White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Invisible Hand Is in Your Pocket Now

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Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” describing the efficient operation of markets, has morphed into a something else: an invisible hand in my pocket  and yours.

This woe comes now at every turn. Corporations — possibly egged on by the battalions of MBAs they employ — have discovered that they can con you by price legerdemain. They do this by imposing fees.

Airlines, banks and utilities play the fee game. Luxury resorts have joined in: You'll pay so much for the room, so much in taxes, and pay special fees if you want to do anything other than sit in it. Bottom line: You'll have pay more than you'd expect. The advertisements that lure you are disingenuous.

Take airline fees. You find an airfare and brace for the taxes. But — Oh, surprise, surprise! — you'll have to pay a hefty fee if you want more than one change of clothes at the other end. Want to board comfortably? Pay up. Want a seat where parts of your body don’t meet other parts of your body in unnatural ways? Pay up. Have to change your flight? There’s a change fee. Just pay up or stay put.

You could take the train, but you might not know that the only corridor of the national rail network that approaches international standards is the Northeast, running between Washington, New York and Boston. The trains aren’t bad at all, but the ticket pricing is predatory and opaque. It puts the airlines to shame.

Amtrak train fares are priced according to minute-to-minute demand. On the no-frills train, a ticket from Boston to Washington can cost around $100 to $400, depending on when you buy your ticket and who else wants to travel at that moment. The result: Amtrak – with a $1.3 billion annual subsidy from you and me –operates a railroad for the well-heeled. Between Washington and New York for corporate lawyers; ditto to Boston with the addition of academics plying the consulting trade.

If you just need to get around the Northeast, take a bus. Or play airline roulette, where the fare fluctuations are held down by JetBlue and Southwest.

Then there is the new trend of companies partially shifting the burden of paying workers from themselves to you. Hotels are urging their luckless guests to tip the chambermaids. (I've always tipped them. But I fear this corporate move is designed to reduce their responsibility for paying their workers a living wage.) Fast-food outlets now have tip jars (begging bowls, really), so the poor servers behind the counter can be paid less because it is becoming a tip-calculated wage.

Now, take a look at the unmitigated scandal of interns: free labor. The government and Congress, the media, think tanks, accounting and consulting firms, and many others, have found the best-and-brightest will work for free, primarily in the summer, to learn the trade.

Fair enough? Not so. Unpaid interns get a leg up in their careers on their peers who can't afford to take those great jobs. If you worked hard all summer, serving ice cream to pay your tuition, your resume will be deficient and you won't make the important contacts. Interns ought to be paid the minimum wage, so all can start resume-building at the same starting line.

We are witnessing a vast change in the way we pay for things with tipping subsidizing companies, fees fattening airlines, banks and hotels against the interest – and often the foreknowledge — of the customer.

Adam Smith — so beloved by the people who are changing the nature of commerce with fees, concealed charges, predatory pricing, tips and free labor — was a canny Scot who liked to know what he was getting for the money he was paying. He must be restless in his grave.  — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

The Atlanta Hawks and the Bruce Levenson I Know

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Bruce Levenson, the embattled principal owner of the Atlanta Hawks, is that anomaly in business: a nice guy who has come in first. I have known Levenson since the 1970s, and have marveled at his acumen and how he and his publishing partners built their hugely successful publishing company, United Communications Group (UCG), into the Goliath of the newsletter publishers.

I published business newsletters for 33 years in Washington and was in awe of Levenson’s achievements. His capacity to understand markets and foresee trends put him way in front. UCG, for example, embraced computers when old-line news people like myself were wary of them.

As UCG grew, we, the other independent publishers, were humbled by its success. Yet we always talked of Levenson as a “sweet guy.”

