White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Case Against Mega Mergers Is Written in History

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At lightning speed, after a judge approved the merger, AT&T and Time Warner announced the completion of their $85-billion deal. Another behemoth has taken the field.

This merger, it is assumed, will lead to a flurry of other mergers in communications. Witness Comcast’s $65 billion bid for Fox, topping Disney’s $52.4 billion offer.

This is heady stuff. The money on the table is enormous, in some cases dwarfing the economies of small countries.

Merging is an industry unto itself. A lot of people get very rich: They are investment bankers, arbitragers, lawyers, economists, accountants, publicists and opinion researchers. When really big money moves, some of it falls off the table into the willing hands of those who have managed the movement.

The fate of the real owners of these companies, the stockholders, is more doubtful after the initial run-up. The earlier merger of Time with Warner Communications is considered to have been disadvantageous for stockholders.

Another concern is the mediocre performance of conglomerates. The latest to have run into trouble is General Electric, which had managed to do well in many businesses until recently.

A more cautionary story is what happened to Westinghouse when it went whole hog into broadcasting and lost its footing in the electric generation businesses. This was spun off, sold to British Nuclear Fuels in 1997, then sold again to Toshiba and later went into bankruptcy.

From the 1950s, Westinghouse it bought and sold companies at a furious rate, until the core company itself was sold in favor of broadcasting. One of Westinghouse’s most successful chairmen, Bob Kirby, told me it was easier for him to buy or sell a company than to make a small internal decision.

In another pure financial play, a group of hedge funds bought Toys R Us and with the added debt, it failed.

In many things, big is essential in today’s economy. News organizations need substantial financial strength to be able to do the job. Witness the cost of covering the Quebec and Singapore summits. As Westinghouse proved by default, big construction needs big resources. That is indisputable.

When growth through acquisition becomes the modus operandi of a company, something has gone very wrong. The losers are the public and the customers. The new AT&T, if it comes about, will still need you and I to lift the receiver, watch its videos and subscribe to its bundles.

Recently, I was discussing the problems customers have with behemoth corporations on SiriusXM Radio’s “The Morning Briefing with Tim Farley” when a listener tweeted that I hated big companies and their CEOs and loved big government.

Actually I’d just spent a week with the CEOs of several companies, admirable people, and I don’t think government should be any bigger than needs be. I certainly don’t think government should perform functions that can be better performed in the private sector.

The problem is size itself.

When any organization gets too big, it begins to get muscle-bound, self-regarding. Although it might’ve been built on daring innovation, as many firms have been, supersized companies have difficulty in allowing new thinking, reacting nimbly and adopting innovative technologies and materials.

If large corporate entities were as nimble as small ones, the automobile companies would’ve become the airplane manufacturers in the 1920s and 1930s. They had the money, the manufacturing know-how and the engineering talent. They lacked the vision. It was easier to be rent-takers in the production and sale of automobiles.

Likewise, it’s incredible that FedEx was able to conquer the delivery business when another delivery system, Western Union, was up and running. But Western Union was big, smug and monopolistic. They had the resources and an army of staff delivering telegrams.

Companies like Alphabet (Google’s owner) snap up start-ups as soon as they are proven. That snuffs out the creativity early, even if it wasn’t meant to, and makes Google even more dominant. I would argue too big for its own good — and for ours.

Customer Frustration Drove Many to Vote for Trump

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Trump is the product of a frustrated electorate sick of elites in Washington who pay no heed to the people who pay the taxes and have little interest in them. Thus runs the popular narrative of how we got President Donald Trump and why his base, despite everything, is firmly committed to him.

Half right, I say.

There was a great national dissatisfaction at the time of the election and there is so today. But was that really the result of unhappiness with elites in Washington?

I’d suggest that it is the daily frustration we all face in simply going about our business. Elites are to blame, but not the elites named in the political narrative that has become the conventional view of the Trump phenomenon.

The elites who frustrate us are the large corporate ones that we cannot live without and have difficulty living with. Substitute corporations for elites.

In no particular order, they are the insurance companies, the banks, the credit card companies, the airlines, the hospitals, the telephone companies, the cable TV providers, Amtrak, Amazon and other corporations that hide behind a battery of devices programmed to avoid any direct human contact with the customer.

