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Anti-terrorism Industry Eyes Private Aviation
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A disturbed man, Joseph Andrew Stack, flies a single-engine Piper airplane into a Texas federal office building. He kills himself and an IRS worker. It is tragic and awful – and it points up vulnerability in our society that could be exploited by terrorists. But it is not a reason to impose new restrictions on private flying.
General aviation–the blanket term given to everything that is not a scheduled airline or cargo flight–has not to this point in time been subject to onerous security. Yet there are those calling for a security regime to be introduced after the Texas incident.
To apply even modest security on general aviation would be a daunting task because airplanes fly from small airports to big ones; and they fly 24 hours a day. Some are light aircraft like Stack’s and others are corporate jets and charter aircraft, all the way up to airline size.
Charter companies and corporations could take the hit from expensive security. But it would mortally wound private flying and not increase security at all. Elaborate evasions–such as flying from deserted roads, farms and abandoned airfields–might increase. What now happens in the light would happen in the dark.
Here I should declare that I have held a private pilot’s license for nearly 40 years, although I no longer take to the air as I once did (whenever possible).
The aviation community has always known that airplanes are easily used as weapons in the hands of suicidal pilots or if rigged with off-the-shelf technology. To turn a light aircraft into a crude missile you need purpose, know-how and access to a hobby shop or an electronics retailer in the local mall.
Over the years, I have heard many discussions on what you can cause an unmanned aircraft to do. No one was planning to do so, but it is a subject that used to come up from time to time in pilots’ lounges: airport facilities where pilots hang out, get weather briefings or just to tell stories of derring-do.
Pilots belong to a freemasonry that binds people of disparate backgrounds together in a common love of aviation and common bad experiences. Horseman and boaters enjoy something similar but not with the depth and passion that unites pilots, whether they are weekend stick jocks (their term for themselves) or former military pilots, who have done extraordinary things and now fly for the airlines or just fly privately.
Pilots tend to revere anything that leaves the ground and to know that part of the thrill is the high price that will be paid if things go wrong. As Walter Hinton wrote in 1926: “Recently, a man asked whether the business of flying ever could be regulated by rules and statutes. I doubt it. Not that flying men are lawless. No one realizes better than they the need for discipline. But they have learned discipline through constant contact with two of the oldest statutes in the universe–the law of gravity and the law of self-preservation. Ten feet off the ground these two laws supersede all others and there is little hope of their repeal.”
At Barron Hilton’s ranch in Yerington, Nev., I saw astronauts riding in gliders, hot air balloons, as happy as they were going into space. Every form of flight deserves the same respect as another. The price of failure is the same: death.
One of the great freedoms in America is that anyone can learn to fly and can fly from the smallest airport; really just a field that has been surveyed and leveled to JFK or LAX. You will need a reservation to land, but you can do it.
Aviation is truly one of the last egalitarian pursuits. You can put passengers through a metal detector at the general aviation terminal at Washington Dulles International Airport, but what about a farm in Kansas?
One of the many firms that is part of the anti-terrorism industry, STRATFOR, has been proselytizing about the dangers of private aviation. Sure there is a remote danger there, as there is with the availability guns or the vulnerability of city water supplies.
Flying is one of the great freedoms. And to those who are lucky enough to fly, it is the supreme achievement in the ascent of man. To curtail it is to make a terrorist somewhere chortle. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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In Nuclear, as in Other Things, the Past Was Glorious
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A train hurtles under the English Channel at 200 mph. In Japan, an even faster train levitates above the track. In France the largest passenger aircraft on earth, the Airbus A380, takes to the sky. Two Asian giants, China and India, are involved in a space race.
If you want to build a new nuclear plant you’d better order the largest component, the pressure vessel, from Japan. They aren’t made in America anymore; stagnation killed that business.
All is not lost to the United States, but there are warning signs that our global scientific and technological expertise is under attack. It is not yet vanquished, but we’re showing signs of vulnerability: Technological arrogance ia leading to the blunting our precious cutting edge.
That arrogance, in the way of arrogance, comes from past triumphs rather than present capabilities.
Once, the world waited for U.S. scientific and technological innovations. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office was stuffed — and still is — with American inventions. But when it comes to applied science, the world no longer waits for us.
When Britain and France built the Concorde supersonic jet, they expected the United States to be right behind them. When the Senate killed the idea of a government-financed, supersonic civilian airliner, the Concorde was doomed.
