Businessmen

Every day, Kenny Kahn could stand on the balcony of his office overlooking Santa Monica's cliff-side Palisades Park and watch scores of homeless sleeping on benches or asking for handouts. One day just after Christmas, the 47-year-old criminal attorney simply got tired of it. "I went to the park, and an old dude asked me for spare change," Kahn said this week. "I started to give it to him, but then I said, 'How'd you like to work?'

The United States, responding to Soviet requests for economic assistance, agreed Thursday to bring dozens of top American businessmen to Moscow next month to consult on this country's transition to a market economy. The agreement, reached between U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, will commit the Bush Administration and the U.S. business establishment to ensuring the success of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's economic reforms.

Ross Perot is moving down a surprisingly well-worn path in his odyssey from the boardroom to the campaign trail. Perot has created a bigger splash in national politics than any businessman since Wendell L. Willkie, a charismatic utility company president who ran a strong race as the Republican presidential nominee against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940.

Government authorities believe that former police officers, fired during an anti-corruption campaign, are responsible for the recent kidnapings of two prominent Mexico City businessmen. Joaquin Vargas Guajaro, whose family owns the pay-television network Multivision, and Jorge Espinosa Mirales, owner of the Grupo Printaform computer company, were abducted separately last month by apparently well-organized bands of gunmen seeking financial gain.

The great foreign investment rush to Eastern Europe is off to a slow--and decidedly cautious--start. As country after country has broken away from Communist domination, headlines have trumpeted a flurry of new ventures in what used to be the Eastern Bloc. Japan's Daihatsu Motor has proposed a plan for producing compact cars in Poland. West Germany's Volkswagen is teaming up with an East German auto maker.

The lobby of the Kuwait Plaza is thick with cigarette smoke. Men huddle in whispers, nervously eyeing their neighbors or feverishly fingering calculators. In one corner, thin, bearded Ibrahim Shaheen tries to look inconspicuous. "I have to hide," he says, glancing sideways when a reporter finally finds him. "Everybody wants me." Little wonder. Shaheen, director of the Kuwait Emergency and Recovery Program, already has dished out more than $800 million in 200-odd contracts to U.S.

They are singing it, dancing it, acting it, even chanting it: "Yellow and black are the sign of courage. Can you fight 24 hours? Businessman, businessman, Japanese businessman." Japan has gone wild over this catchy theme song to a television commercial for an energy-restoring health tonic called Regain. Whether seen as an ode to the Japanese businessman or as a satire of his excesses, the Regain commercial has achieved a popularity akin to Wendy's "Where's the Beef" in the United States.

Gregory Mevs leaped from his silver, armored Toyota SUV and marched past the guards and mango trees into what serves these days as the center of the Haitian government. He was ready to dispense a million gallons of fuel to the earthquake-ravaged capital. But the paperwork was not in order. He needed the Haitian prime minister's signature. Ten minutes later, he had it. Mevs can do that. He has the prime minister's ear. He hobnobs with people like Bill Clinton, George Soros and the chief executives of the world's largest corporations.

Wherever there's a deal in the works, Marvin J. Winkler can't be far behind. Heard about that group led by Broadcom techno-billionaires Henry Samueli and Henry Nicholas to buy Walt Disney's Angels and Mighty Ducks? Winkler is part of it. Nicholas and Samueli's new-media start-up hoping to meld the Internet and TV? Winkler is chairman. The indoor snowboard and surf park in Anaheim? The 44-year-old Winkler is behind the $100-million effort to finance it.

So Mr. Ueberroth (Mr. Olympics) and a blue-ribbon panel of businessmen of this state recommend that parents be allowed choice as to their children's school (April 24). Will someone please explain to me how such a program is a business concern and how such a program will improve business profits in California? Frankly, I question the wisdom of picking a "blue-ribbon panel" of businessmen to solve the state's economic problems. It seems to me that businessmen, through a decade or more of greed and short-term, "bottom-line" profit-motivated activities, put us in the present hole in the first place.