White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

How Computers Are Trashing the Old Ways of Work

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I saw the future outside my apartment building this week — and it was a brown van. To be exact, it was a United Parcel Service van and the operator was struggling with a huge load of parcels on a hand truck.
 
You can’t tell too much from a parcel, but the shape gives the contents away to some extent: a small, rolled carpet; a large, flat-screen television; about a dozen boxes that could contain a variety of goods — goodies for fun and essentials to keep things going. Talk about Frankie Laines’1949 hit “Mule Train.”
 
Every day the UPS delivery man is at our building, sometimes with more, sometimes with less. Sometimes he brings clothes for my wife, and recently he brought a book for me. What the trusty fellow in the brown van doesn’t unload, his compatriots from FedEx and the United States Postal Service do.
 
A sea of goods flow into this building each day; goods that have never seen a retail store, never been offered for sale in a mall or high street shop, but goods that people want anyway. Welcome to online shopping and the future disruption it'll bring.
 
What's missing with this shopping is the shop, whether it's a big box store in the mall or a ma-and-pa operation on the high street.
 
It's part of one of the great historical revolution brought about by the Internet. All the data show that online shopping grows every day.
 
Eventually, in the way that the malls undermined the neighborhood shop and the chains killed off those wonderful downtown department stores, a different one for each city (Garfinkel's in Washington, D.C., Jordan Marsh in Boston and I. Magnin in San Francisco), the Internet may bury the malls.
 
Make no mistake, the Internet is a hellishly efficient and cruel exterminator of jobs, as well as a ruthless agent of social change.
 
As so often, the political class is still convinced that job growth can be achieved by economic and regulatory policy shifts. It's easier to blame presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, depending on your ideological persuasion, even though the evidence of massive change is everywhere, than to face a new reality.
 
It's nigh impossible to speak to anyone on the phone at a bank, an insurance company or a utility without going through 20 minutes of computer-assisted torture in the form of voice prompts — “Press star 2 to get your balance.”
 
Academia has been surprisingly slow to study and quantify the job-threatening nature of the new order. MIT, Oxford and Harvard have spoken up, and now you can expect more pessimism from on high as academics get the wind up about their own employment.
 
In the ivory towers, those citadels of refined arrogance, there is deep disquiet. The cause: MOOCS, or massive open online courses. These are attracting students by the hundreds of thousands; some for credit, some just for the joy of watching the most articulate professors in action. They are creating a star system that favors the telegenic over everything else and could, in time, change the nature of higher education so profoundly that many lesser university will close up shop. One study, by researchers at Oxford, has estimated 47 percent of our jobs may disappear.
 
History tells us that new ways of doing things lead to new areas of endeavor; agrarian people became urban manufacturers, manual labor gave way to service-sector work. The computerization of work is an equal-opportunity un-employer. Is new work possible?
Factories in China and Germany are as subject to computer predation as those in the United States. We may yet see a global economic collapse driven by too much productivity; computer productivity.
 
This column was written on a computer and distributed by computer. The contents were generated by a human being, but that may change. Stay online. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
 
 
 
 

 

Conquering Radiation Fear, the Big Challenge

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Can we learn to love radiation? Maybe not, but if we understood it better, we might not be so damned scared of it – a fear that has cost us in many ways, from where reactors are sited to how hospitals handle life-saving nuclear material to the benefits of eradicating deadly bacteria in food.
 
There's a lot of data on the long-term effects of ionizing radiation, ranging from that which was generated by studying the health of survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings to the environment on the Bikini Atoll, where weapons were tested in the 1950s, to conditions at the Chernobyl meltdown site in Ukraine. The big news is that the data doesn't support the idea that cancer and mutations will follow as night and day after exposure to high doses of radiation.
 
Now the battle has been joined by a Harvard researcher and lecturer in public health, David R. Ropeik. He doesn't suggest that we rush out and encourage dentists to be even more promiscuous in their use of X-rays than they are already, but he does draw attention to the epidemiological data over the past 68 years and what it says: The linkage between very high radiation exposures and cancer and mutations isn’t there.
 
For years, it's been postulated that radiation leads to cancer axiomatically. The data says otherwise.
This glimmer of light, this pinprick, this faint glow could be the beginning of a new day in nuclear, or at least encourage a new look at radiation and its effects. It comes at a time when the American Nuclear Society (ANS), the professional society for nuclear scientists and engineers, is planning a more active public role.
 
The ANS president this year, Donald P. Hoffman, is a hard-driving nuclear advocate, who, in 1985, created the nuclear services company which he still heads, Excel. He'd like to see the 12,000 members of ANS step forward and provide honest witness in disputes about nuclear, believing that the professionals would be more believed than corporate people.
 
He'd also like to boost public knowledge of the uses of nuclear outside of generating electricity, especially in medicine, where it is growing. Already, about one third of hospital patients benefit from nuclear through CAT scans and X-rays to the direct application of radiation to cancer cells. This evolving therapy is less debilitating than chemotherapy or large-area radiation.
 
Hoffman says, “We are seeing nuclear science deployed in new ways,” including non-destructive testing, food irradiation, medicine, space exploration and many more. He believes the uses for nuclear technology are only in their infancy.
 
Outside of the hospital and the laboratory though, the big impediment to nuclear is the fear of radiation or, as popular phenomenon author Malcolm Gladwell would argue, the “fear of fear.”
 
In a recent New York Times piece, Ropeik salutes the Environmental Protection Agency for beginning to take a different look at how we should respond to a nuclear accident or even a terrorist “dirty bomb.” For example, because most radiation can be stopped easily, it may be better to go indoors than to begin a frenzied and hazardous evacuation.
 
As many as 30 years ago, Dr. Mortimer Mendelssohn of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, whose life’s work has been studying the populations around Hiroshima and Nagasaki, told me that the cancers and mutations he expected simply had not occurred. “They’re just not there,” he said.
 
At Bikini Atoll, the Pacific test site, marine life goes on. The vegetation has concentrated some long-lived radionuclides, but the marine life is healthy. At Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accident site, wildlife is teeming among the radioactive ruins.
 
Towns within the radiation belt around Fukushima, which are now safe for their populations to return, remain deserted. The Japanese population is in the grip of a national psychosis of fear — not of earthquakes and tsunamis, but of radiation. The earthquake and tsunami that damaged the reactors at Fukushima killed some 18,000 people but radiation killed no one.
 
The fear of fear is a social construct, as Gladwell and before him, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, pointed out — a mighty challenge for Hoffman and his ANS. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
 
 
 
 

Is There a Jobs Catastrophe in the Making?

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Disruption is in the air: disruption in Congress, disruption in the workplace, disruption in the well-being of the middle class. History may well term this the Age of Disruption.
 
This need not be all bad.
 
Disruption is only a problem if it is poorly managed, or if forces beyond control devastate existing order. Take the Russian Revolution or the recent tsunamis in Asia. Nowadays, we tend to think of disruption as being uniquely in the province of technology – and it is this disruption that harbors the most future shock.
 
The most serious disruption now getting underway is the disappearance of jobs; not the replacement of old jobs, but the utter disappearance of jobs. Jobs that once were are going into the ether or, call it what you will, to the cloud. Gone for good.
 
For the first time since the Industrial Revolution was ushered in by the substitution of human and animal labor by shaft horsepower derived from a waterwheel or a steam engine, technology is subtracting jobs rather than adding them. This is a disruption that hurts.
 
From Oxford University comes one of the most disquieting studies on the future yet to appear. Two researchers, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, predict that 47 percent of American jobs are at risk in the coming years from computerization.
 
Their conclusions are stupefying: nearly half the jobs in the United States could disappear in a few short years. Worse, according to the Oxford University researchers these jobs will affect the great middle reaches of employment, from the white-collar jobs down to unskilled workers.
 
Their study “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization?” should have every parent and every policy wonk asking: What should be done? What can we do to save half of the population from not being able to find a job at any level, of being driven to compete for minimum-wage employment?
 
Until now, each leap forward in technology and its corresponding increase in productivity has had two effects:

1. The economic benefits have been shared with the workers. That has ended.

2. New prosperity from automation always led to new demand for more goods and services. This maybe ending. Depressed wages do not lead to new purchases.

In turn, this history has led to a pervasive economic myth that the relationship between automation – even automation using advanced computers – will always lead to more jobs and more prosperity.
 
Yet the market for labor is changing dramatically, and that lockstep has lasted pretty well since the first loom in England substituted shaft horsepower for human labor in the 18th century.
 
That happy union may be broken. The Oxford researchers, in a National Public Radio interview, suggested that the only safe jobs might be those that require a high degree of education and interpersonal skills like the law, teaching and management consulting.
 
My own daily reminder of the world of jobs that is changing is my Kindle. It reproves me. Its value is that I am never without a new book, and it is more portable than any but small pocket books.
 
But I used to publish books and every time I open the electronic book, I think of the long chain of people who were involved in making a book years ago: typesetters, printers, binders, warehouse staff, book wholesalers, and finally the clerks who took your money — all worthwhile jobs with dignity.
 
Books and book stores are not worse hit than many other things, but they are suffering. When did you last speak to a person at your bank, airline, insurance company or utility?
 
A nation that does all of its business online may be efficient in the short term until online leads to the breadline.
 
Disruption is the new normal and we need to understand it. New industries need to be sought. An example of a newish industry that has flourished in recent decades is tourism. A century ago, a few rich people traveled. Now tourism is the world's largest employer.
 
Old remedies for new problems won't do it. The jobs deficit won't be fixed by what we seem to have on the table: lower corporate taxes and less unionism. Less general wealth is the wrong kind of disruption and we are heading that way. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Love Blooms Across the Atlantic

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The casual observer may wonder why the United States and the European Union are working on a scheme to bring about a trans-Atlantic free trade zone by 2015. The project is big. It is ambitious. It is daunting. And it is underway.
 
There is no shortage of European goods in America whether it is machinery from Finland, wine from France, cars from Germany, beer from Holland, subway cars from Italy, trains from Sweden, and cheese from all over Europe. And there is a raft of American goods, ideas and investment flowing into the European Union's 28 member states. In fact, 45 percent of the world’s trade is between the European Union and the United States.
 
Yet in the embassies and among the foreign-policy wonks in Washington, the project, known as the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), is the hot topic — after the government shutdown, of course. There are those who believe that the bonds between the United States and Europe have been loosening since the Cold War era, as has the importance on both sides of the Atlantic of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
 
The TTIP (pronounced TEE-tip) has political purposes as well as trade ones. In trade it will endeavor to remove all remaining tariffs – the average tariff is around 4 percent — and to end the practice of revenge tariffs, whereby a commodity that is not involved in a trade dispute becomes a tariff target. For example, sticking a huge tariff on olive oil because there is a dispute over how carcasses are washed down in slaughterhouses. Many of these disputes now end up before the World Trade Organization and drag on for years.
 
Another touchy and expensive issue is certifications. Although the European Union and the United States have high standards of safety and consumer protection, products have to be certified on both sides of the Atlantic. Sweden's Volvo automobiles are designed to be super-safe, but they have to be certified as street-legal in the United States.
 
A new study by the Bertelsmann Foundation, Europe’s largest think tank, the British Embassy in and the Atlantic Council concludes that the TTIP will create between 740,000 and 1 million jobs in the United States. All 50 states would see new jobs created and an average 33 percent rise in exports to the European Union by 2027, according to the study.
 
The political case is both sentimental and practical. European Commission President Jose Manuel Barosso has made strengthening Atlantic ties a high priority. German Chancellor Angela Merkel sees tightening the Atlantic bonds as important to her legacy.
 
But nobody on either side of the Atlantic needs the TTIP more than David Cameron, the beleaguered British prime minister. It may be the olive branch that will soothe the anti-Europe forces in his own Conservative Party and across Britain.
 
Cameron has promised a referendum on whether Britain stays in the European Union or pulls out. A new American alliance with jobs attached may just be enough to bring the right wing of his own party to heel.
 
To understand how divided the Britain’s conservatives are, look no further than the U.S. House of Representatives. Political fury is not a U.S.-only phenomenon.
 
Supporters of the TTIP see it as against fortification against Asia; an opportunity to maybe gain back some footing in non-luxury goods, and a reassertion of Western values.
 
Yet the road ahead is rough.
 
The North American Free Trade Area was negotiated and signed by President George H.W. Bush and ratified by President Bill Clinton with Republican support, as the unions and their Democratic allies wanted nothing to do with it, although it is now regarded as a template not only for the TTIP but also for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would brings together the United States, Canada, Mexico and many Asian countries but excludes China.
 
Tyson Barker, director of European relations at the Bertelsmann Foundation, says that when both free-trade deals are concluded, the United States will be a fulcrum between the two. Sadly, at present, negotiate is a dirty word in Washington. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 
 

Requiem for the American Dream

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There is such a chorus from the punditocracy declaring the American Dream dead that one is scared to lay one's head down at night. A quick Google search reveals that there are at least a dozen books declaring the end to what is the American ethos: a dream in which everyone could graduate to the middle class with a lifetime of dignified employment with a pension, and good educations for their children.
 
Like all declines, there are many threads to the change that is wracking the country. Some of them:
 
  • There has been a dislocation between the growth in productivity and the growth in wages. Hedrick Smith points this out in his excellent and detailed book, “The American Dream and Who Stole It.”
 
  • The years of great national prosperity lasted from the end of World War II until it began to erode savagely toward the end of the last century. Smith dates the rot all the way back to the Carter administration, but most of us were not aware of it until much later.
 
  • If the workers are not sharing in the growth in productivity, we have severely reversed upward social mobility and the enduring belief of an immigrant people that their children would have a better life.
 
The failure of institutions to mobilize against what was patently happening is extraordinary and, in its way, peculiarly American. Our sense of exceptionalism leads us to avoid collective action.
 
Unionism, which has always been a force for incorporating productivity gains into wage packets, has been muted and itself has failed to grasp what is happening. While the world was changing, the unions were lost in old labor-management struggles of an irrelevant past. Management learned they no longer had to sit and take it: They could move to union-free locations like the South, and ultimately Asia. Collectively we watched our own decline in silence.
 
The monied class learned how to buy Congress and turn the watchdog into the enabler of the looter. A powerful new breed of lobbyist — often men and women who had served either in Congress or as congressional aides — threw themselves into the business of making sure that the money people (the corporations and super-rich individuals) got whatever the wanted; subsidies, light regulation, tax breaks and exemptions and, finally, light taxes.
 
As running for office — never easy in the House with its two-year election cycle — became more expensive, elected officials became more vulnerable to campaign contributions. Now it is a giant system of bribery in which neither the bribers nor the bribed feel shame; there are willing buyers and sellers of the U.S. government as farmers buy and sell cattle. This trading money for favors is well documented in Mark Leibovich's book, “This Town.”
 
Everyone who works on Capitol Hill and its lobbies knows what is going on. Money is changing hands for influence, and legislation is being passed favoring big business and big money. You can buy permission to pollute, buy a change in securities laws and buy favorable tax treatment. And you can secure the minimum wage at below poverty levels.
 
It used to be, as one long-term lobbyist explained to me, that if you wanted favors on Capitol Hill you had to assemble a large and transparent coalition of people who would benefit from the change in law that your client wanted. You had to get many interests on board and persuade some newspaper commentators of your high purpose. Now, this veteran said, you just do it with money — in the dark, he might have added.
 
The Chinese did not send an armada of junks to take out jobs; we exported them for short-term gain. We embraced the myth that cheaper goods were better for our people. They are – if we have money to pay for them.
 
The middle class, to use the vernacular of the moment, has been thrown under the bus.
 
The tea party, briefly the hope for middle-class salvation, drank from the horn of myths spread by the monied class. Now, in their folly, they are supporting a destructive shutdown of the government, which will further damage the middle class.
 
Of course it is not just venality that has brought us to our dreamless state: rapid technological change, and the decline in the need for whole classes of work present a serious challenge. But who is taking up the challenge? Not Congress, whose members are mostly millionaires; not the tea party; not the unions.
 
Fancy a double espresso before bed? — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
 
 

Getting a Seat at the Table

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Think of this as a primer for all of those, like the sufferers of the awful disease Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, who need to be heard in Washington and aren't. Silence has a price.
 
There are two branches of lobbying in Washington. The first is big lobbying, with big money making big campaign contributions. The second is everyday lobbying, which is quietly effective, scarcely organized and part of the fabric of decision-making. Call it "informational lobbying."
 
Congress cannot expected to be knowledgeable about a myriad of issues, and this is where the lobbyists perform their often more innocent function. Simply, they know stuff. Their advice isn't always objective, but it's informed.
 
Certainly, Congress has the best research available through the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress and all the executive branch agencies. But it's a lot easier to call a friend, where a question can be asked and answered in the vernacular: “Joe, what's the story on the helium shortage?” It can be argued that, at this level, lobbying is not suspect but efficient.
 
Proximity is a force in Washington, familiarity a lever. There are no fingerprints; it's how the system works. A chance meeting in a restaurant can change the course of policy; influence a congressional opinion about something obscure but important, like the Endangered Species  Act, which is now receiving attention on its 40th anniversary.
 
The indictment of this informal lobbying regime is not that it exists and works, but that if you aren't at the table, you won't be heard. Woe betide those who don't have a lobbying operation, however modest, in Washington.
 
The lobby-less must suffer in obscurity: no lobby means no input. No conversation after church or at a kid's soccer game means no information is spreading about actions and decisions that will have impact down the line.
Make no mistake, proximity means a lot in the informing of government. A few casual words will often trump a great academic study.
 
For the past several years, I've taken a keen interest in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), also known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. It's a disease associated with the suppression, for reasons unknown, of the immune system. To get it is to contract a life sentence of daily suffering, often so severe that patients can be bedridden for years. They think of themselves as “the damned.”
 
This community has issues with the federal government; specifically with the Department of Health and Human Services, which has oversight of the National Institutes of the Health. Yet the advocates for CFS — many of them superbly articulate – aren't heard in Washington.
 
This is very clear, at the moment, when the department, acting through the NIH, has signed a contract with the Institute of Medicine to, according to NIH, to develop “clinical diagnostic criteria” for CFS.
 
This has so enraged the top tier of 35 doctors and researchers in the field that they — risking good relations and future research funding — have written to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius, imploring her to halt this folly. The Institute of Medicine doesn't have expertise in this field, according to the CFS doctors.
 
Most CFS specialists agree that an effective definition of the disease, known as the Canadian Consensus Criteria, is working fine and should be retained. Confusion and expense from Washington aren't needed. A wrong definition can be destructive to research, treatment and patient well-being. It will have consequences.
 
But the protests may have come too late, as knowledge of what the NIH was up to came too late.
 
To me, this bureaucratic shuffle by HHS is an example of the dangers of not having a presence in Washington. Government responds to pressure. No presence, no pressure, no result — or worse, a bad result.
 
You don't need huge money to lobby. Effective lobbying is often a case of simply being there and being known to be there: walking the halls of Congress catches the attention not only of Congress, but also wayward federal departments and the media. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Guns and the Middle Class

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The thing about gun lovers is that they are passionate. The thing about those who aren’t gun lovers, is that they simply want the killing to stop. That makes the argument asymmetrical and gives the advantage to the gun lovers.
 
After every mass shooting – Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, and now the Navy Yard – there is outrage among the articulate middle class, but in time it dies down. This, too, is asymmetrical.
 
The thing about mass shootings is that, as often as not, the victims are middle class. The middle class can't get to the barricades fast enough when it is they who are in trouble; but it is notably absent when their members aren't being shot or, for that matter, imprisoned, frisked, or fighting on the front lines.
 
In Chicago, an average of three homicides occur every night. On Labor Day alone, 12 people were killed and 25 wounded. But these are almost all in the ghetto and are black-on-black.
 
We lose 31,000 people to gun deaths, accidental suicide and murder every year. By 2015, gun deaths will exceed road fatalities. Most of the gun deaths will be among youngsters on the street.
 
Cars are getting safer by design, as new technology is incorporated. Guns are getting more dangerous by design, as more civilian versions of military weapons flood the country.
 
Military weapons are supposed to be lethal. The most obvious example of a modified battlefield weapon is the AR-15; it is the civilian version (semiautomatic instead of fully automatic) of the U.S. Army’s basic assault rifle, the M16. The AR-15 featured in the Sandy Hook shootings.
 
Let’s take time out for people like me who like guns. I love the feel of them, the inherent majesty of them, the transference of power when you heft one. Yes, they make you feel more manly, more like a card-carrying member of the warrior class.
 
I learned to shoot when I was quite young, maybe 11. The thrill — the sense of being augmented — stays with you. Guns are seductive. If you are young and male, the seduction is complete; you have a pocketful of machismo.
 
But if you are young and male and you live on the streets of a city like Chicago or Houston or Los Angeles, entrapped by drugs and gangs, your gun will seem like your best friend until someone else’s gun takes your life, or you take another life. In this demimonde, children who are too young to have been in love are not too young to kill or be killed.
 
Joe Madison, a tireless crusader for many causes, and broadcaster on SiriusXM Satellite Radio, urged after the Sandy Hook shooting rampage that the bodies — the broken, bloody, shattered bodies — of the schoolchildren, should be shown on television. That way, he argued, the nation would be shocked into action.
 
No good, in other words, showing the flowers and the teddy bears. Guns don’t make flowers and teddy bears; they make gaping, lethal wounds.
 
It was the pictures of the wounded and the dead that turned the tide of public opinion during the Vietnam War; it was stark pictures that drove home the horror of lynching.
 
If the day in, day out murders were documented, if the agony of the street killings were exposed by a modern-day Charles Dickens, this national veneration for the tools of killing would pass. Guns would begin to go where they belong: under lock and key, or in a well-ordered militia.
 
Guns don’t enhance freedom, they curtail it; they put our cities off limits to many after dark and take life. Death is the absolute confiscation of freedom.
 
The gun lobby cannot be fought the way Piers Morgan of CNN fights it — with logic. The victims must speak from the grave through photography, video and even fiction.
 
You don’t fight the gun lobby; you undermine it with the silent voices of those it has claimed. Guns kill people. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 
 

Cry, the Beloved Elephants

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The elephants of Africa have have a fix on family values. They look out for their calves and each other. When an elephant dies, often from a bullet, the herd tries to raise the fallen animal; to lift it back on its feet; to make it whole again. They do not appear to understand death, these the largest and most glorious of land mammals.
 
They walk their young much as human families do, often the adults sheltering the young'uns between them. Soon there may be no African elephants left in the wild.
 
The great, kindly beasts are facing a holocaust. They are being slaughtered on an industrial scale by poachers for their ivory, which is fetching record prices in Asia. A similar extermination of the rhinoceros is taking place, but it is to the elephant that I feel an affiliation, an affiliation tinged with guilt.
 
My mother and one of her brothers hunted elephants in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, the 1920s. She was proud, and as time passed, a little ashamed of her hunting days. It may even have been that she liked to be thought of as a retired big game hunter and had never actually pulled the trigger. As elephant became more endangered, she clammed up.
 
My own sin is that in Kenya, at the Nairobi airport, I once bought a small ivory pendant for someone. It had a government certificate of guarantee that it was made of “old ivory” that had been taken – I find it hard to say harvested — when it was legal. I wanted to believe that and I did at the time, but I doubt it now. I wish, to my soul, that I had not bought it.
 
That piece of ivory, my mother and life in Zimbabwe all came back to me with pain when I learned of the latest, greatest, most ghastly slaughter of elephants – and, in the course of it, many other innocent creatures and maybe people, too – the poisoning with cyanide of the watering holes of 41 elephants. Cyanide is widely available in Zimbabwe, where it is used in gold mining.
 
It happened in the Hwange National Park southwestern Zimbabwe. There are photographs of the carcasses on the Web. They died horribly and, because of their size, probably slowly.
 
The thought of those magnificent animals, bellowing in pain, trying to save each other and writhing as the poison did its atrocious work has been with me for days. I cannot shake the horror of the holocaust in the bush.
 
There is a horror aplenty to go around, from Syria on down. But the gross indecency of the slaughter of the Zimbabwe elephants and the way it was done; cow and calf and bull alike going down in agony for money.
 
There is blame to go around for the elephants' poisoning outside of the lawlessness of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe. There is the unfettered trade for rhino horn — Didn't Viagra take care of that? I had hoped so. — and for the ivory used in jewelry and fine furniture. I have seen, in my youth, elephant tusks mounted just for show. And their feet, after treatment, used as indoor planters. Deadly decorations.
 
There is an international regime to intercept and prevent the looting of Africa but, like many international agreements, it is underfunded. It has also fallen prey to, of all things, sequestration on Capitol Hill.
 
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service mans the front lines in persuading other governments not to allow trade in ivory, rhino horn and other products from endangered species. Most importantly though, this small but critical corps fights the use of the United States as a transhipment point. Yet, according Daniel Ashe, writing in Scientific American, there are only 216 agents covering the global movement of animal contraband and there are 63 vacancies that cannot be filled because of budget sequestration.
 
I wonder if any members of Congress can hear, in the far recesses,of their minds, the ghostly trumpeting of 41 beautiful giants as they go down to cyanide poisoning? I can, and I always will. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate


 
 
 
 

Stop the Airline Merger

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Those nice people who run two of the largest airlines, U.S. Airways and American Airlines have this nifty idea: they will merge. But the Justice Department — showing uncommon good sense for once — has said "no" to the merger.
 
So the airlines have done what multibillion-dollar outfits do: they have hired the best lawyers (i.e. the most expensive), the best lobbyists and the top public relations operatives to persuade a judge and the public that the Justice Department is off its rocker and that if the merger happens, the traveling public will be transported on aircraft as comfortable and as safe as magic carpets.
 
A new and glorious era in air travel would be at hand.
 
Don't you believe it. The last thing we need is a new monster company with monopoly control of many airports and life-and-death control of the prosperity — even the survival — of small towns. If the merger goes through, go long on bus companies.
 
Airlines, to give them their due, have their problems; starting with the ups and downs in the price of jet fuel, the vagaries of a market that is spooked by terrorism, a downturn in the economy or the difficulty of getting landing rights at top airports, particularly those serving the North Atlantic route.
 
But the vagaries of the commercial space occupied by the air carriers has not brought out their humanity. Instead they have become predatory, turning on their passengers with the viciousness of hungry snakes. Flights are overbooked with the certain knowledge that customers will suffer extreme discomfort. Likewise flights are canceled arbitrarily if the passenger load is not high enough, and fees have spread through the industry like the Black Death in the Middle Ages.
 
The airlines don't answer their phones and they juggle prices endlessly, so you can't predict the cost of travel. And if you should even think of modifying your itinerary, you become an economic target.
 
Recently on an international flight on one of the two carriers trying to buffalo a judge, the Justice Department and Congress that they should get into bed together, I tried to change the last leg — flying from Philadelphia to Washington instead of Philadelphia to Providence, R.I. My original itinerary said there would be a change fee of $150, and I had credit card in hand ready for this extortion. But I underestimated the ingenuity in kleptomania of the airline. Sure there would be a change fee, but there would also — get this — be a much higher fee for re-writing the ticket. Oh, even if I tried to get off the plane in Philadelphia, I'd have to pay a fee.
 
But, like the Ginsu knives ads on television, that was not all. To fly the last leg as needed, I would have had to pay more than the original ticket cost.
 
The airline would not check my bag to Philadelphia; nor would they allow my wife to put it on her ticket, while I took a few toiletries in the cabin. That change would cost $100 because they knew I was going to jump ship and take a bus to Washington.
 
The airlines are simply out of control. They de facto collude to fix prices on non-ticket items. One airline decides to charge for baggage, bang, and they all do. One decides that any change in itinerary is a revenue stream, and as fast as you can say “cleared to land,” they all have. One decides to charge for food, and in days they're all at it.
 
The Justice Department is right to oppose this merger which has, at its heart, what economists call “market power” or the ability to gauge their defenseless customers. If Justice loses its suit, Congress should act to block the merger — and it should outlaw non-transport fees and other thievery within the present law.
 
We should be able to see airliners for what they are: the triumph of the ascent of man, not as winged predators. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate