European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - January 8, 1992, Darmstadt, Hesse                                Wednesday january 8, 1992 the stars and stripes b Page 13 commentary Anthony Lewis Bush should learn not whine while in Japan 1he�,m Pun fora leaner work Force after / president Bush a visit to Japan this week with his entourage of business executives is a metaphor for what ails America. There in a neat package Are symbols of corporate failure social division and lame political response. The most prominent businessmen in the delegation Are the leaders of the . Auto Industry the cos of general motors Ford and Chrysler. And what is their message to Japan and the world that when an american leads his company into disastrous losses his response is to whine about the Competition and indulge his personal greed. Ten years ago the . Manufacturers won a a voluntary restraints on japanese Auto exports to this country. They said they wanted the Protection temporarily a breathing space to modernize their products and production methods. After 10 years the american manufacturers Are in worse trouble than Ever. General motors lost Between $6 and s8 billion in 1991. Last month the company announced drastic measures to Cut jobs and close plants Over the next three years Steps that experts thought were Long overdue. Ford and Chrysler Are also losing heavily. Having failed to make Good enough use of the Protection they were Given the car companies want More. Bush is expected to press Japan for new Export quotas. The losers will be american Consumers who buy japanese cars not out of some Bias but because they Are very Good cars. Bush talks passionately about free Trade and fair Competition. But by bringing the big three Auto executives along he tells his japanese hosts that what he really wants is an unfair protected position for inefficient american manufacturers. There is another reason Why the japanese Are Likely to be unimpressed. That is the record of the american automobile chiefs in lining their own pockets while they run their companies into the ground. The loudest of the Auto cos is Lee Iacocca of Chrysler. In 1990 he was paid $4.65 million and Given $718,000 in Chrysler shares. And the company bought two houses from him because he could not get what he wanted for them in a falling real estate Market. Gmys chairman Robert Stempel got $2.18 million in immediate and deferred compensation in 1990. His predecessor Roger Smith who presided Over much of the company a slide gets an annual pension of $1.2 million. In Japan managers whose companies do so badly resign. The ethic is personal responsibility which does not seem a bail idea for any society. Moreover Japan has a very different idea of what top business executives should be paid. The american pattern with cos getting 160 times the pay of an average worker seems to the japanese to be grossly disproportionate and socially divisive. The Wall Street journal provided some comparative figures last week inn compelling Story by Jill Abramson and Christopher j. Chipello. It should be required Reading for All interested in the comparative Rise of japanese and decline of american Industry. The 12 major cos who Are with Bush earned on average a Little More than $2 million in 1990. Chief executives in Japan get about one sixth of that figure Between $300,000 and $400,000 a year. And they pay a top marginal income tax rate of 65 percent. A president of the United states who sought serious answers to the decline of american manufacturing might go to Japan to learn. He would learn about the ethic of responsibility and about a system that values the production line worker and not just the executive. If he had an open mind that president would also learn How much Japan has achieved by Industrial policy a by government working with Industry to support of Vilian research and development and Point capital to Ward promising areas. He would see what a difference it makes when the government does something about education instead of just talking. But we do not have that president. We have one who repeats the cliches of free Enterprise Good govern mint bad. We have one who cares about Short run politics instead of the Long run problems a the critical problems a of the american Economy. We have one whose answer to our recession is to blame the japanese. I Tho new i is Timio a Richard o mar statue of Britain s bomber Boss under fire the Queen Mother will arrive sometime this Spring to a perfect Little 10th-Century Church in downtown London called St. Clement Danes and there she will dedicate a statue to the commander in chief of Britain a bomber squadrons during world War ii sir Arthur Harris. Or maybe she wont. It is not something the Queen mothers representatives care to be definitive about. All that one can get out of them is that her participation in a ceremony whatever form it May take has not yet been decided. The guest list for the May 31 ceremony is still a Little infirm too As is the appropriateness of the whole idea in some Peoples minds. Relatives of the 55,573 men of bomber command who died in the War have been invited As Well As representatives from some of the German cities they bombed. The statue of Harris is being finished by the sculptor Faith Winter. She did the 9-foot rendering of air chief marshal lord Hugh Dov Ding already standing on the South Side of London a St. Clements cobbled Plaza on the strand. Lord Dov Ding headed the Raf fighter command. His statue was unveiled by the Queen Mother about three years ago in her capacity As commandant of the Wom ends Royal air Force. Over that there was no it is. But a a bomber Harris As the late sir Arthur is known remains a figure of hot controversy in parts of Europe. Bomber Harris is said to be responsible for killing about half a million German civilians during the War. He did this starting in 1942, by sending thousands of his Lancaster and Halifax bombers in night raids Over cities such As Cologne Hamburg and Dresden Rostock Linbeck Wurzburg and others turning them into incinerators which consumed their inhabitants. Forty thousand people were killed in Hamburg alone. Then about 100,000 died in Dresden when in one february night in 1945, the a Florence on the Elbe was firebombed by British bombers. The americans hit it the next Day another 20,000 civilians were killed in Pforzheim. Some argue such assaults were necessary to bring the War to a quicker end and thereby saved More lives in the Long run. But not everybody believes the attacks on non strategic cities were necessary even justifiable. Said Joachim Becker mayor of Pforzheim a it is a disturbing idea to Honor a Man whose plans did virtually nothing to shorten the length of the War but much to increase its  the More in sadness than anger nature of Beckers reaction to the proposal to Honor bomber Harris has been typical of the German response. Many newspapers throughout the Federal Republic have mentioned the proposed memorial but there have been no expressions of massive outrage or shrill denunciations of it. The tone is one of incredulity that anyone could think of honouring him. A major German publication Der Spiegel of Hamburg wrote that if Harris is to be criticized then so too should Winston Churchill. It was the wartime prime minister who ordered the raids on civilian targets after military targets proved too costly to attack. Der Spiegel also observed that this was the same strategy Hermann Goring ordered in 1940, when he turned the Luftwaffe away from military factories in Britain and onto cities such As London. The British daily Telegraph is the conservative Quality newspaper which More than any other celebrates traditional values especially military expressions of them. It argued that Harris Quot a notable wartime commander deserved a memorial if Only because there Are so Many statues around of incompetent commanders such As Douglas Haig commander of the Britain s expedition to France in world War i and a that 19th-Century military Booby the Duke of  Paul Oestreicher the Canon at coven try Cathedral has been drafted to advise the Queen Mother in the matter and to create a ceremony that will not offend too Many people though clearly his Chait is not in honouring bomber Harris. The original Coventry Cathedral an architectural treasure was destroyed nov. 14, 1940, by German planes. The new Cathedral consecrated in 1963, Quot has become a Symbol of reconciliation Between Germany and Britain said Oestreicher. Coventry in fact is Dresden s sister City in Britain both having suffered similar wartime traumas. A personally my feelings Are that it is unfortunate that the commemoration of the 55,0 x thousand dead men of bomber command is being done in this Way a said Canon Oestreicher. A but i take the View that to Stop it the memorial being erected would compound the problem. 1 wish it had never been commissioned in the first place. But to Stop it would create a great Deal of anti German  the Canon Hopes to create a ceremony in May that will not he so much a Celebration of bomber Harris As one a of remembrance and grief a for All the bomber Crew members who died on both sides. U o  of of o a