Likewise with advanced nuclear reactors. When the Clinch River Breeder Reactor was terminated, it was a mortal blow for similar programs in Britain, France, and even Russia.
Those were the days. We were the pacesetter.
Nowhere was this truer than nuclear power. It was our technology, and the world almost demanded our leadership. So much so, it even copied our licensing procedure; and anti-nuclear activists were trained in the American ways. The German pebble bed reactors, British graphite-moderated reactors, and Canadian natural uranium reactors were squeezed in the market, because the Americans, who were known to know about these things, favored the light water reactors. That would make them the world standard. And so it was.
But as the United States faltered, the world went ahead. France built out its nuclear fleet, Japan forged forward, and today reactors are under construction in many places: 25 in China, five in South Korea, and two in tiny Finland.
With this in mind, there’s something sad about the Obama administration’s backing, with loan guarantees, just two new reactors. Gosh.
The industry has calculated that 65 new reactors are needed but two are welcome, even if they’re to be built by Westinghouse, once one of the great industrial names and now a subsidiary of Toshiba.
The master must now play the apprentice.
With sickening predictability, Friends of the Earth President Erich Pica was on the PBS NewsHour to decry the oh-so-modest Obama move. He stopped by the morgue on the way to the studio to get cadavers of arguments about subsidies and waste.
Those technologies favored by Pica, wind and solar, are only known to us because of government subsidies. But he went further and had more disingenuousness up his sleeve. He claimed hydroelectric production from dams built decades ago as part of the “green” bounty. He must know that many members of his own organization want those dams torn down.
Jim Riccio of Greenpeace said that splitting atoms is inherently dangerous and should be treated as such. There’s a vision of pusillanimous policy-making. Columbus, keep those ships in port. John Glenn, stay on Earth; space travel is, er, dangerous.
Worrying about what’s going to happen to nuclear waste in thousands of years is a conceit as well as a stupidity. There’s plenty of it around, which did not come from electric production but from making weapons and driving Navy ships and submarines.
Civilian electric production is the bonus, not the problem, and the solution lies in nuclear evolution — not in unilateral abandonment. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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In Congress, Party Loyalty Trumps Conscience
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All those people who treat politics like baseball may have to start again. All those statistics about what happened in off years down through our history, all those references to recurring political phenomena, like the impact of the weather on elections, are null and void.
What’s changed?
We’re moving from government as we have known it — a system of two parties modulated by bipartisanship on many issues, where factors other than ideology matter to members of Congress — to a new order in which party loyalty trumps conscience.
Congress is acting more like a parliament than a congress. People who have been clamoring for a Congress more like the British Parliament, with features like “Prime Minister’s Question Time,” have got more than they wanted. They’ve got something like the British party system, and it is not a step forward.
While watching the Brits go at it on C-SPAN is good sport, and certainly tests the mental acuity and verbal dexterity of the players, it is an inflexible way of governing.
Despite the jolly repartee and the openness of discussion, the House of Commons can be a sterile place. The individual member feels impotent and frustrated. Unless a member loves constituency work with a passion, they can feel very unloved by the parliamentary legislative process.
The former Conservative M.P. Matthew Parris has written brilliantly about the impotence of the backbenchers in his autobiography. He abandoned elective politics for journalism, where he felt he could be more effective in shaping public policy.
The dirty little secret about Britain in particular, and parliaments modeled on Westminster in general, is that they aren’t kind to mavericks and are institutionally structured to keep them down or out. Private consciences cannot be aired easily, if at all. A cri de coeur may have to be embedded in a question on an aside in a debate late at night. It won’t be reflected in a vote when “the whips are on” — party discipline in force. The rare exception is a free vote of the House of Commons on a matter like the death penalty.
Here in the U.S., despite the emasculation that goes with party discipline, the Republicans are well down that road. And one wonders, can the Democrats be far behind?
The dynamic across the aisle is becoming asymmetric, and the only Democratic response will have to be a closing of ranks. Something unique to the American system is being lost here.
The genius of Congress is its ability to hear minority voices and, on occasion, for the administration to make common cause with the opposition — as President Clinton did with the Republicans to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement.
But the Republicans have given up one the great freedoms of our system of government. They have sacrificed on the altar of discipline the special freedom to vote as you see fit.
Sadly the move to party authoritarianism hasn’t come from within the party — although Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, and House Republican Leader John Boehner, of Ohio, are enjoying it — but from the forces that are shaping conservatism from without.
First among these forces is right-wing broadcasting. It’s a vicious and relentless goad to Republicans to move ever further to right, to embrace positions not of their own making.