In fact, to most billion-dollar-plus corporations, the individual is less significant than a grain of sand on a California beach. These suppliers of our needs are hidden in a thicket of automatic phone systems that seem to require that you spend half an hour in a maze of prompts before, maybe, you reach a person who will also behave as though he or she is a recording; a person who is reading from a script and diverting your pleadings.

Collectively, what they’d like to tell you is you are in the wrong and will always be in the wrong because you are a statistical inconvenience, your custom a nuisance.

Step forward my bank.

More than 40 years ago, I added my wife to a credit card. We had an amicable divorce and we both got married again.

Regularly, over the years, I’ve asked my bank to remove her name, Jane Doe King — to protect her privacy — from the card. I paid all the bills, and my notes with the payments and letters were never answered.

Suddenly this year, my bank decided it was imperative that they get information on Jane Doe King, who is a nonexistent person. I went to my branch, explained the situation and was told by an officer that she’d been removed from the card. All’s well that ends well.

But it wasn’t the end, and all wasn’t well.

A few days later, when I tried to call an Uber car, I learned that my card was blocked because Jane Doe King hadn’t supplied her financial information to my bank.

I called my bank. After the de rigueur half hour of playing the equivalent of telephone pinball with their answering system and the irrelevant prompts, I spoke to a representative. He might as well have been a recording because no matter what I said, he went back to the script in front of him.

I explained, he demurred. Jane Doe King would have to prove first that she existed and then that she wanted to be removed from the card, which she had never used in more than 40 years.

I asked him to call the officer in the bank’s branch with whom I’d spoken. He said his phones didn’t have outgoing lines and so he couldn’t do that. I said I’d go to the bank’s branch and have the officer call the credit card department and straighten out the matter. But he wouldn’t give me his direct-dial number or his last name; just his first name and the general number. I went into serious profanity suppression mode.

Only the appearance of the person who does not exist would satisfy the Man Who Can’t Make Phone Calls. Fearing temper loss, I hung up and emailed the bank officer who had “fixed” the problem. He hasn’t replied.

The message is that you, the customer, and your account and patronage don’t count.

Even as you read this, thousands of Americans are getting the electronic runaround as they try to solve simple issues. Confused and angry, they are turning to the wildest political solution they can: Trump. Sadly, this is another abortive pursuit.

Llewellyn King on Morning Briefing with Tim Farley

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Llewellyn King joins Tim Farley, host of “The Morning Briefing with Tim Farley” on SiriusXM Radio’s P.O.T.U.S., Channel 124, to discuss the inhumanity of illegal immigrant deportations and the future economic need for immigrants in the United States. He also discusses a “third way” to remedy many of the stresses borne by communities from illegal immigration.

Click the play button below to listen.

 

 

You Need to Be Brave for This New World

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Pondering the future requires an extrapolation from a data point in the present. But different data points give very different futures. Beware of the prognosticators.

Take this as a data point: Stephen Entin, senior fellow at the Tax Foundation, a think tank devoted to tax studies since 1937, predicts that with an aging population and low birthrates, we’re going to need more immigrants to fill the federal and state coffers with their taxes. We’re also going to need hundreds of thousands of workers for health care and aged care in the years ahead, he says.

Or take this as a data point: MIT Sloan Professor Tom Kochan fears that artificial intelligence will substitute for millions of employees. Retraining is possible, but can you see a long-haul truck driver pushing wheelchairs in an assisted-living facility? Not easily.

Upheaval in work is the most predictable aspect of the future.

It is, if you will, already arriving in the workplace. New techniques and new concepts of what is work are afoot.

The old concept is that a person leaves school, gets a job and signs on to the social/work contract — gets company-paid benefits and expects security and stability. The infrastructure of society pointed the way to employer-employee model.

The new concept is the gig economy, where contract work and freelancing rule. The work/social infrastructure where medical insurance, Social Security and retirement are part of the deal is dying. But a one has yet to emerge in concept and in law.

Business is in the throes of its own future adjustment. Take 3D printing, more correctly called additive manufacturing. What was novelty a decade ago is now a tool used in industrial plants across the country. Instead of taking a chunk of metal, say aluminum, and cutting and lathing it to make a part, which wasted most of the metal, there’s no waste with 3D printing.

Now to make a part, you print it from metal powder to a design lodged in a computer. The saving in material, shipping and manpower is enormous.

And additive manufacturing, just like everything else on the shop floor, can be automated. Machines can sinter — the term for 3D printing — through the night with only artificial intelligence supervision.

There’s a new existential worry in every large enterprise in the United States, from banking to manufacturing, from electricity generation to hospital management and from building crane operation to pharmaceutical design: cyber-vulnerability.

To paraphrase Leon Trotsky, you may not be interested in cyber-war, but cyber-war is interested in you.

I’ve interviewed widely on the subject, from top academics to some of the most successful cyber-security entrepreneurs, to National Security Agency sources. The story is the same everywhere: Nothing connected to computers is entirely safe; and if it’s safe today, will it be tomorrow? That plague, like the plagues of old, will, I’m assured, be with us for decades, if not centuries to come.

Cyber-defenders build, cyber-hackers build around. It’s a version of what one secretary of defense, Harold Brown, said about the Soviet threat in the Cold War: “We build, they build.”

The changes are all around the home: Everything has changed since the day of the black AT&T phone, but you haven’t seen anything yet. Your packages may be delivered by drone, your phone service will be entirely mobile, and your life will be dictated by electronic secretarial aids. Alexa is just the beginning. With artificial intelligence, these robots will talk back to us and maybe argue, shudder the thought.

I pity the dogs. We had a dog that would be very upset if she heard my wife, a talk show regular, on the television when she was also elsewhere in the house. Dogs are sensitive to these things.

What if man’s best friend, eternal unquestioning companion, develops a strong affection for the electronic assistant and changes loyalties, especially if the gadget is feeding the dog? Will it be as Julius Caesar might have said, “Et tu, Fido?”

 

 

Photo: Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

A Third Way on Immigration Proposed by Tax Expert

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To me, there is something especially savage and cruel about deportations. It reminds of what I saw in colonial Africa, or in South Africa, or touring the Auschwitz concentration camp. Armed men and women coming by surprise to rip apart a family, to condemn people to a future they had braved so much to escape, evokes all the horrors of history. The rough brutality of one person taking charge of another appalls, twists the gut and stops the heart.

Even if sanctioned by law, the unfettered power of the state and its officers moving against an individual is profoundly ugly. The fact that those seized have broken the law doesn’t seem, in most cases, to justify ending the order and hope of their modest lives.

Yet I don’t believe any nation should allow conquest by immigration which is a threat to one’s culture, one’s language and one’s own sense of place. I believe there should be legal immigration, screened immigration. Our natural rate of population replenishment is inadequate.

Against the backdrop of vast shifting populations around the globe, the United States has only a modest problem. The illegal immigrant inflow, particularly across the southern border, has dwindled. So the issue is the estimated 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants who are here, have put down roots and are often raising American children.

Their fate is bitterly divisive: on one side, liberals and groups that speak for immigrants wanting amnesty and citizenship and on the other, conservatives demanding that our immigration laws are immutable, and the illegals must be arrested and deported.

Mark Jason, a retired IRS inspector from Malibu, Calif., looked at the problem from a taxman’s point of view through the Immigrant Tax Inquiry Group, which he founded in 2008.

Jason was concerned with the negative effect illegal immigrants were having on local communities, straining budgets and overwhelming social services. This kind of pressure has led many local entities to act against these people, denying them services, from driving licenses to schooling.

Jason knew from his research that many illegal immigrants, who came here to get a better, safer life, want eventually to return to their homelands. Trouble is they are immobilized in the United States, particularly if they have family here. If they visit their homelands, they can’t get back into the United States.

Jason believes a creative tax could defuse the illegal immigrant argument and stabilize life for what have become people of the shadows.

His plan, his third way, will:

—Grant all illegal immigrants who want to work a permit, called a REALcard (short for respect, equality, accountability and legality) that is valid for 10 years and renewable.

—Impose special taxes — 5 percent on the wages of the workers and 5 percent on the same wages to be paid by the employer — which would go to the hurting local communities.

Jason calculates that his tax will raise $210 billion over 10 years and that this money should be earmarked for communities hosting large numbers of immigrants.

For a decade, Jason has been imploring immigration groups, think tanks and Congress to consider his plan. Next week, he will be holding an information session on Capitol Hill to investigate various perspectives on immigration. His plan is to have a discussion on immigration focused on sound public policy, placing the interests of U.S. taxpayers first and treating all the stakeholders with respect.

I’ve known Jason for five years and have been astounded by the tenacity of this gentle Reagan Republican and his desire to do the right thing for those caught up in the immigration gyre, to relieve the acute artisan labor shortage, and to help counties and cities with their added illegal immigrant burdens — the new money going to education, health care, policing, jails and social services.

Legalize the illegal immigrants and some will go home early. Data shows that about half will return eventually to their homelands.

To my mind, Jason’s self-funded Immigrant Tax Inquiry Group is offering a solid alternative to the bleak immigrant policy debate — and to the swinging door of the detention center. Illegal entry into the United States in law, so venerated by the deportation enthusiasts, is only a misdemeanor.

Families physically torn apart, deportation and ruin, is a severe penalty for a misdemeanor. Does it fit the crime when there is another way?

 

 

Photo: VANCOUVER, BC – OCTOBER 30 The peace arch border on October 30, 2016 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Peace arch border between Canada and USA represent the world’s longest undefended border.

Remembering Tom Wolfe, Revolutionary in a White Suit

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Every field of endeavor gets stuck in a rut and it takes a pioneer, a rebel, to blast it loose. In journalism and literature, Tom Wolfe, who has died, age 88, did that, starting in the 1960s.

His incendiary device was the “New Journalism.” It used the techniques of the novel in observation and quoted speech for news and feature writing. Wolfe was its exemplar with unequaled verbal pyrotechnics.

In the summer of 1963, I had the luck to work in the same room as Wolfe at The Herald Tribune in New York City. He was in the initial stage of shaking up journalism.

That golden summer, somehow, some of the greats of American journalism found themselves at “The Trib,” a newspaper that had had a history of shaking up journalism and was doing it again.

By 1963 the newspaper was suffering from years of poor business decisions, which had reduced it to near bankruptcy. It had been bought by the oil billionaire Jock Whitney to provide a conservative voice to counter the liberal New York Times.

What Whitney got was a cornucopia of newspaper talent.

Probably never before or since have so many gifted wordsmiths been assembled in the same place: a championship season of talent that was to affect journalism for a generation.

Altogether Murray “Buddy” Weiss, who was the managing editor, and I calculated, long after the paper had failed in 1966, that 67 people who worked at the paper went on to major journalistic success. The names included Eugenia Sheppard, Jimmy Breslin, Red Smith and David Laventhol, who later created the Style section of The Washington Post and fired another newspaper revolution.

And sitting there, in the middle of one of long tables where the reporters sat, was one Tom Wolfe, already wearing the white suit that was his trademark all the long years of his success. The tailoring got better over time, but the color remained.

Wolfe got to New York via a Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale and stints at The Springfield Union and The Washington Post. At both papers editors knew he had talent, but sort of ignored it.

Fortune helped Wolfe along when The Trib was closed by a strike in 1962 and he contracted with Esquire magazine to travel to San Francisco and look at psychedelic paint jobs on cars.

Wolfe discovered the counterculture and Esquire discovered what became known as the New Journalism — a term that he didn’t really like. When he had difficulty putting his discoveries into traditional journalistic form, his editors told him to send them a memo and they would write it for him.

He did and they published the long, long memo, 49 pages, in full: “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.” It was unique in reporting history. It also introduced Wolfe into the world of the counterculture that he, along with Hunter S. Thompson and others, was to chronicle.

But unlike Thompson, Wolfe never joined the counterculture. He reported on it and gave it a language of its own, drawn from how people in the culture spoke, but remained a courtly Virginia gentleman.

One of the many gifted people at The Trib at the time was Clay Felker, editor of the newspaper’s magazine, which survives today as New York Magazine.

They were made for each other and Wolfe, the reporter and wordsmith, was on his way with Felker guiding and cheering. A collection of Wolfe’s pieces came out in 1965 and the New Journalism became the rage, especially in magazines. Other names like Gail Sheehy, Gay Talese and Joan Didion were soon in the flux.

But Wolfe was the supreme writer and reporter. His masterpiece on the space program and the Mercury 7 astronauts, “The Right Stuff,” his blockbuster novel, “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and another novel, “A Man in Full” were all built on meticulous reporting.

Wolfe “pushed out the envelope” — one of the many phrases he has left us with — in reporting, writing and creative punctuation. A few other Wolfe-isms: “me generation,” “radical chic” and “master of the universe.”

 

 

Photo: Author Tom Wolfe participates in the White House Salute to American Authors hosted by Laura Bush in the East Room Monday, March 22, 2004. Public domain.