He was also a philanthropist. We, his competitors, with our little businesses, were bowled over when UCG — in the beginning of what I assume continued to be Levenson’s charity — donated $300,000, as I recall, to a cause for African-American youth in Washington, D.C. I don’t believe any of us could have mustered a tenth of that then mighty sum. It spoke volumes about Levenson’s business success, but also about his concern for African-American youth. Later, as owner of the Atlanta Hawks, he served on the advisory board of the Hoop Dreams Scholarship Fund, which provided more than 900 D.C. students with college scholarships.

When I read about Levenson’s “racially insensitive” internal memorandum, I wondered if his accusers — that rump of the politically correct who wait to take umbrage at anything that might be construed as a racial slur – knew anything about the man and his works. They are those who would have us believe that careless words betray vile hearts, for which they must receive humiliating public opprobrium.

This comes at a time when the police shooting of an unarmed young black man in Ferguson, Mo., has led to a fresh call from people like Peniel Joseph, professor of history at Tufts University, for a new dialogue on race. But there will be no real dialogue on race while some of the participants are afraid of being branded “racist” if their speech drifts from the true north of political correctness.

This is tragic, as the changes in the work place make it harder and harder for African-American youth to find meaningful employment and when conditions in the schools, in housing, and in medical care for the African-American community are lamentable. Their plight is visible and moving to anyone who takes a bus or subway in any major city.

There should be a wake-up call for all of those with a concern with social welfare and justice from what has happened in Rotherham, in northern England, where systematic sexual abuse and gang rape of young, at-risk white girls, largely living in public-housing estates, was institutionalized by gangs of Pakistani men. Yet the social services and the police were reluctant to pursue complaints because, according to the official investigation, they were afraid of being called “racist.” A gargantuan 1,400 incidents are being investigated: the price of racial rectitude has been high.

It seems to me that Levenson’s memorandum, which dealt with the economic impact of a lack of white support for the Hawks, was the kind of memorandum we might have written in the publishing business — like how could we attract more universities to subscribe, or why there weren’t enough law firms buying a particular title.

That doesn't mean that Atlanta doesn't have a severe racial divide and, as Levenson’s memo inadvertently points out, that the African-American community there is disproportionately impoverished.

Race and marketing are entwined, that's why there is a Black Entertainment Network and why certain liquors are marketed more to one race than another. At one level, professional sports is all about marketing.

Within a few days of Levenson’s purchase of the Hawks, I had occasion to meet with him, and he was boyishly enthusiastic. Particularly, he was happy because he was assured that the team would let him on the court during practice. He wanted, more than anything money could buy, to shoot hoops with the pros — most of whom, of course, are African-American. — For the Hearst-New York Times

When Ralph Nader Was the Consumer’s Hero

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Ralph Nader is to blame. It's that simple. I'm not talking about the election of 2000, where his candidacy was enough to hand the presidency to George W. Bush and all that has followed. I’m talking about when Nader went AWOL as the nation’s consumer conscience.

In the space of a week, three U.S. flights have been diverted because of passenger disturbances over reclining seats. Would this have happened if Nader of old were on the case?

In the mid-1960s and early 1970s, Nader was the nation’s bulwark against corporate excess. He may have gotten it wrong — as many have claimed — about the safety of the Corvair, the rear-engine compact car, manufactured by the Chevrolet division of General Motors, that was to have rivaled the Volkswagen Beetle. No matter. Nader’s 1965 book, “Unsafe at Any Speed,” launched him as the consumer's knight in shining armor.

For nearly a decade, we felt that Nader was on our side and those big, faceless monsters like insurance companies, banks, airlines, consumer credit outfits and appliance manufacturers could be brought to heal by invoking the one name that would strike fear, trembling and rectitude into the hearts of the titans of corporate America: Nader.

It was a halcyon time for those who wanted, like actor Peter Finch in the 1976 film “Network,” to shout, and be heard, “I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!”

Nader was a figure of mythical omnipotence. You didn’t have to take your troubles with a faulty car or broken contract to Nader, you simply had to threaten; the words “cc Ralph Nader” at the bottom of a letter were enough. Corporations quaked, the earth moved, and restitution was forthcoming.