Then there’s the party rump, characterized by the Tea Party movement. It’s implacably at odds not just with the administration of Barack Obama but with the times we live in. It yearns for another America in another time. It doesn’t want to face the cultural, demographic and political realities of today. But it’s in tune with the conservative broadcasting colossus, and it will have a large and negative affect on the Republican Party.
Arcing across the political sky, compounding all of this, is the phosphorous rocket of Sarah Palin. The former governor of Alaska may be in the 10th minute of her 15 minutes of fame, but for now she’s a bigger force in Republicanism than are its wiser leaders.
All of this has forced the Republicans in the Senate, and to a lesser extent in the House, to look more like the opposition in a parliament than the minority in Congress. Significantly, we’ve always favored “minority” to describe the other party rather than “opposition.” These words have described the uniqueness of Congress — its authenticity, if you will.
At least until history took a new course in 2010. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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If only Tax Credits Were Answer for Small Firms
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The shutters are coming down at hundreds of thousands of small businesses, grossing between $1 million and $10 million. For them the question that hangs in the air, if not spoken, is: How much did we take today?
It’s the eternal question that haunts small business. Whether it is daily, weekly or monthly, the same brutal calculation has to be made: Was more money booked than committed?
Politicians, and certainly President Barack Obama, gathering from what he said in his State of the Union address, know that they need the support of myriad small businesses.
They need the husband and wife who drive an 18-wheeler across the country and the baker who rises at 4 a.m. to make doughnuts for city office workers. They need the suburban bicycle repair shop, the ethnic restaurant in the rundown strip mall and the Web design firm in a city loft.
These are real entrepreneurs who start businesses from dreams, not from textbooks in business schools.
Politicians know America needs the entrepreneurial class. But they are morbidly disinterested in the real needs of this class. They demonstrate this in their only answer to the question of helping small business people: tax credits. In the 33 years I operated a small publishing company, only one year were taxes close to being a problem.
The problems for small businesses, whether making gadgets for Wal-Mart, running a salon or operating a travel agency, are the same: Banks think you are a nuisance and are loath to lend you money, or even take the time to understand your business.
Banks’ lending criteria are created by MBAs in marble towers, far from the street below. That’s why so many businesses have been launched on credit cards with previously established credit. It’s risky and expensive, but it happens all the time.
Then, there’s the problem of providing health care for employees. It’s punitively expensive if you provide it, and you feel morally at fault if you don’t.
Corporations — all corporations — are inclined to seek monopoly. Therefore, they squeeze small companies, whether it’s Target pressuring the local toy shop or Borders putting the old neighborhood bookshop out of business. They close those lines of endeavor to countless people.
For every chain restaurant, count one family restaurant that didn’t open. The family-run hotels and motels that dotted U.S. highways are gone. Things of the past.
Congress’s normal response, and one given by the President, is to give tax breaks to small businesses. Most small businesses would be glad to do well enough to pay taxes.
Once, there were many small business people in Congress. Now, there are few. The last congressman I knew who knew something about small business was Rep. Chet Holifield, D-Calif. Powerful and hardworking, he chaired the House Government Operations Committee. He also operated a haberdashery in California. Are there many haberdashers left in the age of Banana Republic?
The Small Business Administration underwrites loans for small business, but it is a slow business. I knew a printer who qualified for assistance, but he was out of business by the time the agency agreed to help. Government is not nimble enough to help the person who can’t make payroll next Friday.
Obama should stop further complicating the tax code, which is a burden to small business. Instead, he should put together a brain trust on revitalizing small business. Forcing the banks to lend to small business is a good first step. The main problem for small business isn’t taxes, it’s credit. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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Money matters
March 1st, 2010
Guest: Darren Gersh, PBS Nightly Business Report; Andy Glass, Politico
Obama goes on the offensive; CPAC courts the tea partiers
February 22nd, 2010
Guest: Brian Kelly, U.S. News & World Report; Lauren Ashburn, Ashburn Media Company; and Andy Glass, Politico
Politics in the Age of Obama
February 15th, 2010
Guest: James Gomes, Clark University; Bob Franken, syndicated columnist
Show 2004
February 9th, 2010
Guest: Joe Mathieu, Sirius XM Radio; Margaret Ryan, Clean Skies Television; and Fred Lucas, CNSNews.com
Steven Hill discusses his book, “Europe’s Promise”
February 1st, 2010
Guest: Steven Hill, New America Foundation