War on Media: Now Trump Wants Our Credentials

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Oh, dear! President Trump has hinted that journalists should lose their credentials. He probably means the passes which allow journalists to enter the White House complex at the Northwest Gate and to walk to the briefing room a few hundred yards away.

Over the decades, successive administrations — in my accounting, starting with Jimmy Carter — have reduced the amount of freedom journalists enjoy inside the White House fence. It has been whittled away to the token that it is today. Jousting with the press secretary, Sarah Sanders, is not freedom to gather the news.

A reporter used to be able to walk around the complex without an escort and meet with White House staff in the Old Executive Office Building (now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building) without an escort.

More important, when you had an appointment in the West Wing, the nerve center of any administration, once you were through the door, you were at liberty to sit in the corridor before or after your appointment and often someone would invite you in for an unscheduled chat. At least, that was my experience and it was invaluable. You and they learned things. It was a two-way flow.

Incidentally, you did not need one of the prized “hard passes” to do that. Even now, in a time of restriction, a journalist does not need a hard pass to cover a briefing. You can get cleared through the gate by that part of the White House communications operation known as the Lower Press Office. You need pretty good identification like a congressional press pass, which are issued by standing committees of journalists covering Congress; sometimes just a passport or driver’s license.

Trump’s tweet about credentials suggests he believes all reporters need these to do their jobs. Fact is credentials are useful but not essential. Indeed, I question the emphasis on credentials in Washington because they hint at the licensing of journalists, devoutly to be avoided and contested — a constitutional violation under the First Amendment.

Credentials are a game subject to abuse: the very abuse Trump hints at.

It has even been suggested, by the George W. Bush and other administrations, that the press should be kicked out of the White House and given a briefing room in a nearby government building. One of the major values of being inside the White House fence is to garner interviews in the driveway with important visitors — to be able to file on the spot with authenticity and to be a constant, if thorny, reminder to the White House, any White House, that the eyes and ears of the world are feet away.

The damage that Trump has done to the media and by extension to this liberal democracy, is the ceaseless denigration. In 2017, 46 journalists were killed around the world – 26 so far this year — for just doing their jobs. Death in the line of duty is not “fake.”

What is the reporting job? It was best encapsulated by my friend Dan Raviv when he was with CBS News Radio. He said, “I try to find out what is going on and tell people.”

Quite so.

Trump makes that simple idea of finding out what is going on and telling people more difficult and sometimes dangerous. Trump’s daily assault on the media has encouraged all of those with something to hide: those who are cheating, lying, torturing, killing and suppressing the freedom of others. He is damaging the body politic here and in other countries.

Journalism maybe a feeble light but it is a light. For many it is last hope for justice, the ultimate appellate court and the hope that they will be heard.

Trump’s relentless undermining comes at the worst of times for the journalism we have known. Newspapers are gasping, television is losing advertisers and viewers. If all this were not sobering enough, many are demanding that the great new forces for disseminating journalistic output, Google and Facebook, should practice censorship. Shame.

Finding out what’s going on and telling people is hard enough without Trump’s dangerous disparagement — and politically correct censorship.

 

Photo: White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders takes questions from reporters at the White House, Friday, October 27, 2017. Editorial credit: Michael Candelori / Shutterstock.com

Life at the Top With Rupert Murdoch

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Rupert Murdoch stands astride the Atlantic. He is the most successful newspaper publisher in the United Kingdom and the proprietor of Fox, the most successful cable news channel in the United States.

While he has many other spectacular holdings in the U.K., the United States, Australia and Asia, those are the two pillars on which the empire stands now that he has sold 21st Century Fox Entertainment to Disney.

I believe the two pillars are linked by what amounts to the Murdoch formula: find a chauvinistic, nationalistic vein and mine it.

Murdoch blew on the embers of resentment and stoked the fires of tribalism through The Sun, his big British moneymaker, and Fox News, his American gold mine.

He understood this social stratum, whether it was in working-class Britain or spread across what we now call the red states in America. This audience felt ignored, put upon and unloved. Its traditional champions on the left — the unions, the Labor Party and the Democratic Party — had condescended to it, but not celebrated it.

Murdoch articulated its frustrations and gave them voice not where you would expect it on the left, but on the right.

A new and exceptional book by Irwin Stelzer, “The Murdoch Method,” lays out how Murdoch did this and how he holds his empire together. Stelzer should know. He has been a friend and consultant to Murdoch and his many enterprises for 35 years.

Stelzer, who I have known for 45 years, is worthy of a book in his own right. When he met Murdoch, he had already achieved success enough for many a man. He founded National Economic Research Associates and sold it well. Then, after a stint with Rothschild in New York, he enjoyed running an energy program at Harvard. Then came Murdoch.

Stelzer worked so closely with Murdoch that a rival newspaper in London described him as “Murdoch’s man on earth.” And he was.

He was sometimes the go-between for British prime ministers and leading American figures, from Richard Nixon to Richard Cheney. Stelzer made Murdoch’s case to the mighty, and he crunched numbers. Money and the power of media made this world go around.

As the title suggests, Stelzer explains in his book how Murdoch manages so diverse a company as News Corp. and how he created and grew it from the newspapers he inherited from his formidable father, Sir Keith Murdoch, in out-of-the-way Adelaide, Australia.

What emerges is a portrait of man who thinks of himself as an outsider, a loner: a practitioner of a kind of minimalist management out to war against the establishment and its elites.

Murdoch, both as a publisher and a businessman, has been incredibly courageous. He flipped The Sun from timid left to truculent right. He also stripped the brassieres off the models on Page 3. Chauvinism, sex and celebrity gossip was what Murdoch offered, and the public could not get enough. He also broke the British print unions in a near-military move to a secret printing site in Wapping, East London, in January 1986.

In America, Murdoch pretty well failed with newspapers he purchased in San Antonio, Boston and Chicago. He has not exactly succeeded with The New York Post, but he keeps it going as a personal indulgence. He is doing well with The Wall Street Journal. Fox News is the jewel in his American crown.

Stelzer’s Murdoch and his method is one of a small executive staff: excellent executives who are very well paid and prepared to answer a call from their boss day and night. He let really gifted people, like Roger Ailes of Fox, run their enterprises until there was a scandal and then, bang, the locks were changed, and settlements were paid. Murdoch is generous and ruthless.

Murdoch and Stelzer were in a way made for each other, although they did argue and sometimes Stelzer lost, only to find out just how wrong he was — as when he opposed the creation of the Fox Business Network.

Stelzer acknowledges he does not like everything Murdoch does; and he should not. Murdoch has treated the world as a playground where you make money by making damaging mischief — so you hire people like Sean Hannity and tolerate the inanity. Or you court the Clintons, but back Trump.

Stelzer has been on a wild ride and he takes you along in clear, readable prose.

The Private Car Is a Miracle — It Gets Better and Better

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Today’s cars are miraculous, marvelous. They are twice as good as they were just 30 years ago — if you measure them by life expectancy, safety, reliability and comfort.

As William Gouse, an expert at SAE International which coordinates and sets the standards for cars and trucks worldwide, said, it was just decades ago when we expected cars to start giving trouble at 70,000 to 80,000 miles on the odometer. Now we expect twice that and more even from cars, SUVs and light trucks. We also no longer expect flat tires and engines overheating.

Gouse told me in a television interview that not only is quality from an owner’s point of view far better, but safety is equally improved. You are more likely to survive a crash.

The story of the automotive evolution to excellence is a story of incremental improvement; of the technological equivalent of compound interest – a little bit more every year.

It is a story of how better technology and materials, government regulation and competition have entwined to produce a welcome result. Therefore, it is a tale that needs repeating elsewhere.

The technology got better because technology is getting better in everything, particularly the role of computers under the hood. The materials got lighter, stronger and more durable. The government has demanded better cars and trucks year after year: better mileage, better safety, better crash survivability and better emissions controls.

The government role is important because it has pushed through regulatory standards that the automotive engineers have risen to meet. There is a kind of gold standard demanded by the government for cars and trucks in the United States and it informs their production worldwide.

“Street legal” is the operative threshold that drives manufacturers worldwide to clear the American bar, otherwise their products cannot be sold here. World production must comply with U.S. standards in safety, emissions and equipment, such as reversing cameras, now standard on all new cars.

This de facto world standard will allow a car to be sold and operated in the United States. Some specialty cars made in other countries – for example, the beloved British Morgan sports car, complete with a wooden frame and a leather strap across the hood (bonnet in Britain) – can no longer be imported into the United States. While they are not for sale here, they are for sale elsewhere in the world.

The final driver for better cars and trucks is the consumer. Competition in the automotive world is brutal. Automobile manufacturers must take an annual market test, answering these questions: Will the new models sell? Did we bend the steel in appealing ways? Will our claims of “happiness behind the wheel” be ratified by the public? It is a test quite unlike that for any other product, except perhaps movies. Is it what the public wants?

Now new challenges and new excitements are afoot in the world of automobiles. The old order of the internal combustion engine — so improved, so dependable and so much cleaner — is going to begin to surrender its hegemony to the new order of the electric car.

Much that has been improved for today’s cars, like tires and brakes, is to be found in the electric car, but the drive train is something different. It is something that is itself evolving: better batteries, motors, designs and new expectations, primarily of range through battery improvement.

The arrival of the electric car is evolutionary, verging on revolutionary.

The big impediment: How will recharging catch up and become as painless as filling the tank is today? In time, it will happen. Gouse is hopeful that one day there will be easily available induction charging (charging without wires) so that at a stoplight or in a parking place, juice will flow from the local utility to your car.

The automobile has changed and way we live and given us a unique dimension: the freedom to go when we want to go in great comfort with our everyone and everything: family, music, telephone service and, when autonomous cars arrive, maybe workspace. The automotive future is an open road.

 

 

Photo: Laura Gariglio on Unsplash

Congress to Hear From an Army of Very Sick Petitioners

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A different voice will be heard on Capitol Hill on May 12 to 15: a gentle, sad voice coming not from lobbyists or politicos but from an irregular army of sick people. It is a voice that has grown stronger in recent years but is still just a zephyr among the hurricane winds that blow in Congress. For Congress, it will be an invasion of sighs.

They will be on the Hill to petition their government for more research funding for the disease Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS).

They will not be coming with checks for campaign coffers, nor with partisan arguments, but simply to make their case that the federal government should put ME on a par with diseases of similar devastation and increase the minuscule funding. They also want Congress to use its bully pulpit to preach a message of urgency and need.

ME is not a new disease, but it has been one of the most neglected. Many believe Florence Nightingale, who was born on May 12, 1820, was a sufferer. The day of her birth has significance for sufferers and their caregivers.

ME is a mystery disease of the immune system, felling patients of all ages and both sexes.

Some are bedridden for a couple of years and then improve enough to partake in very limited activities, others languish and are totally dependent on families and charities. Some are hypersensitive to sound and light: I know about a young man who was forced to seek dark and quiet in a closet.

In California, Tom Camenzind, a former Stanford University student, lies in bed so physically incapacitated that he is only able to communicate by a sensor attached to his finger. Tom’s exceptional parents, Dorothy and Mark, allowed me to bring a television camera into his bedroom last year to help the cause.

Others manage somewhat better but are shackled to their illness, never able to escape it. A small amount of physical exercise can send them to bed for days, as can a night out with friends. There is no known cure and no easy identification of the disease.

To get the disease is to be imprisoned by it, to serve a life sentence without parole. Sufferers live and do not live; they endure brain fog, severe headaches, aching joints and exhaustion beyond comprehension.

I have been writing and broadcasting about ME for nine years and many correspondents tell me they pray not to wake up in the morning. Suicide rates are said to be high among the sufferers.

Anita Patton of Incline Village, Nevada, was struck down, as many are, in her prime, writes, “Thirty-two years ago, I came down with a viral disease that wiped out my energy and immune system.” She suffers to this day.

Like many other patients, Patton began a long odyssey in search of a diagnosis. Eventually she found Dr. Daniel Peterson, a clinician who has devoted his life to ME. She moved close to his practice.

Peterson has been treating Patton with Ampligen, an experimental and expensive drug. It has enabled her to function, so long as she gets regular infusions. But the hard-to-get drug is not a cure. It suppresses symptoms in a subset of patients and it, like every other aspect of this scientific enigma, needs study.

A volunteer organization, #MEAction, will hold demonstrations across the United States and the world May 12 under the rubric “Millions Missing.”

These will be followed by a serious lobbying effort May 15, led by the advocacy group SolveME/CFS Initiative. It already has signed up nearly 100 patients, caregivers and activists to call on members of Congress, asking for recognition and explaining that they suffer from a disease that has been described as hidden in plain sight. Visibility is the first step.