We delighted in learning little details about Nader the aesthete, who lived in one room somewhere in Washington, had no creature comforts, partners, or trappings, but always wore a suit. People happily believed he slept in it, ready to rush to court to slay a dragon of corporate excess.

Journalists loved Nader. We learned that he kept a secret office in the venerable National Press Building in Washington and would sneak up to the National Press Club on the 13th floor to peruse the press releases, which were then displayed near the elevators. One presumed he was looking for evidence of consumer abuse in false corporate claims.

The Vietnam War was raging, and the nation was divided on every issue except the wonder of the man who was called “consumer advocate.” The nation had never had one before and we loved it.

Oh, yes, love is not too strong a word. We went to bed at night knowing that if the mattress wasn't what had been promised by the Divine Mattress Company, Nader would fix it.

Jimmy Carter promised that when he was elected president, he would have a direct telephone line to St. Nader. That was the zenith of Nader’s consumer advocacy power.

But Nader and his acolytes, known as Nader’s Raiders, had already begun to pursue broader political aims and to embrace the extreme reaches of the environmental movement. Nader, our beloved consumer advocate, saintly and virtuous, was becoming a partisan — a partisan of the left.

It was an extreme blow for those who had followed along behind Nader’s standard because we believed he was the unsullied, virtuous supporter of the individual against the institution. The voice that could be heard when, as often, politics had failed.

Over the years, I had battles with Nader. We argued most especially over nuclear power and a raft of related energy issues. I and the late physicist Ralph Lapp, together with the great mathematician Hans Bethe, put together a group of 24 Nobel laureates to support nuclear. Nader assembled 36 Nobel laureates against, and won the argument on numbers. He has always been a tough customer.

Poor Ralph. He had it all – and so did we — when he fought for the common man against the common enemy: those who stole our money or shortchanged us.

Deep in my heart, I think he is to blame for high bank fees, payday loans, tiny aircraft seats, high Amtrak fares, and the fact that corporations won’t speak to us – they have machines do that. Ralph, it could have been so different if you had just stayed at your post. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Sex, Booze and Rock ‘n’ Roll in Making a British Jihadist

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It is a simple question, but there are only fragments of an answer. The question is: Why do so many Muslims, born in Britain, turn to jihadism?

The best numbers available show that more than 500 young, British-born Muslims have traveled to Syria to fight for the Islamic State. By comparison, an estimated 100 Americans have taken up arms for the Islamic State. As the population of the United States is 313 million, compared to 63 million for the whole of Britain, the disparity is huge.

The “the enemy within,” as the British media calls these young people, has deeply disturbed the British public, as it looks to its political leaders to take action. One writer, in The Daily Telegraph, says that the government has been soft when it should have been tough, and tough when it should have been soft.

The truth is that successive British administrations have been silent on the consequences of immigration since the second Churchill government in the 1950s. Everyone is to blame and no one is to blame.

Britain never saw a large influx of immigrants after the Norman Conquest in 1066. In fact, it had become quite proud of its tolerance for émigrés; Karl Marx was the exemplar. The Jews were tolerated after the 1650s, but excluded from many occupations and social circles.

Past and present Britain is made up of enclaves remarkably disinterested in each other. Hence, a small island nation can support 53 distinct, regional accents and dialects.

Idealists believed that post-World War II immigration would change Britain for the better, sweep away its imperial trappings. Actually if anything eroded the class structure, it was the great wave of pop music and fashion in the 1960s.

Surveys show that of the immigrants from the subcontinent, the Indians assimilated best and took to business — and the class system — with alacrity, many becoming millionaires. The Muslims, primarily from Pakistan, have fared the worst. They assimilated least and imported practices that are a savage affront to British values: forced and under-age marriages, honor killings, and halal butchers, opposed by many British animal rights groups.

