrapped plans to install lights and donating the steel to the US war effort after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

According to media reports, the Cubs and Chicago are close to a $500 million renovation plan that will also include a parking garage, without a cent of public money. When the deal is finalized, Ricketts will likely share the stage for the announcement with Mayor Rahm Emanuel, former chief of staff to the US president Ricketts tried so hard to oust. Perhaps Ricketts will eventually yield on one principle and gives some money to a Democratic politician. Baseball makes strange bedfellows.

Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

Fodors.com pick Sarong rises in Miele Asia 20

Best restaurant lists usually provoke equal parts envy and ennui. I’d love to enjoy some top-notch gourmet experiences, but decorated eateries tend to be upmarket joints where dishes bear little resemblance to what real people eat and are served with sides of high prices and attitude. Moreover, my taste runs more toward dai pai dong jok (congee from a street stall) and vegetarian “meats” from wet markets.

While working on the Lovely Planet Indonesia guide and the inaugural edition of the Borneo guide, I steered travelers away from Samarinda’s purported best burgers toward authentic local foods ikan bakar lalapan (barbecued fish served with fragrant kemangi leaves) and soto banjar. That’s territory where best restaurant reviewers are rare.

But on the recently released Miele Asia’s Top 20 list, I found a restaurant that fits my taste, one that I’ve sampled, enjoyed and perhaps even influenced.

Sarong has been a mainstay at the top of Bali’s food chain for several years. It debuted at number 18 on the Miele Asia list last year and rose to 13th place this year. Friends have come back from Bali raving about Sarong, and I’ve passed the word to others on their way to Bali, many returning with their own glowing reviews. When asked to work on the Fodors.com guide to Bali, I put Sarong on my restaurant list and was lucky enough to sample it, along with some of the island’s other stars including Bumbu Bali and Naughty Nuri’s.

As noted in my Fodors.com review of Sarong, the menu captures the flavors of Asian street food and family cooking, served in elegant settings and paired with creative cocktails and fine wines. Leaving Sarong, I ran into chef Will Meyrick, and we began talking about the restaurant and the just completed meal. While the scallop appetizer, curry and roast lamb were overwhelmingly delicious, my wife (who is Indonesian) and I focused on the Acehnese specialty burung puyuh sembunyi (hidden quail) – a bird chopped into parts and buried in a mound of greens that in Aceh would be marijuana. We noted that the leaves seemed to overly indulge the Indonesian passion for deep frying. Meyrick defended the dish as capturing the essence of its Acehnese model.

A few nights later at Mama San, Sarong’s more casual sister restaurant, we ran into Meyrick again. After we thanked him for another memorable meal, he said, “A few of us tried the burung puyuh and you had a point. So we tweaked it a bit. Thanks for letting us know.” We gained new respect for Meyrick for giving credence to our opinions.

Now we’ll be happy to lend our thoughts to Robuchon Au Dome in Macau at the top of Miele Asia list or its Hong Kong cousin, L’Atelier de Robuchon, at number three. Please send an email to arrange a booking.

Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

Meet the new bosses

As a teenager, I was a big fan of The Who, a band that spoke to my adolescent angst in the tenor of those anti-establishment times. Their classic song Won’t Get Fooled Again by lead guitarist Pete Townshend concludes with the line “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

Last week, 2.5 billion people around the world got new bosses. Despite the waves of optimism greeting Pope Francis of the Catholic Church and Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China, we’d all do well to heed Townshend’s words. Don’t expect either of these freshly minted leaders to let loose the winds of change in their domains.

Yes, the Pope likes to cook his own breakfast and Xi visited Muscatine. Iowa, to study agriculture and even made a reunion trip there. But they are both products of sclerotic systems that have lost their way and, more importantly, their moral authority through the bad acts of cadres. Search the headlines for Catholic Church and you’ll find more about scandal, sexual and otherwise, than sanctification.

The true nature of the Chinese leadership isn’t embodied by anything said at the National People’s Congress but by the corruption of Chongqing’s ousted Communist Party boss Bo Xilai, the man who wasn’t there at last week’s national conclave.

