Dear Editor
Dear Editor The Hidden Story Thomas Land's report ("Swept Away," NL, September 17) on a study of the misrepresentations perpetrated by journalists who covered Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon...
...Unfortunately for Brockway's analysis, and fortunately for the American taxpayer, the Internal Revenue Service has ruled that if one borrows money to purchase tax-exempt securities, the interest on the borrowed funds is not tax deductible...
...You buy some tax-exempts with your own money, and sometime later you borrow $100,000 to pay for the jalopy...
...But our romantic preference for small, independent businesses is likely to be compromised...
...The Jewish State is a proverbial newspaperman's paradise, with many hot stories and few restrictions on reporting them...
...As I said in the original piece, you've got to have some money to begin with...
...Other nations in the region discourage the press from visiting, and usually succeed...
...Let's say you have $100,000 in loose cash and a hankering for a vintage model Rolls Royce...
...True enough...
...Japan's monoliths are smaller, but it has more of them...
...The basic reason is that in the competitive and mercurial high-tech marketplace, businesses must spend fortunes to create popular new products, yet have to replace them almost immediately with still newer ones...
...To compete, we may or may not have to concentrate our economy to the extent that Japan has...
...In other words, responsiveness to technological change implies more than a mere willingness to ply consumers with the advanced products they seem to want...
...During the lifetimes of many people now living, high tech will eventually bring not only unemployment, but the sheer impossibility of ever being employed...
...The telephone company certainly is not, though its difficulties result from its emasculation, rather than from its size...
...Jerry Hollenhorst Economics Department, School of Business Southern Illinois University George P. Brockway replies: Not exactly...
...Denver Peter Dubin High-Tech Misery Robert Lekachman's fine review of Michael Harrington's The New American Poverty ("Prescriptions for a Better America," NL, September 17) refers in passing to "the latest recruits to poverty's ranks...
...In a situation of this kind it is very difficult indeed to make money...
...IBM is in fine shape...
...The United States, of course, has two that are even larger, IBM and AT&T...
...Another sentence should have read, "Many varieties of Alternatives Leben, for example, have been markedly on the rise...
...With the whole concept of work as a means of livelihood being progressively undermined, we will desperately need "new ideas," liberal or otherwise...
...According to him, it is that "great size, in and of itself, is an economic evil" ("Big Is Ugly," NL, September 3...
...Edwardsville, III...
...Brockway's point is that big companies need big bailouts when they fail...
...That ominous science is now in its infancy, but it is already quite capable of making just about all forms of manual work economically worthless...
...at the very least, we will have to permit cooperative R&D, financing and production...
...Whatever its past attitudes, today's American car industry is the most automated business in the country...
...Consider the electronics industry...
...Correction In Alexander J. Motyl's "The New Vienna," (NL, September 17), the quotation from the Hapsburg Hymn should have been, "God preserve, God protect our emperor, our land...
...This makes Brockway's revised scheme either unprofitable or illegal...
...The result is that many of its former employees are still out of work or remain stuck in other, less well-paying jobs despite the booming profits of the Big Three...
...Misery is said to love company—and in this case will certainly have lots of it...
...We ought to explore the proposition that corporate expansionism can have beneficial consequences, and examine all the effects of the corporate Balkanization he favors...
...Houston Teddy Gonzales Rich Man's Bluff George P. Brockway may be a careful reader, but his amended rich man's dodge of borrowing money, deducting the interest expense from income tax, and investing the principal in tax-exempt bonds ("Between Issues," NL, September 17) is still wrong...
...Dear Editor The Hidden Story Thomas Land's report ("Swept Away," NL, September 17) on a study of the misrepresentations perpetrated by journalists who covered Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon fails to mention the basic source of the problem: the democratic institutions of Israel and their absence in neighboring countries...
...In part, however, those autoworkers have surely been victimized by Detroit's belated conversion to high technology...
...But there are other, perhaps more important, economic evils...
...It also involves the ability to manufacture those products by high-tech methods: in a word, by robotics...
...Of the American companies, only IBM and AT&T clearly have the resources to finance and carry out the kind of research and development that will be needed in future...
...Many of our other firms are in trouble, too...
...Detroit Charles Mann Big Bad Business George P. Brockway believes that he knows the lesson of Continental Illinois, Financial Corporation of America, Lockheed, and Chrysler...
...We also have a fair number of middling companies and a multitude of small ones...
...Among them, we read, are steel workers undermined by "their industry's critically negligent failure to keep abreast of technological advances and au-toworkers similarly victimized by the managerial failures of the overpaid chieftains of General Motors and Ford...
...Japan competes against us through its handful of giant concerns...
Vol. 67 • October 1984 • No. 19