These same values have made life rough for young men of Pakistani descent. For working-class British youth, sex, booze, music and soccer are their safety valves. Sexual frustration is endemic all over the Muslim world; it is at work among devout, young Muslim men in Britain, where sex is celebrated in the culture.

British business had a role in the mix of immigrants in the 1960s. Businesses wanted workers for the textile mills and factories in northern England, who would do the dirty, poorly paid work nobody else wanted. The proprietor of large tire retreading company boasted to me in 1961 how he had solved the labor problem by recruiting rural Pakistanis, who worked hard and cheaply and kept to themselves. His words have echoed with me down through the years.

This alone does not explain why, for example, a preponderance of the jihadists are from London, or why some of them seem to be university types from the London School of Economics, King’s College London, the School for Oriental and African Studies, and others. If you are young, male and Muslim, and even somewhat religious, it is easy to be persuaded that you live among the infidels with their alcohol and preoccupation with coitus.

But, again, it is not explanation enough; not an explanation of why a generation of British-born young men are attracted to the life and values of their distant ancestors, or why they have shown such savagery.

Britain has comforted itself by dealing with self-identified “community leaders” in the Muslim community. Unfortunately the real leaders have been fiery, foreign-born imams who proselytize hatred in the mosques that serve Britain’s 2 million Muslims. The Muslim communities have been hidden in plain sight from the British mainstream.  — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate


A Tale of Two Dams: Catastrophe in the Making

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This is a tale of two hydroelectric dams. Two dams far from each other, but either of which could produce the next great humanitarian crisis.

The first is the Mosul Dam, which stretches across the Tigris River in a valley north of Mosul, Iraq. As dams go, this one is a civil engineering horror. It has been captured by the Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

Should the two-mile-wide dam fail, which is likely, Mosul will be wiped out and the damage will extend to Baghdad. Loss of life could reach 500,000, and millions could be deprived of water and power. An immense catastrophe piled on the daily pain of Iraq.
The second dam, far away in Southern Africa on the Zambezi River, is the Kariba. This 55-year-old dam, by some measures, is the world’s second-largest. It was a civil engineering masterpiece and has held up well, given the spotty maintenance by its owners — Zambia, on the north bank and Zimbabwe, on the south bank.

If the Kariba Dam fails, as it is predicted to do in three years without repairs, surging water would rip a vast trench down the length of the Zambezi River on its route to the Indian Ocean. The wall of water would take out another giant dam, Cahora Bassa, in Mozambique. Loss of life could reach 3.5 million, with untold damage to wildlife. Central Southern Africa would lose 40 percent of its electric supply.

While the Mosul and Kariba dams are linked in their potential lethality, they are very different structures.

The Mosul Dam was a rush job, ordered by Saddam Hussein in the 1980s without regard to the engineering realities on the site. It is anchored in gypsum, which dissolves in water. So leaks in the foundation have to be plugged daily with “grout,” a mixture of cement and sand. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said the Mosul Dam is fundamentally the wrong structure for the location, and called it the “most dangerous dam in the world.”

Even with careful tending, the Mosul Dam is in danger. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, many of the workers who have kept the dam going fled when the Islamic State arrived, and only one dedicated manager is known to have remained.

The United States spent $33 million trying to stabilize the Mosul Dam, but the money, according to an inspector general’s report, was largely wasted. Now the United States cannot bomb near the dam for fear of destabilizing it further.

Apart from general-maintenance issues, the Kariba Dam issues are a little simpler. When the dam was built between 1955 and 1959, it was planned that the river flow would be controlled though six sluice gates set in the wall. These empty into a plunge pool before the water flows downstream.

The trouble is that the plunge pool has grown from an indentation in the riverbed to a vast crater 285-feet-deep. There it swirls around with great force and is eroding the basalt rock on which the dam is anchored. The dam is eating itself alive. All the sluice gates dare not be opened at once, and have not been since 1966.

The fix is a mixture of blasting the plunge pool, so the water goes downstream without creating a whirlpool, and injecting grout — in the form of underwater concrete — to shore up the foundation.

A consortium of the World Bank, the European Union and the African Development Bank this month agreed to provide $250 million to save Kariba. Engineers say the work must be done in the next three years or it will be too late.

If Zimbabwe and Zambia can agree on the contracts and let them in time, work should begin next year. But in that part of the world, the only thing that moves fast is the Zambezi River. The future of Mosul Dam is anyone’s guess. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Real Investment Africa Needs Is in Its Women

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The great African summit in Washington last week was largely theater; necessary and important, but still a work of fiction.
If you knew nothing about the subject, you might think that U.S. business, in an extraordinary historical oversight, has overlooked opportunity-rich Africa. Actually, America's trade with Africa has been in free-fall since 2008. China’s trade with Africa is reaching new heights every year, including this one. It more than doubles ours now.

For a decade, Africa — nearly all of its 54 countries — has looked east, and China has seized the opening. Yet the Chinese presence in Africa hasn't helped its underlying problems. Instead, it has put money in the pockets of the ruling elites and has turned a blind eye to the excesses of those elites.

China's interest in Africa, brilliantly and cynically exploited, has been in raw materials. A theme at last week's Washington summit was that there was something wrong with exploiting raw materials, and that value-added manufacturing — which creates real wealth and real jobs — could just be wished into being with more investment dollars.

China has flooded the continent with its lowest-quality exports – goods that wouldn’t make it onto the shelves of Walmart — and has even cheated the Africans out of the best jobs that its raw materials-hungry policy has created by bringing in Chinese workers.

The Africans get even less out of the Chinese colonization, by another name, than it did out of the European version in the “scramble for Africa” in the last decades of the 19th century. But the elites are allowed a free hand with their kleptocracy, their human rights violations, and their indifference to the condition of their own people. This sets up an asymmetrical competition with Western laws against bribery, fair trade practices, and the fact that American and international companies cannot be directed to serve a political purpose by their home governments.

President Obama made a good, even a great start, before the summit when he called for an end to the bad old ways of Africa. But his words weren't echoed by the delegates.

The long-term future of Africa lies in fundamental reforms within its social and political structures — and one in particular: its attitude toward women. If you spend any time there, two things are apparent: women have a raw deal, yet they — not the oil or the chrome or the copper, but the used and abused women of Africa — are its future.

Women hold Africa together and suffer in silence. They are the ones bent over with primitive implements in the fields, inevitably with their latest infant strapped to their backs. They are the ones who must endure marriage during puberty, bear children before their bodies are fully formed, and face the world’s highest rates of death during childbirth.

In shiny office buildings in Accra or Lusaka, it is the women who are moving the work forward. If you need something done, from a permit to an airline reservation, seek out a woman in an office. However, very few women make it to those jobs.

On the farms in Africa, it is the women who have managed small cooperatives, mastered micro-credit and provide family life. But they still must bend over their budzas with their youngest child strapped to their backs. The budza is a kind of hoe used for weeding, tilling and sowing. In its way, it is also a symbol of female enslavement; light enough for a woman to use all day long.

The women of Africa need to be told often and in every way they are special. They need to know that they have value beyond sex and work; that they are not an inferior gender, that they are the future.

The summit touched, in passing, on the talent and the plight women, as the male leaders talked the talk of international good intentions. But the women of Africa need recognition. Give them the tools of education and opportunity and they will do the job.

The budza needs to be retired, as does the culture of female enslavement of which it is the symbol. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Motorcades Are a Symbol of Africa’s Values Deficit

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This week, Washington will seize up. Roads will be closed and traffic will be snarled in maybe the worst tie-ups the city has ever seen, except for those on Sept. 11, 2001.

This will not be because of a national security drill, but because 50 heads of state from Africa will be in town to meet with President Obama – and apparently every one of these leaders will have a motorcade. A motorcade?

The leaders of some of the poorest countries on earth — where starvation prevails – will be riding around Washington in motorcades. This is not just appalling, it is symptomatic of the troubles of Africa.

The peoples of Africa are not monolithic: they are divided by culture, language and religion. But they are united by the throughgoing ineptitude of their leaders; those leaders' love of the trappings of power, including motorcades and grand homes; and a far-reaching sense that the wealth of the nationals they lead is also primarily their own wealth.

Whoever in the Obama administration thought that the visitors should have motorcades not only did a disservice to the workers and residents of Washington, but also to the kind of expectation he needs to instill in African leadership: service, rectitude and real care for their people.

The kleptocracy that has characterized so much post-colonial government in Africa is fed by delusional grandeur, insane egoism and a profound indifference to the people who suffer for want of food, shelter, sanitation, medicine, education and employment. The people of Africa cry out for real leadership in their need.

There is a kind of thinness that Africans suffer that one does not see in Europe or America. I am always struck by this cadaverous appearance of people in Africa; often they have had enough food to stay alive, but just.

Living as we do in a country where obesity is widespread, I shudder at what I see in Africa, which is diverse in so many ways and bound by the same awful bonds: bonds of hunger, bonds of joblessness. They are there to be seen in Senegal or Malawi, Kenya or Ghana, and even in rich South Africa.

Outside of bad government and relentless unemployment — 80 percent, and more in some countries — the other scourge is violence and the promiscuous spread of small arms.

To me this is the most perplexing because when I grew up roaming around what are now Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe, violence was unknown. The prime minister of those countries, which were linked for a decade by the British administration into a federation, Roy Wilensky, drove his own car every day and gave lifts to strangers thumbing a ride. I used to ride with him to school, and later to the newspaper office where I worked.

I can tell you that in giving rides, this prime ministerial chauffeur was color- blind and security blind. Motorcades did not exist and the prime minister lived in a suburban house without so much as a policeman on duty, so much as I am aware. He lived up the street from us.

My youth colored my view of Africa. I see it not as the Dark Continent, but rather as the Light Continent; a place of beauty and talented people.

Obama should tell his African colleagues to forget the trappings of leadership and try the real thing. He should persuade them that Africa’s wealth is in its people, but they will not be free if they grow up in a culture of corruption that is so inhibiting, so draining and so self-defeating.

The symbol of bad government in Africa is the Mercedes-Benz automobile. Dictators and plain incompetents love them. There are jokes in local languages about the “Mercedians,” meaning politicians.

So endemic is the political class in Africa's commitment to this luxury automobile, that Mercedes-Benz is building a plant in South Africa to manufacture the most extravagant of these vehicles, the 12-cylinder S600.

Sadly there is a market in the political hierarchy of Africa as, even sadder, there always is for military equipment. “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrica” was the slogan of the African National Congress. It means “God Bless Africa.” Indeed. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate



 

Beware the Armchair Terrorist

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Terrorism isn’t what it used to be. Disruptive technology is at work, and terrorism is much more threatening than it was.

The long-running, terrorist wars of the last century – like those of the Palestinians, the Basques in Spain, or the Kurds in Turkey – were relatively contained, both in the fields of operation and the political motivations.

The new face of terrorism is more awful, more random, and has little of the political purpose of terrorism of the past, however terrible its consequences were.

A new generation of robots is coming, which will make remotely controlled terrorism a real threat throughout the world. Add to that threat the profound difference in terrorism motivation.

Yesterday’s terrorism, though heinous, could claim high purpose: It was wholesale terrorism with political goals to be attained by murder and destruction of civilian targets. Today’s terrorism, by contrast, is increasingly retail, motivated by hatred and revenge. Often the motivation is more religious than nationalistic. The 9/11 attacks were the harbinger of this new terrorism.

Now take blind, irrational hatred, as in the Middle East, mix it with killer robots technology, and you have a huge global threat.

In May, the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons convened a first-ever meeting of experts in Geneva to discuss Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, which could be the start of a wave of anonymous killing across continents and oceans.