Bo ruled autocratically under the banner of Maoist revivalism, stole millions, and was complicit in his wife’s plot to murder an alleged accomplice who threatened to blow the whistle. As I wrote in Asia Times, Bo is still behaving with his customary impunity, even as a prisoner.

The Catholic Church and China’s Communist Party are both organizations that rely on top down leadership and complete loyalty, promising rewards to their acolytes while mainly delivering them to their top echelons, the very people who selected these new leaders. These elites, handpicked by the system that enriches and empowers them, wouldn’t dream of selecting a boss that might rock the boat.

Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

Surgeon-Poet Hall doubles in LA book awards

Dr Neal Hall, a hit at last year’s Ubud Writers Festival, has scooped up more awards. The eye surgeon’s poetry collection Nigger for Life has won both the poetry prize and grand prize at the Los Angeles Book Festival. Hall will collect his honors at Hollywood’s legendary Roosevelt Hotel on Friday.

Hall also won the poetry prize at last year’s New York Book Festival and New England Book Festival, as well as the Ubud Festival’s poetry slam. He extends the tradition of acclaimed poets with day jobs that includes Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and fellow physician William Carlos Williams.

Title notwithstanding, Hall asserts Nigger for Life isn’t about race, but about freedom, told from the only perspective he’s got. Hall’s poems are both lyrical and extraordinarily powerful, well worth reading and richly deserving of their accolades.

Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

Download Dead Sea, Down with Amazon

My friend Tom Vater, a co-founder of Crime Wave Press, sent a note that the publisher is giving away the ebook version of Dead Sea through February 28. “The Beach meets The Deep,” Tom’s note says.

So I went to Amazon to try to download it. But Amazon told me that item is not available from my location in Asia Pacific.

How great is that? The publisher, which focuses on Asian crime fiction (and seeks submissions), wants to give away the book, and the bookstore won’t let them. Amazon needs to rethink its whole geographic discrimination policy. If Amazon imagines it’s indispensable, let it talk to Netscape or Kodak.

Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

Casino billionaires risk all in brawl

When elephants fight, the grass gets trampled, according to an Asian proverb. Most animals know how far to take a confrontation without lasting consequences, but occasionally, one or both elephants gets gored.

For more than a year, Wynn Resorts chairman and CEO Steve Wynn and Kazuo Okada, his one-time largest shareholder and key financier, have dueled publicly. Last week, Wynn shareholders voted to remove Okada from the company board of directors, a day after Okada, the chairman of Japan’s largest pachinko machine maker, resigned amid leveling a blistering attack on Wynn.

Behind the boardroom drama, billionaire casino developers Wynn and Okada have traded allegations of numerous shady dealings in Macau and Manila. Bribery accusations, in dollar amounts ranging from the hundreds to the hundreds of millions, figure prominently in their charges. As I wrote in Asia Times, inviting regulators to scrutinize the casino business is a risky bet. That’s especially true in this confrontation, where neither elephant seems inclined to back off.

Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

Taking up cultural residency

Since moving to Hong Kong in 1995, I’ve been celebrating Chinese New Year, including sending greetings to friends and business associates here. Some non-Chinese friends have told me they think it’s weird for a gweiloh (literally ghost, used as slang for Westerner) to wish them a happy lunar new year. I think it’s just about going with the flow wherever you live.

In a Chinese society, you can’t avoid the spirit of Chinese New Year, or as some say, Spring Festival, anymore than you can avoid the spirit of Christmas in the West. My first new year in Hong Kong, I didn’t realize some of my favorite neighborhood shops would close for up to a full month for the holiday, so my cupboard got awfully bare. To a avoid a repeat in 1997, a couple of days before the year of the ox lumbered in, I made a special visit to my favorite vegetable stand in the Graham Street market to stock up. As I chose tomatoes, carrots and greens, the vendor excitedly blurted, “Come back tomorrow. Price even higher then.” Her enthusiasm may have been misplaced, but it was absolutely infectious.

Growing up Jewish in the US, I got a lot of practice celebrating other people’s holidays as cultural phenomena without getting caught up in the details. I’d visit Christian neighbors to admire their trees and join my friend Dimitri’s Greek Christmas celebration a week later, sharing the joy and not mentioning it was his father in the Santa suit. I was always happy to take those holiday shifts in the newsroom so that my Christian colleagues could enjoy that time with their families.

My first Christmas in Hong Kong, I took a walk around Kowloon on Christmas eve. Thousands of people were out for what felt like a spontaneous street fair, celebrating for no apparent reason. (Everyone who actually observed the holiday presumably had somewhere else to be.) It felt like being in the middle of a joy fountain.

In your homeland, when people celebrate holidays you don’t, you’re the cultural equivalent of an innocent bystander. Whether you participate or walk on by is up to you. You’ve got no skin in the game and an easy way out. But if you chose to live in a different society, you take up cultural as well as physical residency, with an obligation to respect and honor local culture and traditions, as well as enjoying the benefits.

From the start, I’ve been grateful for the opportunities that I’ve had in Hong Kong and the good friends I’ve made there and across Asia as a result of living and working there. Honoring the Chinese New Year custom of sending good wishes to friends and colleagues is a simple way of showing that appreciation. Just don’t ask me to eat moon cakes this fall.

Kung hei fat choi. Gong xi fa cai. May your prices rise every tomorrow.

Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.

No more Stupid Bowls, Stupidomes

Long before kickoff, we know two things about Super Bowl XLVII. A coach named Harbaugh will win, and taxpayers will lose.

The Super Bowl, like major golf and tennis tournaments, big races, and many other high profile sporting events, has become a corporate junket haven. Big business splashes out millions of tax-deductible dollars to entertain itself and its best customers. Even the famed Super Bowl commercials that some TV viewers anticipate more highly than the game that this year cost $4 million per 30 seconds, are paid for with advertising funds written off against profits. But that corporate welfare is just a sideshow when it comes to picking taxpayers’ pockets.

The New Orleans Superdome, this year’s Super Bowl venue, has been the beneficiary of hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds. Its original construction cost of $165 million in the 1970s translates to more than a half billion dollars at current prices. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, another $156 million in public money went to repair the stadium.

The Superdome is hardly the biggest or most questionable recipient of government funding among sports venues. The extraordinarily profitable New York Yankees received more than $1 billion in public financing, plus 22 acres of public parkland to build a monument to themselves, the new Yankee Stadium. Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the Yankees’ self-proclaimed number one fan, spearheaded the sweetheart deal for his favorite team.

The family that owns the Yankees, the Steinbrenners, also got a half-billion dollar windfall when my old pal Boss George Steinbrenner died during the estate tax holiday. There’s no evidence the Steinbrenner family or Giuliani were involved in the timing of Boss George’s death.

Aside from capital investment, stadiums deals generally include years of tax abatements and exemptions that add up to hundreds of millions of dollars, plus tens of millions in additional spending for related infrastructure, such as roads and other transportation connections. Stadiums are the gift from government that not only keeps on giving, but keeps on costing.

As a city planner, I often heard the case that stadiums are good investments of public money because they generate economic activity. But those benefits are virtually impossible to prove. Except for construction costs, additional economic activity generated by these projects largely represents shifting discretionary spending from one use to another, say from shoes and dinners out to game tickets and hot dogs. Even where there may be added economic activity, the so-called benefit goes to the ballclub and everyone else has to cross their fingers to hope something trickles down to them. Particularly in times of concern over government spending and debt, that’s hardly seems the best investment of public money.

But if politicians insist on indulging their edifice complex and building stadiums, then they should ensure that taxpayers get something real out of it. As a condition of accepting public funds, stadium developers should be required to offer a number of seats, say 100, for every event to taxpayers, chosen by lottery, for a nominal fee, say $5. Imagine if 100 lucky fans from the state of Louisiana could rock up to Super Bowl XLVII with the corporate bigwigs, or if average New Yorkers could get Yankee tickets at a substantial discount to their average price of $86.

A few dozen tickets at knockdown prices aren’t enough to justify using taxpayer money for stadiums; that question needs to be vigorous debated on a case-by-case basis. But where the decision is made to use public funds, taxpayers deserve a sure thing to show for it, a guarantee that the regular people footing the bill, not just moguls, come out winners, just like a Harbaugh will in Super Bowl XLVII.

Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his bio, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook and Twitter @MuhammadCohen.