In today's pages: rape as genocide, Dubai on the brink and Los Angeles needs a new school Superintendent.
In editorials today, the board asks two noted leaders to step aside. In its most gracious manner, the board urges Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. David L. Brewer to resign. Since Senior Deputy Supt. Ramon C. Cortines was hired in April, the board argues, the retired admiral has morphed into a sort of Queen Elizabeth II -- the ceremonial head of government, not the actual leader of the school system -- and an unnecessary figurehead. The board asks less of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger: he's called on merely to reliquish his role as the nation's leader on global warming. That position, which made Schwarzenegger the nation's "greenest Republican," is going to be taken by President Barack Obama.
On the Op-Ed pages, Columnist Rosa Brooks is revolted by Dubai and the "cold-eyed Russian oligarchs, coked-out London pop stars and the spoiled princelings of global finance" who make it their playground. She stops short of feeling good about the economic hard times headed that way, out of sympathy for the massive number of workers who will be impoverished. Peter Navrro, a business professor at UC Irvine, says Schwarzenegger's proposed tax on Disneyland, Legoland and other amusement parks is goofy. And David Scheffer, the former U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes and professor at Northwestern University, argues that if the International Criminal Court in The Hague charges Sudan's president, Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, with rape as genocide, "thousands of women and girls attacked by rapists as a means of destroying their ethnic groups will share a small measure of justice and peace."
Cartoon: M. Wuerker/Politico
While the UAW has some blame for helping make the Big 3 auto makers uncompetitive, the far bigger blame has to go to the GM, Ford & Chrysler executives for poor manufacturing & marketing strategy. They all chose to spend millions of dollars lobbying to be able to continue selling too many SUVS and light-trucks, obtaining fuel efficiency and pollution exemptions. They all chose to ignore the vastly growing green market and desire not only for more fuel-efficient vehicles, but also for alternate fuel vehicles. Ford once had 7 alt-fuel models but chose to not sell ANY of them in the U.S. Now, Ford has just 3 alt-fuel models, all of which are sold only abroad. Likewise, GM had 16 alt-fuel models at one point and now only sells 3 in the US, with the rest confined to foreign markets as well. As a result, the Big 3 are being killed by competition that sells very fuel-efficient cars and reduced-sized trucks, reacting to economic realities of what models will sell YEARS before the Big 3 execs did, and which are dominating the alt-fuel vehicle markets which the Big 3 have largely abandoned. It's knee-jerk to blame it all on UAW, since foreign cos employing US workers, like the Sales Big 3 of Toyota, Honda & Nissan, did not suffer the same problems, despite having to pay their workers union wages, and in fact expanded their market shares and profitability.
Posted by: Ken Ralidis | November 13, 2008 at 02:10 PM