These new robotic weapons can do everything that a human with a bomb or improvised explosive can do. The old brake on terrorism — that the terrorist would be caught or, more likely, be killed in the attack — could be over. The age of the armchair terrorist is at hand.

We have all seen the carnage from a simple bomb made from fuel oil and fertilizer. Now add to that the possibility that bombs and other weapons could be made and stored for future detonation using mobile phone technology; or that remotely operated vehicles could drive down a street with machine guns blazing.

Then there are drones. The United States has pioneered the highly sophisticated Predator — remotely-piloted vehicles that can destroy a target across continents and oceans with precision. But non-lethal drones are doing all sorts of work, from examining pipelines to determining the views from potential skyscrapers in New York.

Not only will tomorrow’s terrorists have farther reach, but they will also have the Internet to create chaos. Imagine a Web whisper about a drone armed with biological or chemical agents flying over a big city, its effects magnified by public panic. Likewise, a drone armed with a dirty nuclear weapon – its impact is likely to be quite limited, but the public panic over radiation could cause severe incident.

Israel may have been more panicked over the appearance of a drone from Gaza than the rockets that the Iron Dome missile system took out. A slow-moving drone at rooftop level might one day be a greater threat than a fusillade of high-flying rockets.

The late James Schlesinger, a former Defense secretary and CIA director, liked to discuss the British Empire with me and how it had held together. Because I had grown up in a British colony, he thought I could tell him.

The answer is a combination of economics, psychology and formation before the worldwide proliferation of small arms and explosives. It was fundamental after the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58 that weapons be kept strictly in the hands of the British. African regiments and police, for example, were seldom armed, and then only for special purposes.

Schlesinger emphasized that all arms developments demanded further developments, because your enemy would soon catch up with you. This has happened throughout history: The British invented the tank in World War I, the Germans perfected it in World War II and overran Europe with its Panzer divisions.

Those who hate the West may use its own technologies to attack it at random with remote-controlled weapons, mobile phones, Google maps, and vehicles invented in America. Disruptive technologies are coming to terrorism — and that’s a horror. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Merger Industry Is Doing Just Fine

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Whether Rupert Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox succeeds in its $80 billion bid for Time Warner, rest assured the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) industry will do just fine. Very fine, actually.

There is such a thing as the M&A industry, but it is elusive. It has no trade association and cannot be looked up in the telephone directory. But this virtual organization is a power in the land and very, very rich.

It is made up of investment bankers, lawyers, economists, advertising agencies, public relations tacticians, lobbyists and legal printing firms. They all swing into action like sharks alerted by blood in the water. They are a diverse crew with one thing in common: They do not come cheap.

At the top of the pinnacle are the investment bankers and their pals in the hedge-fund world, who are ready with ideas and capital if it is needed; ready to reap the rewards of arbitrage. These are the elite officers of the Wall Street Brigades; money is their North Star. They have been bred, in the best schools, to expect it as their entitlement, and they are keen to live up to that expectation.

They are retained by both sides in a hostile takeover and, however it goes, their fees will be enough on one transaction to keep them on Easy Street for years. They fly high, shoot high and live high. They are aristocrats in the kingdom of money.

Just below them come the lawyers, droves of them each offering advice on some aspect of the challenge. Each billing more for one hour than most people earn in a week. When working on a big merger, where there are billions and billions of dollars in play, the legal fees run into the tens of millions of dollars — and nobody cares. Outside of the senior management, who expect to get extraordinary wealthy — hundreds of millions of dollars, at least — in a takeover, it is the bankers and the lawyers, denizens of Fifth Avenue and the Hamptons, who make out beyond normal dreams of avarice, and do it over and over.

So it is not surprising that it is often bankers who instigate mergers either by pushing the ideas and the finance mechanism on the firm that hopes to be the acquirer, or persuading a firm that it is time to put itself on the market. Once a target is “in play,” as Time Warner is, anything can happen: A white-knight suitor can come along or the vulnerable company can become an acquisition, as in the way Men’s Warehouse stitched up Jos. A. Bank.

If there is a hostile battle, the advertising and public relations people come in, cajoling shareholders to hold out or sell out. More millions are spent in this effort: No one is trying to save money when the transactions are so large.

The biggest winners are those at the top of the heap: the managements. They own stock options and shares, plus special deals are written to sweeten things for them.

Everyone engaged in the M&A industry makes money when the game is on, all the way down to the caterers, who provide the sustenance when the midnight oil is burning. A merger is a grueling and fun undertaking; the fun of making money under pressure, a lot of pressure and even more money.

Who loses? Certainly the staff of the lesser-partner firm. The conqueror calls the shots and decrees the layoffs, which are one of the principal savings or “efficiencies” of the takeover. There will be less duplication, fewer subsidiary businesses, and fewer facilities that can be consolidated.

The other loser, feverishly denied in advance of the nuptials, is the consumer; the poor stiff who purchases the goods and services that the new entity offers. These may be fewer and, almost certainly, they will become more expensive over time.

Not all mergers are bad. Actually, Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of The Wall Street Journal has resulted in an invigorated newspaper.

But anyone, including myself, who has flown on the merged American Airlines and U.S. Airways has nothing good to report about service, pricing, or frequency. I’ll venture that the M&A moguls are taking private jets — wouldn’t you? — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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Barking Mad about Dog Justice

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You are embarking on reading something that is hopelessly one-sided, patently biased and completely partisan. It is plainly and simply a call for equality.

I want dogs in the United States to be accorded the same rights and privileges as they are in France.

I say that if you want to be born a pooch, do it in France. The French dog’s life is tres bonne.

You may think I am barking mad, but I have been studying pampered pooches for decades. In Britain, people have a screw loose about all animals. But in France, the dog is the overlord of all it surveys.

British dogs may get roast beef on Sunday, if they are lucky. Their French equals drag their owners to the patisserie whenever they feel the urge for an eclair or a napoleon.

British dogs get a bath infrequently in the family tub. But French dogs go to a salon. Sadly, in America, we outsource the grooming to a chain; not the same as a salon for Fifi the Pomeranian or Jacques the wolfhound.

But it is really at lunch and dinner when the French dog struts his or her superior situation: They go to fine restaurants with their owners, and sometimes — Mon Dieu! — eat their meals on the same china.

In England the lucky few four-footers can go to the pub and, with the publican’s permission, enter the hallowed premises. After some unpleasantness with the same publican’s large mongrel, which always blocks the entrance, he or she will find a spot under the table and hope for a bit of overcooked banger.

It is quite amazing how many dogs will show up in a restaurant in France and, after a few snarls, how fast they will settle down to the serious work of begging for food, or waiting in the certain knowledge that if they have the power over their owners to be taken out to lunch or dinner, delicious victuals will be provided with a loving, “Bon appetit, mon petit chien!” Last month in Paris, I saw a happy dog sitting on a banquette in a fine restaurant.

Dogs in France also are conspicuous on public transportation. You see them on the trains, both local and intercity, and the intercity airplanes. Some taxi drivers feel safer with a German shepherd or Rottweiler on the front seat. I have always thought a dog is superior to plastic dividers and other security devices in these uncivil times.

The French indulge their dogs and owners to such an extent that they have special sanitation workers who ride motorcycles equipped with vacuum cleaners, so that the good citizens do not, well, step in it.

But in America, dogs are defendu, not allowed to darken the door. They are classified as a health hazard. You can get away with dining with your best friend outdoors at some establishments. But mostly, the dear creatures must endure confinement at home while we gorge.

My fellow Americans, can this go on? Can we allow the pampered poodles of France to lord it over good ol' American coon hounds? Liberte, egalite, fraternite for the dogs of the U.S.A.! — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate