LET’S MAKE A DEAL : It’s a Great Time to Buy and Sell, So Place Your New World Order Now

It’s becoming almost as hallowed a tradition around here as not publishing an issue at the time of major holidays: my periodic attempt to improve the common plight by sharing notions so startling in their obviousness that they can only be called Bright Ideas.

Today’s helping of helpful concepts involves the commercial counterpart of breathing in and breathing out--buying and selling. Lost in the holiday gloom was dire testimony by our new CIA director, Robert Gates, before a congressional committee. Gates, who, as his own confirmation hearings pointed out, has made a career of being too worried about the Soviet Union, is now perhaps too worried about the Soviet Union’s sudden lack of existence.

It’s got money troubles, he reported. It’s got plenty of nuclear material. But what brought Gates to near-alarm was the thought that one or another of the new ex-Soviet republics might part with some nuclear material in exchange for some paper currency that’s worth something.

In fairness, there’s more than enough in that prospect to disturb any of us. Kazakhstan or Belarus goes out and sells enriched uranium, plutonium or other selected pieces of the nukepile to Arab oil sheiks, to Saddam Hussein, to the Indians or the Argentines, to any terrorist with a Visa Gold card. Suddenly, the United States is no longer such an important source of weapons on the international market. What kind of New World Order is that?

One reason that the members of the new Commonwealth of Independent States might resort to such desperate money-grubbing is our government’s slow and unsteady commitment to help the ex-Soviets through a winter of chaos and shortages. We spent trillions to outgun them, but we can’t quite see how it’s in our interest to keep the place from collapsing more violently than a dying star. The increasingly popular view along the Potomac seems to be, “Let the Germans feed them.”

So, since it’s always politically popular here to spend money on weapons, let’s buy theirs. Like a city offering a bounty if you turn in your gun, we’d be buying some peace of mind. The republics get much-needed hard currency, we take their weapons off the market and destroy them, contributing to world peace. Or, if we like, we turn around and sell the weapons at a healthy markup to some Arab oil sheiks. That would be, as Ollie North once put it, a neat idea.

Thinking of impenetrable Kremlin bureaucracies ultimately turns our attention to something similar close to home: Los Angeles County government. Given the conjoined apathy and ignorance that afflict most of its subjects, the few insiders who know how the place runs have managed to skim the cream off county business as enthusiastically as if they’d never heard of cholesterol.

In the offices of county executives, a splendid redecorating program is in full swing, while budgets for such luxuries as hospitals and mental-health programs get the fiscal equivalent of Marine haircuts. And, while the rest of the world is supposedly discovering the joys of free enterprise, county government has continued to act as feudal overlord, owning every square inch of one of the poshest waterside developments in the known world, Marina del Rey.

County officials have been leasing Marina property to a few fellows who have actually been known to contribute money to certain reelection campaigns. Recently a howl arose when the terms of a lease extension appeared, let us say, overly favorable to those fellows.

All this leads to the brightest of ideas: L.A. County could raise enough money to actually fund hospitals and mental-health programs at a more-than-Dickensian level if it simply--wait for it-- sold off the Marina ! People have suggested selling LAX, or prisons, to help local budgets, but those are genuine public facilities. The Marina is a collection of pricey apartments, condos and restaurants. It belongs in the public sector like Pizza Hut.

I even know who might put in a bid--the federal government. It’ll probably need an out-of-the-way place to store all that Russian plutonium.