Challenge to the GOP: Privatize and clean house.
Congratulations to Congressman Christopher Cox. His bill to end the buildup of the nation’s helium reserve opens the door for taxpayers to recover some of the billions that have been wasted during the past 80 years on storing gas for blimps (the Business Journal’s Dec. 6 Viewpoint).
Cox was pressing for this when I still was in the British Parliament, supporting Margaret Thatcher’s massive program of privatization. And Cox is right to remind us that it’s only now,given that the Republicans have the same kind of legislative majorities as the prime minister could count on,that Americans can look forward to more of their national assets being liberated from the public sector.
Selling Off Airports
So what should be the next targets for privatization in America? Suggestion to Congressman Cox: Focus on airports (which Thatcher also privatized) and team up with Arnold Schwarzenegger to write the state and federal laws needed to privatize John Wayne Airport and Los Angeles International Airport.
Together they should fetch $3 billion.
As in Britain, the arrangements for selling these airports must include cast-iron guarantees that their future owners will deliver not just the same but better standards of service to airlines and passengers.
Naysayers still will object. But think of the vast amount of public debt that could be retired if John Wayne and LAX were auctioned off.
Prediction: Privately owned U.S. airports can and will be managed more efficiently and expanded with far less cost to taxpayers than they would be if they stayed in government hands.
Lame Ducks
And here’s another challenge for the GOP: Clean the congressional stables of some of the political ordure that clogs up the machinery of U.S. government.
How?
Start with the lame duck gap. No other modern democracy permits, much less requires, elected officials who have been repudiated by the voters to stay in office for the 10 weeks between a general election in November and a new government’s inauguration in January.
Too often, this obsolete delay in giving effect to the peoples’ most important decisions leaves U.S diplomacy in limbo and foreign governments confused about who speaks for America.
The time’s come to close this gap. It makes no sense to have the U.S. government suspended in midair for the better parts of three months while hundreds of top officials on their way out and hundreds more on their way in, hawk their resumes around Washington.
Next, put a stop to gerrymandering, another grotesque malpractice that cries out to be reformed.
Because pols themselves are in charge of drawing their electoral boundaries, it’s all but impossible for U.S. voters to get rid of any but a handful of the 435 members of Congress.
In California, it’s worse. Every seat in the state Legislature last month returned the incumbent or a candidate from the same party as the retiring Assembly member.
Last but not least, the pork barrel. This year’s omnibus budget bill, an unreadable 3,800 pages, bristles with a record number of the “earmarks” that congressmen habitually insert to finance such wasteful exotica in their districts as mariachi research and transgender centers.
Is there any hope of the GOP using its majorities to mitigate if not eliminate these abuses?
“The chances of reform are between slim and zero,” says a former president of the California Senate. “And slim has gone out of town!”
Yet I do not despair. George Bush has asked the leaders of both parties to restore the line item veto whereby the president can strike out the worst kinds of pork. Gov. Schwarzenegger,there’s that man again,suggests that independent panels of retired judges should take over the job of drawing California’s electoral boundaries.
Both proposals make a lot of sense against the background of the president’s nailing the “extension of responsible democracy” to the mast of his foreign policy.
Bush sees this as the best long-term strategy for tackling the sources of terrorism. He may be right. But “physician, heal thyself” is not a bad motto. Exporting American-style democracy is not going to work unless Congress at the same time cleans up at least some of the flaws that foreigners can’t help noticing in America’s own backyard.
Clouseau Returns
As Christmas looms, think back to Inspector Clouseau, the hapless French detective in “The Pink Panther” movies. Twenty years ago, when the president of France paid a state visit to the queen of England, five small tubes of explosives were found in a flowerbed at the grounds of Buckingham Palace.
“French bombs threaten monarchy,” screamed the London tabloids,until a French security man, assigned to guard the president, admitted he had planted le plastique, to help train his sniffer dogs.
Fast-forward to last week, when three flights from Paris landed in New York and Los Angeles. A message from the French police warned that explosives might be hidden in the luggage of one passenger, whose identity they could not trace. Frantic searches were made of every bag on board but no explosives were found.
Only then did it emerge that the plastique, which couldn’t go off because no detonators were attached, had been surreptitiously inserted into the suitcase of some unknown traveler at Charles de Gaulle International Airport by French police themselves.
Why had the French cops done this? The answer,would you believe it,is to help train their sniffer dogs!
Who says Clouseau isn’t still on the job?
Griffiths, a resident of Laguna Niguel, is an author, journalist, and a former member of the House of Commons and undersecretary of state in the U.K. government.
